I think this could be the sort of thing that we see a lot more of in the future. But in a more advanced form.
For most people, the bottleneck is the pipe between their premises and their ISP. Anyone can implement QoS for their outbound traffic, and can use any classification and prioritization technique they want. At my office we prioritize VoIP RTP packets and iChat video conferencing streams over (for example) ftp and http transfers. In fact we have 5 separate queues that outbound packets are filtered in to.
But inbound QoS is by and large outside the control of the individual customer. You can do a few crude things by dropping TCP packets, but that's about it. What is really needed is the ability to classify and prioritize packets at the ISP end, before they enter that slow last-mile pipe to the customer premises. Then I can select the prioritization that is right for me. To do this the customer needs their own router at the ISP, or at least the ability to define their own queues and priorities. I have not found an ISP implements such a feature at this time.
I think if the prioritization policy is under control of the paying customer, then ISP's could have an argument for metered billing - where the highest priority packets cost more than the lowest priority ones (which would be very cheap or even free of charge).
Of course QoS setup is technically too advanced for most home customers, but it doesn't really matter - they could be given the option of a few profiles to choose from or just start with a default which is no prioritization at all.
I had exactly the same problem with Time Warner Cable in SoCal. My apple tv would take 12 hours to download a film. Changed my DNS servers to level3, which resulted in a Akamai server outside TWC (but still in LA), and viola! Instant HD streaming.
It's actually a bit poor that the CDN doesn't detect this and redirect some connections to alternate servers. I always wondered if it was Akamai that couldn't handle the load or a limit within TWC..
.. is allow people to sign up for a virtual mailing address (like a PO Box number). Mail sent to that address is scanned and emailed.
Then I could choose - I can give my virtual mailing address to utilities that still insist on sending me paper bills, and keep my actual address for 'sensitive' material.
As someone who does personal business in 3 countries and moves relatively often, I'd love to have a service like this.
The second phase, of course, is to interface to the mail senders as well, offering to take PDF files and the print and send them. Or if the recipient is taking scanned bills, just forward the PDF and save a tree.
This is a real problem. Many blacklists are far to eager to list an IP without real evidence of spamming.
openrbl.org is useful for looking up your host and trying to figure out what blacklists you are on. But it is still fairly difficult to track down. Our server is listed on three blacklists there even though we have a static IP and have never emitted a single spam address. Sigh.
The other problem I've found is that when a bounce arrives from another server that says you are blacklisted, you can't email them to find out what list they use!
Our mail server does not use any blacklists, which is a shame because we get quite a bit of spam. But we are a business and I cannot take the risk of a client email bouncing, especially if they are innocent and the blacklist is wrong.
What I'd like is a SMTP front end that uses blacklists to determine the likelyhood of the site as a spam source, and delay spam messages for a day or so. The idea being that many mass email programs cannot keep retrying for that long.
Even though Apple ships a 1-button mouse, OSX works very well with any USB mouse. There is full support for a 2nd button and even the scroll-wheel works. The right mouse button performs the same action as click-and-hold on a one button mouse. I sold my Mac mouse and bought a Logitech USB mouse and it works great.
Has anyone considered that a transparent proxy might be the solution, or at least a partial solution?
The internet is more of a tree than a net, at least for the smaller ISP's. So a site can run a transparent proxy that aggregates all it's gnutella clients, and only maintain a few outbound connections for the entire site, as opposed to a few per client. In addition, incoming gnutella connections are intercepted and directed at the proxy (which is essentially another gnutella node).
This allows ISP's to limit the number of gnutella connections to the rest of the world. In fact, it would be best for them to connect only to other ISP's using a proxy as well.
This would tend to greatly improve query response time for nodes that are close by, but on the other hand would make it harder to create connections to remote nodes, because that control has been moved from the client to the proxy.
But an office or an net cafe or school could run the proxy and have a single link between it and the ISP's proxy, instantly connecting the site with all the ISP's users and cutting bandwidth considerably.
Proxy's can do other things to accelerate searches. If a request for "Grateful Dead" has been forwarded, then there is no need to forward the same query string in the immediate future (say 1 minute). And of course the is the option of caching the file transfers themselves...
This is a mature C-like language that has been used in a lot of different applications, is extremely portable and absolutely free. http://www.zeta.org.au/~atrn/ici/
Surely bandwidth problems could be resolved to an extent by simply making the file(s) available via HTTP and rely on ISP's HTTP caches. I don't know how common it is in the USA but in Australia most large ISP's transparently proxy all HTTP.
Of course, many caches may not bother to keep a 600Mb file, but they should, and if the proxying were done at all levels of ISP then the original sites would hurt a lot less.
There are other options. Zip (www.zip.com.au) have a direct satellite connection to the US (5MBit) and you can get that for 14c/MB.
I think once Optus get their act together and create some serious competition with the cable modems the internet costs will drop across the board. Telstra has a long history of keeping prices as high as possible until they are forced to price-cut due to competition.
There is some information on the Traverse Technologies web site - http://www.traverse.com.au/ - of course it is for their ISDN cards, but the start/stop script does show how to get multilink (synchronous) PPP working.
