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US citizens pay a flat rate? Thats news to me. For as long as I can remember my landline has unlimited local calls but charges for long distance by the minute. Of course now services like Vonage are changing that, but traditional phone will remain the same I'm sure.

What the flog are you talking about ? Near-pinnacle ? That's exactly the neanderthal response I would expect from a VB/Delphi programmer ( emphasis ON PROGRAMMER ).

As someone who's not only designed and developed highly interactive user interfaces ( http://consumer.mci.com/TheNeighborhood/res_local_ service/jsps/callmanager.jsp?subpartner=DEFAULT , just to name one ) for almost 20 years, but also developed applications in both of those languages ( and many others ), I can tell that your statements are written with the same tunnel-mindedness that came up with VB in the first place ( I'll get to Delphi, further on ). VB was a way to rapidly prototype things, yes, and it could serve it's purpose well. But it fails miserably in two key areas that are ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for any good software development effort. Ready ? Ok, here we go.

1. Adaptability
2. Extensibility

For the former, VB is a nightmare at least to adapt to applications needed to operate in non-homogenous environments. If you're all M$, fine, but there, you're locked in.
As for the latter, I direct the reader to just look at all the hullaballoo about the "evolution" of VB into VB.net to the point where there's near furor over the obvious attempts to get VB coders out of the last century, and into the here and now.

Now as for Delphi ( or C++ Builder for those folks who chose it as their alternative to Pascalized-OOP ), it has the unpleasant distinction of being tied to a company who has no less than an identity crisis on it's hands ( I direct the reader to look up Borland's recent announcement to spin-off "CodeGear" as the "Software Development products arm" of Borland. Who for some reason thinks that Software ALM is REALLY where the money's at. Ding ! Wrong answer. But that's a different discussion ). The user community for Delphi is just as staunch as the VB encampment, but at least they've taken more readily to moving forward. Not to mention, that at least with it's Object-Pascal roots, it has more than a ghost of a chance at having software developed with it that has some software methodology applied to it, and therefore would make it open to being made extensible.

The only reason VB could've provided a KISS "developer experience" was because of the proliferation of VBX/ACX/OCX controls ( which invariably ended up being written using MFC/VC++ ) to do the heavy lifting for them. Anyone who regularly reads slashdot doesn't have to be reminded what the proliferation of ActiveX controls has done for the user desktop experience ( hint: just ask anyone who's had their PC taken over as a zombie. Bets are it was due to an aberrant ActiveX control burrowing itself into the user's system ). Don't get me wrong, I don't hate VB, it, like so many other languages ( don't get me started on Smalltalk ) has it's place. But as a the be-all-end-all Sange Real of user interface development environements ? &Deity forbid.

I just have to quote one statement "MVC is a mess only....." to state definitively as to the amount of real understanding of OOD methodologies you must have. Don't take it as an attack ( though chances are you probably will ), take it as a suggestion that perhaps you should take a deeper look.

And to anyone who's curious as to what language/environment the desktop app I provided the link to earlier was written with/in, just ask. I'll give everyone a hint:

1. Developed using strictly spen source tools and a cross platform language.

http://global.mci.com/resources/cerfs_up/fun/requi em.xml

And to think it's only been 14 years since NTP invented it.

OK you have general peering a bit messed up here is a normal agreement for UUNet http://global.mci.com/uunet/peering/ this is for tier 1 peering. It's expected that tier 1's will have a mix of content and users to acheive a fairly ballanced interconnect. Assuming you have the traffic you can per with UUNet for nothing but your cost to get to the common interconnect points.

Ummm.. Was I sleeping when Cogent became a Tier-1 ISP?

Several things:
1) The size of your ISP's ARIN/APNIC/RIPE netblock allocation is not exactly related to the concept of peering parity. (more on this in a moment..)

2) If you use the Internet for "mission critical" applications, YOU should a) be multi-homed on multiple ISP backbones, verify that they have good peering with backbones you need to transit and have your own BGP AS OR b) leverage a single providers' network to the extent possible, thereby elininating problems like these.

3) You buy from Cogent - YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.

