I have worked on the bill pay side of intercarrier compensation and have also worked on the accounting side of intercarrier compensation. I've done this for wireless, CLECs, and for ILECs. The way that a large carrier pays for bandwidth is not like you assume. The carrier will purchase drains with other carriers that have a lot of peering (such as Level3). That drain (usually GigE or 10GigE but there are still OC circuits being used) has three different charges associated with it. The first charge is the access charge, this is just a charge for the circuit and access to the POP that the peered carrier is at. Next you will have a minimum commitment based on a certain amount of bandwidth at the contracted per megabyte rate (which is usually a few dollars per megabyte but it is lower than it sounds when you hear how the bandwidth you are billed for is calculated). Most contracts the bandwidth comes from a sample. For example you might have the prior month split into hour long segments. Level 3 would take the hour that falls into the 75th percentile and bill you based on the number of megs of bandwidth used during that hour.

VZW is on EV-DO Rev. A which supports 3.1Mb transfer speeds NOT 2-300kbps and is MUCH faster than EDGE. HSDPA actually supports up to 18Mb not the 20 you claim. However as seen below you will never see anything close tot hat in the real world.

Also PC World did a piece in June comparing REAL world transfer speeds (http://www.pcworld.com/zoom?id=167391&page=1&zoomIdx=1)

AT&T averaged: 717 Kb/sec
Sprint averaged: 745 Kb/sec
VZW averaged: 890 Kb/sec

For reliability...

AT&T: 66%
Sprint: 84%
VZW: 83%

Please get out of here with your misinformation.

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

To a previous commenter. The companies doing high frequency trading "are" the brokers. They aren't paying any brokerage fees because they have direct access to the market. Additionally speed is important enough that your computers need to be at least in the same physical vicinity as the trading computers. Literally every millisecond makes a difference. One of the things explained in the article is because the computers are so fast they can issue and cancel an order before it gets fulfilled. So with the Intel example: Notice there is a large buying trend in Broadcom Issue at x and see if there is a match. When a match is found immediately cancel. Issue at x+1 and see if there is a match. When a match is found immediately cancel. Repeat until a match isn't found. Place a huge sell order at the final number a match was found. PROFIT Basically the company made a .4% profit in a few seconds on 1.8 million by doing nothing but taking advantage of proximity to the market. This runs against several of the ideas around how an exchange is supposed to work. By the way... if I remember the match correctly that small .4% profit? It becomes huge when you consider this is done every second of every day. All that money those big firms are sucking up are coming from the small investor. The question is what is there to do about it? It will kill any small time daytrader. Someone like me who buys and holds will be alright but man forget trying to trade minute by minute based on technicals.

HCL recently took over a company that we used for various services. I have learned that the folks HCL brought in are very polite, very nice. However, once they get put into a situation that they don't have a prewritten set of instructions on how to handle they completely fall apart. We have hired temps with nothing but highschool diplomas and little to no prior experience that have exhibited better problem solving skills.

So yes, for doing purely mechanical and incredibly boring tasks they are pretty good. Fast turnaround etc. Get them out of that realm and into the realm of "thinking for themselves." Like I said... they fall apart.

I know this isn't how all Indian workers are since I went to school with some that were quite intelligent. The only experience I have with an offshore outsourcing firm is HCL and that has only happened recently.

The reason is that the receiver on the tower picks up signal fine. The tower is connected to a local telco endoffice by multiple T1s. If those T1s get saturated then your speeds are going to go in the crapper. ATT's problem is that (obviously) they don't have enough bandwith to their cellsites. Since they don't seem to be able to count on Apple doing a good job of putting some sort of compression on the iphone and I assume their network management is good. All they can really do is throw bandwith at the problem, which of course gets expensive. And since the plans are all unlimited you don't really get the revenue to support it.

As the husband of an actual Psychologist I feel fairly well qualified to say you are full of shit. Manic episodes of Bipolar disorder don't do anything to your "IQ" (which is a pointless tool anyway). The manic means you are in a "good mood." Not you are magically smarter because you pushed the turbo button in your brain.

I simpler thing to say is:
I really only try when I care about something. When I care enough to focus I work with much higher efficiency.

See? That way it doesn't sound like you are blathering on about things you know nothing about.

I have an 18-month old and voted Kevlar. Don't need a sleep button he lays down in his nap area at 11am every day and sleeps until about 1:30pm. At 9pm he climbs onto the couch so his mom can put him to sleep and then sleeps in his crib until 7:30am. The little bugger is like clockwork.

As far as mute he only gets loud if I "attack" him. Or if his mom does something stupid like makes popcorn and refuses to let him have any.

I worry much more about injury. He is fearless lol.

It isn't about Jobs. It is about insiders selling shares before the announcement while at the same time saying he was fine to prop up the price.

See http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=AAPL

It seems very plausible that Jobs held back the announcement (or Apple as a company did). To allow company insiders to divest themselves of a significant number of shares.

You would be surprised. I work on the wholesale side for a large CMRS provider. There are hundreds if not thousands of ILECS and CLECS in the United States. Many of them have one or two end office switches to their name and that's it. I've ran into several LECs where the President is also the engineer and accountant and billing person. We call them mom-and-pops and hate dealing with them.