Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on September 24, 2013

Earlier this month, CenturyLink announced their intention to bring 1 gigabit fiber Internet service to the Las Vegas valley. This move will add Las Vegas to the small list of cities in the United States with such access speeds, and I was super excited to talk to the fine folks at CenturyLink to learn all about gigabits and fibers and whatever else they were willing to say about Internets and Technologies.

Unfortunately, my questions to CenturyLink were intercepted by their public relations team, turning a potentially useful information mining session into an exercise of reading a lot of words that actually say as little as possible (kind of like this twice a month column, in fact). Still, I did manage to find out some useful bits and now I will share them, because hey, this is potentially a big deal among people who care about things like gigabit Internet in Las Vegas, ie me and maybe you too if you’re still here. Here’s what we do know:

To start, the service area will only include select northwest Las Vegas neighborhoods, but CenturyLink has not revealed particular street boundaries. When asked specifically about downtown neighborhoods (under the guise of the ‘tech boom’ but in reality because that is where this columnist lives), we were told “the downtown area is part of [CenturyLink’s] research for 2014 development of the 1 gigabit fiber service network, and we can consider a fiber build out in the area if there is enough demand.”

We should all consider that to be a enthusiastic “Yes!” to downtown fiber, right? I can’t wait!

The rollout will take place over the next few months, continuing into 2014 as initial customer demand is evaluated blah blah basically if people buy it they’ll keep rolling it out I guess.

Unlike with current CenturyLink Internet services, gigabit users will not be subjected to the company’s Excessive Use Policy, and no bandwidth limits will be enforced. When I asked about home server restrictions, an issue that has recently been brought to light by Google’s initial banning and subsequently allowance of non-commercial servers, I was offered the helpful “CenturyLink is still determining how server use on the gigabit network will be regulated.” Were I to guess, which I’m about to do, I’d guess this: CenturyLink will tacitly allow the use of servers on a gigabit account while maintaining the freedom of restriction in their terms of service. Google received a fair amount of flack over this, and I expect CenturyLink to attempt to make it as much of a nonissue as possible.

Pricing for CenturyLink gigabit access will range widely, depending on the additional bundled services the customer chooses to go with. For standalone Internet service, the cost will be $149.95 a month, double what Google Fiber is charging for the same access in other municipalities. Throw in another CenturyLink service such as Prism TV or unlimited calling and the cost goes down to a much more palatable $79.95, but then you’ve still got the costs of your bundled services to consider, which is odd because honestly I really don’t think there’s a lot of crossover between the sort of person in the market for a new landline and those who are planning to increase their Internet access speeds to 1 gigabit levels. Hell, even television service is less appealing these days, more so when one happens to have fiber optic Internet running to the house. Anyway, whatever, 1 gigabit access will range between $79.95 and $149.95 per month.

So, assuming the rollout happens as planned, would I recommend CenturyLink’s gigabit Internet service?

Consider this. Cox Communication’s $110 highest-end Ultimate tier was recently increased to 150 Mpbs down and 20 Mbps up. Assuming speeds are as advertised (yes, that’s a hell of an assumption from both of the involved parties), fiber to the home from CenturyLink would run ya only $40 more for over 6x the download speed and a whopping 50x increase in upload speed. That’s a lot of increase.

Would you use all this new bandwidth? Who knows. First of all, you’ll need to make sure that your home network can support the speed – that’ll mean new hardware if it’s been a few years since you’ve upgraded your network gear.

Second, bottlenecks along the way will prevent you from frequently seeing peak speeds for individual transfers, although with the high ceiling of gigabit, multiple heavy users in a single household will rarely interfere with each other. No matter what the rest of the family is doing in the other room, what with their Netflixes and Xboxes and all, your porn is gonna get to you blazing fast.

At this point I’ll give the service a hesitant yes. Partly because it’s new and shiny and fast Internet, and who doesn’t love new and shiny and fast Internet, but mostly because I need all of you living up there in the Southern Utah parts of Las Vegas to buy in and make the service successful so CenturyLink will actually expand and bring gigabit Internet down my way. Oh, and if you do pick up the service? Send me a note and let me know what you think.

Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on October 10, 2013

On the evening of September 24th, with only a day remaining in his crowdfunding campaign, Joshua Ellis met and then exceeded his $10,000 goal. Thanks to the support of nearly two hundred backers, Joshua will spend a month traveling across sub-Saharan Africa, where he’ll pen a travelogue (to be developed into a book upon his return) about the technological ingenuity of home-grown innovators throughout the region.

