I really don't think he's intentionally manipulating the media. I think he's just wandering between topics saying crazy things and mostly getting away with it, like Mr Magoo, because everyone is so caught off guard.

It's like hypothermia. They have to cut off the extremities or die in the short term. Hopefully if they retain their core R&D they can ride the 5G wave. If they do not put R&D first right now, Huawei and Nokia will crush them when 5G rollouts start.

That does not make them an operator, that still just makes them a vendor. Professional Services is just another product vendors supply to operators and service providers.
https://wiki.mef.net/display/C...

When I was on the Google campus last year they had fliers posted on the wall above the urinal basically telling me how overpaid and privileged I am, as a man.
I've got no doubt that there's a lot of vocally pissed off self-righteous people in Mountain View right now. Wait, that's a tautology.

Fiber is not dead. AT&T and VZ slowed their deployments, but they're both in the middle of upgrading their GPON network hardware and they'll be supporting what they still have. Their main obstacle to deploying more is that they're betting on 5G and wireless fixed access, and don't want to invest money in their wireline plant when they can invest that money in a network that supports both homes and mobile phones. Personally I think that wireless with never be as good as fixed, and it won't even be 'good enough' for the majority of users as 4k, VR, cloud-based everything starts becoming the norm.

AT&T and VZs competition which do not have a mobile network, Centurylink, Frontier, Windstream, and the cable companies, are cheerfully deploying GPON networks. There are also lots of small companies and municipal networks being built every day.
It's not going to happen overnight because of the cost, but it's happening and the US is actually well ahead of Europe when it comes to fiber. Europe is mostly betting on vectored VDSL2 and G.fast to get them through the next few years.

You're making a lot of bad assumptions. Not every house has a single person living in it. Not every house (pass) is going to sign up for service. The typical cost of a FTTH build is around $2,000 per home passed, and depending on the market you may only get 20 to 40 percent of those to actually sign up for service. Then there is millions of dollars worth of networking gear required for a market, and many thousands of dollars per month for transport costs and IP transit, plus the expense of operational and engineering staff, which is not cheap because there's no shortage of demand. Of course, what Google did instead of hiring experienced network engineers is hire silicon valley college grads who care a lot more about 'disrupting' shit than reading manuals and standards docs.

Google thought they could 'disrupt' the market and do things cheaper than the telcos and MSOs and instead did a lot of dumb things that raised their costs relative to the AT&Ts and Comcasts of the world.

There are no two places in Texas that are alike anyway. Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Amarillo, Pecos, Texarkana, El Paso, Corpus, they're all wildly varied. If you lived in Texas you might know that what set's Austin apart isn't *that* it's different but *how* it's different.

Modem....routing? Holy balls. 802.1q. Double-tagged traffic, with tags added at the ONT (FTTH customer prem equipment). Outer tag identifies Service Provider, Inner tag identifies Customer, or there could be other schemes. Some access equipment supports MPLS encapsulation so you don't even need to worry about VLAN assignments being unique accross ISPs. The access equipment can be connected directly to a colocated ISP on a dedicated LAG, or there could be an ENNI between routers of the facilities based ISP and the colocated ISP, which would require fewer physical connections but would burn more of the ISPs router ports ($$$).

The main problem with this is that it requires a level of cooperation that most US ISPs aren't competent to handle. There are standards for how services are delivered between carriers, defined by the Metro Ethernet Forum, but they're not widely understood outside the Wholesale game. AT&T or VZ are competent enough, but have no incentive to support it.

That's why Hillary raised almost double what Donald did. I bet those people are kicking themselves for having bought someone who isn't even in office.

Honestly, I probably wouldn't unless they did it badly. If there was a hard reset I would assume a power issue while I wasn't looking. If they didn't change the function or the admin interface, I probably wouldn't now that my Tomato had been replaced with CherryTomato.

This is a terrible example. If you get a subsidized phone, expect it to be carrier locked. If you buy a car with a loan, expect a lien. The option to pay for either with cash has always existed, so don't moan about a deal you voluntarily chose.
If you want a real example of where regulation is neede, look at large high rise apartments without fire alarms.

Why is a plane change even needed? That's why they are excited about SpaceX's quick turnaround and rapid launch abilities. They just launch into the plane of the space object they want to check out or take out on demand.

I disagree completely. Operations should be separate from Engineering for the same reason the Executive branch needs to be separate from the Legislative. If Operations has concerns about a network change or a software roll out, they shouldn't be reporting to an Engineering manager who can just say 'This is what we're doing' because they have a date to hit.

I see this over and over. A company needs high reliability at some site so they buy one connection from Company A and another connection from Company B.
Then the customer has an outage in which both connections go down within milliseconds of each other. "WTF" they say, "this is why we bought one from AT&T and one from Zayo"!
75% of the time Company B will just buy the last mile from Company A!!! Even in the remaining 25% of the time they are almost certainly sharing some network infrastructure. Maybe Company B is colocated in Company As central office. Maybe Company A is using long-haul fiber from Company B to get back to their core network.
If you really need diverse redundant connections buy both of them from the SAME company and specify in the service order that they must be on physically diverse paths with no single point of failure. It will be expensive.

I would take that bet. I've had the misfortune of supporting a major Silly Valley corp that was trying to 'innovate' an existing industry.There was an attitude that technology is magic and that they would be able to come in and in 18 months be better at that industry than companies which have existed for a century. The individual engineers and project managers are also not interested in anything that isn't 'disruptive', including hard work and studying their competitors. They didn't seem to grok the basic concept that if you don't understand something well enough to do it manually, you don't understand it well enough to automate it.