I’m at the Telecom 04 conference in Vegas this week. It’s a huge conference with tons of exhibits and technologies on display. A cool one I saw this morning was a DSLAM — DSL access multiplexer — in a fish tank (to show that the DSLAM can withstand all sorts of weather, including floods).
And in other news, at the last panel I saw, someone from Sprint told the audience that “things are changing so now the customer is the focus.” The first thing I thought when I heard him say that is “I’m glad I’m not with Sprint if they are only realizing now that the customer matters.” And then I remembered that there’s a reason I’m not with Sprint. When I moved to the US from Canada years ago, Sprint refused to do a Canadian credit check to see if I would be a worthy cell phone customer (even though they have Canadian operations). Since they wouldn’t do the check, it looked to their computer that I had no credit record, so they wouldn’t sell me phone service. I shrugged, walked over to Verizon, whose employees did the check in a matter of minutes, and walked out the door with my Verizon phone.