The Internet Is Coming It Crowd

[Vennie Fireman]

WhenI first got my gateway it worked ok 6 months now and it sucks so bad I can't play games and half the time my wife can't even watch her shows without it buffing I think TMobile needs to stop making new stuff and fix theyre crappy service when I get another service in dropping this crap

If you have multiple towers in your area, monitor which you're connected to when you have issues (CGI in the advanced metrics). I started having very poor service and finally figured out it was always when I got bounced off my home tower to another down the street. Although, even though I figured out what the issue is, tmobile will do nothing to fix the poor service on the one tower.

My phone is always fast. Even though it is smaller, runs on a battery, and the location varies. But t mobile gives so much priority to cell phones, my home doesn't have the 25 needed to stream a TV show at certain times.

He mentioned about sending new hardware and I declined. He then mentioned something about refreshing their network settings on their end. I did have to reboot the gateway, but after they did something on their end, they said it would take 24 for 48 hours to take full effect (odd, but OK)

It has been a few days past the 48 hours and it has been good, but too early to say it is reliable. I have a speed test app on my phone so I have a easy way to track the history of my bandwidth and ping.

A week ago, when I had trouble streaming at 4:45 pm (before the refresh), I was getting 35.5 Mbps download, which can barely support streaming at 4k quality. Usually I get 250+Mbps which is way more than needed.

Hi, checking in from Carlsbad California. We switched over about a year ago. The home internet was never good but passable. We travel frequently and our security system and cameras require internet, they now go down consistently and have to be manually reset. Small problem when your not at the house.

Tijuana tower, att tower, unknown tower when there is a T-Mobile tower very close. Terrible option for Carlsbad ca. goes down 20 times a day not counting buffering and the techs are unable to do anything. As mentioned above, no good options in Carlsbad. Did hear a neighbor went to spectrum commercial for $280 per month and seems satisfied. We live in a third world country. Thank goodness ting is coming for $89/mo. Signed up. Just resigning myself that it will take another 6-12 months.

Absolutely useless, the past 3 months I have had no Internet more than I have had Internet. TMO even sent me a new "router". No fixes, it goes offline probably over 40 times a day. But! The router says service is good.

I think i'm starting to experience the same issues that everyone else is. Supposedly if we're not on a contract we can leave. I'll go back to pay more comcast if I need to. At least their connections were reliable.

Still, on this day in mid-July, Shar Ya Wai pushed herself out of a crowded store in central Yangon, holding the cellophane-wrapped cell phone as though it were an injured bird. Her fingers cradled the top and felt for the button that would turn it on, but then hesitated.

Today, news sites have become so popular that print magazines called Facebook and The Internet regurgitate stories spotted online for stragglers who have not yet joined the internet revolution. Many of them feature sensational and salacious tales, cribbed from Facebook pages with a very loose definition of facts. Drinking ice-cold water while eating hot food will give you a stomach ache! Angelina Jolie has secretly adopted a Burmese baby but is keeping it locked away due to a deformity! A Thai cabinet minister is secretly dating an Olympic gymnast!

Back in 2011, a SIM card for a mobile phone could cost upwards of $3,000, and was available only to those with high-level government connections. A handful of internet cafs existed, most of them in the capital, but were far too expensive for the average person. Less than 0.2% of the country was online, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Myanmar, said Weidman-Grunewald, was unique in that its isolation from the internet was so complete for so long, and then, just as quickly, it opened up its whole country to the whole, unfiltered internet.

Nowhere is the sudden growth as evident as in the shops underneath the golden peaks of the Sule Pagoda in downtown Yangon. Sheltered beneath the awning of the pagoda, shops that once sold stamps and watches have disappeared, replaced by storefronts crammed with mobile phones and accessories.

It was not the first time Wirathu had taken to Facebook to bolster his position globally. Following his release from jail in January 2012, where he had served a seven-year prison sentence for inciting anti-Muslim pogroms in 2003, Wirathu immediately took to the platform.

His first account was small, he said, and almost immediately deleted by Facebook moderators who wrote that it violated their community standards. The second had 5,000 friends and grew so quickly he could no longer accept new requests. So he started a new page and hired two full-time employees who now update the site hourly.

