Re:Not quite Re:but still not effectively because.
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Wireless Mesh Networks
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· Score: 1
If instead D whispers to C, C whispers to B, B whispers to A, then the other conversations aren't affected.
How do you propose this whisper? In ad hoc 802.11b/a, D will be transmitting frames to whoever can hear it, regardless of whether it feels like whispering or not.
In order to pick up omni coverage for mesh, you're probably running some sort of omnidirectional antenna which does not have the ability to discriminate and focus energy from D to C. Likewise, D is not going to calculate that it can run at a lower power level to transmit a frame to C, then bump back up to a different level to E, so on. It's a nice thought, but I'm aware of no protocol that supports this approach (someone correct me if I'm wrong please!).
And all of this would have to be factored into the routing OS as well as any link-state protocol would need to be aware of these factors.
I've read of experimental mesh antennas that redirect using an array - sort of a doppler approach were by sending a frame to antennas 1, 3 and 4, but not 2 or 5 or 6, I can focus my transmission in a directional manner.
Also, per the mesh discussion, we've run Nokia Rooftop (now discontinued) and clearly observed that A-->B-->C results in significant degradation with every additional unit added to the mesh. From an initial 3 Mbps for the FHSS mesh, a tiny network with 7 units was having a difficult time getting at best 384 Kbps to a given subscriber.
*scoove*
Re:Not quite Re:but still not effectively because.
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Wireless Mesh Networks
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· Score: 1
Each hop increases the bandwidth, not the bandwidth used.
How? When c = maximum capacity per radio, c+c+c > 3c?
The original poster was correct; it decreases the maximum capacity, and god forbid you start bridging instead of routing. Remember, you've got a retransmission of an ethernet frame going on.
Radio A sends out a frame destined for Radio D. B hears and repeats, C picks up B's and repeats. D hears and acts as the access point for the network where egress to the Internet occurs.
But RF doesn't work like a normal point-to-point model; you have point-multipoint going on and in most 802.11b/a ad hoc modes, it can get rather inefficient quickly. Just look at an 802.11b repeater/bridge, for instance.
bandwidth scales UP with the number of nodes; since you then have multiple independent ways to route from A-B through the mesh
Sounds nice but unless you've designed some load balancing protocol into the mesh, it isn't going to happen.
cities and counties are taking matters into their own hands
At risk of being modded a troll, I'll just suggest folks actually look at real examples of municipal-run telecom before they ask for one in their backyard.
Inefficient. Slow. Overpriced. Never efficiently purchased. Terribly overaggregated (what, one T1 won't take care of a town with a 8,000 population?). And worst of all, they're usually mini-Enrons. Accounting tricks all over the place to sneak money into the competitive enterprise while bilking ratepayers from the monopoly side.
Every one I've looked at various degrees of these problems, and it's not too hard to understand why. As a quasi-governmental entity, they can't pay the techies very well (look at your newspaper for city tech jobs - they're not too exciting compensation-wise). Subsequently the people they get aren't always the best, or if they are, they leave. Nobody has any ownership per se that would encourage them to work hard or better. If the server's down another day, big deal.
Please say no to this or think it through. Socialism hasn't worked yet and it certainly isn't going to magically solve the broadband issue.
BTW, I see the relativists have marked opinions they don't like as troll or flamebait again. Funny how they don't have anything to say, but don't hesitate to shut up those they disagree with. This seems to be happening more frequently to those who post from a pro-liberty/reason perspective. Downtime for the anti-judgment marchers?
Guess that happens when you make a post that is anti-government centralization of everything. Come on folks, RTF Posting guidelines and don't mod stuff down just because you don't have a good argument against it.
doozer writes: The only way we are going to get broadband across the board is if the government mandates it, and takes it upon themselves to install and run it.
Doozer - what do you do for a living - work for a government office (or are you still a person in training at school)? Perhaps you can give me an example of a government agency that runs:
- efficiently - under budget - on time - is customer-service focused
OK, outside of the IRS and the dept. of motor vehicles, who can you name? (grin)
I've never had a government office experience where I came away amazed at how good of a job they did.
In our part of the country, we have some local municipalities trying to offer broadband Internet.
Their trick? Charge twice as much for the other monopoly services to subsidize it, hire FDH (fat dumb and happy) employees that are high on self-esteem but low on competence (hey, everyone deserves a job and the government will give them one), and fulfill every other social program objective outside of providing good service at a good price while covering the cost of the service without borrowing the money from elsewhere.
$45/month broadband, fed by a single T1 to the community (that is shared across about 2000 subscribers and businesses). At 9pm, thruput is about 30-60 Kbps. Wow... dialup.
My customers in a town south of this one pay $30/month and are guaranteed 256 up and down. And get this... I'm not skimming four million bucks out of a cross-subsidy and jacking up the city's water and electric bills by double what other community rates are. How is this possible? Worse yet, I make money and they are looking at needing another loan to subsidize their boondoggle broadband network.
As soon as it's left up to a corporation todo, they're going to not provide services to the customers that are expensive.
That's simply wrong. My company services what the elitists would call "fly over country." My smallest market is a town with a 220 population. I'm delivering a 12 Mbps backbone to them. Yea, they don't make very much money, but they're loyal customers and we break even.
Why? Because thats the point of a corporation. They want to make a profit.
Look, I know I'll never put an end to this misnomer, but maybe I can help you out. Take your personal finances. You go to work and bring in $1500 take home in your paycheck. You have bills that totals $1400. Uh oh... you ran a profit!
So for the next few months, spend $3500 per pay period and bring in only $1000 (tell your boss he's paying you too much). Now what do you do?
Why should a company be any different?
Private corporations are not the ideal method of provided uniform services, because not everyone can be served at uniform cost.
Because not everyone wears a uniform with a swastika...er... sorry! (kidding). Not everyone is uniform. Some of my customers are businesses with hundreds of employees needing 6 Mbps or more. Should I charge everyone $2500 a month to be uniform?
Interestingly, I have a flat price for my residential customers that is indifferent of how easy or hard their installation is. Some take 15 minutes for an install - new PC with current OS operated by someone with a clue - and others take 6 hours of struggling with Win95, DLL-hell, etc.
Funny... I'm providing uniform service without uniform cost.
The sooner we realize this, and stop trying to privatize everything, we'll be better off
Please do reply. I've yet to find a successful person (in any endeavor of life outside crime) that thinks this way. Most who do are college students living off of someone elses money and their opinions don't matter anyway.
How can they let you download them, but stop you from burning them to CD?
Actually, they let you burn anything you want, but stop you from downloading them.
AOL at 56 Kbps for MP3 downloads? And booked as a pay service? Maybe they'll get granny to believe she has broadband now that she can download music...
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How do they block it without knowing what the sites are?
Exactly. I'd have to require a list to impose anything per court order. To expect otherwise would be like asking the police to "just go get all the criminals out there - we don't have names, but make sure you get them all."
This issue will certainly be moved up on appeal, and I'd have to believe it will lose as it violates the framework of common carrier. You can trust that no service provider will permit themselves to operate without those protections - Prodigy's embarrassing loss in the 90s (due to its policy of filtering some content and therefore providing a guarantee thta the content was free from offensive material, vs. the Compuserve case where they clearly disclaimered "life has risk" and let people determine where they wanted to go) is enough of a reminder of where we service providers do not want to go.
