Tam Harbert

I remember how excited I was when I first read about Verizon’s FIOS technology. The company intended to blanket the country with fiber-optic lines, bringing lightning-fast Internet, wonderful high-definition TV and low-cost, reliable phone service to millions of homes. I was especially thrilled that I’d finally have another Internet service option besides Comcast and the phone company’s DSL service. I could hardly wait.

That was nearly five years ago, and I’m still waiting for FIOS (the F surely stands for fiber, but no one’s very forthcoming about what the rest of it stands for). It was introduced in Keller, Tex., in September 2005. Reading about it, I felt like the people in Keller were taunting me. “It’s been the most incredible service I’ve ever had,” one Keller citizen was quoted as saying. “You’re either part of the technology revolution or you’re not, and I wanted to be part of the cutting edge.” Uh – me, too.

By June 2007, Verizon’s FIOS was available in 12 states and had more than 500,000 subscribers. Although my state, Maryland, was one of them, my neighborhood was not.

I started checking Verizon’s FIOS locator page regularly. Every time I entered my address and phone number, it responded with the message: “We’re sorry. FIOS is not currently available in your area.” As if I didn’t know that. It also gave me the option to add my name to a list so that I’d be notified when the service was available. But they never wrote, they never called. If they had, I would’ve been deluged with voice and e-mails – that’s how often I added my name to that list.

Meanwhile, FIOS was growing up all around me. In Northern Virginia. In the District of Columbia. In several parts of Maryland. But not in my neighborhood.

Then, last summer, glimmers of hope. FIOS trucks were spotted in our neighborhood. Then, our homeowners’ association newsletter announced that, indeed, FIOS would be coming in the summer of 2009. But it turned out that Verizon was leading me on yet again. FIOS was installed in the next neighborhood over – about six blocks away. It did not come to my street.

As of the end of the second quarter of 2010, Verizon FIOS was available to 12.9 million “premises,” according to its financial reports. And I was pretty sure that mine would never be one of them.

Finally, this summer, along came a crew of subcontractors – digging holes and trenches every 10 to 20 feet, laying fiber, putting stinking port-a-potties at the end of our street. And Verizon started teasing me again with flyers left on my front door and brochures in the mail. “FIOS is coming soon to your neighborhood!” they said.

It’s been about six weeks now. The construction crews (and the port-a-potties, thank God) are gone. All is quiet. Including Verizon. I haven’t received a flyer in awhile. Tonight, I checked the FIOS availability page again. It still tells me that the service is not available in my area.

As far as I’m concerned, FIOS stands for “forever imminent online service.” Before I’ve even had a chance to try it – and regardless of how wonderful the technology may be – I’ve soured on FIOS. If Verizon does ever offer to sell it to me, it’s hard to imagine that it could be so incredible as to make up for these repeated disappointments. Besides, I bet that the next new, and even better, technology is right around the corner. I’m so good at waiting, I just might wait for that one to arrive.

A few weeks ago, I read “Connecting America: The National Broadband Plan,” a 376-page report by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, for a story I wrote for Electronic News. OK, I didn’t read every single page, but I skimmed through most of it, and actually read entire chapters.

One chapter in particular hit me where I, and in fact anyone who works from home, live. In Chapter 3, which describes the state of broadband in the United States, the FCC points out that consumers are not exactly getting the broadband speeds that are advertised. In fact, the actual broadband speed in American households is on average only 40 to 50 percent of the speed advertised by the provider, according to the FCC.

I’ve often wished there were a way to verify the speed claimed by my broadband provider, Comcast. Over the years Comcast has purportedly upgraded my speed several times. I’ve never noticed a difference. Last year, when I called to complain about its prices, the customer service rep lowered my monthly subscription fee by 50 percent. (This had more to do with Verizon’s high-speed fiber service, FIOS, moving into my neighborhood than my complaining, I’m sure.) He also threw in a free PowerBoost, a speed upgrade which is supposed to deliver download speeds of up to 15 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds of up to 3 Mbps. Notice that very useful marketing phrase: “up to.” As the FCC report puts it: “An end-user with a connection for which download speeds are ‘up to 8 Mbps’ can expect to reach 8-Mbps download speeds, but not necessarily reach and sustain that speed all or even most of the time.” Again, I never noticed a difference.

Meanwhile, the FCC recently launched a nifty Consumer Broadband Test on its website. The test, still in beta, actually offers two different testing tools: one from Ookla and one from M-Lab. Simply enter your address and click a button, which starts a transfer of small amounts of generic data between your computer and the nearest test server. In about a minute, it gives you download and upload speeds, as well as a few other statistics.

I ran both tests several times, expecting to find how much slower my speeds were than what Comcast claimed. The results were different each time, sometimes wildly so, both between the two tests and for the same test in different instances. But in general they all fell within a certain range. And those general results surprised me. If I’m correct in my math (the tests deliver speeds in kilobits per second, which I had to convert to megabits), the tests showed download speeds of around 24 Mbps and upload speeds of about 4 Mbps – much faster than the advertised speeds. If this holds true for most Comcast customers, the company is missing a golden marketing opportunity. It’s rare that this broadband provider has delivered more than it promised, at least to me.

