According to Connectify, Dispatch — which went live in December — has some inherent limitations. While it was able to aggregate multiple wireline and wireless connections into a single fat pipe, allowing your Windows-based PC to take advantage of every available internet link, Dispatch could only ship certain types of content over one of those connections at any given time, Connectify President Bhana Grover said in an email.

“This worked fantastically with multi-threaded applications like web browsing and Bittorrent,” Grover said. “But the feedback we got from our backers and customers was that they wanted a more robust connection aggregation technology: one that could speed up video streaming, uploads, and VPNs… and was Mac-compatible, too.”

Switchboard basically works like a virtual private network (VPN). All of your internet connections — whether Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G — link to Connectify’s servers in the cloud. Those servers then go about dismantling content or files into their component packets and routing them over those different connections. Over Dispatch, a Netflix movie would stream over the highest-bandwidth connection available to the PC. If you were on public hotspot or cellular network that connection might be fairly slow. With Switchboard that single Netflix stream is split between multiple connections, resulting in faster buffering and better resolution.

Connectify has developed a prototype for Switchboard on both the PC and Mac, but it wants to raise $100,000 in funds on Kickstarter over the next month to complete its user interface, develop customer management software and deploy its first cloud-based servers. As with Dispatch, Connectify plans to sell Switchboard on a subscription basis, but due to its software-as-a-service element Switchboard is setting capacity limits as well. That means the more data you consume via Switchboard, the more you pay. Backers of the project, however, will get early discounted access to the service this fall.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How to deliver the next-generation web experience
• How to manage the signaling storm in 2013
• New solutions for the evolving mobile network

Coupled with the markets T-Mobile has already upgraded, it has a new HSPA+ network running in the PCS 1900 MHz in 37 cities, including many of the country’s largest. T-Mobile isn’t updating its coverage figure for the overhauled network, but these new markets will add considerable numbers to its last count of 100 million people covered.

T-Mobile will begin selling the iPhone sometime next year, but in the interim it has been trying to lure customers with unlocked iPhones over to its network. Its biggest obstacle, however, was the fact that its old network configuration could only supply the iPhone with 2G speeds. By relocating its HSPA+ from the Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) to the PCS band, it can now link to the iPhone’s 3G radios, but T-Mobile also clears up space for its LTE launch next year.

Update: Interestingly enough, T-Mobile customers won’t be the only ones benefiting from this upgrade. T-Mobile mobile virtual network operator Solavei said it would take advantage of its wholesaler’s reconfigured network to support the iPhone as well. Like T-Mobile it won’t sell the iPhone, but it will sell a micro or nano-SIM that fits into an unlocked iPhone and allows customers to take advantage of its $49 unlimited voice, text and data plans. Other MVNOs like Straight Talk already offer similar iPhone SIM activations, though they work mainly on AT&T’s HSPA network. Now that the reconfiguration is well underway, expect more MVNOs to start offering iPhone support over the T-Mobile network soon.

Here is the full description of the new upgraded markets from T-Mobile’s blog:

• New York, including The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island
• Newark, N.J., including the surrounding cities of East Orange, Elizabeth, Jersey City, North Bergen, Paterson and Union City
• Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including the surrounding cities of Amherst, Andover, Arlington, Bedford, Belmont, Billerica, Braintree, Brockton, Brookline, Burlington, Canton, Chelmsford, Chelsea, Chicopee, Dedham, Everett, Framingham, Hadley, Holbrook, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lexington, Lowell, Ludlow, Lynn, Malden, Marblehead, Medford, Melrose, Metheun, Milton, Nahant, Natick, Needham, Newton, Quincy, Reading, Revere, Salem, Saugus, Sommerville, Stoneham, Swampscott, Tewksbury, Wakefield, Walpole, Waltham, Watertown, Weston, Westwood, Weymouth, Wilmington, Winchester, Winthrop and Woburn
• Springfield, Mass.
• Providence, R.I., including the surrounding cities of Cranston, North Providence, Pawtucket and Warren
• Philadelphia
• Detroit and Warren, Mich., including the surrounding cities of Dearborn, Romulus, Royal Oak, Sterling Heights and Troy
• Dallas, including the surrounding cities of Arlington, Carrolton, The Colony, Denton, Farmers Branch, Flower Mound, Frisco, Garland, Grand Prairie, Irving, Lancaster, Lewisville, McKinney, Mesquite, Plano, Richardson, Rowlett and Southlake
• Fort Worth, Texas, including the surrounding cities of Keller and Mansfield
• Austin, Texas including the surrounding city of Round Rock
• San Antonio
• Tampa, Fla., including the surrounding cities of Clearwater, Largo, Safety Harbor, St. Petersburg and Vinoy Park