I think it'd be wonderful to demand the list from the State of Pennsylvania, and then when they miss a site, hold them accountable. Or if they accidentally block a site, nail them for interfering with commerce.
BTW, it'd help if people would quit electing nanny-wannabees...
Actually, that's much easier said than done. It sounds great on paper - and like all "easy money" ideas, it really only serves the interest of the stock scammer.
Exactly (and well stated, btw). When I discovered concerns about WaveRider for instance, I received several contacts telling me confidentially to bug off as these folks were expecting to game the gamers.
Because it's such a matter of timing, you just cannot beat the dealer, as TackHead indicated. Don't forget too that there usually appears to be a relationship between the market maker and the parasite - though I've never seen enough on that aspect to fully understand how its being exploited.
The other thing to watch for on some of these shell games is acquisitions of nothing companies when the company has gone into a dormant period. This is a "reloading of stock" move by the parasite.
Yes, the SEC has got to make enforcement visible, rather than complain about being underfunded - (yes, guys, we're all overworked these days. Be glad you're employed!)
While it's nice to see the "don't bug us, we're woefully underpaid and overworked" SEC finally going after one of these parasites, it's too bad they have to get geeked out about the whole spam bit to do so. That's only the tip of the iceberg on these pink sheet company abuses.
I got taken by a pink sheet bulletin board stock deal in the mid-90s. We put a good company and $15 million of local investor capital into what's called a dormant shell - a publically trading company that perhaps didn't make it in a former life, got kicked off of NASDAQ (or never made it), is probably late on SEC filings, and is operationally dormant. You can buy these things for a quarter million or so in Nevada, apparently.
The whole pitch is "you can go public for much less than an IPO, and get a publically trading stock which is much more liquid for your investors and allows you to get more investing money for less equity." The reality is that the shell's broker gets a credible asset in the shell to use for pump & dump.
The only problem is that every single one of them I've come across has had a controlling parasite "broker" in the middle - as was the one we encountered. The broker broke all the merger terms by refusing to hand over control of the company. He illegally siezed the company and the millions invested and looted it all. Ficticious board resolutions were used to change who could sign on the company bank accounts, etc. Offshore Bermuda accounts were used to funnel things to Swiss accounts - sounds hollywood, but it was very effective.
By the time the courts caught up with it all, the company was absent any cash or assets. The SEC's response? "Sorry - We have too many people doing this to be able to help you. Call your congressperson and ask them to increase our funding." Seriously.
Two years ago, I thought I found a company that had this background that wasn't a scam. WaveRider, a manufacturer of near-line of sight 900 MHz proprietary fixed wireless gear. Then I found the parasite, the Bermuda angle and the Swiss angle. It has since gone from $1/share to around $0.12. Like the best of these deals, the parasite retains competent management that really truly believes it has a chance. But they never do - not when legal control of the company is closely held by the parasite.
So... before you invest in a bulletin board stock, look for the parasite. Late on SEC filings? Run. See a Bermuda/Swiss connection? Run. Nevada corporation? Be very nervous. Read that 10K and 10Qs very, very closely.
Oh, and what ever happened to our parasite? He's still pushing his stocks and has avoided SEC and IRS enforcement for years. He's grown rather confident that he's untouchable and is probably right...
East/west coast yuppie people (I'm stereotyping, I know!) apparently don't seem to know that times are tough in other parts.
As a broadband provider to part of fly-over country, I can attest that things are tight. I just had a fellow who's been overanxious for broadband to come to his town announce yesterday that he's "holding off, paying down a few credit cards, and taking it cautiously with the war coming and all the new taxes they're dumping on us."
People have done an amazing job cutting luxuries, and are even tightning the belt on necessities. Tons of layoffs to bump stock prices and all the other factors have finally done their trick. It's ultimately self-defeating though.
Certainly Segway knew it was a luxury item, right? (Yea, I know, "everyone's gotta have one" culture inside, right?)
In the United States, there are "Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers" (ILECs) and "Competitive Local Exchange Carriers" (CLECs). The ILECs are the "Baby Bells" that everybody knows and loves.
Actually, the other guy was right. I'll explain:
ILEC = any incumbant local exchange; not exclusive to RBOCs. RBOC = regional bell operating company; aka Baby Bell. Formed from divestiture; e.g. MFJ.
ILEC != RBOC/Bell. For instance, United Telephone, GTE, and thousands of little guys like Benkelman Telephone and Hooper Telephone of Nebraska are also ILECs, but not RBOCs.
Instead of being broken up into competing interests (like AT&T), instead they were broken up into regional monopolies
Somewhat, except the MFJ believed that the separation of long distance from local service would be the beginning of the separation. I still don't believe it anticipated the sluggishness of competition in the local loop.
This really was one of the most disappointing failures of the MFJ. It ignored the reality that the monopoly was based upon right of ways granted to the ILECs by local governments and property owners, creating a significant owned infrastructure that very few could compete with. Even today, there are communities in our parts that maintain an exclusive francise for cable and telephone. Competitors could not run wireline service even if they desired.
(called ILECs), each having a monopoly in a number of states but none of them allowed to operate outside their designated regions.
actually, this geographic limitation is a factor more on local service rather than other areas like directory services, Internet, long distance, etc, and it's also more focused on the RBOCs.
Nebraska did a study in 1992 on its own "opening up of the local exchange" (they eliminated rate controls over ILECs but didn't drop the other shoe permitting competition). Result? US West and LT&T (Lincoln Tel - now Alltel) stayed stable. Small incumbants like Huntel, on the other hand, went gangbusters raising rates (over 90% increase by Huntel in 5 years on resi and business service) while nearly halting infrastructure investment.
Where'd the money go? New competitive ventures, like computer shops, Internet businesses, etc.
the Act requires the ILECs to lease the use of their hardware to these competing interests (terms to be dictated by federal and state governments)
And unfortunately, the RBOCs like US West (now Qwest) discovered the loopholes, like if you fill up a central office switching facility with a bunch of cubical workers (freezing their butts off in the CO space, haha!), then you can claim you don't have enough space to permit CLECs to tie into your switch.
CLECs... do it by leasing Baby Bell hardware.
This is only partially true; they're leasing the unbundled element of a last-mile wire pair. The CLEC must supply its own DSLAM or comperable last-mile switching/termination, provide its own trunking back to its central switching, etc.
Having done this for years, I can attest that the only thing the RBOC will do is the wire pair, and even then, they'll get it wrong.
you have a problem with DSL service: The CLEC and the ILEC spend a few days blaming each other for the service problems before anything starts to get done.
Rarely is the CLEC at fault (and the ILEC knows this). Look at SWBell's game with its DSL provisioning "fax hotline" - consisting of a single fax machine for its territory that was always out of paper. Oops...
In their defense, they shouldn't have been left with the local loop. This was a community asset built and paid for by ratepayers of a monopoly. To hand this over to the ILEC only invited abuse.
If you can't get DSL service from your local Baby Bell, you can't get DSL from anybody.
Very inaccurate. Besides the fact that there are many ILECs who are not baby bells, there are CLECs that are ILECs from other territories providing service in each others area (such as Harlan Iowa, which has four broadband providers, including Farmers Telephone which provides DSL over its own copper - but isn't the ILEC), etc.
Hope that helps... telecom is an ugly world sometimes.
