Why buy a big expensive ecologically damaging Prius when you could get a Volkswagon Polo BlueMotion which is more economical and cheaper? Or even some Jaguars are more economical than a Prius. That is all.
Personally I don't see what Musk's problem is with the Top Gear review.
On the whole, the review was positive, even cautiously optimistic about the Tesla car(s), but when it comes to battery efficiency (only 55 miles on a charge as opposed to the 200 mile quote), the review clearly shows Clarkson driving the car much harder than anyone would normally do - and let's be honest, by driving *any* car like that you'd expect the fuel efficiency to drop fairly significantly (maybe not 70+%, but still significantly).
They waited until *high school* to teach you about sex? Sheesh.
In NZ we start learning that stuff in middle school (age 11). And in detail - for about 2 weeks - including the subjects of nocturnal emissions, periods, masturbation and the acts itself. We were never taught that it's dirty, sinful or bad, just how to "play by the rules" so to speak.
Not to mention that living on a farm I was witness to a variety of animals doing the deeds and subsequently giving birth.
All this combined with reading my parents copy of "The Joy of Sex" at a young age seems to have been enough to keep me safe (thus far I've not knocked anyone up), healthy (no diseases, and I get regular checkups) and very able to enjoy the whole experience.
Then again, I didn't really grow up in a particularly religious household - my parents stopped taking us to church when I was about 4 and were otherwise pretty liberal/relaxed about almost everything. Guess I got lucky.
But here's my $0.02 on the whole thing: If parents want religious arguments taught in their child's science class, they should send them to a religious school - doesn't matter whether they're Christian (of whichever denomination), Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or anything else. If parents **insist** on sending their children to public schools *and* demanding religious arguments be taught, then those children should probably be taught separately as an extra curricular class.
And that being the case, why are only the Christians demanding their creationism/intelligent design? It would seem these days that there are significant populations of other religious groups in the US - shouldn't they get a word in, too? Weren't all men created equal according to the declaration of independence? Surely that *has* to include people of races other than white Christians, doesn't it?
At the end of the day, my views on religion are similar to my views on homosexuality, drugs, alcohol and pretty much everything: do whatever you like. I will even defend your right to do it....Gay and want to marry? Go ahead, here's a wedding gift! Good luck to you....Want to smoke Marijuana? Fine, but do it at your place!...Want to drink until you can't walk properly? Have fun, but please don't drive, I'd probably like to see you again!...Want to teach your "theories" of creationism to people? Teach them to your kids, leave mine alone. And if that means sending your kids to a religious school, well, there's nothing stopping you from doing exactly that. Unless there is something specific, in which case, teach them at home.
Otherwise, public schools should probably be free of religious influence of any kind. Period. After all, separation of church and state is in your constitution, isn't it?
In the US, Level 3, MCI, GTE, and others were relatively even in traffic, up and down. They'd peer, and they'd so so such that the peer traffic would be transit most of the time, but it worked because it was transit from them as much as to them, so it was even. That'll never likely be the case in NZ, so Telecom won't try to peer because peer can't happen with it, it would always be transit.
...I don't know about that - even if a provider only sends/receives 20% as much traffic as Telecom sends/receives to it, that would still fit within the scope of your average peering agreement (5:1 ratio)... or, if Telecom peered only once at a neutral peering point, then there would be a group of providers sending/receiving traffic to the singular peering connection which would end up maybe roughly evening out the traffic flows.
Some of the smaller providers do a lot of telehousing, too - I think Telecom does "big business" but the likes of Orcon, Maxnet etc have got a bunch of retail hosting providers co-located in their DCs which could help contribute to a more-even-than-you-might-expect traffic flow.
I worked ISPs in the US back 10+ years ago. Peering was peering. You don't filter your peers. In fact, the peering agreements were so open that when evil accountants got a hold of AT&T, AT&T played "hot potato" with their data. They'd push customer traffic off their net as soon as practical. This resulted in peers carrying AT&T internal traffic. If someone in NY sent a packet to LA, there was a chance it would be pushed off AT&T in NY, travel across the country on someone else's network, then go back on AT&T in LA for the last leg. That was very broken, but it did happen, and it's proof that peering agreements were so open that.
Yeah, but based on people who've dealt with AT&T both on the consumer and wholesale fronts, AT&T are bastards. Not the most apt comparison compared to civilized countries with civilized policies - whether NZ or anywhere.
