Map of the Week 11-14-2011: Internet Black Holes

Internet Black Holes

From: Reporters without Borders, http://en.rsf.org/more-than-25-000-people-have-08-11-2006,19651.html and http://en.rsf.org/nawaat-reporters-without-borders-11-03-2011,39776.html

        Continuing in our cartographical exploration of  Freedom of the Press, (and Freedom of Information, in general, see http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/09/map-of-week-9-5-2011-growth-of-us.html) from a couple of months ago, this week's Map of the Week shows countries in the world where access to the full Internet is severely restricted.  

        “The fight for online freedom of expression is more essential than ever. By creating new spaces for exchanging ideas and information, the Internet is a force for freedom. In countries where the traditional media are controlled by the government, the only independent news and information are to be found on the Internet, which has become a forum for discussion and a refuge for those who want to express their views freely.

However, more and more governments have realised this and are reacting by trying to control the Internet. Never have so many countries been affected by some form of online censorship, whether arrests or harassment of netizens, online surveillance, website blocking or the adoption of repressive Internet laws. Netizens are being targeted by government reprisals. Around 117 of them are currently detained for expressing their views freely online, mainly in China, Iran and Vietnam.”  Text from http://march12.rsf.org/en/

You can download the full report with the list of countries considered to be “Internet Enemies,” and also those countries “under surveillance” at the web site above.  Surprisingly, amongst the “usual suspects” are also countries such as Australia and France, and if the UK government has its way, it may soon be joining the list.  In the wake of the recent riots in the UK, the government is considering banning certain uses of social media. 

And this is a mapped database showing BLOGGERS who have been threatened, arrested, or killed.  Unbelievable.  From: http://threatened.globalvoicesonline.org/
On the interactive map at the website, you can click on the icons, and each blogger's story comes up about their arrest, imprisonment, or murder.  

Wireless Internet Access For Farms

There are many advantages to living and working on a farm, but one of the disadvantages is that broadband Internet access is harder to come by. No, DSL and Cable broadband probably aren’t in your future. But there are options available at reasonable prices right now.

It’s true that DSL and Cable are popular with independent professionals, small businesses and home-based occupations. You get a decent amount of bandwidth at a reasonable cost. The one hitch is that these services are distance limited. DSL signals decrease rapidly as you get a mile to two from the telephone company central office. Cable is a wired service that goes only where the Cable company has decided that there is enough population density to justify stringing the coaxial cable. Unfortunately, those factors keep Cable and DSL within or close to the city limits.

What you really want are either line services that don’t have distance restrictions or wireless services that don’t require stringing or burying cable of any type. There are several options that meet this description.

First is T1. This is a telco digital line service first used between telephone company switching centers. The beauty of T1 is that it is designed to be provisioned on two pair of ordinary telephone wires, available just about everywhere. The second advantage is that it was designed to work with regenerator boxes that clean up and boost the signal so that it can go another mile. You can generally get T1 line service miles from the nearest town, although it gets more expensive as you get farther out in the country.

Second is satellite. Satellite broadband service comes from above and needs no wires. All it requires is AC power that can even come from a gas generator or solar panels and an inverter. Disadvantages include the need to get a professionally installed two-way satellite dish installed on your roof and a half-second or so of latency due to the long path up to the stationary satellite. For many email and Web uses, this slight delay from issuing a command to getting data back is no big deal.

A third option is wireless terrestrial Internet service. Many communities have WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers. These tend to be locally owned and have a very limited service area. More often than not, WISPs target rural subdivisions and small towns to get enough customers to justify the cost of the equipment and bandwidth.

One of the most exciting new services is fixed wireless or cellular broadband. This service uses the data channels that every cell phone carrier has available for mobile phones and laptop computers. Accel Networks is a leader in this field and has contracts with the major carriers (AT&T, Verizon and Sprint) to connect with their broadband data channels. By combining the coverage areas of multiple carriers, Accel can pretty much blanket the nation except for mountainous and remote areas of the West where there is no cell phone coverage. If you can get a decent cell phone signal, you can probably get fixed wireless service.

The way this works is that Accel Networks customizes their standard interface box and antenna to optimize the signal strength for your particular location. That gives you a really good chance of getting a solid signal that will deliver decent bandwidth. How much bandwidth? This service is competitive with T1 lines with a minimum rate of 750 Kbps download and 250 Kbps upload, bursting up to 1 Mbps on downloads. This is more than adequate for most farm uses, such as getting agriculture reports, using email, general Web surfing and even watching video clips. It’s not intended for high intensity usage like downloading HD movies or running a server.