Yes, SBC's decision not nto improve broadband is a real win for Kansas consumers.
Actually, it really is. It sends a message to consumers that SBC isn't interested in their communities, but rather has become an anonymous monolith, too used to 60%+ margins commanded with little effort.
I've had a similar issue with a larger incumbant independent in one state promising DSL for three years now to several small (under 5,000) communities, when the rest of us knew there was no way. Every month, it was "next month" and they always put out an attractive low price to keep people from subscribing to competitors. More than a year later, we're finally seeing some of these holdout consumers quit waiting - sad as it may be to see such abused yet persistent believers.
By allowing consumers to see thru this masquerade, it allows them to more quickly shift their dollars to smaller, community-focused companies that are investing and building new infrastructure. Better to send the business this way - the RBOCs haven't had an interest other than themselves since deregulation.
Personally, I think California should secede from the union.
Can we give them a big push and accelerate the succession?
We've got a similar issue in Nebraska, although it's on a smaller scale. Overspending during the past years and funding of every special little project was the norm by *both* parties (and given the Republican dominance in the state, more of the blame should lie there).
The solution? Taxes everywhere. Raise income tax. Sales tax. Property tax. My truck licensed in Nebraska was $450/year for plates. Across the river in Iowa, it's $85 (and $30 in South Dakota). Better roads? Hardly! After all the tax announcements, now it's new service fees - except none of them make any sense. $2 per vehicle registration to add employees at the attorney general's office? What, government isn't big enough already? New bilingual government proposals - wouldn't now be a good time to tell those new citizens that English/is/ the language they're supposed to learn to be successful instead? New spendings to subsidize in-state tuition for illegals, while the university system is being radically downsized? Our government has simply gone wacky.
Interestingly, many in government misperceive their citizens money as government property, and subsequently neglect the possibility of circumvention (You're always free to act, but never free from consequence).
We're taking away a dozen jobs from the state of Nebraska and encouraging employees to relocate across the river. For every one I remove, it'll take several dozen to replace it - not factoring the multiplier effect the loss will have on other service businesses.
Per the Register story about ES&S and Sen. Hagel, let me give you a few more details that the Register didn't report, as well as some clarification on the alleged mail order guru Harris:
- ES&S is mostly owned by World Enterprises, not the McCarthy Group. McCarthy and World Investments (VC subsidiary of World Ent.) do lots of investments together, but World definitely lead on this one. Incidentally, World Enterprises owns Omaha's only newspaper, the Omaha World Herald. They have a hundred-year history of anticompetitive practices against other area newspapers and enjoy their monopoly status very well. They do an acceptable job printing a paper, though they've had some amusing missteps (i.e. declaring the Internet a "temporary fad only interesting to computer geeks" back in 1996).
- The Hagel election conspiracy story is unfortunately nothing more than a bizarre construction by nutcase and self-declared expert Bev Harris (btw, I think we've reached the point in society where the expression "right-wing conspiracy nut" needs to be changed to reflect the lack of party exclusivity on these oddballs!). Anyone familiar with Nebraska politics knows that the state's democratic party is in total disarray and has failed to produce any viable candidates other than quasi-moderate Senator Ben Nelson (the 2002 races were a total disgrace and provided no political balance and parity to the state's republicans). Nebraskans rarely ever elect leftists and see themselves as moderates. Hagel is a product of uncontested elections.
- Hagel does have his own set of problems, including presidential ambition that frequently sets him at odds with his president, and his excessive comfort with the views of lobbyists. He's been very pro RIAA and broadcasting industry, pro-baby bell, anti open source, anti-internet broadcaster, etc. He's not much of a person of principle and quite the "vote to the highest bidder" type, unfortunately.
- The real story on ES&S: A few years ago, my company was asked to assist ES&S in their documentation. After assessing the project, I declined and indicated the problems at ES&S were structural, not cosmetic. Inept management, totally absent process management and the usual Omaha "big small town" practice of putting incompetent but aspiring sons and daughters of the community's social elite into senior management of each other's companies was much to blame. There's plenty of "high self-esteem, low competence" at ES&S but no grand conspiracy.
It may be a bad idea, but it's nothing that a lawyer has anything to do with.
I have to totally disagree (there's nearly nothing an attorney can't spend 20 billable hours contemplating!).
Seriously though, it's the awareness of this fact that can be a bit of negotiating leverage to folks put in this position.
I've had noncompetes and credit/background checks thrown at me. Besides being an annoying libertarian that hates this practice, I don't really have anything to hide. However, the noncompete is something that needs to be purchased - as does any other request in negotiations of this sort.
Should the employer demand a background check or expect a noncompete, don't say no! Say Yes*
Tell them you'd be happy to do so immediately, but any such agreements have to be reviewed prior to signing by your attorney. Blame it on some terrible former employer who snuck in all sorts of crazy language like being permitted to spy on you in the employee bathroom and such.
The catch, of course, is that it would be unfair to expect you to incur legal bills on their behalf, reviewing their document, which is only provided for their benefit. Clearly, the reasonable expectation is for them to authorize you to incur the expense of your attorney on their tab - you must be reimbursed.
Don't let them put a cap on that legal bill either - why, they could simply stall on your attorney's legitimate questions and be back at square one.
This strategy works well. Should they be stupid enough to say yes, tell your attorney to work on it to be as one-sided as you can get until they get tired of spending money and give up.
Should they say no, you probably don't want to work there.
But in every case I've used it or seen it used, what usually happens is that you frustrate the "non-profit center" human resources grunt by making them get unusual expense authorizations so much that they give up and let you sneak around the rules, only to nab the next unsuspecting fool.
Cost them money, folks! It's only a most reasonable expectation, after all...
or another Nokia "introduce, undersupport and drop" failure like Airhead.
Nokia's mesh wireless broadband radio system had tremendous potential, but they found about every way to screw up a free lunch, including:
- having shipped units delivered with unpatched, known bad software. "Oh, you always have to patch them before you use them" said our Tessco rep. A year later, same rev shipped and newer patches still to apply. Can someone say single production run?
- restricting software patch access. We played games with Nokia and Tessco for two months, while watching 200 Airheads collect dust and not go on rooftops. Patch software required a special login to Nokia's site, but passwords were only assigned by the distributor. Distributor couldn't get them from Nokia.
- Pricing just didn't reflect the real world. $740/unit for a home subscriber?
- Performance, well, was good when you only had three customers. See the website with the picture of a housing developing with every house having a unit? Hahaha... not.
But hey, it did have a kick-ass management GUI.
Nokia seems to be the next Apple of stillborn & abandoned product lines...
Geez... is it really that hard to find dynamically-updated pages back then, or am I missing something.
Having formerly been a undercapitalized ISP back then (1993-1996), I remember several customer projects that had links to dynamic content, including:
Omaha Steaks, who was an early merchandiser on the net
and
the Applied Information Management Institute, who had written their own code to front-end an Oracle database complete with company and job listing information. (I remember the Sparc servers rather well sitting in the equipment room and listening to their IT people talk about how the code and project worked). Click on CareerLink button and it would take you to a page of career areas, and click on the career area and it'd pull up dynamic pages of content all driven by the back-end database.
This was all pre-May 1996, since my involvement with the company began winding down over summer 1996.
1. Buy "Unix" name 1.1. Scribble out all references to BSD and the Univ. California's intellectual property role in the development of UNIX. Toss out any history on UNIX litigation, including Net2 code issue and round after round of court decisions.
