For those unfamiliar with 95th percentile billing here is as simple an explanation I can deliver. If you a using bandwidth for a month and your peak download OR upload rate is say 20Mbps your 95th of that might be 15Mbps for instance. The concept in itself involves dropping the top 5% of use to account for infrequent high bursts (in this example to 20Mbps).

Why is 95th an important billing method? It allows the supplier to account for peak demand and actually bill and make money off that peak level. If the supplier is relied upon to deliver to the end user at such a peak rate at ANY time, why shouldn't that peak rate be the billed amount since the supplier actually had to build infrastructure to accomodate for it? Of course there is oversell but in reality there is similar pattern of use between most end customers, requiring that expense asset expenditure to accomodate for peak levels of each and every end user.

Why aren't so many other things billed via this method? Cell phones, electricity, municipal water...etc.

WiFi aka "Poor Man's Wireless"

Great for coffee shops and stealing it from (mostly) unsuspecting non-tech types who leave their home router unsecured. Also good for those cities that somehow believe blanketing their downtown or the entire city with WiFi will make their city more attractive and a better place to live (which in my opinion will result in class action lawsuits by taxpayers in jurisdictions where they may have footed a portion of the bill). Dailywireless reports that there are over 300 municipal wireless WiFi systems in the USA!

YVR was a mess. The normally easy to transit, verging on calm airport was transformed in to the longest line I have personally ever witnessed at an airport. No one was complaining much...it was mostly stunned looks and bewilderment in the thousand deep crowd.

The terrorists? They succeeded. Whether they were really ever going to blow up planes in mid-air is almost irrelevant. The terrorists (or extremists, or whatever you personally want to call them) managed to push up the terror alert status to the maximum (since it has come off) in both the USA and Britain.

What is going through a politicians mind when they 'come up with the idea' that their city should have ubiquitous WiFi coverage for the masses? Maybe ubiquitious housing, education or medical aid is a more likely target?!? I'm telling you it makes me crazy. Why don't they start dealing in electricity, cable TV or countless other commercial services?!? Does WiFi makes their citizens smarter or something? I haven't seen such a study.

The small box takes input from your analog or digital cable box, compresses the stream as it is received and then makes it available via the internet via your home broadband connection. Even even has IR emitters for controlling hundreds of types of cable boxes, allowing you to change channels, etc.

Why? Being a true entrepreneur (i.e.: neither an old family business nor a franchise) is time demanding, cash draining and can be extremely stressful and anxiety producing.

I have owned my two zone Sonos system plus controller for just over one year so I figured it was time to tell the internet world about how this amazing music system has completely 180'd how I own, manage and listen to music.

Sonos is made up of Zone Players that you place in each room where you would like to distribute music. Only one unit must be connected (somehow) to your LAN for access to wherever you store your MP3's. The storage area can literally be any drive map(s) or hard drive visible on the network. I started off story my MP3's on my PC but my collection quickly outgrew the hard drive space and I later migrated to a network hard drive (essentially a hard drive in a case with an ethernet port).

Personally I had some great discussions with many individuals that no doubt have spurred me to think (even more) about our industry and the global impact it is having and going to have on communications and information flow.

I was particularly excited chatting with Tony from CWLab. I told him about our equipment woes and what a strange time it is for our industry.

It was interesting to see a close to comprehensive comparison between countries on various metrics regarding WiMAX. Clearly at odds with most of the other countries in the report was the United States.

I have been deploying last mile microwave since 2000 and last fall began deploying what WiLAN termed 'pre-WiMAX' equipment (recently WiLAN announced their exit from the hardware game to focus on their WiMAX patent portfolio).

The show is about a very small IT department of a UK business and their (in)ability to run an efficient IT help department. If you have ever been in an IT department or had to interact with one this show will no doubt provide some great laughs.

On another note, supposedly Canada is the leader in illegal downloads.

Over the past two years I have strongly asserted to anyone who asks whether my blackberry (since the 957 a 7280, 7290 and now an 8700) is useful or not, I strongly proclaim that my company, MetroBridge Networks, would be atleast 30% smaller in both sales, number of employees and number of customers with Blackberry.