Who Does Wifi?

6 October 2005

Read with interest the news that San Francisco wants a wifi cloud. Lots of cities do. When it gets right down to it, though, which companies have the capability, financing and technical relationships to pull off something in such a tricky topographic region as San Francisco?

For a short list (i.e. 26 companies) that might make the cut, take a look at the list of companies that responded to SF’s Request for Information. That’s RFI, not RFP. As I understand municipal bidding, there’s a rather significant distinction. I suspect responses to the RFI may lead to an even shorter list of companies that are offered an RFP. (Just a hunch).

It’s also interesting to note that Cisco is in the hunt with a partner, but not alone, but HP is apparently there and ready to go to work.

Reading about Korea, I conclude that the USA needs a wifi cloud from coast to coast and north to south. Don’t make it some 300kbps nonsense, either. We need a plan for 10Mbps. Yeah, I know, it’s the physics. But, get the minds at Google and Level 3 together and the problem won’t be intractable.

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Not So Broad

16 September 2005

What passes for high speed in this country is pathetically slow compared with Internet service in some other countries.

For instance, Verizon’s entry-level DSL service, at 768 kilobits per second for downloads and 128 kilobits per second for uploads, is considered high-speed here. But in Japan and Korea, families can buy moderately priced Internet service measured in the tens of megabits per second.

Walter Mossberg made these statements in his column today titled Verizon’s Fios Service Moves U.S. Internet Beyond a Snail’s Pace.

Until we learn to think of Internet access at speeds similar to 10Mbps, 100Mbps and gigabit Ethernet service, we’ll always lag behind the Asian providers of high-speed, low-cost service. When can we expect 10Gbps (i.e. Gig-E)?

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TextDrive Does It Again

5 September 2005

TextDrive VCIII

TextDrive has another lifetime hosting offer. What this means is that you’ll pay a single fee and you’ll receive the listed specs for life. No more monthly or annual fees—ever. Click here or on the image above for details.

They’ve just moved their datacenter into one of Level 3’s Gateways. They’ve just populated it with Dell 2850 servers. It just gets better with age!

Oh, and they’re donating a bit of money from each subscription to the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

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Scalability Revisited

1 September 2005

Ham radio once was, and probably still is, a tool for the masses when catastrophe strikes. Internet technology has similar potential, but it is only potential right now.

The number of hosts, companies and bandwidth users with the capacity to handle a step function in instantaneous bandwidth demand is quite small. Google comes to mind. Microsoft might be in the hunt. Is Yahoo there? Who else?

Here’s an example of what can happen. Imagine 1000 requests per second!

* * * UPDATE * * * Revealing is the following quote from one of the administrators over at TextDrive:

To put this in perspective, a mid-tier dot.com such as ESPN.com, Realtor.com get anywhere from 20 to 30 million page views per day. IIRC, last year Amazon.com was in the order of 80 million. This site, if we let it stay up and the hit rate was steady, would’ve gotten 86 million in 24 hours.

No regular host can survive that amount of traffic. The bandwidth costs alone would be ruinous. And, since this surge of traffic came with absolutely no warning, we couldn’t do anything ahead of time to stop it.

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Intersection

21 August 2005

Once in a while things you like and admire cross paths. As a long-time shareholder in Level 3 Communications, I’ve followed the
company’s progress through the long build-out and boom period. I watched as the stock plummeted with the rest of the telecommunications industry.

They survived and continue to add business. This morning I learned that the folks at TextDrive have selected Level 3’s San Diego co-lo center as home. In aligning Textpattern with TextDrive and Level 3 it seems excellence attracts!

On top of all that I’ve added some recent assistance from Joel Dueck to this web site and the circle seems complete. Excellence defines Joel’s work.

Archives are back. Some things have been optimized. Some problems have been eliminated. All seems right with the world.

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