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

The Philadelphia-based company is rolling out a new image and purpose on Monday: gone is the dated-looking frog-adorned logo, replaced by a fresher, more vibrant look. But more importantly, TicketLeap is targeting a new customer base: entertainment event organizers, and the growing number of events that take place outside of theaters, clubs, music halls and arenas. We’re talking about street food fairs, arts festivals, affinity group meetups and the like.

Two things make TicketLeap, a company thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, a good company to watch: its focus on mobile and its focus on data.

Build your own box office

Thanks to the ubiquity of mobile devices, TicketLeap is able to sell software that lets event organizers build a seating chart, scan tickets, and sell tickets at live events all from an iPad, a smartphone — or a laptop, if that’s your thing. The iOS box office software lets ticket takers scan tickets with the iPad’s front-facing camera as well as sell them via a nondescript black credit-card reader. (You can scan tickets only via its mobile site on an Android device.)

But the reserved seating feature, announced recently, lets anyone build a custom seating chart on the fly in a couple of minutes, and more importantly lets attendees claim specific seats, which is not at all common among ticketing companies not named Ticketmaster or LiveNation.

Data is big for events

Through TicketLeap, attendees can talk about the event with others on each event’s site, or by posting on Facebook or Twitter.

“The No. 1 thing that motivates someone to buy a ticket is because their friends are going. The way we look at it, the event used to start when the doors opened, but now it’s when the tickets go on sale,” said founder and CEO Chris Stanchak in an interview last week.

What event organizers get out of the software is the ability to make decisions based on the data TicketLeap shows them. Its box-office software lets an organizer see if a post on someone’s Facebook page drove views of the event, and how many actually bought tickets as a result. Knowing this kind of information can help organizers decide whether to dole out VIP status, a free drink ticket or anything else to reward their most influential patrons.

The backstory

Built in his dorm room at nearby University of Pennsylvania in 2003 as a favor to a friend, TicketLeap was a side project for Stanchak. In 2007, Stanchak got funding and built it into a viable alternative ticketing platform, but its strongest growth has come in the last 18 months, during which TicketLeap passed $100 million in transactions. That is part of the reason the 25-person company is choosing to re-brand now.

San Francisco-based Evenbrite, a competitor, just passed $1 billion in transactions, so while TicketLeap is much older, it’s also considerably smaller. But Stanchak’s company has recently introduced a bunch of new features that it hopes will set it apart from the other ticketing startups. It doesn’t want to attach itself to specific venues like Ticketfly, and it isn’t interested in being a broad platform for any kind of event like Eventbrite, which does everything from corporate conferences to pool parties.

Obviously they’ve got big competition. But they have about 10,000 clients as far away as Australia right now that use their software and a fee structure that’s simple: $2 fee per ticket over $10, $1 for per ticket under $10, and if you’re not charging for entry all TicketLeap services are free. Deciding which type of events to target helps them narrow potential customers and giving more power to event organizers — with custom seating and instant data — is a good way to get attention. But it’s going to take even more to help them stand out against the competition.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Netflix may suffer from limited mobility
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis

Their success faces two challenges: a lack of sufficient broadband infrastructure in some low-income areas and broadband adoption efforts that miss the mark because policymakers don’t understand what leads to success. Fortunately, these issues can be addressed. Once we accept that success depends on how we spend that stimulus funding and what stakeholders expect (hope) to achieve.

A recent Forbes article illustrates the challenge we have when well-intentioned people don’t fully understand a particular market or that market’s broadband needs. Back in December, Forbes’ columnist Gene Marks told the world how he’d handle life and technology “If I Was a Poor Black Kid.” Quite a national backlash erupted.

Forgetting for a minute the tone of the piece (which was grating not just to those of us from the ‘hood), blood pressures spiked too because Marks assumed several things about a poor urban kid’s access to technology that are not true. If policymakers and others in positions of influence who read Forbes carry similar assumptions, good luck trying to bridge that divide. Poor kids of every color will lose out.

Better infrastructure is Job 1

Too many folks take as gospel that a good marketing campaign will increase broadband adoption in low-income communities. Use just the right spin, price point or magazine column, and poor folks will flock to the digital promise land.