If you can't reach Vocus through Maxnet, then it wasn't a peer, it was a filtered Maxnet-only transit. Peering was initially making someone else's network an extension of your own.
I think it still is that way - but by peering with a network, doesn't mean I can use that network to reach yet another network. That is to say - if we continue using Maxnet as an example - if I peer with Maxnet, I can't use them to carry transit traffic unless we mutually agree to do so, which would involve some form of financial transaction and probably a separate link - whether I link with Maxnet's network at a neutral point such as APE (the most likely scenario being that I utilize a second port and private VLAN) or whether I have a dedicated circuit running from my DC to theirs (which I might also be inclined to do for the purpose of redundancy).
The Internet is a "network of networks" and the initial networks had 100% trust of all endpoints (they started as physically connected computers in the same room), and the Internet was a number of those trusted networks connected through private dedicated lines between trusted organizations in charge of those networks. The reason we have so many security issues is that we evolved from a mechanism of complete trust to one of the current reality. Original peering was based on accepting the other network into your own. Now, peering is a trustless link that has a filtered subset of routes advertised over it.
In part because of the sheer number of routes... but also for geographical scope. An ISP in NZ isn't going to know how to get to an ISP in, for example, Ghana - and it would probably be wasteful for the ISP to know that unless for some reason there was a significant amount of traffic heading there - but as it is, it doesn't really *need* to. HOWEVER, in the circumstance where such a route might be required, said ISP is going to know how to get to an ISP in the US or Europe that in turn knows how to get to Ghana.
15 or more years ago, the Internet was still in a relatively fledgling state, so ISPs only really had to deal with the basics: LA, NY/NJ, London, Frankfurt, HK, Singapore, Tokyo - and maybe a few others, so you could pretty much have these trusted links. You also didn't have grossly disproportionate traffic levels due to the content and services available these days burdening peering links which really should have been transit links, which is why some peering agreements now only allow for a maximum in/out ratios of 5:1.
If you were the size of the combined Voda/T/C, you'd be able to peer with Telecom and get to Maxnet. Because that means that Telecom can get to Vocus through you. Both win. Rather than a mesh of 9 interconnects, you only need 3 links and everyone can get to everyone else.
Perhaps, but then peering might be the wrong term to use here. Telecom (historically) hasn't been so good with the peering, nor has TelstraClear. Where I could peer with practically every other ISP in the country at a facility like APE for the low low price o
McGraw-Hill is not the only one to make the mistake of using Java - ALEKS uses it too. And even forces you to use the Sun/Oracle version too, can't even use IcedTea.
Many of these courseware websites I fear are dreadfully out of date (that is, even if the courseware is recent, the technology running it is not and has probably been around since ~IE6 was still popular).
Sadly, wouldn't be surprised if, even in new iterations of such sites, the specifications provided to the programmers include that the whole damn thing be in Java.
Even more sadly, for the most part it's only really us geeks who know/care that Java is bad - your average student probably doesn't know or care.
That will take someone spending millions on a risky gamble to unseat Sky. Sky owns almost all the content for NZ. They even buy shows they have no intention of showing, because that prevents the others from having them. Especially sports. They have to be losing money on sports, give how much they spend on them and the advertising rates during them. But they do make sure nobody else shows them, except for the All Blacks, who are always sold to at least one free provider, even if with a delay. Quickflix and Igloo are bit players trying to get in. So far, mostly unsuccessfully.
Of course it takes a lot of money to unseat a monopoly. That's a given. There are companies with the resources to do it if they just would.
And zero rating doesn't mean that much. I considered Telecom's 500GB plan, but upgraded to the 150GB first, and tried but couldn't reach the cap without pointlessly downloading things I didn't want. I could watch on-demand from multiple providers all day every day and download all the game demos I could find, and still not get close. But if that's not enough for you, you can get more than 3 times the amount on the 500 GB plan. Telecom doesn't zero rate anything, but they have some of the largest caps of anyone.
Yes and no. Zero Rating is beneficial for those who *don't* go ahead and spend the money on the higher plans but still want to consume a limited subset of content... the thinking behind this is something to the effect of "Why should I get the 150GB plan when I could survive on a 60GB plan if only it wasn't for iSky" or whatever... More to the point, "unlimited" could become a more feasible and/or cheaper option (as more providers are beginning to offer such plans anyway it could even become, dare I say, the norm).
