Category Archives: networking

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2014-02-07

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networking

You’re Being Held Hostage and You May Not Even Know It

To me, net neutrality isn’t about fair business practices between businesses. That’s certainly part of it, but it’s not the crux of the issue. To me, net neutrality is about consumer protection.

Your broadband provider would like to charge companies – particularly content companies – extra in order to bring you their content. Setting aside the utterly delirious reasoning behind this for the moment, let’s think about this from the consumer’s perspective. You’re paying your ISP to provide you access to the internet – the whole thing. When you sign up for service, you’re signing up for just that: access to the internet. Period. What your ISP fails to disclose, at least in any useful detail, is how they intend to shape that access.

For your $40, $50, $60 or more each month, you might get high-speed access to some things, and not to others. You don’t get to know what ahead of time, or even after you sign up – the last thing your ISP wants is for you to be well-informed about your purchase in this regard. They’ll do whatever they can to convince you that your service is plain, simple, high-speed access to the whole internet.

Then, in negotiations behind closed doors, they’re using you as a hostage to extort money from the businesses you’re a customer of. Take Netflix as an example: you pay your ISP for internet service. Netflix also has an ISP, or several, that they pay for internet service. Those ISPs have what are called “peering arrangements” that determine who, if anyone, pays, and how much, when traffic travels between their networks on behalf of their customers. This is part and parcel of what you and Netflix pay for your service. You pay Netflix a monthly fee to receive Netflix service, which you access using your ISP. Netflix uses some part of that monthly fee to pay for their own internet service.

Your ISP has gone to Netflix and said “hey, if you want to deliver high-definition video to your customers who are also my customers, you have to pay me extra, otherwise my customers which are also your customers will receive a sub-par experience, and they might cancel their Netflix account.” They’re using you as a bargaining chip without your knowledge or consent, in order to demand money they never earned to begin with; everyone involved is already paying their fair share for their connection to the global network, and for the interconnections between parts of that global network.

To me, when a company I do business with uses me, and degrades my experience of their product, without my knowledge or consent, that’s fraud from a consumer standpoint. Whatever Netflix might think about the deal, whether Netflix is right or wrong in the matter, doesn’t enter into it; I’m paying for broadband so that I can watch Netflix movies, I’m paying for Netflix so that I can watch movies over my broadband connection, and my ISP is going behind my back and threatening to make my experience worse if Netflix doesn’t do what they want. Nobody asked me how I feel about it.

Of course, they could give full disclosure to their customers (though they never would), and it wouldn’t matter a whole lot, because your options as a broadband consumer are extremely limited; in the majority of cases, the only viable solution is cable, and when there is competition, it comes from exactly one place: the phone company. The cable companies and phone companies are alike in their use of their customers as hostages in negotiations.

What about fiber broadband? It’s a red herring – it’s provided by the phone company anyway. Calling fiber competition is like saying Coke in cans competes with Coke in bottles – it’s all Coke, and whichever one you buy, your money goes into Coke’s pocket.

What about wireless? Wireless will never, ever be able to compete with wired service, due to simple physics. The bandwidth just isn’t there, the spectrum isn’t there, there’s noise to contend with, and usage caps make wireless broadband a non-starter for many cases, especially streaming HD video. Besides, the majority of truly high-speed wireless service is provided by the phone companies anyway; see the previous paragraph.

Why aren’t they regulated? The FCC is trying, in its own way, but there’s little traction; the cable and telephone companies have the government in their collective pockets with millions of dollars of lobbying money, and We The People haven’t convinced Our Government that we care enough for them to even consider turning down that money.

In the United States, we pay many, many times what people pay in much of the developed world, and we get many, many times less for what we spend. On top of that, our ISPs are using us as bargaining chips, threatening to make our already overpriced, underpowered service even worse if the companies we actually chose in a competitive market – unlike our ISPs – don’t pay up. This is absolutely preposterous, it’s bordering on consumer fraud, and you should be angry about it. You should be angry enough to write your congressman, your senator, the president, the FCC, and your ISP (not that the last will do you much good, but it can’t hurt.)