5. ??? Actually, it's: 5. Develop pump and dump scheme to boost SCO stock for a few days while the execs dump and get out.
Then... 6. Bankruptcy!
Bingo. It's funny how history repeats. It wasn't too long ago that BSD/386 faced a similar threat from the current UNIX TM licensee.
Regarding Atlas Shrugged [amazon.com], I've read it 3 times--it's my favorite book.
Yea! Three times here as well; it's one of those rare books that I've got to read a page at a time and think about what I just read. And the darn thing is huge too.
How do all of these different ISPs interact with each other?
There's been a bit of battling that got us to the current model of interchange between networks. A bit of history helps explain why we have the model we have now:
At first, we had the NSFNET system - which was a government contract administered network consisting of a national network (NSFNET, run under contract by ANS, which I believe was a venture between IBM and MCI), and then distributed to regionals, e.g. NEARNET, SURANET, MIDNET, etc. The regionals were initially nonprofits, occasionally directly administered and sometimes done via contract (I believe PSINet was formed by operating the regional contract in the central east cost).
NSFNET didn't permit true commercial traffic, due to its AUP and the fact that taxpayers paid for the network and it'd be an abuse. Still, many regionals blatently ignored this rule. (They also charged obscene rates like $60,000/year for a 56 Kbps leased line, which I was quoted for a community connection in 1993 by our regional - guess someone had to pay for the retired college professors doing research on their payroll).
NSFNET, its pols and associated lobbyists from the Baby Bells, decided to push for a commercial network monopoly that would create a commercial national network, regional NAPs which would be Bell-operated (granting Internet monopoly to them), and then service providers could buy access to the NAP and compete (yea right) with the Bells. We actually saw this model take place with DSL unbundling and the massive failure of DSL and CLEC providers when the Bells played paperwork games (such as SWBell, which allegedly had a single phone line for all the fax requests for DSL orders from competitive carriers - and gosh, guess what kept running out of paper!) Incidentally, Al "Father of the Internet" Gore was a big proponent of this Bell monopoly grant. I guess it is kind of true that he was the father of the aborted Internet Bell Monopoly.
Fortunately for all of us, UUNET, PSINet, Sprint and a few others started up the Commercial Internet Exchange and created a multilateral exchange - where all could tie together by joining the organization and peer for free.
Naturally, as each one joined, they wanted to stop multilateral connections, as they wanted all newcomers to buy through them instead. Then came the MAEs (metropolitan area ethernets, administered then by MFS) which had peering that was bilateral instead of multilateral - meaning you could show up at a MAE but have no connections. You had to arrange for peering with each party one-by-one. Sometimes they'd play, sometimes not.
As things grew, we ended up with what former SprintLink head Bob Collet called "NSPs and ISPs" - network service providers being the backbone providers that were interconnected and bilaterally peered at numerous peerpoints and bilateral interconnects, and ISPs being those that buy from the NSPs and perhaps occasionally partially bilaterally peer.
Do the larger ones set up networks then charge the smaller ones (like my ISP) for bandwidth which is then passed on?
Yes. NSPs charge for transit.
Or do they have 'back and forth' arrangements where the ISPs only pay for the difference between in and out traffic?
This is an excellent question, given that it is very much the rule in international voice telecom. Between international voice carriers, there usually is a "settlement" arrangement - where each tracks traffic sent to each other, and then if there is any significant difference, it is either carried over to the next month or it is paid for to bring the balance back to zero.
Whether the Internet will mature in this manner is anyone's guess, though I have a hunch it might. Understanding that we still have a big battle over which is more important: consumer eyeballs or content, and we can't build settlement models until we resolve this.
Are Earthlink and AOL's masses worth money to a content-heavy network? Or do content providers (like cable TV) have material that Earthlink should pay for? If that's ever meshed out, I think we might see settlement models become a real possibility.
I disagree. A T1 customer who only averages 1500 Kbps costs less then one who avereages 1 Mbps.
Not sure I follow that reasoning; 1500 Kbps 1000 Kbps? And how do you put five 1500 Kbps averages into a single 1500 Kbps line? IP compression?:-) If their average is a sustained 1500, then they're using 1500 - not 300 (1/5). Perhaps you meant peak? Understand there is not a 1:5 aggregation law you can pull out either. It's a bit more detailed than that.
I should clarify per my classification of burstable as a marketing concept; there really are two costing models for a packet share network: fixed and measured.
"Burstable" is a marketing concept for part fixed, part measured. It is even more marketing concept when you discover that many (and initially most) service providers provided it as a short term fix to the problems of price sensitivity and bandwidth consumption cost.
In fact, many of the burstable products offered at first couldn't be monitored, and their sales persons would even announce this to prospective customers ("it says burstable, but the secret is that we don't yet know how to measure it so you can really use all you want").
Of course, many carriers have finally figured out how to measure and bill their burstable products, but not all.
ISPs are probably what can be termed "price searchers."
Ugh... and this merited an insightful? Must be lots of leftover mod points:-) Don't mean to harp on an aspiring young mind, but...
but largely I imagine this is negligible--the bandwidth is there whether or not it is used.
Your professor has fallen prey to the fiber glut myth. Yes, even in our parts of flyover country, it is "fiber, fiber everywhere, but nowhere to connect." Countless miles of 100-lane highways with no onramps.
But when you realize that most of the cost is in the onramp and the interchange (last mile and switching, respectfully), there isn't this mythical nearly free bandwidth.
As a few other posters have noted, ISPs are out to make money.
As witnessed from the events of Worldcom, Global Crossing, Level3 and countless other carriers, probably not enough were out to make money. Please explain though, why would this comment be relevant (not to mention "insightful")? If your employer is not out to make money, RUN. Got stock in a company that is not out to make money? SELL. Buying service from a company not out to make money? LEAVE.
Making money permits us to be around tomorrow to provide you service, give people jobs, and pay our vendors and shareholders. If you feel otherwise, a good cure would be some reading to discharge the mush your professor presented.
A price searcher has a set cost that is basically unrelated to the amount of service they sell.
IF sum(ISP) = bandwidthcost, AND bandwidthcost is fixed, then this would be true. Neither is correct. I'm buying from a multihomed, dual OC3 IP carrier and have a 1 gigabit pipe to them myself, and pay around $200/month per Mbps of bandwidth. Doesn't seem fixed to me. It isn't to my upstream either, and last time I looked, Sprint and AT&T didn't give free extra T1s after the first one was bought.
They simply match up the price/quantity demanded at that price that leads to the highest revenue and thus profit.
This model might apply more to someone like Microsoft, Nokia or Motorola who have a set R&D cost to engineer a product and very little reproduction and distribution cost (e.g. reducing cellphone circuitry to ASIC). But it doesn't fit the carrier business.
Slashdot Mirror
If instead D whispers to C, C whispers to B, B whispers to A, then the other conversations aren't affected.
How do you propose this whisper? In ad hoc 802.11b/a, D will be transmitting frames to whoever can hear it, regardless of whether it feels like whispering or not.
In order to pick up omni coverage for mesh, you're probably running some sort of omnidirectional antenna which does not have the ability to discriminate and focus energy from D to C. Likewise, D is not going to calculate that it can run at a lower power level to transmit a frame to C, then bump back up to a different level to E, so on. It's a nice thought, but I'm aware of no protocol that supports this approach (someone correct me if I'm wrong please!).