Well, I always hear everyone bitching about Telecom not peering. But Telecom is about the size of everyone else combined, and they want Telecom to pay their hosting cost, peer for free, and they'd get free transit out of the deal, and Telecom gets higher cost and no benefit. So there is no national peer. Until Vodafone pays Telecom for hosting and aggregates all the Voda&T/C traffic, there won't be a national peer. And it'll never be in a "neutral space" The people demanding that are places like Maxnet who want to "peer" (read "free transit") and they want Telecom to meet in a "neutral" site, preferably owned by Maxnet, who will then make a killing on everyone who wants to host there to be in the PoP. Maxnet being a good example because their "main" datacentre, small as it is, isn't that far from the international PoP in Glenfield (and yes, I count the Takapuna exchange as being in Glenfield, even if it is essentially across the street from the Takapuna golf course). But there are plenty of data centres in the Rosedale area not far from there, any of them would love to be the domestic PoP. Skytower would be a natural place, but it's expensive to get in. So there is very little domestic peering going on because the sizes are so asymmetrical that it's always transit to someone.
I hear a lot about Telecom not peering as well, but generally speaking, peering agreements almost always prohibit the sending of transit traffic, that is to say if I peer with Maxnet, I can't use my peering links with Maxnet to reach Vocus - if I want to reach Vocus, I'd have to buy my transit from them. I don't think there's any way that I could *only* peer with a provider (say Telecom) and then use them to reach a provider like Hurricane Electric, and if I even tried I'd probably have my virtual ass virtually kicked in to next year.
As for the facilities, that's what APE/WIX/CHIX/etc is for - Citylink runs a bunch of peering facilities around the country and it's not expensive - you buy a rated link or a dark fibre in to the facility, you pay a fixed monthly fee per gigabit to the peering exchange which covers the equipment, electricity etc and it's all done... I don't see wha
Whether *you* recognize Slingshot/Orcon or not is moot - those are the names most people know, even if Callplus and Kordia are the companies behind them and are more or less operationally the same entities.
As I recall Vodafone has purchased numerous smaller ISPs over the last few years (they didn't even really exist outside of cellular until the late 2000's), and it's nice to see a bit of consolidation, as there were (are still?) somewhere around 30 ISPs in NZ, which is a pretty tiny market for them all to be competing for. Not that I would agree with a duopoly or triopoly - competition is healthy - but 30 providers for ~2 million subscribers may be too much.
At least New Zealand has a reasonably healthy scenario when it comes to peering and backhaul - there are many things there that I'm trying to implement for myself in the hopes of improving the situation where I live - if it works, it may even benefit customers that aren't mine and set a precedent for some kind of quality standard. Which would be nice.
As far as upgrades go, I think the reason most ISPs haven't upgraded to 100Gbit/s yet is because, individually, it's not really necessary because no one provider (excepting Telecom) is big enough and it's probably hard to justify the cost - they can do just fine with their multiples of 10Gbit/s, and for the time being, an upgrade would be wasted.
Whether or not 400G works on Southern Cross, that system is basically half-way through it's projected life now, so if there's any time to think about building another cable, maybe now is it - it would probably be about 5 years from now until light-up anyway, by which time SxC would be beginning to show its age, and if not for the age thing, well, there needs to be some competition where there currently is none.
The situation as it is now is that there's too much retail competition, decent enough domestic transit competition, and not enough international transit competition, so, if we can even all this out a bit, we might just have the kind of Internet utopia I left the country to find 8 years ago... and with the UFB rollouts and more zero-rating of certain content (like some of the ISPs currently do already) I genuinely hope that we can start to really utilize some of the high bandwidth services that *are* legal in NZ - as well as hopefully attract some of the international players like Netflix to that market (Sky pretty much has a monopoly on pay-TV content - it would be nice if this could change).
Also, I seem to remember being offered both regular and redundant routes on SxC a couple of years ago - I don't recall if the situation was the same as you describe Alaska as being but I wouldn't be surprised if it was and an ISP was left in the lurch if a non-protected route went down.
Notice I was talking about India. The police could potentially get involved because of the licensing restrictions in that country - there have been various acts passed in the last ~13 years or so which make all sorts of ludicrous things a crime.
For the record, collecting any form of fee after an account is terminated is damned near impossible in that country, and trying to sue the customer for it would mean a 10-year court battle. There's pretty much no such thing as a term contract (providers do have quarterly/half-yearly/yearly plans, but, it's a pay-in-advance deal)... and when it comes to services that's why almost everything is prepaid. Obtaining credit usually requires pretty much 150% of the credit line as collateral.