4) Peering. From dictionary.com "Peer" - 1: a person who is of equal standing with another in a group. Notice the use of the word "Equal"? Its there for a reason. If you take the time to read the fine print of peering agreements (http://global.mci.com/uunet/peering/) , you will see that section 1.2 states:

Traffic Exchange Ratio. The ratio of the aggregate amount of traffic exchanged between the Requester and the MCI Internet Network with which it seeks to interconnect shall be roughly balanced and shall not exceed 1.8:1.

Translation: If you dump more traffic on us than we dump to you, then we have an asymmetric relationship. You are not worthy of being my peer because you take more than you give, which lumps you in with the rest of my customers who must PAY for access.

The above peering language is similar for all major Internet backbones.

5) I would expect that Cogent is present in at least one of the public peering points (Mae+pick your favorite ordinal direction) - so their BGP reachability information should be flowing through the MAE's.... Should...

Let this be the lesson - if you build a network on $10/mbit access, you get $10/mbit access. Usually, it's great, but sometimes bad things happen. Even to good fiscally responsible people, like yourselves. Good luck in your next job.. :-)

There goes MCI's notoriety. http://global.mci.com/us/enterprise/insight/cerfs_ up/

Yeah, I can't imagine anyone has thought of that joke before...


http://global.mci.com/us/enterprise/insight/cerfs_ up/

Just read the transcript.

Once again, I can do no better than cite a reply to your journal entry:

Go back to the original interview that caused all this fuss. Gore's interviewer asks candidate Gore to point out the highlights of his legislative career. From the context I think any fair-minded person can see Gore left out a word. He should have said, "I took legislative initiative in creating the internet." Everyone knows he is not a Scientist or Engineer. He is a legislator. From the context any fair-minded person knows he was talking about "legislative initiative". It was an interview, it wasn't scripted. He left out the word "legislative".

In addition, that reply contained a link to comments by Vinton Cerf.

The Vice President was among the first of the members of Congress to recognize the importance of the Internet and his interest as far back as 1986 (to my certain knowledge) led him to sponsor legislation and to speak favorably about optical networks, high performance computing, and led to programs such as the National Research and Education Network program, the Next Generation Internet program and so on.

I think the Vice President is very deserving of credit for his active support for the Internet and the businesses that depend upon it daily.

Gore's statement in context was factually correct and no less than Vint Cerf says he deserves credit. At the time, you're lame response was, "I'm just using VP Gore's statement to show that from his point of view at the time, he was responsible for the explosion of the Internet in the '90s." As the transcript shows, Gore never claimed to be "responsible for the explosion of the Internet".

Repeating the errors in your journal entry here is not going to make them any more valid.

I'm not defending MCI/UUNET, or even sure if this is the same MCI that this story is about, but an MCI's AUP:

Email Sending unsolicited mail messages, including, without limitation, commercial advertising and informational announcements, is explicitly prohibited. A user shall not use another site's mail server to relay mail without the express permission of the site.

Which is strange because in the article it mentions "MCI is the only American, and indeed only Western network, where this spam support activity is 'not against our policy,'".

Or does MCI just post that as it's AUP on it's site to cover it's back if it wants to close an account for spamming in the future, or to comply with possible regulations etc?

If you're a residential MCI customer, and wind up speaking to someone who's in the U.S., you are extremely fortunate. Only high spending residential customers are routed to U.S. representatives.

abuse-mail@mci.com and 1-800-900-0241.

• Cerf's InterPlaNetary Internet PowerPoint presentation at the National Technology Hall of Fame, March 31, 2004
• Other resources from Cerf's Up

• Cerf's InterPlaNetary Internet PowerPoint presentation at the National Technology Hall of Fame, March 31, 2004
• Other resources from Cerf's Up

Like it or not, the guys who thought up foo@bar.com-style addressing

Those "guys" would be, I believe, one Vint Cerf.

...has some interesting comments on his collaboration with Robert Kahn and where the net is headed in his blog.

Sending traffic across the road to the "Big 4" (Telstra, Optus, MCI/Ozemail, Telco NZ/AAPT) costs a fortune, since they refuse to peer with anybody else. In fact, bringing your own link from the U.S is cheaper than transit bandwidth from the Big 4, that is, if your in Sydney with lots of money. Only 6 ISP's actually have their own international links.

