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Terry Huval — Lafayette LA fiber project
Huge benefit to local businesses
Filed lawsuits. Unknown citizens sued he city. 3.5 million dollars cost in litigation etc.
Cable co. raised their rates every 6 months until they finally stopped in Lafayette, and they think that the rate savings ALONE in cable rates saved the citizens of Lafayette $3.5 million. so, they got back the cost of defending themselves in litigation.

20% less than standard pricing is the target for things like triple play services

They offer:

TV and phone and internet service (Triple Play)
SmartGrid

Overlaid the existing electrical infrastructure

Value of the topology, head end has generation and reliable substations also have electronics, mini hub in each substation.

Head end – 3 96 fiber rings 4 fibers 20 gigs per second Alcatel/Lucent product

Installed at each home:
2 fibers for RF video
2 fibers for IPTV Internet, Phone

This provides:
Optical terminal – includes a TV coax 4 POTS telephone lines, battery backup
2 100 megabit fiber connections

Topology

OLT – OLT 72 ports –> Local conversion point – 9

OLT provides 2400 customers.

Passive optical network.

At the home, the electric meter,

Issued bonds in July 2007
First customers served in Feb 2009 Remaining customers to be served by early 2011

VIP bundles video / internet / phone

84.85
10 megabit 2 way symmetrical (LK now foaming at the mouth).

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Offerings for home internet service
10 megabit
30 megabit
50 megabit download and upload speeds

Calling rates: 5 cents for international, Europe, Caribbean, S. America and Asia

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100 mbps peer to peer — within the system
included with every fiber internet product with a non-static IP
opens doors for citizens and businesses
$5.00 per month for a static IP

They also offer a TV Web Portal
basic internet access w/o a computer

Business
10 meg
100 megabits for $200 per moth

Medical hub
education
movie industry – tax credit made available

80% businesses wanted LUS
Borrowed 100 million 60 used for build system
50% market penetration for the business plan
23% penetration allows for breakeven

So many people are so excited to support the community owned system
Just as important as electricity

More jobs, future of telecommunications, etc.

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Tim Denton

Broadcasting in New Media

Question: Should we be taxing ISPs to put money into a fund to go into promoting Canadian content?

Not a single group raised a question of free speech across the internet?

Net neutrality issue, should look at the filings

Lafayette TV — This is the DRIVER in Lafayette for getting new customers. They must offer equal or better or cheaper service than the competitors.

Todd Marriot – current leader of the UTopia project – similar to the Lafayette project.
Question regarding “Open Access” model. Third-party businesses have infrastructure access.. with multiple service providers.

Answer: They are the only switched telephone provider, or cable TV provider on their muni network (at least until the bonds are paid off….) However, they need the services to pay for the network at this point. They assume that they are oversubscribed.

Terry Duval will play his fiddle. (cajun) (Old version of fiber networking)

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John Jorgensen Quintet plays

I don’t even know how to title this blog post.

This is the article in the New York Review of Books by Mark Danner, that comments on the International Red Cross report about the treatment of prisoners (oh, excuse me, detainees) after rendition to Guantanimo Bay and other secret U.S. prisons.

And so, after a devastating and unprecedented attack, the gloves came off. Guided by the President and his closest advisers, the United States transformed itself from a country that, officially at least, condemned torture to a country that practiced it. And this fateful decision, however much we may want it to, will not go away, any more than the fourteen “high-value detainees,” tortured and thus unprosecutable, will go away. Like the grotesque stories in the ICRC report, the decision sits before us, a toxic fact, polluting our political and moral life.

A shorter synopsis appeared in the Sunday New York Times.

The author’s web page includes audio interviews.

I had a visit from John Palaszynski, our regional Polycom rep the other day and had a look at the Polycom CMA client. (CMA stands for Converged Management Application. Doesn’t that sound like something out of corporate?) This appears to be their answer to Tandberg’s Movi client…which is a little ironic, because although the Movi client appears to have gotten the greater mindshare, version 2 (much improved) has been rumored for almost a year, but not yet deployed. CMA is indeed available; and has been since August 2008 or so.

Both are “server-based” videoconferencing clients which work on the Windows platform. By server-based, it means that if a user wants to participate in a videoconference, they click on a web site within their browser which takes them to the video server. After authenticating the user, the server checks to see if the videoconferencing client software is installed on the user’s machine. If it isn’t, it asks permission to download and install the client. This gets around the issue of installing a fat client on the machine, (i.e. PVX).

