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Time for Device Independent Data Plans

Now that everybody talks about the iPad, let’s talk about something just as important as the new device:

iPad data plan

It’s a screenshot from Engadget’s coverage.  Yes, reasonable data plan prices. Except… how many of them do you need?  An iPhone data plan, too?   A data plan for your USB stick for the times you do need a “regular” notebook to work on?

Remember this?

rotaryphone

Yes, phones looked like that.  And there was a time when phone companies (Ma Bell) charged extra when you had more then one outlet in your home….

Remember the early days of cable TV?   You had to ( well, were supposed to) pay extra for each additional cable outlet.

How about the early days of the Internet, before wireless became pervasive?  Yes, ISPs expected us to pay extra for each outlet.

These anachronistic charges are all gone – we pay for the service, no matter what device we use to access it.

So why would wireless access be any different?  We will soon have an increasing number of devices, but the underlying service is the same.  In fact chances are when I use my iPad (which I don’t have), I will not be using my Netbook / Notebook, or browse the Net on iPhone, Google Nexus One … as a consumer I may own a variety of devices, but chances are I will only use them one at a time.

It’s time wireless providers wake up to the 21st century and charge for consumption on a per account (person) basis, not per device.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

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OpenDNS Shortcuts (are) were More Like Detours

Use OpenDNS (Updated)
Using OpenDNS instead of your ISP’s default supposedly speeds up your surfing experience – it’ s probably true, see ZDNet’s explanation.

However, there’s one feature – a convenience – you should avoid, and ironically it’s called a shortcut. Ironically, because in reality it’s more like a long detour.

For example I have t set up for www.techmeme.com. Here’s my little experience this morning:

Conclusion: OpenDNS may be fast, except when it has to access it’s own server – you’re better off not using shortcuts.

I obviously cleared the browser cache before each step. Stats were measured by the Load Time Analyzer FireFox plugin by Google, and the results are displayed using the Zoho Viewer.

Update: I received several helpful comments, from OpenDNS’s David Ulevitch and Paul Stamatiou who wrote a pretty good review of the shortcut feature earlier. They both pointed me to this system status message, which indicates an earlier server issue this morning, at the time I ran my tests is now resolved.

I have actually experienced slowdowns for days now, which of course was only my subjective feeling, but in the end that’s what prompted me to look for diagnostic tools and run the tests today.

That said, I ran the tests again, under the same conditions, repeatedly, and the results are around 2000ms , with only 3-400ms difference between the ‘shortcut’ and the full URL method. I guess that means OpenDNS is back to normal. Thumbs-up

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Comcast Testing Higher Speeds?

My Internet experience has been bumpy all day, even though my connection speed was far better than expected. I don’t think the problem was speed as such, it’s was the spottiness – lost of 1-2 second mini outages. Now I’m starting to wonder if Comcast is silently testing a major speed update. Just looks at these test results:

That’s quite unbelievable, it’s about 4 times faster than Comcast’s stated speed. Can anyone confirm / deny? Rumors?