Otherwise, yeah, you're right about the contract termination stuff and how it would work in any other country.
For most of the route, the system is 3 pairs. Only Hawaii to continental USA is 4 pairs. So realistically, for NZ/Australia, you need to cut 25% off those calculations - so 12Tbit/s seems about right.
Being that it was all built at a time when the US had reasonably good broadband compared to the rest of the world, I'm guessing that they kinda had to have the extra pair for HISJC so that that state alone could support the same services that the mainland has.
As for how much traffic the providers have, only some of them publish their traffic levels - Kordia and Callplus don't, Orcon has a bit less than 10Gbit/s. I haven't checked others.
In some countries where the femtocell is being pushed (I'll use India as my main example), the likelihood of your ISP and cellular operator being the same company are quite slim, and from what I've read, having a femtocell could potentially constitute a violation of most ISP ToS (the operator needs to know the subscriber identity and all that, a femtocell may not offer that)... whether it would actually be enforced is another matter entirely - the police there are only bothered with prosecuting for crimes that require zero effort, and anything Internet related is almost guaranteed to be way above their heads.
Then again, most operators there couldn't give even half a shit about call quality anyway, so...
20Tbit/s? Really? Who on earth told you that? Even Wikipedia (the source for any possible exaggerations) doesn't claim that.
Last time I looked it was going to be 12 - and even then only after the next phase of upgrades (100G) is complete, and that too I think is marketing fluff based on the assumption that nobody buys protected circuits... so really 6. Lit capacity was something like 2Tbit/s as of late last year. Perhaps ironically, now that I think about it this is a very similar amount of lit capacity across all the cables connecting India....have you got any citations on the 20?
The same thing could be said about owning a Femtocell, however providers around the world are beginning to push for just such an approach because they can't (or won't) install more towers - especially in densely populated areas - you're still providing some kind of network access to persons (known/unknown) on the back of your residential service.
Sorry, you're SOL on property India. Foreigners can't own shit unless they have a PIO card (that is, "Person of Indian Origin... basically: non-citizens with parents who are or were Indian citizens).
It's also *hideously expensive* in some cities (...ok, mostly Mumbai... which holds some world records for prices paid per square foot, so...)
It almost seems like every other day something else becomes illegal in your United States of so on.
Come to think of it, last time I got a mobile on contract (not in the US), it didn't have any carrier crap on it whatsoever. And it was unlocked... I mean, had I chosen to switch providers I'd have still been liable for the monthly bills... but I guess this is not enough of a deterrent in the US?
Being (I assume) much younger than you are, I have to agree with some of my counterparts that there are plenty of women born after 1965 who are all about the amount of currency you have available (most of my experiences are with women born in the 80's).
To drive that point home, one girl bragged to me that she once dated a man purely because he had a Ferrari. While I could potentially compete, that seemed just a little too close to (for lack of a better word) prostitution for me and I decided not to pursue that girl after that moment. All I could think was "want me for me, damnit". Sure, that's just one example, but I'm not going to write my whole life story here now, am I?
On the other hand, while you might be right that there might not be any genuine forms of feminism that are all about trashing men, plenty of girls put the feminist label on their misandry and it makes us blokes who can actually tell the difference wonder whether she's actually a feminist or just a man hater. Other than that, on the whole I like feminists.
Divorce. Am a child of a reasonably amicable divorce but something I've yet to experience for myself (putting aside the termination of non-marital long-term relationships which have stuffed me up big time) is a big scary monster for both sides. From what I've seen though, **sometimes** it would seem that the courts give just a little too much to the woman, causing the man to have no life - she keeps the house & car while he moves in to a tiny 1 bedroom flat in an undesirable area with the beat up piece of shit in the driveway because she takes most of his pay packet.
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Why buy a big expensive ecologically damaging Prius when you could get a Volkswagon Polo BlueMotion which is more economical and cheaper? Or even some Jaguars are more economical than a Prius. That is all.
Personally I don't see what Musk's problem is with the Top Gear review.
On the whole, the review was positive, even cautiously optimistic about the Tesla car(s), but when it comes to battery efficiency (only 55 miles on a charge as opposed to the 200 mile quote), the review clearly shows Clarkson driving the car much harder than anyone would normally do - and let's be honest, by driving *any* car like that you'd expect the fuel efficiency to drop fairly significantly (maybe not 70+%, but still significantly).
