Forum Overview :: The Zionist Media Conspiracy

On getting streaming video delivered, Internet and Bell Atlantic by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 02/02/2012, 6:46am PST I'm not including this with the Netflix thread because it deals with something else - the delivery of streaming video and connecting to the Internet, plus my problems with C&P Telephone, later Bell Atlantic, now Verizon - rather than Netflix per se. My sister was asking about the idea of Netflix doing streaming of movies and asked me about it. I pointed out that to watch it on a TV you either needed an Internet-enabled TV or an Internet-enabled video game console to receive the signal. She was surprised; she had no idea that the way they get the video to you is they stream it over the Internet. She didn't have the words to explain it but her comment effectively summarized was that she couldn't believe there would be enough bandwidth and the latency would be low enough to allow video to be streamed. I pointed out that for normal web surfing, e-mail and such, you can get by with Verizon DSL, which is what she has. For anything more, you need at least real broadband, like what I get from Comcast. What surprises me is that Verizon has been doing communications for over 100 years. Before they were Verizon they were Bell Atlantic (I know, I worked for a contractor of theirs as a tech support person for Bell Atlantic Internet Services) back when "high-speed internet" was a 53K connection over a phone line (your modem at that time was restricted to 53K by FCC regulations to protect the phone company from overloading the line; modems running in Europe could provide the full 56K.) Before they were Bell Atlantic they were C&P Telephone of Washington, DC, C&P Telephone of Maryland, C&P Telephone of West Virginia and C&P Telephone of Virginia. And C&P goes back to at least the 1890s. Back in the middle 1990s I made a comment to someone about the not-very good cell phone service when there were essentially two suppliers, Bell Atlantic and Cellular One (later becoming Cingular until it was bought up by AT&T). I asked the guy who he has his cell service from, "Barf Atemetic or Crapula One?" I've had problems with Verizon going back to when it was C&P Telephone. I tell you, their field service people are world class, I've never had a technician who came out who wasn't 100% up on everything they needed to know how to do, and if there was something too complicated, they'd call in and ask for assistance. Their technical people are very good. Their back office operations on the other hand - where they handle orders and paperwork - plain sucks. I've had other people confirm this to me independently. If I had to order anything from C&P Telephone I held my breath. If it was simple, it was guaranteed they'd screw it up. If it was complicated, they had to check the instructions or the manuals and thus the order came out right. One time I wanted to change to a commercial line, basically it meant I was now charged an extra $10 a month plus I got charged 10c for each call I made, but it meant I now got a commercial listing with the Yellow Pages and a listing by company name under 4-1-1. What they did was to turn off one line, drop my Identa-Ring service on the other (the feature that gives you a second phone number with a different ring on the same line), and worse, show the Identa-Ring number as listed to the previous owner, who had it three years ago when I got my line. Any time I ordered anything simple from Bell Atlantic I feared I'd find out they'd installed Foreign Exchange service from West Virginia or something. One time I decided to try setting up as an Internet provider, where I ordered 4 phone lines, with Caller-ID and hunt group, one line with the new name+number caller ID so I could get experience with it,three with the older number-only Caller-ID, all with hunt group so calls coming to one line shunted to the next if it's busy ("hunt group" is the old form of "call forward on busy" with the difference that call forward on busy costs $8 a month per line but hunt group costs $1 a line per month.) A guy in a bucket truck had to come out; The number of lines available in the area was maxed out, they had to bring in a new trunk into the neighborhood for the additional phone lines, and the line running from my house to the nearest connection point on the telephone pole across the street was a spliced line - the technician pointed it out to me where the line crossing the street had a splice in it - and only had the two phone lines, so in order to support me having six phone lines they had to run a new line anyway, so the tech cut, removed and disposed of the spliced line, replacing it with a brand-new eight-pair phone cable, meaning I'd be able to add two more phone lines in the future if I needed to. Also, it turns out my house was the only one on that pole; all of my neighbors were served by connections to pedestal boxes or other telephone pole connections, so it also meant that I had exclusive use of a 25-pair block if I ever went that far. The only problem we had was the new Caller ID wasn't working. They eventually sent someone out at no cost to me to test it - C&P had just gotten the switches that supported the new Caller ID - and they didn't know much about it either. The guy in the switching center was seeing good data signal coming out, but me and the technician weren't receiving it. What we discovered - and the tech people in the switch didn't know either - is that the new Caller ID with name is not downward compatible with the old number-only format. A modem or reader box that understands the new name+number format will understand the old number-only format but the ones that can only receive number-only can't receive the number part from the new data stream. The point of this was that this complicated install came out perfect. Everything worked flawlessly (except the new name+number Caller-ID data stream, and that was because I - and the technician who came out to check it - had number-only Caller-ID devices.) After C&P decided to merge with a couple of other former Bell Companies, they changed their name to Bell Atlantic. When they decided to buy General Telephone - then, the largest national telephone company that had never been part of the Bell System - they changed their name to Verizon. I've had service with General Telephone (GTE), they were one of the few companies that were worse than Bell System companies. So I think the new Bell Atlantic+GTE=Verizon equation made what was Bell Atlantic worse. Now we compare what is now Verizon to Comcast, which has maybe 30 years of doing communications. And what I have found is that the Internet service provided by Comcast is consistently better than that provided by Verizon. It suffers less likelihood of dropped connections, always provides higher bandwidth, and has less problems. Of course, you can obviously provide a bigger signal over the space available for signal delivered on a coaxial cable vs. the space available for delivery on a two-wire phone line. But I think what has happened was that Verizon has acted like a protected monopoly public utility and hasn't really considered the need to react to competitors, vs. Comcast which has always had potential competitors in the form of a roof antenna or later when satellite television came out. (When I was living in Virginia I had two choices, I could get Dish Network to come out and install their service at no charge and the monthly fee was $29 a month, or Comcast would come out to install their service, and the install fee was $300 and the same $29 a month. You can guess which one I chose.)

On getting streaming video delivered, Internet and Bell Atlantic by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 02/02/2012, 6:46am PST