Then again, the FCC cautions that the current beta version of the tests may not be very accurate. Presumably, the FCC will improve future versions so I can trust it at least more than I trust Comcast. The FCC report notes that broadband companies have misled consumers about more than just speeds; they’ve also been accused of not actually delivering services in certain parts of their advertised service areas. The Consumer Broadband Test will give consumers and the government (which plans to gather and aggregate the data from the test) a way to keep them honest.

Very little of what I write actually gets printed on paper anymore. Most people read my stories online. But most publishers – magazine publishers especially – haven’t adjusted well to digital. The visual presentation is boring, often awkward and sometimes downright ugly. The text is hard to read. A beautiful two-page spread from a major magazine feature gets stripped of its best design elements online. It just stands there, naked.

It’s not all the publishers’ fault. So far, no technology has been able to do justice to the beauty and class of glossy magazine articles. Three weeks ago, I was skeptical about the future of digital magazines . But in the course of reporting a story on e-readers, I’ve learned about recent developments in both publishing and technology that could bring magazines fully into the digital age.

First, e-readers are catching on fast. There are about 50 e-readers on the market today. Semiconductor companies, excited by the potential, are jumping into the market with chips that offer faster speeds and more functions at lower costs. These chips will enable new e-reader makers to enter the market. The drop in electronics cost combined with the increased competition could cut the price of an e-reader – the least expensive of which is about $250 today – to less than $100 by year end. To differentiate themselves, e-reader vendors are experimenting with designs, including a hinged reader that would open up like a magazine, according to Gregg Burke, manager of the e-book business line of chips recently introduced by Texas Instruments. He thinks such a product could be on the market by December 2010.

The displays are still limited to black and white, but some promising color technologies are on the horizon. Jennifer Colegrove, director of display technologies at consultant DisplaySearch, says that within five years, rich, full-color e-magazines could be common.

Second, publishers seem to be finally loosening their death grip on the old print model and rethinking how to sell their product in digital form, taking a cue from Amazon’s Kindle and its digital newsstand, which offers dozens of magazines, including Time, Forbes and Fortune. Hearst Corp. recently launched Skiff, a digital magazine and newspaper service for e-readers. And in December, a consortium of publishers, including Time Inc., Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst and News Corp., announced a joint venture to create a digital storefront for their magazines.

Independent companies also are trying to make a business out of distributing digital magazines. Zinio claims to be the largest digital newsstand in the world, offering 1,900 consumer magazine titles.

The big question is whether publishers can and will design their content for multi-dimensional digital media rather than plain old analog paper. After all, why would I pay $3 a week for a digital subscription to Forbes when I can already read it on my PC for free? Several reasons:

• It’s hard work to read a long magazine article on a PC. All that scrolling and jumping through pages. Plus the text is hard to read, at least for middle-aged eyes. Take one look at the crisp display of an e-reader and you’ll immediately appreciate the difference.

• I want to read that magazine at the dinner table, in bed or on the subway – NOT at my desk when I’ve got more important stuff to do.

• I get articles with beautiful color and layouts, articles that are presented even more attractively online than on glossy paper.

• I get interactive features that are fun, useful and informative. Clicking on a photo of baseball star Manny Ramirez, for example, might reveal a list of his stats.

Technology is already delivering on the first two points, but that won’t be enough. As for the last two, the next year will be critical. I hope the technology to present rich color develops quickly. I hope magazine publishers invest the time, money and effort to get it right. (To get a sense of how magazines could develop, see this video from Swiss media company Bonnier AB.)

Magazines just might survive. I plan to buy an e-reader so I’ll have a front-row seat to watch.

As we packed for our Thanksgiving trek to the family homestead last week, my son was stuffing his laptop into the suitcase when I pointed out that his aunt might not have WiFi access at her house. At first, he looked at me like I was speaking Russian. Then, as he grokked the concept, he looked at me as if he were being consigned to Siberia.

Age 17, he barely remembers a time when he couldn’t access the Internet from anywhere. Even I, who remembers dialing a rotary phone, have a hard time recalling how many phone calls and how much legwork was required when I first started working as a reporter in the 1980s. I couldn’t google a company to find the exact spelling of its corporate name, its location and a description of its product or service. I used to spend hours chasing down such basic information.

During our holiday, we drove through the sparse Kansas farmland in search of the town where my mother was born and raised. Ost, Kansas, consists of a handful of buildings dominated by St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and the parish school, which houses a total of 94 students in grades 1 through 12. We couldn’t remember exactly where Ost was, but trusted that if we got within a few miles we’d be able to spot the church steeple. No hills and very few trees make this wonderfully possible in the Sunflower State. Instead, my son whipped out his iPhone with GPS.

Problem solved. Adventure cut short.

I wonder what we are giving up when answers come so easily. In the past, it took discipline, planning, imagination and determination to track down a piece of information or to find a tiny town in the vast prairie. Today, it’s literally at our fingertips. There was courage, adventure, challenge and reward in the struggle to uncover a fact or solve a problem. Now, it’s tempting to give up if we can’t find an answer quickly and easily. Like the proverbial tree in the woods that makes no sound if no one’s there to hear it fall, what happens to information that’s not on Google? Will anyone be willing to hunt for answers? I fear we may just stop asking the questions. What an ironic side effect of the Information Age.

Postscript: Even if we are willing to hunt for answers, they may no longer be there because apparently no one’s preserving the archives of dying newspapers: http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/01/05/archives-in-peril-generations-of-history-gone-with-the-flip-of/

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