uComcast Hopes To Deploy Multi-Gigabit Broadband By 2018r

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  (Mike Mozart)
  

  Earlier this summer, Comcast revealed that it will soon be testing an upgrade to its cable broadband network that should allow it to deliver download speeds of up to 10Gbps, ten times the current top speed of Google Fiber. Now the company is giving some idea of how long it thinks it will need to make this super-fast Internet access available on a wider basis.

  Comcast’s VP of network architecture recently told FierceCable that the testing of new DOCSIS 3.1 tech — which uses existing cable lines rather than requiring the construction of yet another new network — is happening this year with a rollout starting in 2016.

  “We want to get it across the footprint very quickly,” he explained. “We’re shooting for two years.”

  That would put a hopeful completion date of somewhere in 2018.

  While the DOCSIS 3.1 standard allows for speeds of up to 10Gbps, Comcast expects that it will initially launch its offering at 1Gbps — the same speed offered by Google Fiber. After that, the company says will begin to adjust the network to offer advanced features.

  The upcoming high-speed service runs over existing cable lines but Comcast’s existing modems are not up to the task of handling the signal. The company plans to start making DOCSIS 3.1 modems available to its customers in early 2016.

  The big question mark here is: How much will Comcast charge?

  The company isn’t saying right now. Google Fiber only charges $70/month for 1Gbps service, but Comcast’s new 2Gbps fiber service (which is separate from the DOCSIS 3.1 deployment) comes with the super-high price tag of $300/month plus upwards of $1,000 in fees just to install and activate the service. The DOCSIS 3.1 tech won’t require running all new lines, so hopefully Comcast won’t charge as much for access.

  Verizon recently tested higher-speed service on its existing FiOS fiberoptic network that could ultimately boost customers’ top speeds from 500Mbps to 10Gbps, and possibly up to 40-80Gbps in the future.

  [via DSLreports.com]

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uChipotle Plans To Hire 4,000 People In Single Dayr

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  (Mike Mozart)

  Chipotle has a plan to grow its workforce by 7%, not over the course of a year or even a few months. The burrito chain’s goal is to accomplish this feat — hiring 4,000 new employees — in the course of a single day in September.

  The Wall Street Journal reports that the job-a-thon is slated to take place on Sept. 9, and that Chipotle isn’t just aiming to recruit anyone who needs a job, but people who could eventually be longterm Chipotle staffers earning decent salaries and even owning a piece of the company.

  To accommodate all the applicants needed to meet the company’s hiring goals, each Chipotle location will open three hours earlier than usual on Sept. 9. Applicants will be interviewed until 11 a.m.

  Four thousand new workers comes out to an average of more than two hires per store. Some applicants will be interviewing for work at soon-to-open Chipotle locations, but most of the interviews will be for existing stores.

  Most fast food chains own few, if any, of their stores. Instead, the majority of McDonald’s and Burger King locations are owned by franchisees who are responsible for doing the hiring. Meanwhile, Chipotle’s nearly 1,800 stores in the U.S. are all company-owned.

  Employee turnover has always been high in the foodservice industry, which can lead to lazy hiring and management practices. After all, if the person you hire today won’t still be working for you six months from now, what’s the point in paying them a competitive salary or investing in training them for advancement?

  Chipotle says that with Americans’ financial situations on the upswing, there is now increased competition for decent workers.

  “The economy has been thawing, more restaurants are opening, and there are fewer job applicants than there were several years ago,” explains co-CEO Monty Moran to the Journal.

  In an effort to attract potential longterm, loyal employees, a number of quick-service chains have improved pay (sometimes in response to local minimum wage increases), and added new benefits like college tuition reimbursement.

  In addition to expanded tuition reimbursement and more vacation time, Chipotle has been marketing its workplaces as an entry into a comfortable living, claiming that “apprentices” can earn $53,000/year while the rare, higher-level “restaurateurs” earn $133,000/year.

  The Journal notes that some online data provided by people claiming to work for Chipotle seem to indicate that these figures might be inflated, but Chipotle says their numbers are accurate.

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uGuy Gets Locked In L.A. Fitness When It Closes For The Night… At 5 P.M.r

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  (YouTube)

  While you might have certain expectations about when a business should and shouldn’t be open, it’s always good to double check those hours, lest you accidentally get stuck inside when everyone locks up and goes home for the day. One gymgoer learned that the hard way last week, when he was locked in an L.A. Fitness location at closing time — 5 p.m., when you might expect people to be getting off work and well, heading to the gym.

  A Florida man posted a video on Facebook and YouTube (h/t Mashable) about his ordeal, where he came out of the sauna and found the lights off, the doors locked and no one inside the gym. It had apparently closed at 5 p.m.

  “No one even checked the bathrooms to see if someone was in there,” he says. “I didn’t know it closes this early — what L.A. Fitness closes at 5 o’clock?”

  He wrote on Facebook that he first called his mother, who wouldn’t stop laughing, so he hung up and called another L.A. Fitness. Workers there confirmed with management that he could simply walk out the exit without triggering an alarm, sparing him from a restless night trying to sleep on one of those oversized exercise balls.

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uFamily Sues American Airlines After Father With Alzheimer’s Goes Missing From Airportr

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  (Skip Nyegard)

  It’s not uncommon for an airline to lose a piece of luggage for one reason or another during any particular trip from point A to point B; that’s just the risk we take when we hand over a $25 fee and our belongings. While material items can generally be replaced, people can’t be. So, when American Airlines somehow lost track of a passenger with Alzheimer’s earlier this year, his family was worried, and angry with the airline. Thankfully, the man was eventually found, and now his family is filing a lawsuit accusing the carrier of negligence.

