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Content Tagged with asides + broadband

This morning I had the chance to play my favorite game, “Is it just me, or is Site X down?” Turns out it was just me, or rather, my ISP, since a couple of fellow Time Warner Internet customers I called were experiencing difficulties as well. Plus, once I moved onto an AT&T DSL network, Google, Yahoo and WordPress all loaded just fine.

It’s not that they weren’t loading at all on the Time Warner network, it’s that they were loading intermittently. As someone who uses a lot of web applications, this isn’t a good thing. I have very little recourse when this happens, other than turning off my modem, router and computer and rebooting.

I thought cleaning out my cache would help, so I did that. I ran a traceroute program to see if I could spot any troubles, but with limited experience at detecting them, I didn’t find anything noteworthy. I tried to check out Down for Everyone or Just me?, but couldn’t get there. I called Time Warner for help and was told to reboot. So I did. And it worked. And then, just as suddenly (you know, right after I got off the phone) it stopped working.

So here I am in the conference room of my husband’s company, using their DSL access to blog. Any suggestions, thoughts or magic spells that might help me figure out how to fix my home network would be greatly appreciated. At this point I’m just hoping that in a few hours it will somehow fix itself. Because on the Internet, that actually happens.

Photo courtesy of Tailored Consulting

I spent part of Sunday (a very small part) watching the Daytona 500 with my dad, who happens to have a subscription to DirectTV’s HotPass service. For those of you who aren’t rabid Nascar fans, HotPass allows a viewer to select a radio channel for a particular driver and hear what he and his pit crew are saying. The service broadcasts the radio channel as well as a variety of camera angles.

It’s was pretty cool, but all I could think of was a demonstration of AT&T’s IPTV service a few years ago. During a demo, I “watched” a snippet of a baseball game in which I could choose the camera angles and see stats running along the screen. The HotPass service was similar in look, but you can’t choose which camera angles you get.

Despite those limits, the service was a cool foreshadowing of what could be potentially game-changing technology — if the technological stars align, that is. IPTV, with its almost infinite number of channels available on demand, needs to be deployed. The content providers need to figure out the legal ramifications of allowing people to customize their content as well as what people might want to see. Finally, the networks need to figure out ways to broadcast multiple IP data streams from a live event.

If all this comes together, March Madness a few years from now could be sweet. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for U-Verse to make it to my section of Austin.