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Two paragraphs from the boardwatch website that i found interesting."

The immediate issues at hand are whether or not VOIP telephony providers should be subject to the same rules and regulations as traditional phone companies. And, if not, what kind of rules are appropriate for these providers. Key areas of debate center around whether VOIP providers must offer an E911 service, pay into the universal service fund, and enable government agencies to tap VOIP calls (known as CALEA-compliance) for homeland security purposes

Complicating the picture even further are the incumbent telecom providers that see VOIP as a giant threat to their installed business and are in no rush to see these services heralded into the mainstream. "The price of these new services is drastically cheaper, and the quality is almost as good," says Kelley Drye's Price. "It's a massive threat to the incumbents."

Was able to obtain a full T1 as many justifiable IPs as needed for $675/month. I also received the same quote from a guy at www.bandwidth.com That was back in April. Just a note, Savvis is a Tier 1 provider. Their service is rock solid. Awesome, proactive tech support. They let me know I'm down before I even realize that I'm down. I found savvis at: http://www.boardwatch.com/isp/bb/n_america.htm

Definite not new.

Alan Cox wrote in the "Linux Redux" column in May 1997 issue of Boardwatch Magazine

He ran the www.uk.linux.org, penguin.uk.linux.org and www.cymru.net on an 8 MB 486DX2-66 with no cache with Boa back then.

Hello,

A couple of months ago I was visiting a client in Old Colorado City (a suburb of Colorado Springs) and he mentioned his next-door neighbor, a wireless ISP named Old Colorado City Communications ISP, was providing technical assistance in this project. Old Colorado City Communications is owned by Dave Hughes, who was a columnist for BoardWatch magazine back in the early 90's.

Dave gave my client a nice color brochure talking about the wireless initiative, printed in both English and Welsh.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

If each contributed equally, that's $19230 each in bandwidth. $19k buys a lot of bandwitdh... much more than a single home could potentially use, even over many months. For example, this budgetary pricing for Verio (a backbone provider) shows that the monthly charge for a 155 Mbit/sec OC-3 line is somewhere around $44k per month.

For that 13 users to have consumed $250k of bandwidth over a period of one year, the "bandwidth cost" would have been equivilant to using one half of a 155 Mbps/sec OC-3 line. Even if all 13 contributed equally, I doubt each of them sustained a 5.7 Mbit/sec stream of data for a whole year! Cable service can rarely run at this speed, and many small groups of houses (like mine) are connected by a 1.2 Mbit/sec line (I saw the At&T tech when he was installing our neighborhood's hub a few months ago). If you consider the "theft" to have occured from February (when "cable officials" claim they first became aware of the situation) until today, that's just 5 months for a "loss" of $50,000 dollars worth of bandwidth each month... equivilant to just 13 users consuming the entire bandwitdh of an OC-3! Even to a someone who has no idea what kind of bandwitdh $250,000 dollars buys, it simply defies imagination that 13 home users would normally consume $50 to $100 per month, could somehow "steal" 1/4 million dollars. It's as rediculous as a claiming someone robbed a 7-11 store and stole 1/4 million dollars from the cash register.

I wonder if it ever occured to Christina Hall or Mark Reiter to ask Paul Shryock how Buckeye figured these 13 home users "stole" such a massive amount. Even if it's larger group of users, it's still an absurd claim. Saddly, they were probably fed a press release with lots of "sound bites", and they threw this scare-tactic story together without even the slighest questioning and investigatave journalism into such an absurd claim.

One thing is for certain... Buckeye CableSystem certainly didn't take a loss of $250,000. If they really were losing that much money, they certainly would have contacted the "others [that] were using a lot". No ISP these days (except perhaps AOL) can afford to take a $250,000 loss and just sit back for five months and wait for the cops to investigage and bust a dozen users.

Boardwatch is indeed still arround, however it has little to do with BBS's now. It's all about running small ISPs.

Here is a link to the September issue table of contents.

Maybe someone should just tell them about OpenBSD, save some time and money.

The DARPA program is called Composable High Assurance Trusted Systems (CHATS) which implies that they are interested in Trusted Systems not systems that claim to be secure because a bunch of hackers allegedly have fixed all the buffer overflows. Being "secure" and being a trusted system are completely different things.

