Ho John Lee's Weblog

It’s the time of spring when all the flowering trees bloom. There are a lot of cherry and wisteria trees in our neighborhood, it looks nice and as the petals start falling in a few weeks off later it will look like every home held a wedding recently. Good weather for being out and about. Speaking of which…

The Wachovia Bank (formerly World Savings) branch over at the Stanford Shopping Center was robbed last Thursday. This is already a little unusual, but what caught my attention was that they were robbed by an elderly man in an electric wheelchair. And he got away! He apparently stopped by The Sharper Image and asked for a shopping bag on his way over to the bank.

Mike’s comment about Comcast and chickens wandering in Keith’s yard reminded me about my former neighbors. When we first moved into our current home, we soon discovered that the neighbors bordering our back yard owned several chickens. During the summer when we left the windows open overnight, we would hear their rooster crowing first thing in the morning. Their chickens never made it into our yard, although their cats came through regularly. They were an interesting couple, living kind of like they were homesteaders on a mountain farm, with a rickety greenhouse, garden, and a yard full of debris, on an oversized lot in the middle of Old Palo Alto. They sold a few years ago, at the moment there’s a brand new house going up, the chickens are long gone but we have had random construction work going on for a while.

We also have Comcast here.  I still use PacBell (now AT&T) DSL for the office network, but the house network uses the cable modem service. The download speeds are higher, but it does go offline sometimes, making me reluctant to run my office on Comcast’s internet service. This is a great fit for the rest of our family which mostly surfs the web, watching online video, web pages, or chatting. The DSL service is relatively clunky (I have one of the first lines rolled out in Palo Alto) and slow, but the continuous uptime is similar to my Linux servers in the back of the closet, running for years with uninterrupted service.

Looking at this heatmap, Palo Alto and Stanford are apparently a little blue oasis of solvency in the map of real estate foreclosures, surrounded by a sea of red.

This week there was a guy from Comcast going door-to-door in our neighborhood, offering promotional rates on their triple play bundle (video, data, voice), and internet service in particular. In general, I’m enthusiastic about the future prospects for combined services from either the cable companies or the telcos, and the Comcast internet service is attractively priced at $19.99 for 6mbits down/384k up, so in theory we are a good prospect for this service.

Unfortunately, I’ve been on the verge of cancelling our Comcast service for months because of sporadic outages. I’m not totally thrilled with my relatively slow PacBell/SBC DSL service (1.5mbits down/384k up), but other than widespread outages due to flooding or power interruptions, it has been quite stable. In contrast, our cable TV service went out for a week last year, and I have observed outages lasting anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more every month or so since then. I can live without CNBC or Disney Channel, but things can rapidly grind to a halt here without internet service.

The Palo Alto fiber loop passes just a block from here. I should see if it’s gotten any easier and cheaper to set up a connection. The Palo Alto Fiber-to-the-home project seems to be perpetually stalled, but the bandwidth business has been coming back over the past few years. There are enough wireless LANs visible from here, I could probably set up a mini-ISP or bandwidth co-op for the whole neighborhood.

At the end of the day, the main thing I want from an internet service provider is fast, stable performance at a reasonable price. $19.95 is a pretty good price, but Comcast hasn’t shown that it can keep basic video service running yet. Maybe later.

Update 01-21-2007: Ended up installing Comcast internet, but we’re still keeping the DSL service in place to run the office network. Internet video is a lot faster on the cable network, but it’s already been offline once.

Comcast just announced that they’re raising their monthly fee by around 7% starting in January:

The package price will rise by an average of $3.13 per month, or about $44.80 to $47.93. Prices vary depending on the community.

I already pay $49.61 per month (with tax) here in Palo Alto, so the new rate will be around $53 per month. The old rate seems too high for what little we watch in our household, and the new rate is worse.

“Comcast’s Bay Area market prices reflect increasing operating expenses,” said spokesman Andrew Johnson, “as well as investments that Comcast is making to improve the value of the service.” He cited improvements in customer service as well as more programming choices that have come through advances in technology and partnerships with new programming providers.

We haven’t noticed any service improvements, and had already been thinking about getting rid of the subscription. Last month our cable service went out for most of a week, and it didn’t really change our daily routine at all. Over the long weekend I also made some good progress on moving our DVDs and VHS videos onto the house server, so I had pretty much decided to reallocate something less than $600 per year to purchasing / buying video content and unplug the cable after December.

Another way to think of it is that for the same price, I can subscribe to Netflix, and also purchase 2 or 3 DVDs a month, and still end up ahead.

One sticking point is likely to be Emily’s cartoons on the weekends. Another is that nobody else in our household can get videos to play over the network reliably, which puts a big dent in the convenience factor.

In the meantime, the channel unbundling discussion seems to have come back to life at the FCC, although the a la carte services would probably be even more expensive.

The cable TV service at our house went out a few days ago. It’s hard to pin down exactly when, since we are atypical media consumers and often go for days at a time without television. The service tech missed his repair appointment window yesterday, so it’s going to be another day or two without network television. From time to time I consider dropping the cable service altogether. I never feel like I’m getting a good value, and some combination of DVDs and internet services seem like it will be a better fit “real soon now”.

On most school days, the television doesn’t go on at all, except if one of us is on the treadmill at home and happens to turn on the news. We don’t even use TiVo, although I occasionally try experiments with the home-built PVR du jour while wearing my “media technologist” hat.

The standard (analog) cable package from Comcast is around $50 per month. For us, this is probably 5 hours / week of cartoons, plus another 5 hours / week of mostly news programs. So, rounding up, call it around 50 hours per month of content. We don’t subscribe to any premium channels, and we generally don’t watch ESPN. My wife watches Korean dramas from time to time, but these are all on DVD or by video streaming (from Korea!). I could live without the cable news, since it’s usually just CNBC with the sound off.

This works out to around $1 per hour of cable programming, or $600 per year for mostly cartoons and CNBC.

I’m not too interested in watching video on an iPod, except possibly on an airplane or while travelling. What is interesting, though, is the possibility of getting online video distribution into the mainstream. iTunes has been fairly successful in popularizing legal online music downloads, and they may have more success than others in getting consumers to adopt a paid video download service.

$1.99 per commercial-free hour seems too high, though. I’m also not fond of the iTunes DRM system, having a household full of networked computers which come and go over time. I find I would rather purchase the CD and rip it to the server than deal with managing the DRM.

If the Comcast guys miss their repair window again, it may be time to try dropping the service altogether. The primary advantage they have at the moment seems to be incumbency, and the fact that it “just works”, except that it doesn’t.

I should probably hook up the antenna feed, though, which might give me an excuse to check out the local broadcast HDTV signal.