Sean Mountcastle

After almost seven years, I was finally awarded a patent: 7,170,862. It’s assigned to my previous employer, Cisco Systems, Inc. Until I started this process, I never imagined how long the USP&TO could take to finally assign a patent. Now I’m waiting to see if any of my other patents filed by Cisco will be awarded.

This actually happened back in January, but since I was never notified, I researched it myself after the recent news of Cisco opening up IOS to 3rd party developers.

My friend Dave is was looking to get an iPhone now that his Treo died. I already have AT&T service and I’d love to upgrade to an iPhone as well. Being an old AT&T Wireless customer from before they were purchased by Cingular and renamed (and now back to the old name) does not appear to be an asset. I’ve had the service before I was married, consequently if I’m going to upgrade my phone, consolidating my service with my wife’s through AT&T’s family plan would probably be best for us.
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My previous employer, Cisco Systems, has decided to restructure my business unit and as a result my choices were to either move or leave and since my family is quite happy in Northern Virginia, I decided to find employment elsewhere. The restructuring was necessary for Cisco, and personally I thought they should’ve taken action much sooner than they did. The company made a series of bad business decisions in the optical business, not the least of which was paying $6.9 billion for the start-up at which I worked. The world is moving to ethernet and IP and the focus should’ve been on leveraging the team’s existing experience in telecom (and SONET/SDH, in particular) to move to an IP-based platform.

I was eager to see Cisco’s shift its image to a consumer-focused company–even though I think the new logo looks considerably worse than the old one. Even though I’m planning to get rid of my cable service in favor of FiOS TV, it would’ve been nice to see the Cisco enhancements to the SciAtl set-top boxes. And as a Cisco share-holder, the fact that consumer companies seem to have higher multiples has given the stock a nice little rise since early August.

I’ll continue to keep my eye on Cisco and now that I’m no longer an employee I can blog about them much more freely.

This afternoon I attended Asterisk Inside and Out by Brian Capouch. His presentation is available here while all of the Asterisk configuration files can be obtained here. The tutorial was based on his forthcoming book, Asterisk Inside and Out: Do-it-yourself Open Source Telephony, from Addison-Wesley.

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I’m curious why I can’t find anyone experimenting with the use of superconductors (high temperature superconducting (HTS) wire, specifically) in networking applications. I realize that fiber is really cheap now and HTS wiring is not. But it would be nice to see the transmission distances, for example, for an HTS version of Cat 6 with RJ-45 style connectors.

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Broadband Reports has an interesting article up discussing Next-gen Broadband. At this point it looks like Verizon and the cable co’s are in the lead to offer high megabit services (i.e. 100Mbps). In my neighborhood, the first wave of Verizon contractors has already come through burying fiber and in response Cox Communications has upgraded my cable modem service (at no additional cost — though see my notes below for more). It looks like Verizon isn’t going to actually hook fiber up to my house until I order their FiOS service (which I’m not likely to do until it is either cheaper or considerably faster than my cable internet service).

Even though Cox claims they have upgraded my service to 5Mbps down/2Mbps up, I have not noticed any increase in speed, either way. Apparently they have not upgraded anything and are just putting a new label on the existing shared 38Mbps. Hopefully now that DOCSIS 3.0 is mostly finalized, we’ll see the equipment hit the streets early next year (though it would be really nice if LinkSys figured out a way to upgrade my existing cable modem’s firmware instead of having to fork over more $ for a new box). At any rate, I’m looking forward to the higher speeds, both downstream and upstream.