Fiber to the Home in Shanghai

Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption

"The issues affecting EC2 customers last week primarily involved a subset of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (“EBS”) volumes in a single Availability Zone within the US East Region that became unable to service read and write operations," Amazon says.

This caused instances trying to use these affected volumes to also get “stuck” when they attempted to read or write to them. In order to restore these volumes and stabilize the EBS cluster in that Availability Zone, Amazon disabled all control APIs (e.g. Create Volume, Attach Volume, Detach Volume, and Create Snapshot) for EBS in the affected Availability Zone for much of the duration of the event.

For two periods during the first day of the issue, the degraded EBS cluster affected the EBS APIs and caused high error rates and latencies for EBS calls to these APIs across the entire US East Region, Amazon says.

Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption

Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption

"The issues affecting EC2 customers last week primarily involved a subset of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (“EBS”) volumes in a single Availability Zone within the US East Region that became unable to service read and write operations," Amazon says.

This caused instances trying to use these affected volumes to also get “stuck” when they attempted to read or write to them. In order to restore these volumes and stabilize the EBS cluster in that Availability Zone, Amazon disabled all control APIs (e.g. Create Volume, Attach Volume, Detach Volume, and Create Snapshot) for EBS in the affected Availability Zone for much of the duration of the event.

For two periods during the first day of the issue, the degraded EBS cluster affected the EBS APIs and caused high error rates and latencies for EBS calls to these APIs across the entire US East Region, Amazon says.

Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption

Consumers Feel Smart Phone Obsolescence

When asked, 62 percent of respondents to a Retrevo survey said they currently feel their smart phone already is "out of date," or will be before their service contracts expire. That speaks both to the rapid pace of smart device innovation and the upside for providers of the latest smart phone models.

The solution, some would argue, are shorter contracts, or no contracts. One is reminded of the surveys taken to assess consumer receptivity to advertising. Those surveys virtually always find that people don't really like ads. But they like the idea of paying more for their desired content even less.

That's essentially what the Retrevo survey found as well.

When asked if they would be willing to pay extra for a shorter contract, most responded as you would guess, with a "no." But some would pay as much as $100 extra to get a one-year contract rather than a two-year contract.

Those sorts of questions and answers are instructive, but also hinge on consumer desire, at least in the U.S. market, for high subsidies on their devices. Few consumers really want to pay $400 to $500 for their devices, to get a contract-free service plan. Most put up with contracts so they can buy those devices for $200 to $250.

You can argue all you want about the wisdom of those preferences. Most of the money a consumer spends over the length of the relationship is service fees. The device cost is a relatively small matter in comparison. But consumers have voted with their wallets, and service providers, though not enamored of the operating expense the subsidies represent, do not seem likely to abandon the model, simply because it works.

One also might argue that the subsidies, which encourage users to swap out their devices more frequently, are one reason the U.S. market now is the world leader in terms of application innovation. A user that has invested $500 to $600 in a mobile device is likely to feel obligated to use that device as long as possible.

A user that has invested only $200 to $250 is less likely to be wedded to any particular device, and is likely to feel that investing in another, updated device makes sense.

http://www.retrevo.com/content/blog/2011/04/are-you-prisoner-your-phone-carrier

Cloud Incidents Illustrate Trend

The recent Amazon Web Services outage illustrates a broader computing trend you'll all recognize, in your roles as consumers, small business or enterprise users of technology. And that trend is that, across the board, users are required to take a more-active role in managing their technology. Most people discover they are required to learn more about their computing devices and applications than they actually would prefer, just to use the tools.

Many would note that the lesson from the AWS outage is that the normal advice to build in redundancy and resiliency into an applications or hardware infrastructure applies equally when buying cloud computing services.

"While it is important to maintain pressure on service providers to improve their reliability footprint, the onus of developing or contracting reliable system stays with their clients, and there won’t be any miraculous cloud that provides 100 percent uptime or that does not risk to fail meeting its own SLAs," says Andrea Di Maio, Gartner VP.

Cloud Incidents Are a Welcome Wake Up Call for the IT Industry:

FCC to Report "Broadband Gap" Growing?

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to argue, in its annual "706" report on U.S. broadband status, that broadband providers are not deploying services in a reasonable and timely way to all Americans.

The report hasn't been officially released yet, but we understand the methodology used to argue that the broadband gap "is widening" will be different from past reports, which have focused more on a lowest common denominator approach. The new report is expected to focus on the higher end of broadband speeds and adoption.

Some suggest the latest version of the study will mirror the conclusions from last year in other respects, which found the speed of broadband deployment unsatisfactory. ” "The FCC concluded in its Sixth Broadband Deployment Report that between 14 and 24 million Americans still lack access to broadband, and the immediate prospects for deployment to them are bleak," the FCC said at the time.

Some might find that an odd way to report the results of survey that found 95 percent of people do have fixed network access. Others might simply note that even the claim of five percent "unable" to get access requires ignoring satellite access which is available to nearly every location. There are likely some locations that cannot get convenient line of sight access to a satellite providing broadband access, but that is a rare situation.

Until 2009, the 706 reports had found adequate and continual progress. The cynical will simply note that broadband has not changed, the political agenda has changed. See http://www.precursorblog.com/content/fcc-706-report-us-broadband-cup-5-empty-netcompetitionorg-press-release.

"This report underscores the need for comprehensive reform of the Universal Service Fund, innovative

approaches to unleashing new spectrum, and removal of barriers to infrastructure investment," the FCC said when unveiling last year's report.

The agency has cited the 2010 findings to justify instances of government intervention, some would say.

FCC poised to give broadband deployment a failing grade - The Hill's Hillicon Valley

PayPal Buys Mobile Payment Enabler

PayPal has acquired Fig Card, which developed a low-cost USB device that plugs into the cash register or point-of-sale terminal and allows merchants to accept mobile payments using a smart phone app.

The solution requires no new hardware on the phones (iPhone, Android, many Blackberry models) and free hardware for the merchants.

Welcome Max Metral and Hasty Granbery to PayPal