And all of this would have to be factored into the routing OS as well as any link-state protocol would need to be aware of these factors.
I've read of experimental mesh antennas that redirect using an array - sort of a doppler approach were by sending a frame to antennas 1, 3 and 4, but not 2 or 5 or 6, I can focus my transmission in a directional manner.
Also, per the mesh discussion, we've run Nokia Rooftop (now discontinued) and clearly observed that A-->B-->C results in significant degradation with every additional unit added to the mesh. From an initial 3 Mbps for the FHSS mesh, a tiny network with 7 units was having a difficult time getting at best 384 Kbps to a given subscriber.
*scoove*
Each hop increases the bandwidth, not the bandwidth used.
How? When c = maximum capacity per radio, c+c+c > 3c?
The original poster was correct; it decreases the maximum capacity, and god forbid you start bridging instead of routing. Remember, you've got a retransmission of an ethernet frame going on.
Radio A sends out a frame destined for Radio D. B hears and repeats, C picks up B's and repeats. D hears and acts as the access point for the network where egress to the Internet occurs.
But RF doesn't work like a normal point-to-point model; you have point-multipoint going on and in most 802.11b/a ad hoc modes, it can get rather inefficient quickly. Just look at an 802.11b repeater/bridge, for instance.
bandwidth scales UP with the number of nodes; since you then have multiple independent ways to route from A-B through the mesh
Sounds nice but unless you've designed some load balancing protocol into the mesh, it isn't going to happen.
*scoove*
cities and counties are taking matters into their own hands
At risk of being modded a troll, I'll just suggest folks actually look at real examples of municipal-run telecom before they ask for one in their backyard.
Inefficient. Slow. Overpriced. Never efficiently purchased. Terribly overaggregated (what, one T1 won't take care of a town with a 8,000 population?). And worst of all, they're usually mini-Enrons. Accounting tricks all over the place to sneak money into the competitive enterprise while bilking ratepayers from the monopoly side.
Every one I've looked at various degrees of these problems, and it's not too hard to understand why. As a quasi-governmental entity, they can't pay the techies very well (look at your newspaper for city tech jobs - they're not too exciting compensation-wise). Subsequently the people they get aren't always the best, or if they are, they leave. Nobody has any ownership per se that would encourage them to work hard or better. If the server's down another day, big deal.
Please say no to this or think it through. Socialism hasn't worked yet and it certainly isn't going to magically solve the broadband issue.
*scoove*
BTW, I see the relativists have marked opinions they don't like as troll or flamebait again. Funny how they don't have anything to say, but don't hesitate to shut up those they disagree with. This seems to be happening more frequently to those who post from a pro-liberty/reason perspective. Downtime for the anti-judgment marchers?
Guess that happens when you make a post that is anti-government centralization of everything. Come on folks, RTF Posting guidelines and don't mod stuff down just because you don't have a good argument against it.
Areopagetica baby!
*scoove*
doozer writes:
The only way we are going to get broadband across the board is if the government mandates
it, and takes it upon themselves to install and run it.
Doozer - what do you do for a living - work for a government office (or are you still a person in training at school)? Perhaps you can give me an example of a government agency that runs:
- efficiently
- under budget
- on time
- is customer-service focused
OK, outside of the IRS and the dept. of motor vehicles, who can you name? (grin)
I've never had a government office experience where I came away amazed at how good of a job they did.
In our part of the country, we have some local municipalities trying to offer broadband Internet.
Their trick? Charge twice as much for the other monopoly services to subsidize it, hire FDH (fat dumb and happy) employees that are high on self-esteem but low on competence (hey, everyone deserves a job and the government will give them one), and fulfill every other social program objective outside of providing good service at a good price while covering the cost of the service without borrowing the money from elsewhere.
$45/month broadband, fed by a single T1 to the community (that is shared across about 2000 subscribers and businesses). At 9pm, thruput is about 30-60 Kbps. Wow... dialup.
My customers in a town south of this one pay $30/month and are guaranteed 256 up and down. And get this... I'm not skimming four million bucks out of a cross-subsidy and jacking up the city's water and electric bills by double what other community rates are. How is this possible? Worse yet, I make money and they are looking at needing another loan to subsidize their boondoggle broadband network.
As soon as it's left up to
a corporation todo, they're going to not provide services to the customers that are expensive.
That's simply wrong. My company services what the elitists would call "fly over country." My smallest market is a town with a 220 population. I'm delivering a 12 Mbps backbone to them. Yea, they don't make very much money, but they're loyal customers and we break even.
Why? Because thats the point of a corporation. They want to make a profit.
Look, I know I'll never put an end to this misnomer, but maybe I can help you out. Take your personal finances. You go to work and bring in $1500 take home in your paycheck. You have bills that totals $1400. Uh oh... you ran a profit!
So for the next few months, spend $3500 per pay period and bring in only $1000 (tell your boss he's paying you too much). Now what do you do?
Why should a company be any different?
Private corporations are not the ideal method of provided uniform services, because not
everyone can be served at uniform cost.
Because not everyone wears a uniform with a swastika...er... sorry! (kidding). Not everyone is uniform. Some of my customers are businesses with hundreds of employees needing 6 Mbps or more. Should I charge everyone $2500 a month to be uniform?
Interestingly, I have a flat price for my residential customers that is indifferent of how easy or hard their installation is. Some take 15 minutes for an install - new PC with current OS operated by someone with a clue - and others take 6 hours of struggling with Win95, DLL-hell, etc.
Funny... I'm providing uniform service without uniform cost.
The sooner we realize this, and stop trying to privatize everything, we'll be better off
Please do reply. I've yet to find a successful person (in any endeavor of life outside crime) that thinks this way. Most who do are college students living off of someone elses money and their opinions don't matter anyway.
*scoove*
No, if you read a little, you'll see it only applies to an item for sale.
What, like misc.forsale.computers ?
This whole prior art thing must be pretty tricky. Either that or the twenty monkeys at USPTO need to type faster...
*scoove*
How can they let you download them, but stop you from burning them to CD?
Actually, they let you burn anything you want, but stop you from downloading them.
AOL at 56 Kbps for MP3 downloads? And booked as a pay service? Maybe they'll get granny to believe she has broadband now that she can download music...
*scoove*
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How do they block it without knowing what the sites are?
Exactly. I'd have to require a list to impose anything per court order. To expect otherwise would be like asking the police to "just go get all the criminals out there - we don't have names, but make sure you get them all."
This issue will certainly be moved up on appeal, and I'd have to believe it will lose as it violates the framework of common carrier. You can trust that no service provider will permit themselves to operate without those protections - Prodigy's embarrassing loss in the 90s (due to its policy of filtering some content and therefore providing a guarantee thta the content was free from offensive material, vs. the Compuserve case where they clearly disclaimered "life has risk" and let people determine where they wanted to go) is enough of a reminder of where we service providers do not want to go.
I think it'd be wonderful to demand the list from the State of Pennsylvania, and then when they miss a site, hold them accountable. Or if they accidentally block a site, nail them for interfering with commerce.
BTW, it'd help if people would quit electing nanny-wannabees...
*scoove*
Actually, that's much easier said than done. It sounds great on paper - and like all "easy money" ideas, it really only serves the interest of the stock scammer.