What makes fixed wireless broadband service so popular in rural areas is that it is readily available and costs half the price of a T1 line or less. Is this the right service for your farm, ranch or rural business? Get pricing, availability and complete details on fixed wireless broadband now. Installation is fast, often within a matter of days.

3G Fixed Wireless For Business

We all know how 3G cellular wireless service has transformed the mobile phone into the smartphone. Did you also know there is a fixed wireless service available that uses the same technology? It’s a unique solution to getting business grade Internet access where everything else is too expensive or not available at all.

What the cellular industry has done is to build out a vast infrastructure of wireless base stations all over the country. You can think of these as a blanket of mobile phone coverage and you’d be right. You can also think of this infrastructure as a blanket of broadband coverage. You’d be equally right. The familiar cell towers are transmitting both voice and data signals on different channels through their microwave radio equipment.

On the data side, the 3G (3rd generation) wireless broadband service acts like a collection of Wi-Fi hotspots with much greater coverage and all linked together. You need a wireless modem aircard and a subscription to pick up this service. It doesn’t use the same channels as WiFi. It’s also not free, but for businesses the cost can be lower than other alternatives.

Many small and even medium size businesses use T1 lines that are available almost everywhere. Cost varies with location, but is typically several hundred dollars per month. Fixed wireless broadband can be had for half of that for a primary connection and even less if you only want backup service.

Unlike DSL and Cable, other SMB bandwidth choices, T1 and 3G wireless are available just about anywhere you want service. That includes locations that are off the beaten path if they can still get solid cell phone service. Fixed wireless is unique in that installation can be in a matter of days and you can have it installed at temporary business locations, such as fairs, conventions, and short term holiday stores.

Accel Networks is a leader in 3G fixed wireless for business. Their equipment and system are optimized for consistent bandwidth and high reliability. That includes proprietary RF optimization and RF level management and a proprietary antenna design that maximizes signal strength. This goes far beyond the simplistic design of the USB aircard modems you buy for mobile computing.

The other advantage of Accel Networks is that they have agreements with all three major providers (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon) to ensure extensive signal coverage. You know that no matter which carrier you pick, there are places where you’d be better off with one of the other carriers. It’s a matter of who has the most towers and channel licenses in a particular area. Accel picks the carrier that has the best signal at your particular business location. Since this is fixed service, it doesn’t matter that they’d make a different choice if you were located in another town.

What is 3G fixed wireless best for? Credit card verification is extremely popular. Accel Networks specializes in this technology and offers a layer 2 PCI compliant network meeting credit card industry requirements.

Most small businesses need credit card verification, but many also need general access to the Internet for Web browsers, email, and perhaps automated ordering, inventory, bookkeeping or data transfers between locations. Accel Networks managed broadband wireless solutions offer a minimum of 750 Kbps download and 250 Kbps upload broadband speeds. They also provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that includes 99.9% availability, minimum acceptable data rates, maximum acceptable latency, and mean time to restore.

Is fixed wireless a good fit with your business? Get a complete set of options and prices so you can compare 3G Fixed Wireless For Business with competing services, and then choose what’s right for your situation.

What Is a PRI Line?

PRI lines are popular for providing multi-line phone service to businesses. But just what is a PRI line and what options are available?

PRI is part of a telephone technology standard called ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network). It was envisioned as a digital line service that would replace analog telephone lines for both residential and business users. At the time that ISDN was being introduced, connections to the Internet were mostly dial-up using 56 Kbps modems at best. Many of those 56K modems really connected at something around 30 to 40 Kbps due to noise and other limitations on most phone lines. All-digital lines offered basic ISDN service with 64 Kbps data plus one standard telephone service on a single line.

This basic service is called BRI for Basic Rate Interface. It consists of 3 channels. There are two “B” or Bearer channels at 64 Kbps each that can be configured as either voice or data. That can be a 64K digital Internet connection and a phone line, 2 phone lines, or 2 combined data lines for 128 Kbps Internet. The third channel is called a “D” or Delta channel. It has only 16 Kbps, but is used for signaling and control.

If you’ve never heard of ISDN BRI it’s because it never took off. By the time it was starting to be deployed in a big way, technology had moved on and broadband over DSL and Cable was taking over the role of Internet access.