The client looks a lot like a chat client or Skype. It has buddy lists and so on. So far I’ve been unable to ascertain whether there is an API, or whether the appearance is configurable. For example, I still don’t think there is a way to have the client open up full screen and wait for a video call. There seems to be no way to suppress the buddy screen/directory window.

Many of the set-up screens look as if they were lifted from the Polycom PVX product; they are identical. One major improvement over PVX is the support for high-definition video.

Of interest is that if you have the CMA server, it does NOT replace the need for an multipoint controller (video bridge), if you want to make multipoint calls. So, the product appears to be ideal for a large corporate deployment on a LAN or VPN-WAN.

Here is the data sheet.

Here’s a press release with a fair amount of background.

They also have a white paper describing a number of example applications.

Nice article and video in the Wall Street Journal that summarizes a project to bring municipal fiber internet access to 22 rural towns in central Vermont. The comments are especially amusing.

Let them eat cake!

This is a transcript of notes of a webcast by Polycom, demonstrating the new CMA product and desktop client.

John Palaszynski Medical upstate NY, Vermont govt, health-care and education rep.
Bill Torrey – Sales Engineer

CMA – Polycom Converged Management Application

It is a little ironic, but I’m attending a Microsoft LiveMeeting web presentation about Polycom’s new video client, which is a web-based client (Windows only for now), which will supplement or replace Polycom’s PVX desktop software application.

The irony is that we’re dialing in to an 800 number for the audio portion of the program, and they are showing PowerPoint slides on the LiveMeeting. (later…. the demo is very interesting. )

CMA has Management and Gatekeeper functionality and a downloadable desktop client

CMA Desktop Client looks like

CMA is a server (Dell rack-mount server, running Windows 2003 server)
Control endpoints

Polycom has a MPLS network worldwide

No specific talking points when comparing with Tandberg Movi 2.

Control bridges
Control recording and streaming devices

Can tie into active directory (as a read-only application)
Can assign rights and privileges (scheduling conferences, monitoring conferencing, troubleshooting)
Provides XML and XMPP (provisioning endpoints.

Buddies list – status of everyone in the list
Start a chat
Escalate to a video call

Dell rack-mount server
Server 4000- 200 seat license, can scale up to 400 seats
Server 5000 500 seat license and can scale up to 5000 seats
5000 has additional hardware redundancy

Gatekeeper
Policy and bandwidth management
Participant admission
Least cost routing (if you use ISDN)
RTP statistics
OneDial (E.164) four-digit dialing plan

Scheduling via Outlook and Lotus Notes

Video client
Licensing – if it is inactive for a default 30 days it automatically pulls the license back into the license pool. This is unlike PVX, where those licenses are essentially “gone” after they are distributed.
MSI installs are supported.
Can receive HD video assuming you have the bandwidth available. It will transmit at 4CIF and is limited to that for transmission for now.
This is an H.323 client – can call into any other H.323 client.
You can do far-end camera control.
CMA does not include T.120 support for data sharing, (and actually the latest PVX client doesn’t support it either…as the standard is considered obsolete)
Recommend the Logitech 9000 camera

The Polycom Communicator is also helpful for 22Khz audio. (This is a USB microphone/speaker with built-in echo cancellation)

The CMA client will NOT work if you don’t have VPN or Polycom firewall product (the S/T5300 ad S/T6400 line)
CMA has “deep integration” with Microsoft Office Communication Server/Client

CMA is an upgrade to the SE200 (management/gatekeeping box). There is an upgrade path.

Demonstration: — The setup screens look very similar to PVX
Shows the desktop

Lost Packet Recovery (LPR) error recovery code

CMA 500 server management application

Think of the CMA clients as just another endpoint. The main difference is that the PVX client doesn’t require connections to a licensing server. So, for multipoint you need to have access to an MCU.

The CMA replaces the MGC manager. This means you can use a web interface instead of the loaded MGC manager.
Right now CMA t won’t go into the bridge and hard reserve a port that the MGC manager does. (Available at the end of the year December).

Discussion of created “Meeting Rooms” configured on the bridge.
Sounds like you still have to use both the MGC and CMA together to be able to reserve ports.
RMX is the more recent Polycom bridge product.

There is a public beta available now of Flow, which is sort of Mind Map for files.

