Apple just had a pretty fantastic keynote; Macbook Air, iPhone updates, iPod Touch that isn’t gimped anymore.. wonderful. The product that really stood out to me as meeting a long term need however was the Time Capsule.  I don’t know about anyone else out there, but backups are annoying.  However, i’m in an evenworse lot.I’ve got Family.Yes, i’m the family nerd.  I made the first step towards reducing total strange calls in the middle of the day or night about error messages and wireless networking by getting everyone to buy cute little white macbooks.  Marvelous!  However, backup remains a looming concern.I’ll buy a Time Capusule, just for me.  But if it can backup over the WAN port, backup over the internet, now then it’s a Family solution. Plus, as a business traveller, how nice to flip open the trusty MacBook Pro, and watch happily as Time Machine whirrs to life, backing up my typed-on-the-plane masterpiece over hotel Wi-Fi!  Apple! Don’t do your characteristic feature limiting. It’s a hard drive with an ethernet port, please let us use it as such!

I have Comcast cable internet.  I’m a non-traditional customer, i’d say that I upload more bits than I download.  I have an asynchronous data rate of approximately 1 megabyte per second download and 60k per second upload. This is what i’ve paid for.  However, when uploading files, I’ve noticed that for the first 5 megabytes or so, I upload as well over this 60k limit, closer to 200k.  Clearly my connection is capable of this higher speed upload, and Comcast has implemented some “speed-boost-esque” speed shaping to ensure that folks uploading puny files get snappy results.  I’m not frustrated that this is the policy, I benefit from the boost just like everyone else.  

What I am frustrated about is the boneheaded business decision to not offer this speed without the shaping as a package to customers.if 1mb/60k is 50 a month and upping that to 1mb/200k would cost me 100 a month, I’d buy it tomorrow.  Why build a network capacity and then decide not to sell it?  GROAN.The options for high-bandwidth upload in our country are amazingly terrible.  If I lived in Korea or Norway or any of several other lovely places, I’d have more bandwidth than i’d know what to do with.

 But no, I live in the great US of A where for whatever reason (stupid politicians, stupid regulations, stupid corporations) we’re still on the bike lane of the internet.

 I’ll get back to pedaling now like a good member of the proletariat.

 Carry on.