I'm afraid I don't really believe this. Have you priced a transit link to the US ?

I don't think you truely understand what peering is. If you did, you would understand why the Big ISPs won't peer with the little ones - which, simplified, is that fact that they aren't approximately the same size AKA peers.

Have a read of this article for an overview of what peering actually is - Interconnection and Peering.

Once you've done that, have a read of the MCI peering terms and conditions at WorldCom's Policy for Settlement-Free Interconnection with Internet Networks.

Now, if all the little ISPs could meet those terms and conditions, and offered equal benefit to MCI, I'm sure MCI would be interested in talking. Otherwise, the smaller ISPs are just customers who want cheaper bandwidth, and are using the "they won't peer with us, they must be evil" reason to further their cheaper bandwidth adgenda.

And no, I don't work for any of the organisations above.

I feel I am being trolled, but here are some articles I dug up.

This one talks about delay, and that most humans can start to detect delay at around 250ms. On the second page, it goes over different G.7xx codecs and tells you the MOS score for each one.

http://www.networkcomputing.com/1202/1202ws3.html

Here is an article about measuring MOS in a network:

http://www.telecommagazine.com/default.asp?journal id=3&func=articles&page=0011t16&year=2000&month=11

Here is an SLA from MCI that has provisions for MOS:

http://global.mci.com/terms/sla/business_connectio n/

Fluke wont have a meter for this, but Agilent does:

http://we.home.agilent.com/USeng/nav/-536885778.53 6882651/pd.html

Cisco more or less agrees with me about the delay (scroll down a bit):

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/788/voip/delay-de tails.html

So, you probably never heard of this stuff because it doesn't matter in a classic digital or analog network mainly because you are using dedicated circuits and g.711 all day. When you start using data networks and codecs like g.723.1, you need to worry about this shit.

BTW, it took me about 5 minutes to find this info using that Google thing. You should check it out.

ft

You think a small private company is going to be able to compete with the big boys?

Actually, yes.

McLeodUSA started as a group of about six people in a rented office in downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and despite going through delisting, bankruptcy, having to sell off its directory business and all sorts of other financial trouble after the dot-com bust, is still a huge thorn in Qwest's side. (McLeodUSA mostly does business in the states where Qwest is the incumbent.)

It's quite heartening to know I could go out tomorrow, file some papers with the Iowa Utilities Board, and become a phone company. (Of course, I'd get fired, but that's beside the point.)

Right now, its a service the Ma Bells have the abilities to provide, but they don't [...]

Not exactly true. MCI has a nice VOIP infrastructure in place, but it appears it is only available to businesses at the moment.

it seems to me that a lot of firms over there that file for Chapter 11 protection eventually emerge from it and become successful again

Yes, as explained here, Chapter 11 bankruptcies allow the company to reorganize and keep going. It is up a judge to decide if this is in the best interests of the creditors. If the company can make a good case that continuing the business would help them pay off more of the creditors, then that's the route they will go. Companies in chapter 11 can even get funding with debtor-in-possession deals that sign the assets of the company over to whoever is providing the money. Chapter 7 bankrupties (more like true bankruptcies) liquidate the assets of the company and divide the procedes among the creditors.

With both types of bankrupties the creditors get pennies on the dollar and the shareholders get nothing.

Software failure: Slashdot's system posted my comment in the wrong position. Hopefully this will be posted as an answer to Jaysyn, under comment #6704329

My comment: That's right. In several email conversations, I questioned Vint Cerf about this, and he said that Al Gore was extremely important in making DarpaNet, a research tool at a U.S. government organization, into the Internet, a public utility available to all.

DARPA is the U.S. government's violence research department. DARPA is devoted to finding more efficient ways to kill people. In the beginning of networking computers together, there was no intention of benefiting anyone.

According to Mr. Cerf, Al Gore recognized the importance of a public computer network long before other public officials knew anything about computers, and made sure the public network had funding.