The second standard introduced with ISDN is PRI for Primary Rate Interface. This much higher bandwidth service offers 24 channels configured as 23 B + D. In this case the D channel bandwidth has increased to 64 Kbps just like the B channels. Why stick with 64K channels? It’s because 64 Kbps is just the right amount of bandwidth to transport one digitized telephone conversation using the industry standard G.711 coding standard.

You can configure a PRI circuit to carry voice, data or a combination. Some ISPs used these to connect to modem banks in the dial-up days. Today, the most popular use of ISDN PRI is for PBX telephone trunking with 23 outside voice lines and one control channel that also handles Caller ID for the other 23. Most PBX switches come already configured for at least one PRI line or can be interfaced with a plug-in card.

BRI was designed to be provisioned over the same twisted pair cable that brings in analog phone service. PRI is provisioned over T1 lines because of its higher capacity. T1 was designed to use 2 twisted pair of telco cable and is almost universally available as a standard business-grade digital telecom service.

Recently, another PRI option has become available. That is business grade telephone trunking provided by Cable companies, such as Comcast. The coaxial cable used to bring in television has tremendous capacity and easily supports broadband services up to 100 Mbps. The same cable can transport individual analog telephone lines or ISDN PRI to support a business PBX phone system. With Cable PRI, you may have the option to order fractional PRI service with as few as 6 phone lines. You can then add more, even one at a time, as your business needs increase.

Are you interested in lower cost multi-line business telephone service to support your in-house phone system? If so, get prices and availability for PRI line service options. Single line service and VoIP SIP trunking are also often available.

IP Transit vs Peering vs DIA

We live in a world of networks and networks of networks. The Internet is the ultimate example of networks upon networks upon networks. All of these networks need some way to communicate. For that, you have the choice of IP transit or peering.

Network to network communication would be unnecessary if the Internet was constructed the way most people envision it. When we think of the Internet, we think of one giant network that links everyone to everyone. It generally works that way for the end user, but the notion of a monolithic universal network is an illusion. Look inside the Internet and you’ll find it to be a collection of large, medium and small networks that all work together to get packets from one point to another. Let’s see what that takes.

At the top of the heap are Tier 1 networks. These are huge international IP networks that have points of presence in key locations around the world. Tier 1 networks are indeed the superhighways of the Internet. But like all highway systems, they don’t go everywhere. In order to create an Internet, you need to connect these superhighways together.

The connection process is called peering. The name suggests that this is a connection between equals or peers. That’s exactly right. Huge networks have huge amounts of traffic. If two of these networks peer to exchange traffic on an equal basis, then each network effectively doubles its reach. Network A has access to all the customers on Network B and vice versa.

Tier 1 networks peer on a settlement free basis. In other words, the networks are interconnected via high capacity routers and the traffic flows back and forth at will. Settlement free means that there are no toll booths at the border. Neither network pays the other because they are getting equal value through peering.

Not all networks are the same size. Smaller networks, called Tier 2, have less capacity and less reach than Tier 1 networks. Tier 1 networks aren’t about to peer with Tier 2 networks at no charge because the smaller network would be getting a lot more value from the arrangement than the larger one. What Tier 2 networks can do is ban together and peer among themselves to create a much larger entity that can compete with those Tier 1 networks. If they want access to the Tier 1 networks, they can pay a settlement charge based on the traffic imbalance. That charge is called IP transit.

Internet Service Providers have a choice when it comes to accessing the Internet. They can spend the capital and maintenance cost to build out their networks to the point where they can peer with other large networks, or they can just purchase IP transit services from a large network and avoid the investment in equipment and personnel.

Very small networks or medium size companies with their own internal networks will choose to buy Dedicated Internet Access rather than IP transit. You need to be a network operator with an assigned AS or Autonomous System number (ASN) that identifies each network on the Internet in order to qualify for IP Transit services. Some large organizations with connections to multiple networks may fit this definition, as well as large scale ISPs.

Everyone else, from local WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) to SMBs (Small to Medium Size Businesses) simply purchases Dedicated Internet Access by the Mbps or Gbps of bandwidth. Operation of the Internet is left to those networks who specialize in that service.

What type of Internet connectivity makes the most sense for your business? It depends on whether you are a large ISP, a content delivery network, a large corporation with international locations, or a network of retail stores. Why not compare pricing options for IP Transit, Peering, or Dedicated Internet Access, as appropriate? Complementary consulting services are available to help you sort through the possibilities.