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Content tagged with "technical"
Tubes Offers an Internet Tour
In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum goes on a journey inside the Internet's physical infrastructure to uncover the buildings and compounds where our data is stored and transmitted. Along the way, he documents the spaces where the Internet first started, and the people who've been working to make the Web what it is today.He was also just on C-Span's "The Communicators." I enjoyed the read and learned a few things along the way. Those looking for a dry, just-the-facts-ma'am approach may not enjoy the frequent musings of Blum on his experiences. But I did. One of his trips took him to a community in Oregon called The Dalles, where a municipal network allowed Google to build its very first "built-from-scratch data center." More on that in a post to come soon... Those who are doing their reading on tablets now will be interested to know that the eBook is temporarily priced at $1.99. The deal lasts until New Years according to the author.
Why Wi-Fi Performance Varies Greatly
Why can Wi-Fi be so great in some places but so awful in others? (Ahem... Hotels.) Time to stop imagining Wi-Fi as magic and instead think of it just as a means of taking one connection and sharing it among many people without wires.
If you take a ho-hum connection and share it with 10 people, it becomes a bad connection. On the other hand, if you take a great connection and share it with those same 10 people, they will be very happy surfers. As Benoit Felten recently told us, the best wireless networks have been built in cities with the best wired infrastructure.
Wi-Fi still has hiccups but they are well worth it for convenience, mobility, and ubiquity. In a recent GigaOm article, Stacey Higgenbotham detailed additional reasons that not all Wi-fi is created equal.
Higgenbotham lays out the limitations of Wi-fi and breaks down the technology's touchiness into four main factors. She addresses the issue specifically for travelers. From the article:
Backhaul: For most Wi-Fi is their access to the internet, but it’s actually just a radio technology that moves information over the air.
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Density:…the more people you add to a network — even if those people are just checking their Facebook page — the worse the network will perform.
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Movement: Wi-Fi connectivity is designed for fixed access, meaning the radios stay put...when you try to jump from hot spot to hot spot problems occur.
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Device: Newer phones and tablets are supporting a dual-mode Wi-Fi radio, which means they can hop from the 2.4 Ghz band to the 5 GHz band….now with phones like the latest iPhone that have dual-band support, you may hop to another band only to find a bunch of other users.
Higgenbotham doesn't have the answers on how to improve service, but she offers practical advice:
How Chattanooga, Bristol, and Lafayette Built the Best Broadband in America
Understanding Fiber-to-the-Home Video For Anyone
Thanks to the Fibre Evolution Blog for alerting us to a slick, short video that explains why FTTH is superior to alternatives when it comes to accessing the Internet. The video was produced the FTTH Council of Europe and is meant for a very general audience. Enjoy.
Verizon: The Future is Wired
"If you get underneath what's driving the fiber in the metropolitan markets it has been the need for increased video, increased reliability and security for customers," Seidenberg said. "The way we think about it is even though we have this great 4G mobile network, you still need to have fiber to the premises because we think your home will utilize a Gigabit of bandwidth." ... "The way we look at it is we want to get fiber to as many business premises and cover as much as the footprint as we can and we believe everyone else going to do the same thing in other parts of the country," Seidenberg said.
Salisbury Discusses Motivation Behind Fibrant on TelecomTV
Barbara Van Schewick on Innovation and Architecture
Barbara Van Schewick, author of Internet Architecture and Innovation, describes the important role of openness on the Internet, what that means, and how to preserve it. Thanks to the New York Chapter of Internet Society for hosting her.
Comcast, Level 3, Peering, and a Bad Best Case Scenario
On its face, this is the sort of toll booth between residential subscribers and the content of their choice that a Net Neutrality rule is supposed to prohibit. In addition, this is exactly the sort of anticompetitive harm that opponents of Comcast’s merger with NBC-Universal have warned would happen — that Comcast would leverage its network to harm distribution of competitive video services, while raising prices on its own customers.Susan Crawford wrote a lengthier piece about Comcast, Netflix, network neutrality, set-top boxes and NBC that is well worth reading (as is just about anything she writes).
Vermonters Angry at Wireless Broadband Stimulus Grant Instead of Fiber Loan
Senator Bernie Sanders led off his “broadband town meeting” Saturday morning at Vermont Technical College with a ringing affirmation of the need for better broadband coverage in Vermont and the nation. However, nobody in the crowd of nearly 300 people needed to be convinced of that. What they wanted to know was whether a huge new federal grant to a private company was the right way to do it.VTel, a small private telephone company, received a $116 million grant to build a FTTH network to serve their existing 18,000 footprint as well as a wireless network that is intended to serve the entire state. In contrast, the East Central Vermont Fiber Network (which we have covered previously), applied for a loan to build a FTTH network to everyone in the 24 communities that have joined together to form the network. The ECFiber network would be run by a nonprofit and would repay the loan from revenue generated by selling triple-play services on the network.
Another Chattanooga Update
EPB contracted with Alcatel-Lucent as its GPON network supplier. "We've designed our network a little bit different, with our control center located where our operations center is," says Wade. "We've designed a series of fiber rings that circle our city, allowing us to have multiple 10 Gig MPLS rings, terminating in 17 communications hubs connected back with our control center."Another article from Cable 360 (affiliate) gets into the smart-grid details of the network:
As far as the cost savings of the smart grid are concerned, users often don't realize that it costs several times more at certain times of day to generate electricity than it does at others, says EPB COO David Wade.But perhaps the most interesting update from EPB is another window into their take rates (from Tecca.com):
We are ahead of our business plan projections for this time frame. Since our launch last September (2009), we have signed up 18,873 homes to our EPB fiber optics services. That is a 15.45% take rate. Our goal is a 35% take rate, and we believe we will reach that in 2 years. Of our EPB fiber optics customers, 81% are receiving our Fi-Speed internet service. We are still building out fiber optics as well, and our entire 600-square-mile customer service area will have access to these advanced services by the end of the this year (2010).And finally, a short interview (audio quality is not good) with an EPB employee discussing Chattanooga's community fiber network. An interesting piece: noting that EPB views all employees as ambassadors of their product and offered them public speaking training.