Some excellent places to find more information:

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2013-06-08

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hardware, networking

My Present Setup

I thought I’d take a quick moment to lay out my current setup. It’s not perfect, it’s not top-of-the-line (nor was it when any of the parts were purchased), it’s not extravagant, but I find it extremely effective for the way I work.

The Machine (DIY Chronos Mark IV):

  • Intel Core i5 750 LGA1156, overclocked from 2.6GHz to 3.2GHz
  • ASRock P55 Extreme
  • 8GB DDR3 from GSkill
  • ATi Radio HD 5870
  • 256GB Crucial m4 SSD (SATA3) – OS, applications, caches & pagefile
  • 2 x 1TB Seagate HDD – one data drive, one backup drive
  • Plextor DVD-RW with LiteScribe
I find this configuration to be plenty performant enough for most of my needs. The only thing that would prompt an upgrade at this point would be if I started needing to run multiple VM’s simultaneously on a regular basis. The GPU is enough to play my games of choice (League of Legends, StarCraft 2, Total War) full-screen, high-quality, with no lag. The SSD keeps everything feeling snappy, and the data drive has plenty of space for projects, documents, and media. The second drive I have set up in Windows Backup to take nightly backups of both the primary and data drives.
My interface to it:
  • Logitech G9x mouse (wired)
  • Microsoft Natural Elite 4000 keyboard (wired)
  • 2 x Dell U2412M 24″ IPS LCD @ 1920×1200
  • Behringer MS16 monitor speakers
If you couldn’t tell, I have a strong preference for wired peripherals. This is a desktop machine; it doesn’t go anywhere. Wireless keyboards I find particularly baffling for anything other than an HTPC setup; the keyboard doesn’t move, why would I keep feeding it batteries for no benefit? The mouse is an excellent performer, and I love the switchable click/free scroll wheel (though I wish the button weren’t on the bottom).
The displays are brilliant and beautiful, they’re low-power, I definitely appreciate the extra few rows from 1920×1200 over standard 1080p, and having two of them suits my workflow extremely well; I tend to have one screen with what I’m actively working on, and the other screen is some combination of reference materials, research, communications (chat, etc.), and testing whatever I’m actively working on. Particularly when working with web applications, it’s extremely helpful to be able to have code on one screen and the browser on the other, so you can make a change and refresh the page to view it without having to swap around. These are mounted on an articulated dual-arm mount to keep them up high (I’m 6’6″, making ergonomics a significant challenge) and free up a tremendous amount of desk space – more than you’d think until you do it.
The Behringers are absolutely fantastic speakers, I love them, to death, and I think I need to replace them. I recently rearranged my desk, and since hooking everything back up, the speakers have a constant drone as long as they’re turned on, even with the volume all the way down. I’ve swapped cables and fiddled with knobs and I’m not sure the cause.
The network:
  • ASUS RT-N66U “Dark Night” router
  • Brother MFC-9320CW color laster printer/scanner/copier/fax (on LAN via Ethernet)
  • Seagate 2TB USB HDD (on LAN via USB)
The RT-N66U or “Dark Night” as it’s often called is an absolutely fantastic router. It has excellent wireless signal, it’s extremely stable, it’s got two USB ports for printer sharing, 3G/4G dongle, or NAS using a flash drive or HDD (which can be shared using FTP, Samba, and ASUS’ aiDisk and aiCloud services). The firmware source is published regularly by ASUS, it’s Linux-based, and it includes a complete OpenVPN server. It offers a separate guest wireless network with its own password, which you can throttle separately and you can limit its access to the internal network. It has enough features to fill an entire post on its own.
Mobility:
  • Samsung Galaxy S4 (Verizon)
  • ASUS Transformer Prime (WiFi only)
The SGS4 is an excellent phone, with a few quirks due to Samsung’s modifications of the base Android OS. The display is outstanding, the camera is great, the phone is snappy and stable, and it has an SD card slot. That’s about all I could ask for. The tablet I bought because I thought it would make an excellent mobile client for my VPN+VNC setup; unfortunately, I’ve had some issues getting VNC to work, and now that I’m on a 3840×1200 resolution, VNC @ 1080p has become less practical. However, it still serves as a decent mobile workstation using Evernote, Dropbox, and DroidEdit.
All in all, this setup allows me to be very productive at home, while providing remote access to files and machines, and shared access to the printer and network drive for everyone in the house. The router’s NAS even supports streaming media to iTunes and XBox, which is a plus; between that, Hulu, and Netflix, I haven’t watched cable TV in months.
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2013-03-29