On the dozens of Facebook pages he runs out of a dedicated office, Wirathu has called for the boycott of Muslim businesses, and for Muslims to be expelled from Myanmar. He said he has a hard time keeping the pages open, since Facebook keeps shutting them down. He manages, nonetheless, to maintain an ever-growing online following.

Facebook says it's constantly thinking about ways to improve digital literacy, and that it will soon release a security awareness campaign designed specifically for Myanmar, and that it's worked with local civil liberty groups to publish a pamphlet that includes a translated and illustrated version of its community standards.

Swe Swe Luin knew that her husband, like many, enjoyed collecting and uploading photos to Facebook. Mostly, she said, he used it to chat with friends when he was on leave from the trawler where he worked hauling fish.

She said she once used Facebook to look at photos of cotton dresses she could re-create using her small sewing machine, and then resell locally. Now, she said, she just uses it to follow news about her husband.

In Myanmar, people are often actually writing in two languages. Because the internet was so slow to come to Myanmar, developers there created their own font for the Burmese script called Zawgyi. No one is sure quite who created the script, but it emerged in the early 2000s and was, critically, free. Years later, when the Unicode Consortium, which creates a standard for languages worldwide, launched its own version of the Burmese script, it found that many in Myanmar were slow to adopt it.

People in Myanmar love to joke about the blank squares that come up on many computers for the Zawgyi script. They look like boxes that would have been used by a military censor, in the days before the army eased its control of the country.

Mark Roderick is a very boring corporate and securities lawyer [AG: his words not mine]. Since the JOBS Act of 2012, he has spent all of his time in the Crowdfunding space and today is one of the leading Crowdfunding and Fintech lawyers in the United States. He writes a widely-read blog, www.CrowdfundAttny.com, with a wealth of legal and practical information for portals and issuers. He also speaks at Crowdfunding events across the country, and represents industry participants across the country and around the world.

When the JOBS Act which of course created crowdfunding came on the horizon, I said to myself, one, this is super cool, but two, this is going to transform the American capital formation industry because it's just aboutbringing the Internet into capital formation. Something that we haven't been allowed to do for 85 years by publicly advertising private investment. I just said this is this is going to be transformative. Disruptive. Awesome.

Probably 90 percent of crowdfunding is still real estate. When the JOBS Act was enacted most people actually saw it as kind of a Silicon Valley phenomenon and that we were going to see lots of high tech companies; who's going to be the next Facebook kind of thing. Indeed that is what the first sites were really about. And I actually wrote a blog post way back then and said, well what about real estate. Real estate is perfect for crowdfunding. For one thing unlike a social media startup, investors investing from a thousand miles away can see a picture of an apartment building or a house or whatever the deal may be.

I don't it's hard to speculate about what impact equity crowd funding is going to have on real estate because it's just the internet and whenever the internet comes to an industry whether the travel or the dating or taxicab or the hotel industry, It is totally disruptive. The internet directly connects buyers and sellers and gets rid of middlemen. So traditionally private real estate transactions are financed through lots of very inefficient and opaque private networks. Who you know, who does your father know, who does your friend know, who does your lawyer know. But this is just a normal thing for the Internet to do.

The internet comes in and says, none of that matters anymore because now you can connect directly with your customers and for real estate developments that means investors. What is happening now and what will continue to happen I'm sure, is that as the word gets out, as the public education process continues, within a few years when a real estate developer wants to raise money the first thing that will come to mind is let me go online. Let me get listed on a crowdfunding site. It just will become the normal way to raise capital. That's what's going to happen.

The Internet of course first picks the lowest hanging fruit and then it picks a little higher hanging fruit. At the top of the tree there's always fruit that the Internet doesn't pick. In the real estate market the sweet spot now is maybe raising a few million dollars for a developer. That will go up and up, but at some point it won't go up anymore because the efficiencies that the Internet is bringing to bear on the market no longer matter. That is to say, if you're the New York developer who put up the new World Trade Center, if you're raising billions of dollars, that market is already a very efficient market in the sense that everyone has access to the same information and everyone knows who the players are. The Internet doesn't have much to add at that level. In this way private equity firms won't be driven out of business, but they will see their lowest hanging deals disappear and they will move upmarket. That that's just what happens when the internet comes to an industry.

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