They waited until *high school* to teach you about sex? Sheesh.
In NZ we start learning that stuff in middle school (age 11). And in detail - for about 2 weeks - including the subjects of nocturnal emissions, periods, masturbation and the acts itself. We were never taught that it's dirty, sinful or bad, just how to "play by the rules" so to speak.
Not to mention that living on a farm I was witness to a variety of animals doing the deeds and subsequently giving birth.
All this combined with reading my parents copy of "The Joy of Sex" at a young age seems to have been enough to keep me safe (thus far I've not knocked anyone up), healthy (no diseases, and I get regular checkups) and very able to enjoy the whole experience.
Then again, I didn't really grow up in a particularly religious household - my parents stopped taking us to church when I was about 4 and were otherwise pretty liberal/relaxed about almost everything. Guess I got lucky.
But here's my $0.02 on the whole thing: If parents want religious arguments taught in their child's science class, they should send them to a religious school - doesn't matter whether they're Christian (of whichever denomination), Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or anything else. If parents **insist** on sending their children to public schools *and* demanding religious arguments be taught, then those children should probably be taught separately as an extra curricular class.
And that being the case, why are only the Christians demanding their creationism/intelligent design? It would seem these days that there are significant populations of other religious groups in the US - shouldn't they get a word in, too? Weren't all men created equal according to the declaration of independence? Surely that *has* to include people of races other than white Christians, doesn't it?
At the end of the day, my views on religion are similar to my views on homosexuality, drugs, alcohol and pretty much everything: do whatever you like. I will even defend your right to do it. ...Gay and want to marry? Go ahead, here's a wedding gift! Good luck to you. ...Want to smoke Marijuana? Fine, but do it at your place! ...Want to drink until you can't walk properly? Have fun, but please don't drive, I'd probably like to see you again! ...Want to teach your "theories" of creationism to people? Teach them to your kids, leave mine alone. And if that means sending your kids to a religious school, well, there's nothing stopping you from doing exactly that. Unless there is something specific, in which case, teach them at home.
Otherwise, public schools should probably be free of religious influence of any kind. Period. After all, separation of church and state is in your constitution, isn't it?
Is what I'm saying really too unreasonable?
In the US, Level 3, MCI, GTE, and others were relatively even in traffic, up and down. They'd peer, and they'd so so such that the peer traffic would be transit most of the time, but it worked because it was transit from them as much as to them, so it was even. That'll never likely be the case in NZ, so Telecom won't try to peer because peer can't happen with it, it would always be transit.
...I don't know about that - even if a provider only sends/receives 20% as much traffic as Telecom sends/receives to it, that would still fit within the scope of your average peering agreement (5:1 ratio)... or, if Telecom peered only once at a neutral peering point, then there would be a group of providers sending/receiving traffic to the singular peering connection which would end up maybe roughly evening out the traffic flows.
Some of the smaller providers do a lot of telehousing, too - I think Telecom does "big business" but the likes of Orcon, Maxnet etc have got a bunch of retail hosting providers co-located in their DCs which could help contribute to a more-even-than-you-might-expect traffic flow.
I worked ISPs in the US back 10+ years ago. Peering was peering. You don't filter your peers. In fact, the peering agreements were so open that when evil accountants got a hold of AT&T, AT&T played "hot potato" with their data. They'd push customer traffic off their net as soon as practical. This resulted in peers carrying AT&T internal traffic. If someone in NY sent a packet to LA, there was a chance it would be pushed off AT&T in NY, travel across the country on someone else's network, then go back on AT&T in LA for the last leg. That was very broken, but it did happen, and it's proof that peering agreements were so open that.
Yeah, but based on people who've dealt with AT&T both on the consumer and wholesale fronts, AT&T are bastards. Not the most apt comparison compared to civilized countries with civilized policies - whether NZ or anywhere.
If you can't reach Vocus through Maxnet, then it wasn't a peer, it was a filtered Maxnet-only transit. Peering was initially making someone else's network an extension of your own.
I think it still is that way - but by peering with a network, doesn't mean I can use that network to reach yet another network. That is to say - if we continue using Maxnet as an example - if I peer with Maxnet, I can't use them to carry transit traffic unless we mutually agree to do so, which would involve some form of financial transaction and probably a separate link - whether I link with Maxnet's network at a neutral point such as APE (the most likely scenario being that I utilize a second port and private VLAN) or whether I have a dedicated circuit running from my DC to theirs (which I might also be inclined to do for the purpose of redundancy).
