Fiber in the Morning for Regularity

If I had some half & half this morning, I would almost be in bliss. But even if I had all I ever wanted for my coffee, MediaCom still doesn't have a good contingency measure for a power outage.

What, do you ask, is the relationship between half & half and power outages? I have a routine, if you will, every morning. I get up, make coffee, and drink it while I check my e-mail, read some news, and research whatever comes to mind. Back in the day, dad's place was the garage or the woodshop out back, or some room he can read in. I have my desk, inconveniently situated in the corner of the living room, in sight of everything. But it is my place for me to enjoy. Early morning is the only time I have all to myself to do what I do without interruption, whether it be surfing porn, reading about protein synthesis, or looking for another job. My sanity depends on this; the day is not right unless I can have at least 30 minutes to myself. So...

My cable modem is out this morning due to a storm in Valdosta last night that apparently knocked out power to their head-end down there. What they must not realize or care much about is that quite a few of their customers these days depend on the cable network for telephone service. Since I moved into this house and was forced to use MediaCom cable, my modem has been offline at a minimum of once per week. The first three weeks we paid for the service, there was none. It didn't work at all.

I am one of those customers whose home telephone depends on their cable network. I am not a customer of MediaCom's telephone service (I use Lingo; it's cheaper), but nonetheless, I would be very enraged about this, I'm sure, if I had a teenage daughter. For as long as I can remember, the telephone was never out when the power went down. This outage is unacceptable, given the frequency. As a technologist, I know that there is just about no way to make a large cable network as solid as the telephone system, so when we start gabbing over copper cable with UDP packets, it's time to take another perspective on the network. Here's my solution:

Some companies are beginning to toy with the idea of running fiber optic cable directly to the customer's house. While this could prove very expensive, it would provide a robust level of service and expand the horizon of the service capability. With the bandwidth that fiber optics can provide, companies can run just about anything over it, including television, telephone, and high-speed Internet service, all at once, to every customer. Maintenance, in my opinion, would become almost nonexistent (recovering the initial cost of implementation) and service interruptions could only be caused by (and this doesn't help me today) power outages or a physical break in the fiber. This would greatly reduce calls to the technical support desk and hatred of such a big dumb company.

But I would still be out of service today, since no one wants to provide backup power to a head-end that serves, by my estimate, ten thousand people. They'd better hurry up, or I'll... Never mind. There is no other company to choose. Maybe I should start one.