CIT49900 2nd Week Review

First of all, I don't know why the original post disappeared.  Let's hope this one sticks around.

We continued our discussion on telco and cableco infrastructure this week.  From what I understand, the telco's focused solely on providing voice service to residential customers and the cableco's focused on broadcasting video.  It wasn't until the cableco's started to offer data connection that the telco's began to offer it as well, in the form of DSL.  The real threat to the telcos now is the availability of VoIP with the cableco's.  This new "triple threat" forced the telcos to innovate and offer packages that provide voice video and internet in the form of AT&T's U-verse and Verizon's FiOS.

Competition certainly does drive innovation.  It's a shame though that the smaller providers (Century Link for example) are unable to compete with the cableco's offerings.  I live in an area that's serviced by Century Link, and I, sadly, cannot get anything that even comes close to U-verse or FiOS.  Their idea of offering video service is to refer customers to DISH network.

This is certainly an interesting topic, however, I'm more interested in learning about the cellular providers and their networks.  I think we're going to start talking about that next week.

I've been thinking a bit about what I want to do for my semester project.  I'm interested in cell technology so I may do something relating to that.  I'll know more once we start talking about it.  I've also though about doing something relating to IT infrastructure in the developing world.