Maybe micheal meant to mention TrustedBSD which is attempting to become certified as a Trusted System?

The little guys are often making more profit per line than the big guys. No M&A charges, no big advertising budget, etc. But being big improved your access to capital, at least during 1997-2000.

See the Spring 1999 issue of the (now online?) magazine 2600, which had an article titled, "Internet Peering." Another good resource is the website of Boardwatch magazine.

Alternic tried this back around 1996. Here's a link to a boardwatch article that discusses their system. It transparently handled regular Internic (now Network Solutions) requests as well as their own names/TLDs. They mentioned that you could get your own TLD for $98/year. How cool is that? :) I never actually tried changing my DNS servers over to theirs, just because it didn't seem to be catching on at all.

It's really amazing how far the Internet has come without settlements between the backbone carriers. It started without settlements because it came from a DOD/NSF background, and continued that way because nobody could agree on settlements should work.

It's really amazing how far the Internet has come without settlements between the backbone carriers. It started without settlements because it came from a DOD/NSF background, and continued that way because nobody could agree on settlements should work.

Here's a little story for "legitimate" companies that wish to send advertising. This story is about SSC, which is one of the most reputable companies on the Internet. I would recommend them to anyone, despite this story.

SSC publishes Linux Journal , one of the oldest (if not the oldest) and easily one of the highest signal-over-noise Linux mags available. I had a fairly long subscription to LJ (which, again, I would recommend despite this incident). One day I got e-mail telling me it was time to renew. Well, this e-mail didn't appear to come from SSC. It gave a different site as the place for credit card orders, had non-SSC "From" and "Reply-To" lines, and a non-SSC origin IP. So, uncomfortable about how my e-mail address was getting picked up, I decided to wait until I could call SSC and find out if the e-mail was from their agent or just some random magazine house trying to scam a commission. After I got a paper renewal notice later, I still hadn't gotten around to calling, so I kept putting my renewal off.

That was probably a year or 2 ago. I still haven't gotten around to calling. That's my rotten procrastination habit again, I'm sure. But, my point to legitimate companies is this: This whole time I've been procrastinating, SSC has been without my (probably 5-year) subscription. And that's a company I actually like, sending me a notice I actually wanted. You can probably imagine what I think of companies who send me e-mail when I've never even contacted them.

The moral of this true fable is thus: Go out of your way to demonstrate that you're a previous business contact. Identify who you are and why you have the e-mail address, so that the recipient isn't worried about their personal information getting out. Net folks are far more concerned with whether their privacy than whether they buy something. I'll bet SSC probably knew this, but their agent didn't get it.

(That said, I'll probably go call them and subscribe to Linux Journal again sometime soon. Now I get to wonder about Boardwatch , who is owned by a different company, and wants to charge me more for renewal ($72) than normal people pay for a first subscription. Ah well.)

Head over to http://www.boardwatch.com/isp/ac/index. html

Right at the top of the page are links for toll free access numbers (800, 877, 888).


Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!

Well, OK, maybe they're not as bad as some, but from what I've seen they're not good. Anybody remeber what BoardWatch was like back in the day? The magazine was full of informed people saying what they thought, the site was a little graphics heavy but balanced by informed and informative content, and they were just a hell of a resource.

Then they got bought by internet.com.

I won't forget the first print issue I picked up after the buyout (and the last I've bought, BTW). The editorial tone had changed from "I'm a guy like you, who has interest in this stuff" to "I've forgotten more about this than you'll ever know"; their politics did a complete 180, and though the magazine was thicker, the content was less.

The really painful thing was what happened to the site. Go look at their back issues there. Articles used to be one file per, with no more graphics than were necessary, and certainly no Javascript. After the buyout, the site became a poor parody of what it was. Javascript, a minimum of 3 ads per page (most animated), and the thing that really cheesed me off: Articles seem to get paginated at around 300 words. Which means that what used to be a simple matter of just finding and reading an article became Yet Another mousehunt for the links that'll take you to the next page, which has it's own 3 to 5 ads, etc.

They still seem to make all their print content available via the web as they did in the old days, for which I'd thank 'em if I still read their stuff. I understand the reasons internet.com pissed all over what BoardWatch was, I just don't think it was needed. I really, really hope they can restrain their tendancies with their new acquistions.