May 4, 2007

PSTN Killer Coming Soon

Filed under: Networking — pj @ 12:00 am

The local phone companies were right to panic about cell phones and VOIP. It looks like T-Mobile will be the first to offer the service that will fundamentally change telephone service in millions of homes. I don’t care what the lame survey survey says:  When people have this service, they will stop using their home phones. One day, they’ll get the home phone bill, realize they haven’t use the home phone in months (except to talk to telemarketers) and have it disconnected. This process will take time – lots of people are in multi-year cell phone contracts and, at least in my area, the local phone company has cleverly tied DSL service to having a local phone service.

I am surprised that flat rate carrier, MetroPCS, doesn’t already offer this service (if only to offload their cell network!), but I’m not suprised to see T-Mobile offer it first. Verizon, Sprint and AT&T get a lot of highly profitable income from local phone lines.

T-Mobile could jump into commercial service as well by having your cell phone become an an office phone extension (only when you are in the office, of course!) when it detects your corporate WLAN.

May 3, 2007

ABCDEFG HDMI which TV for me?

Filed under: Home Theatre — pj @ 12:42 am

Prices on High Definition TVs (HDTVs) finally fell. A month or so ago, the manufacturers decided they had soaked the sports fan market for all it was worth and lowered prices to where the rest of us might consider a new TV. There is still not enough (non-sports) HD content available. There are just a handful of HD DVDs available to rent at my local Blockbuster and though my satellite provider, DirecTV, has a handful of HD channels available now, they are promising a lot more “real soon now”. 

For various reasons, I recently needed a new TV for the basement. As usual, I did my homework and bought a TV.  So, which TV is the right one for you? Getting the ideal TV is kind of complicated and depends a lot on what you want to do with it… (more…)

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