So out of curiosity, what do the contents of an African tech-writing trip bag look like? What hardware and gear will you be bringing along for the journey?

I’ll be taking a Panasonic Lumix GX1 camera, which one of my backers is sending me — it’s small, light and easy to carry. Apparently theft is a really big issue in some of the places I’m going, so I’m probably going to take a crappy little netbook to write on. I’ll be backing everything up onto SD cards which I keep in my pocket, and uploading it to the cloud whenever I have Net access. Also a paper notebook, a cheap Android phone with local SIM card, a solar charger, and a big-ass knife.

How abundant are internet cafes (or other places offering shared internet access) along your route? Any guesses as to how frequently you’ll be able to post travelogue entries or otherwise communicate with backers?

I don’t actually know. Probably pretty widespread in Nairobi and Lagos, elsewhere I’m not sure. I’m hoping to use my phone to tether and send stuff that way, but I’m not sure if I can even get data plans where I’ll be. I’m researching that now.

While a handful of the locations you’ve outlined are clustered together, there’s a fair amount of land to cross, too. How do you plan to travel between Nigeria and Kenya?

Funny story: originally, I was gonna try and do it over land. It’s almost 2400 miles, but I looked at Google Maps and it said it was a 50 hour drive. Sounds reasonable, right?

Turns out that there are two roads — and I’m using that word “roads” in the most conceptual sense — that can get you from Lagos to Nairobi. One of them runs through the middle of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, through the areas where the internal fighting has been most fierce. The other runs way north, through Darfur. So not comfy, mellow road trip driving.

Then I discovered that, basically, nobody will rent you a car for that trip. They’ll sell you one. Because they know that, one way or another, you’re not coming back. And the actual travel time is probably closer to six weeks, because much of the “road” is basically paths through the jungle. You will probably lose your car. You will pay thousands of dollars in bribes along the way at borders. You will probably die in one astonishing way or another.

So I’m flying.

Have you set up any specific encounters or agenda items yet, or are you planning to wing it and take advantage of opportunities as they arise?

A bit of both. I’m going to try and set up meetings with startup kids and tech people in each place I’m going, but I also rely a lot on serendipity, which has never failed me. I’m good at figuring out what’s interesting around me.

If there’s one thing the press is good at, it’s over-illuminating dangers to the degree that any place can look like a war zone. With that said, some parts of Africa are actually legitimate war zones. Now that the project is underway, are there any planned destinations that you’re particularly wary of?

Christ, yes: all of them. I was counting on Nairobi being the safest place I was going to be, until those al-Shabaab assholes decided to run amok in that mall and announce that foreigners in Kenya were “fair game” for targeting, which they did the day after the campaign tipped over the goal. And there are definitely some al-Qaida dudes in Lagos as well. Rwanda’s generally safe, except when it’s not. Thanks to America’s imbecilic War on Scary Brown People, it’s dangerous to go anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a Starbucks on every corner. It’s difficult for me to realistically evaluate the danger from here. I know what the State Department travel advisories say for the places I’m going, which is basically “What are you, an idiot?”

So I’m more than a little nervous. I don’t exactly blend in, right? I’m not a small target. I look like a giant aging record store clerk. I’m tattooed and pierced. Plus, let’s face it, it’s not like I’m Jason Bourne. Thanks to a car accident twenty years ago, my knees are absolutely shot, and I’m completely out of shape. My only particular skill is an ability to generate an astonishing amount of chaos and physical mayhem on command. So if somebody tries to jack me I’ll just start screaming and throwing things and hope somebody comes to my rescue.

Of course, after all my worrying, I’ll probably show up and it’ll be like a goddamn Paul Simon video — nice people, beautiful scenery, a certain amount of wry wordplay. That’s what I’m fervently hoping. But I’d rather be overly cautious than overly dead.

Your mother was an ardent supporter of the campaign, even going so far as to offer home-cooked meals to local backers, and you’ve spoken before on your travels as a child. Has she been involved in the planning, and are the risks of the project a concern for her?

She was so happy when I called her after the campaign reached 100% funding that she was crying. She hasn’t really been involved in the planning, other than offering meals to local backers, which I thought was very sweet of her. She’s definitely concerned for my safety, but I think she and my dad understand that this is a really important thing for me to do, both personally and professionally. She also knows, from thirty-five years of experience, that once I’ve committed to something, there’s no point in trying to change my mind.