An in-depth qualitative survey report commissioned by the FCC and released in 2010 by the Social Science Research Council reveals that lack of relevancy is not an issue, “even among respondents with profound histories of marginalization. No one needed to be convinced of the importance of Internet use or of the value of broadband adoption in the home.”

Poor kids in Philadelphia take little comfort in Marks’ advice when they can’t buy Internet access above DSL speed even if they can afford it. Brigitte Daniel, EVP of Philadelphia private cable provider Wilco Electronic Systems, Inc. applied for stimulus funding for infrastructure because at least 10,000 low-income residences fit into this category. Service providers can’t make a business case for building highspeed networks in those neighborhoods. “Philadelphia isn’t the only urban city facing this dilemma,” she says. “I’ve spoken with providers in other cities who have documented similar issues.”

Internet service may be advertised as available citywide in large metro areas. However, there’s no financial incentive to build infrastructure where ROI prospects are poor.  Furthermore, when infrastructure there deteriorates or becomes obsolete, potential ROI is too low to justify upgrading. Computing centers are as great as the infrastructure that supports them.

Leonard Salcido is Senior Art Director for Change Agent Productions, located in one of Long Beach, CA’s poorest neighborhoods. They teach inner city kids digital media skills, plus provide consulting services to clients. They rely on 3 Mbps over bonded T1 lines. Even though Verizon’s central office is only a block away and Leonard’s organization is a $400,000 enterprise, after multiple attempts they still can’t get Verizon to sell them the same FiOs service Verizon offers Long Beach’s more affluent neighborhoods.

Parents in 10 million families work for wages so low they are still poor. Subsequently they likely have to pay more to get less broadband, which often means they get no broadband. A survey of the Washington, DC area released in 2011 by American University revealed that low income neighborhoods paid three times more ($31.17 per megabit/second) than wealthy neighborhoods ($9.58 per megabit per second). These findings are similar to a Department of Commerce national survey report.

Libraries are key to adoption. However, 76 percent of economic development professionals recently surveyed said broadband’s main impact on individuals’ economic development comes through facilitating home-based businesses, reaching higher education levels and improving job skills. Spend time in libraries in a few communities (which I’ve done), and you discover there can be too few workstations, not enough bandwidth and not enough branches open at times when many kids and most working parents could pursue these goals. Urban city libraries need the same direct link to fiber that rural libraries are receiving via broadband stimulus funds.

This way out

Perhaps Marks could write a piece titled “If I Were President/Governor/Congressman..” and offer sage advice on how to unite the government and private sectors to replicate Washington, DC’s good gigabit fortune in other urban areas, as Kansas City is doing with Google. Then thousands of poor kids could plug their computers into Net connections fast enough to access those wonderful free Web sites Marks recommends. Libraries could become better digital resources.

Also tell us how as an elected leader  you would overcome critics of every attempt to close the divide because they fervently believe poor people are lazy, undeserving or some other insidious stereotype. Is this easy?  No it’s not.  It’s hard. Let me suggest a follow-up column. “If I were in a position of influence, I’d learn about organizations such as the Long Beach YMCA Youth Institute and challenge critics to replicate their success in other cities.”

Each year 200 low-income high school, 300 middle school and 2000 elementary school kids receive the Institute’s hands-on long-term training that builds business-level proficiency in a range of digital media skills. Students become technology instructors, print publication editors and producers of original movie and music while in school, paid interns upon leaving school and for some, managers and staff at the Institute. The Institute’s Change Agent Productions provides a range of online digital media consulting services to clients around the country.

Together, both organizations require a minimum 20 Mbps Internet connections to operate with average productivity, bandwidth currently beyond their reach. With access to a network such as Washington, DC just launched they could train more kids, service more clients and turn more lives around. The network could sustain dozens of similar high-bandwidth operations. Thousands of students could access and manage those multimedia capabilities from their homes. Some could start Web-based home businesses.

Critics blinded by stereotypes only see broadband in low-income neighborhoods as “my tax dollars supporting poor people wasting time.” These communities’ stakeholders see a digital engine to tech-driven economic self-reliance. The smart money should be on economic self reliance.

Craig Settles is a broadband industry analyst and consultant who helps organizations develop effective broadband strategies. Listen to his radio show (Gigabit Nation) and follow him on Twitter (@cjsettles) or via his blog.