The Internet is a "network of networks" and the initial networks had 100% trust of all endpoints (they started as physically connected computers in the same room), and the Internet was a number of those trusted networks connected through private dedicated lines between trusted organizations in charge of those networks. The reason we have so many security issues is that we evolved from a mechanism of complete trust to one of the current reality. Original peering was based on accepting the other network into your own. Now, peering is a trustless link that has a filtered subset of routes advertised over it.
In part because of the sheer number of routes... but also for geographical scope. An ISP in NZ isn't going to know how to get to an ISP in, for example, Ghana - and it would probably be wasteful for the ISP to know that unless for some reason there was a significant amount of traffic heading there - but as it is, it doesn't really *need* to. HOWEVER, in the circumstance where such a route might be required, said ISP is going to know how to get to an ISP in the US or Europe that in turn knows how to get to Ghana.
15 or more years ago, the Internet was still in a relatively fledgling state, so ISPs only really had to deal with the basics: LA, NY/NJ, London, Frankfurt, HK, Singapore, Tokyo - and maybe a few others, so you could pretty much have these trusted links. You also didn't have grossly disproportionate traffic levels due to the content and services available these days burdening peering links which really should have been transit links, which is why some peering agreements now only allow for a maximum in/out ratios of 5:1.
If you were the size of the combined Voda/T/C, you'd be able to peer with Telecom and get to Maxnet. Because that means that Telecom can get to Vocus through you. Both win. Rather than a mesh of 9 interconnects, you only need 3 links and everyone can get to everyone else.
Perhaps, but then peering might be the wrong term to use here. Telecom (historically) hasn't been so good with the peering, nor has TelstraClear. Where I could peer with practically every other ISP in the country at a facility like APE for the low low price o
The Holiday Inn in Tbilisi mysteriously has Windows installed on the 4 big shiny Macs in the business centre. Not sure why.
McGraw-Hill is not the only one to make the mistake of using Java - ALEKS uses it too. And even forces you to use the Sun/Oracle version too, can't even use IcedTea.
Many of these courseware websites I fear are dreadfully out of date (that is, even if the courseware is recent, the technology running it is not and has probably been around since ~IE6 was still popular).
Sadly, wouldn't be surprised if, even in new iterations of such sites, the specifications provided to the programmers include that the whole damn thing be in Java.
Even more sadly, for the most part it's only really us geeks who know/care that Java is bad - your average student probably doesn't know or care.
That will take someone spending millions on a risky gamble to unseat Sky. Sky owns almost all the content for NZ. They even buy shows they have no intention of showing, because that prevents the others from having them. Especially sports. They have to be losing money on sports, give how much they spend on them and the advertising rates during them. But they do make sure nobody else shows them, except for the All Blacks, who are always sold to at least one free provider, even if with a delay. Quickflix and Igloo are bit players trying to get in. So far, mostly unsuccessfully.
Of course it takes a lot of money to unseat a monopoly. That's a given. There are companies with the resources to do it if they just would.
And zero rating doesn't mean that much. I considered Telecom's 500GB plan, but upgraded to the 150GB first, and tried but couldn't reach the cap without pointlessly downloading things I didn't want. I could watch on-demand from multiple providers all day every day and download all the game demos I could find, and still not get close. But if that's not enough for you, you can get more than 3 times the amount on the 500 GB plan. Telecom doesn't zero rate anything, but they have some of the largest caps of anyone.
Yes and no. Zero Rating is beneficial for those who *don't* go ahead and spend the money on the higher plans but still want to consume a limited subset of content... the thinking behind this is something to the effect of "Why should I get the 150GB plan when I could survive on a 60GB plan if only it wasn't for iSky" or whatever... More to the point, "unlimited" could become a more feasible and/or cheaper option (as more providers are beginning to offer such plans anyway it could even become, dare I say, the norm).