Some have called Mr. Cerf, "The Father of the Internet", but, as his biography says, many people were involved. Mr. Gore was the main promoter, "father", of the public utility we now call the Internet.

That's right. In several email conversations, I questioned Vint Cerf about this, and he said that Al Gore was extremely important in making DarpaNet, a research tool at a U.S. government organization, into the Internet, a public utility available to all.

DARPA is the U.S. government's violence research department. DARPA is devoted to finding more efficient ways to kill people. In the beginning of networking computers together, there was no intention of benefiting anyone.

According to Mr. Cerf, Al Gore recognized the importance of a public computer network long before other public officials knew anything about computers, and made sure the public network had funding.

Some have called Mr. Cerf, "The Father of the Internet", but, as his biography says, many people were involved. Mr. Gore was the main promoter, "father", of the public utility we now call the Internet.

On this anniversary, let us not forgot one of the other fathers of the Internet, Dr. Vinton Cerf who co-created the TCP/IP protocol and was a major contributor to the invention of DNS. Dr. Cerf is currently Chairman of the Board of Directors at ICANN and Senior Vice President for Architecture and Technology at MCI®. So, Dr. Cerf, combined with Dr. Postel and Mr. Mockapetris, are the three fathers (or, father, mother, and uncle) of the Internet.

Best,
Doug

This is stretching my certainty (I'm recalling all of this from a sophomore year CS networks class and I've been overwhelmed by booze in my graduating week), but here's a stab at this...

I don't think that having a long RTT (round-trip time) will have a huge effect on transmission rate in the standard TCP case. Internet traffic, if I remember correctly, is bursty (cite), meaning that a typical transmission looks like:

SEND 32 PACKETS
RECEIVE 32 ACKS

SEND 36 PACKETS
RECEIVE 36 ACKS

SEND 40 PACKETS
RECEIVE 38 ACKS

(oops! Sent 2 more than I could! Halve TX window!)

SEND 20 PACKETS
RECEIVE 20 ACKS

etc. In this case it's easy to see why having a long RTT doesn't slow things down particularly, since there can be a big gap between the SEND and RECEIVE and nothing changes.

In the case of non-bursty traffic, I don't think large RTT causes a big problem for normal TCP either. This is because even with a large RTT (if it takes 400 ms to go from sender to host, for example) ACKS will still be streaming in at a constant, if slower, rate, allowing for more packets to be sent out (this is more subtle to explain, so you might want to google more for a better explanation).

I think the reason you misunderstand this is because the New Scientist article makes it sound like you send a packet, then receive an ACK, then send one, etc. This is not the case -- you send lots of packets together...this is the principle behind the "window", that you can send out more than one packet at a time without receiving an ACK because you've been successful at that so far.

FYI, I looked up MCI's traffic times and found that transatlantic latency is roughly 80ms compared to 45ms for within-US traffic (cite). This is non-trivial, but also not huge.

If anybody disagrees with this assessment, please feel free to correct, since as I said, I'm not 100% sure that increased RTT doesn't mean lower window size.

Also, from my reading a lot of the gain was simply in the fact that halving a throughput rate of 800K/sec means you're dropping to 400K/sec when realistically you should probably only be dropping a little bit. According to NS, they improved by more than two-fold, but that's probably just because normal TCP doesn't often get to the actual max of the network, it may burp a lot on the way up and dip more than halfway than its reasonable max.

I happen to work 15 feet from Vint's Office and this has been a pet project of his for years. The TCP jokes are funny and all, but they have some of the smartest people on the planet creating new protocols especially for the Interplanetary Internet.

Check out Vint's own website for more info.. http://global.mci.com/resources/cerfs_up/interplan etary_internet/

TequilaMokingbird

What's the point of getting this if you already have a cell phone? You can already get unlimited minutes for $40 a month. Why pay a total of $80 for a $40 service?


Long distance. No cell phone plan gives you unlimited long distance minutes for $40 a month. And even plans that give you unlimited, unrestricted "local" minutes must be pretty rare -- there certainly don't seem to be any in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and New York. Most ~$40 plans in NY or LA give you a few hundred "anytime" minutes (that includes long distance of course) and a few thousand (not unlimited) "night and weekend" minutes. In many plans your "anytime" minutes are used up, even at night and on the weekends, before your "night and weekend" minutes take effect, rendering the whole deal little better than an advertising scam.