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I think this could be the sort of thing that we see a lot more of in the future. But in a more advanced form.
For most people, the bottleneck is the pipe between their premises and their ISP. Anyone can implement QoS for their outbound traffic, and can use any classification and prioritization technique they want. At my office we prioritize VoIP RTP packets and iChat video conferencing streams over (for example) ftp and http transfers. In fact we have 5 separate queues that outbound packets are filtered in to.
But inbound QoS is by and large outside the control of the individual customer. You can do a few crude things by dropping TCP packets, but that's about it. What is really needed is the ability to classify and prioritize packets at the ISP end, before they enter that slow last-mile pipe to the customer premises. Then I can select the prioritization that is right for me. To do this the customer needs their own router at the ISP, or at least the ability to define their own queues and priorities. I have not found an ISP implements such a feature at this time.
I think if the prioritization policy is under control of the paying customer, then ISP's could have an argument for metered billing - where the highest priority packets cost more than the lowest priority ones (which would be very cheap or even free of charge).
Of course QoS setup is technically too advanced for most home customers, but it doesn't really matter - they could be given the option of a few profiles to choose from or just start with a default which is no prioritization at all.
I had exactly the same problem with Time Warner Cable in SoCal. My apple tv would take 12 hours to download a film. Changed my DNS servers to level3, which resulted in a Akamai server outside TWC (but still in LA), and viola! Instant HD streaming.
It's actually a bit poor that the CDN doesn't detect this and redirect some connections to alternate servers. I always wondered if it was Akamai that couldn't handle the load or a limit within TWC..
Then I could choose - I can give my virtual mailing address to utilities that still insist on sending me paper bills, and keep my actual address for 'sensitive' material.
As someone who does personal business in 3 countries and moves relatively often, I'd love to have a service like this.
The second phase, of course, is to interface to the mail senders as well, offering to take PDF files and the print and send them. Or if the recipient is taking scanned bills, just forward the PDF and save a tree.
This is a real problem. Many blacklists are far to eager to list an IP without real evidence of spamming.
openrbl.org is useful for looking up your host and trying to figure out what blacklists you are on. But it is still fairly difficult to track down. Our server is listed on three blacklists there even though we have a static IP and have never emitted a single spam address. Sigh.
The other problem I've found is that when a bounce arrives from another server that says you are blacklisted, you can't email them to find out what list they use!
Our mail server does not use any blacklists, which is a shame because we get quite a bit of spam. But we are a business and I cannot take the risk of a client email bouncing, especially if they are innocent and the blacklist is wrong.
What I'd like is a SMTP front end that uses blacklists to determine the likelyhood of the site as a spam source, and delay spam messages for a day or so. The idea being that many mass email programs cannot keep retrying for that long.
Even though Apple ships a 1-button mouse, OSX works very well with any USB mouse. There is full support for a 2nd button and even the scroll-wheel works. The right mouse button performs the same action as click-and-hold on a one button mouse. I sold my Mac mouse and bought a Logitech USB mouse and it works great.
Has anyone considered that a transparent proxy might be the solution, or at least a partial solution?
The internet is more of a tree than a net, at least for the smaller ISP's. So a site can run a transparent proxy that aggregates all it's gnutella clients, and only maintain a few outbound connections for the entire site, as opposed to a few per client. In addition, incoming gnutella connections are intercepted and directed at the proxy (which is essentially another gnutella node).
This allows ISP's to limit the number of gnutella connections to the rest of the world. In fact, it would be best for them to connect only to other ISP's using a proxy as well.
This would tend to greatly improve query response time for nodes that are close by, but on the other hand would make it harder to create connections to remote nodes, because that control has been moved from the client to the proxy.
But an office or an net cafe or school could run the proxy and have a single link between it and the ISP's proxy, instantly connecting the site with all the ISP's users and cutting bandwidth considerably.
Proxy's can do other things to accelerate searches. If a request for "Grateful Dead" has been forwarded, then there is no need to forward the same query string in the immediate future (say 1 minute). And of course the is the option of caching the file transfers themselves...
This is a mature C-like language that has been used in a lot of different applications, is extremely portable and absolutely free.
http://www.zeta.org.au/~atrn/ici/
Surely bandwidth problems could be resolved to an extent by simply making the file(s) available via HTTP and rely on ISP's HTTP caches. I don't know how common it is in the USA but in Australia most large ISP's transparently proxy all HTTP.
Of course, many caches may not bother to keep a 600Mb file, but they should, and if the proxying were done at all levels of ISP then the original sites would hurt a lot less.
There are other options. Zip (www.zip.com.au)
have a direct satellite connection to the US
(5MBit) and you can get that for 14c/MB.
I think once Optus get their act together and
create some serious competition with the cable
modems the internet costs will drop across
the board. Telstra has a long history of keeping
prices as high as possible until they are
forced to price-cut due to competition.
There is some information on the Traverse Technologies web site - http://www.traverse.com.au/ - of course it is for their ISDN cards, but the start/stop script does show how to get multilink (synchronous) PPP working.
And it works for me for 128k ISDN.