We drift far from towers here, but as long as we're not getting our wrists
slapped...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill VanAlstyne, W5WVO" <w5wvo@cybermesa.net>
To: "TowerTalk" <towertalk@contesting.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:06 PM
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] "The Socialized Power Grid"
> Thing is, for probably 99% of broadband subscribers -- via any media,
> cable/DSL/sat, you pick -- "speed" is thought of in terms of downstream
speed.
> And for casual web surfing and e-mail, even for downloads of
> entertainment-oriented material (music/video etc), upstream speed isn't
very
> relevant. 128k upstream over a satellite link is great for the vast bulk
of
> subscribers.
>
> For those of us who work for a living at home, though, things are
different. I'm
> a telecommuting tech writer/editor, pay for my own connectivity out of my
> pocket, and I upload as much stuff as I download. Hundreds of megabytes a
day,
> typically. I can't get any kind of symmetrical broadband service here
without
> paying commercial rates for T-1 or OC-3 or whatever. (Out of the
question.) And
> the residential cable/DSL/sat services ALL cap upstream bandwidth at some
> artificial (i.e., profitably marketable) level, usually pretty low
compared to
> downstream.
<snip>
>Due to this limitation, the best speed I can
> get with VPN over direct satellite upstream is about 28kbps. Ugh.)
In your specific case, do you really need "interactive" uploads, or is that
an artifact of the VPN. If file transfers are all that needs to happen,
then something other scheme like an encrypted FTP (ssh?) would work.
Although, I recognize that it's probably "anomalous" for the corporate IT
folks, and as such, way, way down on the implementation priority list.
There are folks working at remote locations who do need reasonably low
latency and decent BW both up and down. My wife does a lot of work with MS
Access databases, etc, from home, where all the data is on a centralized
server. Access is not really designed for remote operation in the first
place, and, with low avail RAM, it tries to swap the database records in and
out (back to the repository). Clearly, a satellite link is going to be
wretchedly non-optimal for this (and, in fact, an asymmetric link like ADSL
is also not too wonderful).
Again, this is more a problem with trying to use a system architecture in a
way that it really isn't suited for. In my wife's case, she'd probably be
better served by a strategy using a "remote console" program like Timbuktu
or PCAnywhere, where the actual "work" is done at the central site, then,
she'd just be sending keystrokes, and getting screen images back. (Mind you,
the idea of a remote access program like this on a long latency satellite
link is kind of scary to contemplate!)
>
> And this is a good example of a real problem in the broadband marketplace,
IMO.
> As technology makes truly interactive digital applications like two-way
> full-speed audio/video available and affordable -- not to mention the much
> tougher two-way security protocols that are bound to be in our future --
> interactive, full-handshaking bandwidth is going to have to keep pace.
Then the
> pressure will be on the bandwidth providers to open up the upstream gates.
This
> is probably already happening, because three or four years ago most
broadband
> services I knew about were upstream-capped at a much lower speed --
typically
> 128-256kbps -- even with 1500kbps downstream.
There are two big reasons holding back upstream speeds.
1) The idea that broadband will be used for entertainment, and that,
perhaps, multiple people will want to see the same things, so that cleverly
structured cacheing will help reduce the downlink bandwidth to "the
internet". This is the Video on Demand thing, for instance. I note that
systems that have rolled out a lot of cacheing have had all sorts of
problems, because of the increasing use of things like dynamic html and web
pages.
2) Limiting upstream speeds is *perceived* to reduce the problem of
peer-to-peer piracy. Whether or not it's really a problem, it is a fact
that entertainment company executives think it is, and are fully supportive
of anything that makes it harder to "send" potentially copyrighted material
from an end user. I'm not sure that it actually does anything in reality.
Most of the big abuses utilize servers with very fat pipes to the backbone
(see recent article about BitTorrent in Wired, e.g.). I don't think that the
casual user ripping CDs to MP3s really constitutes a huge threat, although,
it has been pointed out that such casual usage creates a "frame of mind"
that legitimizes the wholesale abuser. Nobody is going to be "sharing" a
DVD with a 100 kbps uplink pipe.
>
Jim, W6RMK.
_______________________________________________
See: http://www.mscomputer.com for "Self Supporting Towers", "Wireless Weather
Stations", and lot's more. Call Toll Free, 1-800-333-9041 with any questions
and ask for Sherman, W2FLA.
_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk
|