Image courtesy of Flickr user See-ming Lee 李思明 SML.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
• Netflix may suffer from limited mobility

CLICK HERE to download the file and listen directly.

HOSTS: Matthew Miller (Seattle) and Kevin C. Tofel (Philadelphia)

TOPICS:

Matt and Kevin share their expectations for this week’s big Consumer Electronics Show. The Nokia Lumia 710 is in hand, so both share thoughts on this $50 Windows Phone device for T-Mobile’s network.

SUBSCRIBE: Use this RSS feed with your favorite podcatcher or click this link to add us to iTunes

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter
• A look back at mobile in Q1

Skype’s blog offers an interactive map showing which airports will have the free wireless access for Skype services. Most of the major airport hubs are covered, but my local area of Philadelphia isn’t getting any love for some reason. Luckily, I’ve got a data-only SIM card combined with native Android SIP support to make free or low-cost calls, and Google Talk video as another supplement!

Speaking of Android, Skype WiFi isn’t supported on Google’s mobile devices. However, you can use it in conjunction with Windows PC, Mac or iOS devices, including iPads, iPhones and iPod touches.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

I spoke with Alex about his motivations for bootstrapping IndyHall, the experience of running the community, his hopes for the future and advice for others. Incredibly, Alex recorded an extraordinary and engaging 30 minutes of video for us, telling the fascinating story of IndyHall’s history and future.

We edited together some highlights on the background of IndyHall, along with plans for the future of Philadelphia’s coworking community as a single video here for readers who want a brief introduction to the IndyHall story.

You can find the full set of questions, answered as short video clips, over on YouTube:

• Introducing Alex and IndyHall…
• Tell us a little about the background of IndyHall – what were the motivations for coworking in Philadephia?
• What’s the breakdown of residents in terms of permenent residents, drop-ins, part timers. What kind of work are they involved in? Do you see much cross-fertilisation between residents?
• What were your greatest challenges and surprises in bootstrapping IndyHall? And the largest operational challenges?
• What’re your plans for the future?
• What’re the key pieces of advice you’d give to people thinking about coworking and people thinking about establishing a coworking space?

Incidentally, the relaunch of the IndyHall web site site just a few days ago is noteworthy in its approach to cohering and aggregating the community of coworkers in the city, providing a platform and a voice for their agenda.

If you’re interested in the experiences of coworking community founders, you should also check out our earlier interview with Stephanie Booth, founder of Lausanne’s Eclau coworking community.

Like Stephanie, Alex’s insights and experiences are invaluable. Do share your own experiences of coworking or founding a coworking community in the comments below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce

The Nervous Nellies of Manhattan’s nether regions have pushed the stock down almost 30 percent so far this year. Of course, these very same worrywarts were sweating about Verizon’s (VZ) bold bet on fiber to the home technologies.

The divergent fortunes of Verizon and Comcast are very clearly reflected in this chart.

Verizon has done a better job of winning the hearts and minds of Wall Street, and that is why Comcast stock is moving south, while Verizon stock keeps moving up. Never mind the fact that Comcast has a much bigger footprint compared to say, Verizon. That said, one can’t deny that Comcast has challenges, and Verizon FiOS is not to be taken lightly. Here are some of the issues facing Comcast.

* More HD channels to compete with satellite broadcasters.
* Show that it can offer even higher-speed broadband connections, not just talk about it.
* Make its web services strategy pay off.
* Overcome the “managed” traffic scandal.
* Better Customer Service. Again, Better Customer Service.

Even with those issues, Comcast can put its rivals on the defensive by making a few aggressive moves.

* Get more people signed up to its phone service, and if that means discounts. It is a move that hits at the heart of phone companies’ core money machine: voice.
* Get serious about wireless — both cellular and WiFi. Connections everywhere will help the company get sticky with its customers.
* Boost speeds to 20 megabits and lower prices.
* Offer $15 a month broadband plan for a basic, 3-megabits-per-second broadband connection. This will take pricing power away from their phone company rivals.
* Bring to market a very compelling online video offering.
* CEO Brian Roberts should make a public pledge for better customer service, and start with making TiVo-powered Comcast DVRs available everywhere, especially in downtown San Francisco. ;-)

Ignore Wall Street is the final thing I wanted to say — but it looks like management knows that all too well.

“Our job is to keep our heads down and continue to put good operating results on the board,” said Steve Burke, chief operating officer of Comcast, in an interview (with the Wall Street Journal). “If we continue to do that the stock will take care of itself.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration