Re: Is it a jury of twelve?
6 person with multible person disorder...
9 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Apr 2012
No - if you are a small municipal and you have the 2 options of:
- Having a major cable corporate to do the work and offer the municipal a small kickback
- Do it your self - to boldly go.....
What do you do?
If you own the cables you can start with as few as 200 internet subscribers and still earn (a lot of) money. But you have to talk to suppliers, make support and take ownership. And have some start capital.
Or do you lean back and let the corporate do the work and take money...
We have done it our self for the last 10 years but it was no always smooth sailing - we had to have a new provisioning system developed, the learning curve has steep and there have been times when we had problems of getting the cost to cover the income.
I'm working with a municipal cable company in my spare time. We are able to offer broadband at 80% of the price from the major commecial cable company. And we are making so much money that we have been able to replace most of our cables over the last 5-6 years.
And we are not that big - 5600 cable TV subscribers and 4200 internet subscribers.
The major problem/issue why no more are doing this is that it looks like a lot of work....
It really is not - it is not easy, but not that hard either.
Given that the zEC12 runs at 5.5 GHz and the fastest Xeon runs 3.6 GHz and you would have an emulation layer on top of that you would not run faster.
But IBM have an emulatetor running on Linux (RDz) that you can use for Development (inhouse and as an ISV). And the engine performance is quite fine - 400+ MIPS for a 3 CP machine.
But you are not allowed to use it for production.
It could be a very fine technical solution for small mainframe installations but on the other hand - the zBC12 'only' cost ~$75,000.
I would love to be able to buy a RDz with zVM 6.x and z/OS 1.13 (2.1?) and the ability to setup and run a parallel sysplex for the fun of it......