For the past month, Bell Aliant FibreOp customers in Fredericton have noticed an odd increase in their speed. The upload speed appeared to be the same as their download speed. In some cases, the upload speed was faster than the download speed. Some had speculated that they were doing large scale testing to see how symmetric internet service would impact the network on a whole.

According to this unverified post on Digital Home Canada, they will be making the new speeds official:

10/2 will become 15/15
25/5 will become 30/30
70/15 will become 70/30
The 170/30 plan will be staying the same.

This is clearly intended to be a great competitive advantage against Rogers. Rogers may not even be technically capable of matching those upload speeds. All indications are pointing to a future where more upload bandwidth will be required due to peer-to-peer networks and social media. FibreOp is clearly ahead of the curve. Has the spirit of NBTel come back? Do the managers at Bell Aliant actually understand the Internet? Hopefully Ma Bell won’t step in and kill it like they did with so many other innovations from NBTel (VibeVision, iMagicTV, etc).

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E10 Gasoline is here. You may have seen people complain about it, but the complainers are usually old car collectors or racers. Here’s a FAQ for regular people:

I have a regular car/truck and fill the gas tank more often than once a month
No problem, just keep buying regular.

I have a lawnmower/snowblower/ATV/dirt bike
The only change you’ll need to make is to switch to premium (not plus) gasoline as that won’t have the additive. Your best bet is to find a station that has a separate hose for supreme. This may be harder as newer pumps have combined hoses.

What’s wrong with E10 in smaller engines?

E10 only has a shelf life of about 3 months. After that, it will degrade and plug up the engine.

What’s wrong with combined hoses?
The problem is when you buy a small amount of gas. The hose will be full of whatever the last person bought.

I can only find combined hoses, what do I do?
No problem, if you also own a car. Just select Premium on the pump, put 5L of gas in your car to flush out the hose first. Then, fill up your jerry can.

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Those daily deal sites have been getting a lot of buzz lately. There have been quite a few of them pop up lately. Some are locally oriented sites, others are larger ones who can afford a Superbowl ad. Will this be a shopping trend that stays?

Probably not. It is essentially an expensive way to advertise. A business owner will lose a significant amount of revenue (around 75%) on the deal items when the promotion is run. They will also have to deal with a surge in new customers, which may strain even more resources. As with every promotion, there is a cost, but the retailer will need to decide if the cost to acquire a new customer is worth it.

We will also have a problem with saturation of deals sites. Users will only be willing to pay attention to so many emails per day. The rest will get ignored, or eventually be moved into the spam folder.

How they should work: Instead of being a promotional tool, they should leverage the value of volume discounts. Imagine a retailer normally sells a product for $20. His cost is about $12/unit and he normally sells about 10 per week. His supplier sends him a weekly shipment of 10, but has a price break at 50 which would bring the cost down to $8/unit. By using a group purchasing site, he can sell them for $12 (of which he would get to keep $10 with $2 going to the website). He still makes a profit of $2/unit, and he has the opportunity to bring in new customers as a side benefit.

I’ll admit now that I may be wrong about this, but there have been many business models that stopped working once the novelty wears off.

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There has been quite a bit of talk about sandwich boards being an issue in downtown Fredericton. Some people find them annoying, others consider them a hazard, yet most people just ignore them. Here are some examples of signs and how they are placed:

Here, we see three of them placed right next to the building, generally out of the way, only partially intruding onto the width of the sidewalk. Most of the sandwich boards are like this.

This one is particularly bad as it is really short. If you aren’t looking where you’re going, you could very easily trip over this one. People who text while they walk are most at risk with this one. Note the footprints in the snow and see how that sign goes right over the ones on the edge.

This one was the worst one I saw, it’s right in the middle of the sidewalk. Yes, it’s a wide sidewalk, but does it really have to be in the middle?

This is the best one I saw. It’s out of the way between a telephone pole and a tree. The store owners solved the visibility problem with balloons.

The simplest solution is to make all the sandwich boards go in the space between the sidewalk and the street. That way, they’re out of the way and the store owners will still get some visibility.

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Declining unconditional grants lead to budget cuts and resentment of nearby communities who “freeload” off the larger centres.

Here’s a chart that shows the percentage of the City of Fredericton’s budget that comes from the province:

This leads to changing attitudes:

1992 – Sure, go ahead and use our rinks, the more the merrier

2011 – That’ll be $685, don’t like it? Move to the city!

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