And we’re a nomad family: my grandfather built oil refineries all around the world, from northern China to Venezuela to Saudi to Turkey, where I lived with him and my grandmother for a year as a kid. I’ve traveled overseas fairly extensively — mostly Western Europe, but also Egypt and Turkey.

My mom was the one who instilled in me a sense of wanderlust and a basic curiosity about the universe, because she’s an amazing woman. Mainly she’s just proud of me for pulling this off, and excited for me as I go out into the big world.

Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on September 19, 2013

If Dot Vegas, Inc has its way, Latvia’s top-level .lv domain will soon find itself in a bit of competition when it comes to representing Las Vegas on the Internet.

Founded by veterans of eNIC Corporation, the registry for the .cc top-level domain, the startup and .vegas proponent began preparations for an application to ICANN (the organization that governs Internet domain names) several years ago, but initial plans were hindered by delays and a competing proposal.

Greenspun Corporation, operator of lasvegas.com and vegas.com and supported by Clark County, insisted that they should be the ones to herald the new TLD, arguing that the company was in a stronger position and could provide better terms (including a revenue agreement with the County), but Mayor Oscar Goodman and the City of Las Vegas balked, instead choosing to sign with newcomer Dot Vegas, Inc.

The Dot Vegas proposal also garnered support from the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority, the City of North Las Vegas, and the Nevada Development Authority.

With the endorsement of the city in hand (an ICANN requirement), Dot Vegas submitted its application. Last month, after internal deliberation and a reclassification from a protected geographic TLD to a generic TLD (meaning anyone worldwide can register a domain with the .vegas extension), it was announced that the .vegas application had passed ICANN’s initial evaluation, and if all goes as planned, the new TLD will be live next year.

I spoke with Dustin Trevino, CFO of Dot Vegas, Inc, about the history of the project and the company’s plans for the new TLD.

Why .vegas?

One of the areas we thought would be popular in the new TLD program would be geographic /city names. Las Vegas has two names. To those that that live here, it is Las Vegas. To those that visit it is known as Vegas. Our rational was simple, if forty million annual visitors and hundreds of millions more around the world know it as Vegas, who were we to argue. The City made it clear that they wanted the .vegas tld to be a worldwide tld, so choosing .vegas over .lasvegas was easy.

Plus, .vegas has fewer characters than .lasvegas.

The Dot Vegas, Inc. relationship with the city goes back to 2008-2009. Has it been a continuous effort to establish the TLD since then, or did the project stall and then recently revive?

The TLD application program was supposed to start in 2009 but delays within ICANN prevented that from happening. During this time we continued to work toward preparing and submitting our application, and at no time did we go dark. While it has taken us longer than anticipated to get to the submission stage, we have kept ourselves busy both operationally and politically.

What are the terms of the revenue share between the city and the company?

The city receives 10% of the gross revenue or $0.75 per domain name, whichever is greater.

Will the City of Las Vegas and/or Dot Vegas gain possession of any particular .vegas domain names once the new TLD is live?

As part of the agreement with the city, Dot Vegas Inc will withhold certain domain names that are in the interest of the city to protect, names such as mayor.vegas and citycouncil.vegas, etc.

How will the initial land rush for popular domain names be handled at launch? Will it be first come first served, or are there plans for divvying out the more enticing names?

Since we can’t directly sell domains to end users, the land rush will be handled by registrars/resellers like Godaddy, Network Solutions and others. However, there will be an auction component for the more desirable names. This will be handled by specialized companies such as pool.com and/or Sedo.

Are other entities (such as the County, etc) involved in the program, or is it strictly between the City of Las Vegas and Dot Vegas?

In terms of a revenue share it’s only the city. However, we have talked to the Chamber of Commerce and plan on others participating in some way.

Has per-domain pricing been announced, and if not, is there an estimated range that it may fall into?

With 1,400 new top level domains coming out over the next few years the pricing landscape could change dramatically. Today, we are researching pricing options. Of course, to get an accurate read on pricing we need to talk to resellers as well as end users, so this is taking us a little longer than we had expected. Internally we have discussed everything from $9.95 to $99.95 per year for an average domain name, though nothing has been agreed upon.

Yet don’t forget that we expect many of the premium names to go for seven figures. Poker.vegas comes to mind, as well as hotel(s).vegas, and there will be many more domain names that command five and six figure prices. These are scarce commodities and whoever owns them will control Internet traffic in a way that no one else can.