Exactly (and well stated, btw). When I discovered concerns about WaveRider for instance, I received several contacts telling me confidentially to bug off as these folks were expecting to game the gamers.
Because it's such a matter of timing, you just cannot beat the dealer, as TackHead indicated. Don't forget too that there usually appears to be a relationship between the market maker and the parasite - though I've never seen enough on that aspect to fully understand how its being exploited.
The other thing to watch for on some of these shell games is acquisitions of nothing companies when the company has gone into a dormant period. This is a "reloading of stock" move by the parasite.
Yes, the SEC has got to make enforcement visible, rather than complain about being underfunded - (yes, guys, we're all overworked these days. Be glad you're employed!)
*scoove*
While it's nice to see the "don't bug us, we're woefully underpaid and overworked" SEC finally going after one of these parasites, it's too bad they have to get geeked out about the whole spam bit to do so. That's only the tip of the iceberg on these pink sheet company abuses.
I got taken by a pink sheet bulletin board stock deal in the mid-90s. We put a good company and $15 million of local investor capital into what's called a dormant shell - a publically trading company that perhaps didn't make it in a former life, got kicked off of NASDAQ (or never made it), is probably late on SEC filings, and is operationally dormant. You can buy these things for a quarter million or so in Nevada, apparently.
The whole pitch is "you can go public for much less than an IPO, and get a publically trading stock which is much more liquid for your investors and allows you to get more investing money for less equity." The reality is that the shell's broker gets a credible asset in the shell to use for pump & dump.
The only problem is that every single one of them I've come across has had a controlling parasite "broker" in the middle - as was the one we encountered. The broker broke all the merger terms by refusing to hand over control of the company. He illegally siezed the company and the millions invested and looted it all. Ficticious board resolutions were used to change who could sign on the company bank accounts, etc. Offshore Bermuda accounts were used to funnel things to Swiss accounts - sounds hollywood, but it was very effective.
By the time the courts caught up with it all, the company was absent any cash or assets. The SEC's response? "Sorry - We have too many people doing this to be able to help you. Call your congressperson and ask them to increase our funding." Seriously.
Two years ago, I thought I found a company that had this background that wasn't a scam. WaveRider, a manufacturer of near-line of sight 900 MHz proprietary fixed wireless gear. Then I found the parasite, the Bermuda angle and the Swiss angle. It has since gone from $1/share to around $0.12. Like the best of these deals, the parasite retains competent management that really truly believes it has a chance. But they never do - not when legal control of the company is closely held by the parasite.
So... before you invest in a bulletin board stock, look for the parasite. Late on SEC filings? Run. See a Bermuda/Swiss connection? Run. Nevada corporation? Be very nervous. Read that 10K and 10Qs very, very closely.
Oh, and what ever happened to our parasite? He's still pushing his stocks and has avoided SEC and IRS enforcement for years. He's grown rather confident that he's untouchable and is probably right...
*scoove*
overpriced useless product
East/west coast yuppie people (I'm stereotyping, I know!) apparently don't seem to know that times are tough in other parts.
As a broadband provider to part of fly-over country, I can attest that things are tight. I just had a fellow who's been overanxious for broadband to come to his town announce yesterday that he's "holding off, paying down a few credit cards, and taking it cautiously with the war coming and all the new taxes they're dumping on us."
People have done an amazing job cutting luxuries, and are even tightning the belt on necessities. Tons of layoffs to bump stock prices and all the other factors have finally done their trick. It's ultimately self-defeating though.
Certainly Segway knew it was a luxury item, right? (Yea, I know, "everyone's gotta have one" culture inside, right?)
*scoove*
In the United States, there are "Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers" (ILECs) and "Competitive Local Exchange Carriers" (CLECs). The ILECs are the "Baby Bells" that everybody knows and loves.
Actually, the other guy was right. I'll explain:
ILEC = any incumbant local exchange; not exclusive to RBOCs.
RBOC = regional bell operating company; aka Baby Bell. Formed from divestiture; e.g. MFJ.
ILEC != RBOC/Bell. For instance, United Telephone, GTE, and thousands of little guys like Benkelman Telephone and Hooper Telephone of Nebraska are also ILECs, but not RBOCs.
Instead of being broken up into competing interests (like AT&T), instead they were broken up into regional monopolies
Somewhat, except the MFJ believed that the separation of long distance from local service would be the beginning of the separation. I still don't believe it anticipated the sluggishness of competition in the local loop.
This really was one of the most disappointing failures of the MFJ. It ignored the reality that the monopoly was based upon right of ways granted to the ILECs by local governments and property owners, creating a significant owned infrastructure that very few could compete with. Even today, there are communities in our parts that maintain an exclusive francise for cable and telephone. Competitors could not run wireline service even if they desired.
(called ILECs), each having a monopoly in a number of states but none of them allowed to operate outside their designated regions.
actually, this geographic limitation is a factor more on local service rather than other areas like directory services, Internet, long distance, etc, and it's also more focused on the RBOCs.
Nebraska did a study in 1992 on its own "opening up of the local exchange" (they eliminated rate controls over ILECs but didn't drop the other shoe permitting competition). Result? US West and LT&T (Lincoln Tel - now Alltel) stayed stable. Small incumbants like Huntel, on the other hand, went gangbusters raising rates (over 90% increase by Huntel in 5 years on resi and business service) while nearly halting infrastructure investment.
Where'd the money go? New competitive ventures, like computer shops, Internet businesses, etc.
the Act requires the ILECs to lease the use of their hardware to these competing interests (terms to be dictated by federal and state governments)
And unfortunately, the RBOCs like US West (now Qwest) discovered the loopholes, like if you fill up a central office switching facility with a bunch of cubical workers (freezing their butts off in the CO space, haha!), then you can claim you don't have enough space to permit CLECs to tie into your switch.
CLECs... do it by leasing Baby Bell hardware.
This is only partially true; they're leasing the unbundled element of a last-mile wire pair. The CLEC must supply its own DSLAM or comperable last-mile switching/termination, provide its own trunking back to its central switching, etc.
Having done this for years, I can attest that the only thing the RBOC will do is the wire pair, and even then, they'll get it wrong.
you have a problem with DSL service: The CLEC and the ILEC spend a few days blaming each other for the service problems before anything starts to get done.
Rarely is the CLEC at fault (and the ILEC knows this). Look at SWBell's game with its DSL provisioning "fax hotline" - consisting of a single fax machine for its territory that was always out of paper. Oops...
In their defense, they shouldn't have been left with the local loop. This was a community asset built and paid for by ratepayers of a monopoly. To hand this over to the ILEC only invited abuse.
If you can't get DSL service from your local Baby Bell, you can't get DSL from anybody.
Very inaccurate. Besides the fact that there are many ILECs who are not baby bells, there are CLECs that are ILECs from other territories providing service in each others area (such as Harlan Iowa, which has four broadband providers, including Farmers Telephone which provides DSL over its own copper - but isn't the ILEC), etc.
Hope that helps... telecom is an ugly world sometimes.
*scoove*
Yes, SBC's decision not nto improve broadband is a real win for Kansas consumers.
Actually, it really is. It sends a message to consumers that SBC isn't interested in their communities, but rather has become an anonymous monolith, too used to 60%+ margins commanded with little effort.