I’m not a design professional, and while I don’t produce projects with hundreds of files, I do indeed produce projects which take up, say, tens of files such as grant applications, Keynote and PowerPoint applications, html files, etc, and Flow looks like it would provide a terrific way of managing the files. Software developers have had applications like this for years…they are called source code control applications.

My tactic now is to create a mind map using Mindjet’s Mind Manager, and link in all the files on the map. Of course this doesn’t address versioning, and only addresses the top level file names; I can’t expect to keep track of graphic files, for example which are inserted in a iWork Pages file. Also, all my “mind mapped” files usually get converted to .PDFs, or Windows files at some point, and so the number of physical files on disk doubles or triples as soon as I start working with other people on a project because of all of the conversions, and then the real version problems start.

After playing with FLOW for an hour so far, I submitted the following issues to the beta forum.

1. Support for iWork 08 is stated as a supported application list, is ’09 supported?

2. In opening a Keynote ’09 file, I didn’t see that Flow found the component files for the project.

3. Wondering how this will work with multiple users on a network, and/or over the web. I”ve got my iDisk indexed in Flow, and this seems to be working Ok, but I don’t know how it will manage a sync between my Macbook and my iMac.

4. Would like support for Microsoft Visio Files. I haven’t found an equivalent drawing program on the Mac…. if I had I could dump Microsoft Window and Parallels.

5. Would like to be able to start a “new project” in Flow.

6. How do we delete obsolete files? For example, my map shows a .pages temp file that was downloaded from my mail program. This then got saved to a folder, and became my starting point….but the temp file stays in the map, and I don’t know how to delete it.

The beta is currently available only for the Mac, but the Windows version is on the way. Pricing looks very reasonable. While the beta doesn’t pass the five minute test, it bears further investigation; in the long term this could become an essential, “how did I get along without it” tool to your document work flow.

From David Pogue’s recent post about iMovie ’09:

The killer app, though, is image stabilization. It takes a long time to apply to a clip–several minutes each–but it winds up making jerky footage smooth, even if you were filming while hiccuping on a camel ride during an earthquake. You control the degree of smoothness; that’s lucky, since 100 percent steady looks almost freakishly unnatural.

He also has an interesting take on Twitter.

iWork ’09
Apple has updated iWork from ’08 to ’09, and after working with it for a couple days, it appears to have been a terrific balance between new features and minor fixes. Here is a succinct description of iWork ’09 from CNET

Always Connected, Seldom Communicating
Why is it, that will all the cellphones, blackberries, eMail, Twitter, chat rooms, VoIP, Wifi, satphones, batphones, and saxaphones it is so difficult to get ahold of people these days? You’d think that people would be easier to reach. Here are my rules:

• If somebody is paying me money, usually as a consulting or project client, then I will return calls within two hours, or eMail back within the business day.
• If somebody is taking my money during a project, i.e. if they are a vendor or contractor or employee, then I would like to feel that I’m on their radar screen as a courtesy during the project. I’m not sure what the frequency of contact should be exactly, but at least once a day if there are issues. Is that too much to ask?

There is a Ph.D. thesis in here somewhere. Inverse Proportionality: The Damping Effect of Hand-Held Electronic Connectivity on Communication Efficacy.

Welcome to Tech for Non-Profits, and the pending Tech for Home Health Care. This is the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. Part lab-notebook, part brain-extension, it is a repository for new and evolving ideas and projects that we stumble across as we move our former exclusively database development and network support company into startup mode for a technology-based home health-care delivery service provider. Being grant funded ourselves, we’re very much looking over the the grant landscape.

Upcoming: I will be giving presentations at the Freedom to Connect conference March 30 and 31 in Washington D.C. and at the American Telemedicine Association annual meeting in Las Vegas at the end of April. Both presentations will focus around the technical (boxes and wires), aspects, rather than medical aspects of one variation of home tele-health; two-way interactive, multipoint videoconferencing, with examples from our ongoing pilot studies delivering supervised exercise classes with senior patients who have fallen or have a fear of falling.

We are located in the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologiesa technology incubator affiliated with the University of Vermont. Our major extracurricular activity is the Vermont Software Developer’s Alliance, a non-profit trade group which promotes economic development in our area, primarily for software development companies. Both organizations, by the way, are looking to encourage high-tech businesses to start up and/or relocate in our state. As software developers, we are pleased to be working in one of the few areas of economic growth.