Well, I always hear everyone bitching about Telecom not peering. But Telecom is about the size of everyone else combined, and they want Telecom to pay their hosting cost, peer for free, and they'd get free transit out of the deal, and Telecom gets higher cost and no benefit. So there is no national peer. Until Vodafone pays Telecom for hosting and aggregates all the Voda&T/C traffic, there won't be a national peer. And it'll never be in a "neutral space" The people demanding that are places like Maxnet who want to "peer" (read "free transit") and they want Telecom to meet in a "neutral" site, preferably owned by Maxnet, who will then make a killing on everyone who wants to host there to be in the PoP. Maxnet being a good example because their "main" datacentre, small as it is, isn't that far from the international PoP in Glenfield (and yes, I count the Takapuna exchange as being in Glenfield, even if it is essentially across the street from the Takapuna golf course). But there are plenty of data centres in the Rosedale area not far from there, any of them would love to be the domestic PoP. Skytower would be a natural place, but it's expensive to get in. So there is very little domestic peering going on because the sizes are so asymmetrical that it's always transit to someone.
I hear a lot about Telecom not peering as well, but generally speaking, peering agreements almost always prohibit the sending of transit traffic, that is to say if I peer with Maxnet, I can't use my peering links with Maxnet to reach Vocus - if I want to reach Vocus, I'd have to buy my transit from them. I don't think there's any way that I could *only* peer with a provider (say Telecom) and then use them to reach a provider like Hurricane Electric, and if I even tried I'd probably have my virtual ass virtually kicked in to next year.
As for the facilities, that's what APE/WIX/CHIX/etc is for - Citylink runs a bunch of peering facilities around the country and it's not expensive - you buy a rated link or a dark fibre in to the facility, you pay a fixed monthly fee per gigabit to the peering exchange which covers the equipment, electricity etc and it's all done... I don't see wha
Whether *you* recognize Slingshot/Orcon or not is moot - those are the names most people know, even if Callplus and Kordia are the companies behind them and are more or less operationally the same entities.
As I recall Vodafone has purchased numerous smaller ISPs over the last few years (they didn't even really exist outside of cellular until the late 2000's), and it's nice to see a bit of consolidation, as there were (are still?) somewhere around 30 ISPs in NZ, which is a pretty tiny market for them all to be competing for. Not that I would agree with a duopoly or triopoly - competition is healthy - but 30 providers for ~2 million subscribers may be too much.
At least New Zealand has a reasonably healthy scenario when it comes to peering and backhaul - there are many things there that I'm trying to implement for myself in the hopes of improving the situation where I live - if it works, it may even benefit customers that aren't mine and set a precedent for some kind of quality standard. Which would be nice.
As far as upgrades go, I think the reason most ISPs haven't upgraded to 100Gbit/s yet is because, individually, it's not really necessary because no one provider (excepting Telecom) is big enough and it's probably hard to justify the cost - they can do just fine with their multiples of 10Gbit/s, and for the time being, an upgrade would be wasted.
Whether or not 400G works on Southern Cross, that system is basically half-way through it's projected life now, so if there's any time to think about building another cable, maybe now is it - it would probably be about 5 years from now until light-up anyway, by which time SxC would be beginning to show its age, and if not for the age thing, well, there needs to be some competition where there currently is none.
The situation as it is now is that there's too much retail competition, decent enough domestic transit competition, and not enough international transit competition, so, if we can even all this out a bit, we might just have the kind of Internet utopia I left the country to find 8 years ago... and with the UFB rollouts and more zero-rating of certain content (like some of the ISPs currently do already) I genuinely hope that we can start to really utilize some of the high bandwidth services that *are* legal in NZ - as well as hopefully attract some of the international players like Netflix to that market (Sky pretty much has a monopoly on pay-TV content - it would be nice if this could change).
Also, I seem to remember being offered both regular and redundant routes on SxC a couple of years ago - I don't recall if the situation was the same as you describe Alaska as being but I wouldn't be surprised if it was and an ISP was left in the lurch if a non-protected route went down.
Notice I was talking about India. The police could potentially get involved because of the licensing restrictions in that country - there have been various acts passed in the last ~13 years or so which make all sorts of ludicrous things a crime.
For the record, collecting any form of fee after an account is terminated is damned near impossible in that country, and trying to sue the customer for it would mean a 10-year court battle. There's pretty much no such thing as a term contract (providers do have quarterly/half-yearly/yearly plans, but, it's a pay-in-advance deal)... and when it comes to services that's why almost everything is prepaid. Obtaining credit usually requires pretty much 150% of the credit line as collateral.
Otherwise, yeah, you're right about the contract termination stuff and how it would work in any other country.
For most of the route, the system is 3 pairs. Only Hawaii to continental USA is 4 pairs. So realistically, for NZ/Australia, you need to cut 25% off those calculations - so 12Tbit/s seems about right.