If you make lots of long distance calls, Vonage is fantastic. I am on the phone, LA-NY, at least an hour or two every day. With my AT&T "One Rate" cell phone, I was paying almost $200 a month (with taxes, fees, etc.) for 1500 minutes, with frequent billing errors, every one-minute dropped call charged for, plus outrageous overage fees of $0.25/minute if I went over the 1500 minutes -- some months I had a $350 bill. And AT&T Wireless is one of the slimiest companies I've hever had the displeasure of dealing with. Sprint, Verizon, etc. aren't much better.

Now I have Vonage and never have to worry about how long I'm on the phone. Of course I've kept my cell phone, on the minimum plan, for when I'm on the road, but I'm looking forward to giving AT&TWS the finger -- with wireless number portability, it should soon be possible to keep my phone number and switch to a wireless provider I hate less.

Vonage is particularly good for my purposes. Most of the people I talk to are in New York, whereas I'm in Los Angeles most of the time. Since I can have my 212 number while I'm in LA (I did this with my cell phone too, of course), there are no toll charges for anyone whether I'm calling or being called by my New York friends and relatives. I can take the Cisco box anywhere there's a broadband connection, so nothing has to change if I move. And the ability to forward calls is a major advantage. When I travel, I forward the phone to (e.g.) my hotel number -- I can do this on the webpage from anywhere. Then, instead of wasting cell phone minutes or using a calling card or (God forbid!) paying inflated hotel toll charges, I simply tell people to call me on my Vonage number and it rings for me in the hotel!

Vonage might not be for everyone, but I would argue that anyone who makes a lot of long distance calls should consider it seriously. I know that there are other alternatives -- even "traditional" long-distance companies such as MCI seem to be getting into the act, with package deals including unlimited domestic long distance. I for one would rather deal with Vonage than with MCI! (Vonage's plan is also cheaper, has no installation fees, and no contract period. On the downside, if your broadband connection goes down, your "dialtone" does too -- so it's not for "five-nines" telco-style reliability).

I imagine that, sooner or later, there will be cell phone plans out there with unlimited long distance. But right now, Vonage is arguably the single best option out there for the heavy long-distance user.

Kiscica

And it's irrelevant what MCI stands for (I don't know anyway), as they don't even exist anymore. WorldCom is now MCI. In other words, MCI as a company doesn't exist, they're WorldCom. Try going to http://www.mci.com/ and see where you get forwarded to if you don't believe me.

AOL/TW and Microsoft will keep each other in check. Internet standards will have to remain open in order for the Big Two to try to cross-lure each other's users.

With open standards, anyone with a server can continue to be a 'netcaster'. To put it in non-Internet terminology: AOL/TW, Microsoft, MCI/WorldCom, etc. are the big newspapers, while sites like Slashdot, UNCENSORED!, and The Onion are the 'zines.

Not much longer and we will be back to a single overall owner,

So what if all the baby bells merge together??? There are other companies out there competing in both the Local and LD markets... MCI has a local telephone service now. Sprint and AT&T are also poised to enter the market, and AT&T isn't re-entering the market by buying a baby-bell, they are going to deliver television/internet/phone over (the former) TCI's cable lines. so, sure, the baby bells might form a new nationwide local provider, but their networks were made accessible to all kinds of ompanies when the Telecom industry was deregulated.

The same is happening with power companies, they now are going to face competion in the local networks that they once controlled.

Of course, the real problem is the fact that the two largest oil companies (mobil and ?exxon?) are going to merge... but even then, there is still BP/Amoco, Shell, HESS (which wasn't formed from standard oil) and others.

Yet another article that claims that MCI WorldCom doesn't do wireless. But what about http://wireless.mci.com/ ? Admittedly, they use the word "reseller" up front, does that not count? I know they exist because my crazy roommate has service with them on a Motorola 3000. (When her phone isn't on, I do get an AirTouch error.)