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hardware, networking, reviews

Stupid Internet Tricks

A few weeks ago I picked up the delightful ASUS Transformer Infinity tablet. About a week ago, I finally replaced my aging, flaky Linksys WRT310N router with a fancy new ASUS RT-N66U router. For one thing, the difference was surprising. They’re both Wireless-N routers from major manufacturers; however, while the wifi on the Linksys was unreliable and suffered random device compatibility issues (I had particular issues getting and staying connected from both Android and iOS mobile devices), the Asus is rock-solid. The speed and range are also a tremendous improvement. What more could you want from a router?

Stupid internet tricks, that’s what. I spent a few minutes in the (notably snazzy) administration UI for the new router. I set up my (free) ASUS dynamic DNS host name and the (built-in) OpenVPN service, and I can now VPN into my home network securely from anywhere with internet access. A quick install of VNC onto my desktop machine, and I no longer have any use for LogMeIn; I have a free service that does the same thing, but entirely under my control.

The router has some other neat features, including a Guest Access option for the WiFi that allows internet access but blocks LAN access; optional complete separation of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz WANs; dead-simple static IP assignment; and, well, more advantages over my old router than I can even count. Definitely worth what it cost, assuming that it has the reliability and longevity I’ve come to expect from ASUS products.
Some additional features that influenced my decision to buy the RT-N66U that I’ve yet to tinker with:

  • The router has 2 USB ports. My printer already has WiFi and Ethernet connectivity, so I don’t need them for printer sharing, but I fully intend to hook two USB HDDs up to the router for network file service (which, of course, will then be accessible over the VPN!)
  • The router has full IPv6 support. I tried to set this up at one point and it failed miserably; this is apparently because the shipped firmware (3.0.0.4.122) has a fatal failure in the IPv6 implementation that causes the router to become completely unresponsive when you turn it on. I had to factory reset to get back into it. I’ve since updated the firmware, but I haven’t yet attempted setting up IPv6 again yet.
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2007-05-04

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networking

Wired vs. Wireless

I was talking to my mom today, and she wanted to set up a wireless network. I advised against it,
and her argument was that wired networks seem archaic.

Now, while I can certainly understand the idea that the same cables we’ve been using for decades are still just fine today may be hard to swallow, but in reality, wired networking is advancing far faster than wireless.

Wireless networking, over the last decade, has gone from 11mbit (802.11b) to 54mbit (802.11g) to “up to 700mbit” (802.11n; effectively 100 – 200 mbit). This bandwidth is per airspace – multiple clients on a network, and multiple networks in the same airspace, must share the available bandwidth.

Meanwhile, wired networks have gone from 10 to 100 mbit, then to 1 gbit and now 10 gbit, all on copper cable. And each client on a wired network gets a dedicated, full-bandwidth pipe all to its own.

So, while the cables may not have changed much (cat 6 is hard to tell from cat 5 to the average person), wired networks are advancing far beyond wireless, and all the while, they provide greater reliability, security, ease of use, and power efficiency.

All in all, I’ll keep my wired network.