Being that it was all built at a time when the US had reasonably good broadband compared to the rest of the world, I'm guessing that they kinda had to have the extra pair for HISJC so that that state alone could support the same services that the mainland has.
As for how much traffic the providers have, only some of them publish their traffic levels - Kordia and Callplus don't, Orcon has a bit less than 10Gbit/s. I haven't checked others.
In some countries where the femtocell is being pushed (I'll use India as my main example), the likelihood of your ISP and cellular operator being the same company are quite slim, and from what I've read, having a femtocell could potentially constitute a violation of most ISP ToS (the operator needs to know the subscriber identity and all that, a femtocell may not offer that)... whether it would actually be enforced is another matter entirely - the police there are only bothered with prosecuting for crimes that require zero effort, and anything Internet related is almost guaranteed to be way above their heads.
Then again, most operators there couldn't give even half a shit about call quality anyway, so...
20Tbit/s? Really? Who on earth told you that? Even Wikipedia (the source for any possible exaggerations) doesn't claim that.
Last time I looked it was going to be 12 - and even then only after the next phase of upgrades (100G) is complete, and that too I think is marketing fluff based on the assumption that nobody buys protected circuits... so really 6. Lit capacity was something like 2Tbit/s as of late last year. Perhaps ironically, now that I think about it this is a very similar amount of lit capacity across all the cables connecting India. ...have you got any citations on the 20?
You mean 1 shitty cable. Just because it's redundant, doesn't make it a separate system. We've had complete outages before.
Mahindra, huh? Prepare for many headlines reading something to the effect of "Another plane crash in India".
Seriously, I'd rather fly on a large paper dart than anything built by Mahindra.
I'm surprised nobody is bringing up FON. http://www.fon.com/en
It's reasonably popular in Europe AND they partner with some ISPs...
The same thing could be said about owning a Femtocell, however providers around the world are beginning to push for just such an approach because they can't (or won't) install more towers - especially in densely populated areas - you're still providing some kind of network access to persons (known/unknown) on the back of your residential service.
Goddamnit.
I meant "property *in* India".
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
Sorry, you're SOL on property India. Foreigners can't own shit unless they have a PIO card (that is, "Person of Indian Origin... basically: non-citizens with parents who are or were Indian citizens).
It's also *hideously expensive* in some cities (...ok, mostly Mumbai... which holds some world records for prices paid per square foot, so...)
Land of the free indeed.
It almost seems like every other day something else becomes illegal in your United States of so on.
Come to think of it, last time I got a mobile on contract (not in the US), it didn't have any carrier crap on it whatsoever. And it was unlocked... I mean, had I chosen to switch providers I'd have still been liable for the monthly bills... but I guess this is not enough of a deterrent in the US?
They can shove it up their arse. Fuck Paypal. That is all.
Yet it is a Greek-German couple that rules the United Kingdom and it's Commonwealth.
Being (I assume) much younger than you are, I have to agree with some of my counterparts that there are plenty of women born after 1965 who are all about the amount of currency you have available (most of my experiences are with women born in the 80's).
To drive that point home, one girl bragged to me that she once dated a man purely because he had a Ferrari. While I could potentially compete, that seemed just a little too close to (for lack of a better word) prostitution for me and I decided not to pursue that girl after that moment. All I could think was "want me for me, damnit". Sure, that's just one example, but I'm not going to write my whole life story here now, am I?
On the other hand, while you might be right that there might not be any genuine forms of feminism that are all about trashing men, plenty of girls put the feminist label on their misandry and it makes us blokes who can actually tell the difference wonder whether she's actually a feminist or just a man hater. Other than that, on the whole I like feminists.
Divorce. Am a child of a reasonably amicable divorce but something I've yet to experience for myself (putting aside the termination of non-marital long-term relationships which have stuffed me up big time) is a big scary monster for both sides. From what I've seen though, **sometimes** it would seem that the courts give just a little too much to the woman, causing the man to have no life - she keeps the house & car while he moves in to a tiny 1 bedroom flat in an undesirable area with the beat up piece of shit in the driveway because she takes most of his pay packet.
This gun is being used in an American school: DISARM.
as opposed to
This gun is being used in a school/village in (for example) West Africa or the Middle East: MEH. FIRE AT WILL.
Kind of a "our children are more important than yours" scenario, by the sounds of it.
I know. That was my point. And I like that about Germany. And Finland for that matter.
Damn sight easier to know what's what (and that it'll work) than where I live.