  The New York Daily News reports that the ordeal began on January 16, when the man’s daughter delivered him to LaGuardia airport for a flight to Haiti – where he could be given around-the-clock care by family members.

  The woman says that when she and her grandmother took the man to the airport, she spoke with an American Airlines employee about her father’s condition.

  “First thing we did was tell the attendant that my father has Alzheimer’s and dementia and he cannot be by himself,” the woman tell the NYDN. “We put him in a wheelchair with the attendant, watching him get to the gate. And that was the last time we saw my dad.”

  Hours later, a family member who was awaiting the man’s arrival for a layover in Florida, phoned to say he never arrived.

  While the daughter tried to stay calm, she quickly returned to the airport after several phone calls to the airline.

  She says a rep for the airline said her father was never listed in their system for special-assistance services, despite the earlier discussion.

  Authorities were able to view security footage of the airport and found that the man had never passed through security or boarded his planned flight. Police officers searched the airport’s terminals, but found no trace of the man. He had simply disappeared.

  After spending hours at the airport, the woman and her grandmother drove the his old neighborhood, but had little luck.

  The following day, police officers in Brooklyn found the man’s luggage abandoned on the street. The belongings included his passport and papers from a hospital visit that took place while he was missing.

  After three days, a concerned resident phoned the daughter after finding him in the street.

  He spent the next two weeks in the intensive care unit of New York Community Hospital on Kings Highway, the NYDN reports.

  An attorney for the family says they plan to file a federal lawsuit against the airline, which he says has offered no explanation or apology for the situation, only a refund of the $300 ticket that was never used.

  “This is a textbook case of negligence,” the attorney tells the NYDN. “We are looking for them to at least acknowledge this even happened.”

  A spokesperson for the airline declined to comment on the situation.

  Family suing American Airlines for losing dad with Alzheimer’s at LaGuardia, leaving him to wander 3 days in frigid temperatures [The New York Daily News]

  
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by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

uGoogle Testing Feature That Lets You Put Your Food Photos On The Mapr

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  (Morton Fox)

  If you’re a diner that enjoys providing your social media followers with (sometimes) artistic shots of the food you plan to shove down your throat, but are getting tired of just getting little hearts from Instagram, have no fear. Google is reportedly working on a new feature that will put your foodie photos on the map, literally.

  Android Police reports that just months after Google scrapped an app called Tablescape – which encouraged users to take “foodographs” and place them in specialized categories for others’ consumption – the company is reportedly working on a feature in Maps for uploading food-related photos to businesses’ pages.

  While Google hasn’t provided an official comment on the new feature, the company previously said it wasn’t giving up on food photography and making it an everyday part of everyone’s lives (like it or not).

  The feature – which doesn’t have a name yet – is reportedly only being rolled out to certain locations for now.

  The system will alert users when Maps has found a newly captured photo taken at a food-related place — grocery store, restaurant, bar, diner – on their device, Android Police reports. It then offers to attach the photo to the location’s page within Maps – you know, to let others see what they might want to order when they visit.

  It’s unclear when the feature will be available to more business listings and areas around the U.S.

  Google’s Foodie Photo Ambitions Live On In New Maps Feature In Testing [Android Police]

  
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by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

uApple Offers To Fix Cameras That Take Blurry Photos On Some iPhone 6 Plus Phonesr

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  (William Hook)

  Can’t take a photo on your iPhone 6 Plus that doesn’t come out blurry? You’re not alone: Apple says it’s recalling a select batch of the Plus phones to fix an issue with the iSight camera that can make even your best efforts come out wobbly.

  Apple says the recall applies mostly to phones sold between September 2014, when they were released for sale, and January 2015. The company says a “small percentage” of those devices have a component in the iSight camera that could fail and cause blurry photos.

  To find out if your phone is part of the recall, customers can enter the serial code (click here if you need help finding that number) on Apple’s site. If your iPhone 6 Plus falls into the eligible serial number range, Apple will replace your device’s iSight camera, free of charge.

  Affected customers can go to an authorized service provider, an Apple store or contact technical support to get the component fixed. Wireless carriers aren’t able to fix the camera, Apple notes.

  Apple customers have been reporting the issue since last fall, with one thread on Apple’s support forums detailing blurry photos and wobbly photos racking up more than 100 replies, many from users noting they’re having similar issues.

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uThere Should Not Be Two Examples Of Target Math In The Same Aisler

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• Pricing errors happen. That’s a fact of retail. What we’ve never been able to understand, though, is why they happen so often at Target, and why that store tends to make the same errors over and over: specifically, pricing items so you pay more when you buy in bulk, and posting “sale” signs with higher prices than the original price.

  One person shouldn’t be able to wander into a store and easily spot two of these errors during the same shopping trip, let alone notice them on the same aisle. Yet that’s what John did, and he took pictures of these two classic examples for us.

  

  I’ll take two boxes of five bars, please.

  

  The interesting question here is which price Target would actually charge: John wasn’t buying this item, so he didn’t check.

  Five years ago, a Target employee wrote in to explain why the chain’s pricing appears to be so crazy, and how to deal when there’s an illogical price on something that you want to buy.

  “That goes for anything. If you see something marked as one price, and it scans or rings up wrong, you can tell someone and have the price corrected,” the anonymous employee told us. “It’s best to find someone on the sales floor to clear it up instead of waiting until the cash register, because the cashier is going to call the sales floor anyway.”

  
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by Laura Northrup via Consumerist