I've had a similar issue with a larger incumbant independent in one state promising DSL for three years now to several small (under 5,000) communities, when the rest of us knew there was no way. Every month, it was "next month" and they always put out an attractive low price to keep people from subscribing to competitors. More than a year later, we're finally seeing some of these holdout consumers quit waiting - sad as it may be to see such abused yet persistent believers.
By allowing consumers to see thru this masquerade, it allows them to more quickly shift their dollars to smaller, community-focused companies that are investing and building new infrastructure. Better to send the business this way - the RBOCs haven't had an interest other than themselves since deregulation.
Time to slaughter this beast.
*scoove*
"They lost the opportunity to keep pace with other states"
What, like Qwest in Nebraska and Iowa, where a state governor has to threaten regulatory action in order to free up a T1 for a large manufacturer?
Where infrastructure investment has been slow for over a decade, attrition is taking its tool and minimal maintenance is the most to expect for?
Geez... if SBC can't keep up with that, I don't know what to think. Then again, maybe some companies just can't compete absent monopoly...
*scoove*
Personally, I think California should secede from the union.
/is/ the language they're supposed to learn to be successful instead? New spendings to subsidize in-state tuition for illegals, while the university system is being radically downsized? Our government has simply gone wacky.
Can we give them a big push and accelerate the succession?
We've got a similar issue in Nebraska, although it's on a smaller scale. Overspending during the past years and funding of every special little project was the norm by *both* parties (and given the Republican dominance in the state, more of the blame should lie there).
The solution? Taxes everywhere. Raise income tax. Sales tax. Property tax. My truck licensed in Nebraska was $450/year for plates. Across the river in Iowa, it's $85 (and $30 in South Dakota). Better roads? Hardly! After all the tax announcements, now it's new service fees - except none of them make any sense. $2 per vehicle registration to add employees at the attorney general's office? What, government isn't big enough already? New bilingual government proposals - wouldn't now be a good time to tell those new citizens that English
Interestingly, many in government misperceive their citizens money as government property, and subsequently neglect the possibility of circumvention (You're always free to act, but never free from consequence).
We're taking away a dozen jobs from the state of Nebraska and encouraging employees to relocate across the river. For every one I remove, it'll take several dozen to replace it - not factoring the multiplier effect the loss will have on other service businesses.
*scoove*
Especially if you live in Nebraska!
Per the Register story about ES&S and Sen. Hagel, let me give you a few more details that the Register didn't report, as well as some clarification on the alleged mail order guru Harris:
- ES&S is mostly owned by World Enterprises, not the McCarthy Group. McCarthy and World Investments (VC subsidiary of World Ent.) do lots of investments together, but World definitely lead on this one. Incidentally, World Enterprises owns Omaha's only newspaper, the Omaha World Herald. They have a hundred-year history of anticompetitive practices against other area newspapers and enjoy their monopoly status very well. They do an acceptable job printing a paper, though they've had some amusing missteps (i.e. declaring the Internet a "temporary fad only interesting to computer geeks" back in 1996).
- The Hagel election conspiracy story is unfortunately nothing more than a bizarre construction by nutcase and self-declared expert Bev Harris (btw, I think we've reached the point in society where the expression "right-wing conspiracy nut" needs to be changed to reflect the lack of party exclusivity on these oddballs!). Anyone familiar with Nebraska politics knows that the state's democratic party is in total disarray and has failed to produce any viable candidates other than quasi-moderate Senator Ben Nelson (the 2002 races were a total disgrace and provided no political balance and parity to the state's republicans). Nebraskans rarely ever elect leftists and see themselves as moderates. Hagel is a product of uncontested elections.
- Hagel does have his own set of problems, including presidential ambition that frequently sets him at odds with his president, and his excessive comfort with the views of lobbyists. He's been very pro RIAA and broadcasting industry, pro-baby bell, anti open source, anti-internet broadcaster, etc. He's not much of a person of principle and quite the "vote to the highest bidder" type, unfortunately.
- The real story on ES&S: A few years ago, my company was asked to assist ES&S in their documentation. After assessing the project, I declined and indicated the problems at ES&S were structural, not cosmetic. Inept management, totally absent process management and the usual Omaha "big small town" practice of putting incompetent but aspiring sons and daughters of the community's social elite into senior management of each other's companies was much to blame. There's plenty of "high self-esteem, low competence" at ES&S but no grand conspiracy.
*scoove*
It may be a bad idea, but it's nothing that a lawyer has anything to do with.
I have to totally disagree (there's nearly nothing an attorney can't spend 20 billable hours contemplating!).
Seriously though, it's the awareness of this fact that can be a bit of negotiating leverage to folks put in this position.
I've had noncompetes and credit/background checks thrown at me. Besides being an annoying libertarian that hates this practice, I don't really have anything to hide. However, the noncompete is something that needs to be purchased - as does any other request in negotiations of this sort.
Should the employer demand a background check or expect a noncompete, don't say no! Say Yes*
Tell them you'd be happy to do so immediately, but any such agreements have to be reviewed prior to signing by your attorney. Blame it on some terrible former employer who snuck in all sorts of crazy language like being permitted to spy on you in the employee bathroom and such.
The catch, of course, is that it would be unfair to expect you to incur legal bills on their behalf, reviewing their document, which is only provided for their benefit. Clearly, the reasonable expectation is for them to authorize you to incur the expense of your attorney on their tab - you must be reimbursed.
Don't let them put a cap on that legal bill either - why, they could simply stall on your attorney's legitimate questions and be back at square one.
This strategy works well. Should they be stupid enough to say yes, tell your attorney to work on it to be as one-sided as you can get until they get tired of spending money and give up.
Should they say no, you probably don't want to work there.
But in every case I've used it or seen it used, what usually happens is that you frustrate the "non-profit center" human resources grunt by making them get unusual expense authorizations so much that they give up and let you sneak around the rules, only to nab the next unsuspecting fool.
Cost them money, folks! It's only a most reasonable expectation, after all...
*scoove*
we've probably got another Lynx.
or another Nokia "introduce, undersupport and drop" failure like Airhead.
Nokia's mesh wireless broadband radio system had tremendous potential, but they found about every way to screw up a free lunch, including:
- having shipped units delivered with unpatched, known bad software. "Oh, you always have to patch them before you use them" said our Tessco rep. A year later, same rev shipped and newer patches still to apply. Can someone say single production run?
- restricting software patch access. We played games with Nokia and Tessco for two months, while watching 200 Airheads collect dust and not go on rooftops. Patch software required a special login to Nokia's site, but passwords were only assigned by the distributor. Distributor couldn't get them from Nokia.
- Pricing just didn't reflect the real world. $740/unit for a home subscriber?
- Performance, well, was good when you only had three customers. See the website with the picture of a housing developing with every house having a unit? Hahaha... not.
But hey, it did have a kick-ass management GUI.
Nokia seems to be the next Apple of stillborn & abandoned product lines...
*scoove*
Geez... is it really that hard to find dynamically-updated pages back then, or am I missing something.
Having formerly been a undercapitalized ISP back then (1993-1996), I remember several customer projects that had links to dynamic content, including:
Omaha Steaks, who was an early merchandiser on the net
and
the Applied Information Management Institute, who had written their own code to front-end an Oracle database complete with company and job listing information. (I remember the Sparc servers rather well sitting in the equipment room and listening to their IT people talk about how the code and project worked). Click on CareerLink button and it would take you to a page of career areas, and click on the career area and it'd pull up dynamic pages of content all driven by the back-end database.
This was all pre-May 1996, since my involvement with the company began winding down over summer 1996.
*scoove*
1. Buy "Unix" name
1.1. Scribble out all references to BSD and the Univ. California's intellectual property role in the development of UNIX. Toss out any history on UNIX litigation, including Net2 code issue and round after round of court decisions.
5. ???
Actually, it's:
5. Develop pump and dump scheme to boost SCO stock for a few days while the execs dump and get out.
Then...
6. Bankruptcy!
Bingo. It's funny how history repeats. It wasn't too long ago that BSD/386 faced a similar threat from the current UNIX TM licensee.
"If you can't compete, litigate."
*scoove*
Regarding Atlas Shrugged [amazon.com], I've read it 3 times--it's my favorite book.
Yea! Three times here as well; it's one of those rare books that I've got to read a page at a time and think about what I just read. And the darn thing is huge too.
*scoove*
How do all of these different ISPs interact with each other?
There's been a bit of battling that got us to the current model of interchange between networks. A bit of history helps explain why we have the model we have now:
At first, we had the NSFNET system - which was a government contract administered network consisting of a national network (NSFNET, run under contract by ANS, which I believe was a venture between IBM and MCI), and then distributed to regionals, e.g. NEARNET, SURANET, MIDNET, etc. The regionals were initially nonprofits, occasionally directly administered and sometimes done via contract (I believe PSINet was formed by operating the regional contract in the central east cost).
NSFNET didn't permit true commercial traffic, due to its AUP and the fact that taxpayers paid for the network and it'd be an abuse. Still, many regionals blatently ignored this rule. (They also charged obscene rates like $60,000/year for a 56 Kbps leased line, which I was quoted for a community connection in 1993 by our regional - guess someone had to pay for the retired college professors doing research on their payroll).
NSFNET, its pols and associated lobbyists from the Baby Bells, decided to push for a commercial network monopoly that would create a commercial national network, regional NAPs which would be Bell-operated (granting Internet monopoly to them), and then service providers could buy access to the NAP and compete (yea right) with the Bells. We actually saw this model take place with DSL unbundling and the massive failure of DSL and CLEC providers when the Bells played paperwork games (such as SWBell, which allegedly had a single phone line for all the fax requests for DSL orders from competitive carriers - and gosh, guess what kept running out of paper!) Incidentally, Al "Father of the Internet" Gore was a big proponent of this Bell monopoly grant. I guess it is kind of true that he was the father of the aborted Internet Bell Monopoly.
Fortunately for all of us, UUNET, PSINet, Sprint and a few others started up the Commercial Internet Exchange and created a multilateral exchange - where all could tie together by joining the organization and peer for free.
Naturally, as each one joined, they wanted to stop multilateral connections, as they wanted all newcomers to buy through them instead. Then came the MAEs (metropolitan area ethernets, administered then by MFS) which had peering that was bilateral instead of multilateral - meaning you could show up at a MAE but have no connections. You had to arrange for peering with each party one-by-one. Sometimes they'd play, sometimes not.
As things grew, we ended up with what former SprintLink head Bob Collet called "NSPs and ISPs" - network service providers being the backbone providers that were interconnected and bilaterally peered at numerous peerpoints and bilateral interconnects, and ISPs being those that buy from the NSPs and perhaps occasionally partially bilaterally peer.
Do the larger ones set up networks then charge the smaller ones (like my ISP) for bandwidth which is then passed on?
Yes. NSPs charge for transit.
Or do they have 'back and forth' arrangements where the ISPs only pay for the difference between in and out traffic?
This is an excellent question, given that it is very much the rule in international voice telecom. Between international voice carriers, there usually is a "settlement" arrangement - where each tracks traffic sent to each other, and then if there is any significant difference, it is either carried over to the next month or it is paid for to bring the balance back to zero.
Whether the Internet will mature in this manner is anyone's guess, though I have a hunch it might. Understanding that we still have a big battle over which is more important: consumer eyeballs or content, and we can't build settlement models until we resolve this.
Are Earthlink and AOL's masses worth money to a content-heavy network? Or do content providers (like cable TV) have material that Earthlink should pay for? If that's ever meshed out, I think we might see settlement models become a real possibility.
*scoove*
I disagree. A T1 customer who only averages 1500 Kbps costs less then one who avereages 1 Mbps.
:-) If their average is a sustained 1500, then they're using 1500 - not 300 (1/5). Perhaps you meant peak? Understand there is not a 1:5 aggregation law you can pull out either. It's a bit more detailed than that.
Not sure I follow that reasoning; 1500 Kbps 1000 Kbps? And how do you put five 1500 Kbps averages into a single 1500 Kbps line? IP compression?
I should clarify per my classification of burstable as a marketing concept; there really are two costing models for a packet share network: fixed and measured.
"Burstable" is a marketing concept for part fixed, part measured. It is even more marketing concept when you discover that many (and initially most) service providers provided it as a short term fix to the problems of price sensitivity and bandwidth consumption cost.
In fact, many of the burstable products offered at first couldn't be monitored, and their sales persons would even announce this to prospective customers ("it says burstable, but the secret is that we don't yet know how to measure it so you can really use all you want").
Of course, many carriers have finally figured out how to measure and bill their burstable products, but not all.
*scoove*
ISPs are probably what can be termed "price searchers."
Ugh... and this merited an insightful? Must be lots of leftover mod points:-) Don't mean to harp on an aspiring young mind, but...
but largely I imagine this is negligible--the bandwidth is there whether or not it is used.
Your professor has fallen prey to the fiber glut myth. Yes, even in our parts of flyover country, it is "fiber, fiber everywhere, but nowhere to connect." Countless miles of 100-lane highways with no onramps.
But when you realize that most of the cost is in the onramp and the interchange (last mile and switching, respectfully), there isn't this mythical nearly free bandwidth.
As a few other posters have noted, ISPs are out to make money.
As witnessed from the events of Worldcom, Global Crossing, Level3 and countless other carriers, probably not enough were out to make money. Please explain though, why would this comment be relevant (not to mention "insightful")? If your employer is not out to make money, RUN. Got stock in a company that is not out to make money? SELL. Buying service from a company not out to make money? LEAVE.
Making money permits us to be around tomorrow to provide you service, give people jobs, and pay our vendors and shareholders. If you feel otherwise, a good cure would be some reading to discharge the mush your professor presented.
A price searcher has a set cost that is basically unrelated to the amount of service they sell.
IF sum(ISP) = bandwidthcost, AND bandwidthcost is fixed, then this would be true. Neither is correct. I'm buying from a multihomed, dual OC3 IP carrier and have a 1 gigabit pipe to them myself, and pay around $200/month per Mbps of bandwidth. Doesn't seem fixed to me. It isn't to my upstream either, and last time I looked, Sprint and AT&T didn't give free extra T1s after the first one was bought.
They simply match up the price/quantity demanded at that price that leads to the highest revenue and thus profit.
This model might apply more to someone like Microsoft, Nokia or Motorola who have a set R&D cost to engineer a product and very little reproduction and distribution cost (e.g. reducing cellphone circuitry to ASIC). But it doesn't fit the carrier business.
*scoove*