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Mike Furlong
Wireless networking equipment reviews and recommendataions at
ShoppingDroid.com
October 20, 2007
Though DSL and Cable internet connection are ubiquitous is cities, broadband internet connection has not penetrated the rural and far flung areas. That does not mean there is no demand for high speed internet connection in those areas.
The only broadband option available in those areas is satellite internet.
Cost has been a major factor in the slow acceptance and growth of satellite internet in rural areas. There are two components of broadband satellite internet cost. First the hardware cost, which is the cost of the satellite dish and equipment. This is an upfront cost of around $500. Then the monthly cost of the service from a service provider, which is around $60.
The initial cost of satellite internet being so high, it is imaginable that not many consumers can afford to have a broadband connection at home.
Demand for high-speed internet connection in far flung areas is driven not only by the residents of that area, but also by visitors who visit those areas for business or for pleasure.
Satellite Internet as a Business Opportunity-
Satellite internet can be easily adopted by local small businesses as a viable business opportunity in areas with little or no broadband access but with a high outside visitor base.
Satellite internet kiosks can be set up with a small investment in camping areas, national parks, ski resorts, gas stations in or around such areas. The investment involved to set up such kiosks will be as follows.
Initial Cost
1. Cost of PC $400.00
2. Billing/Time management Software $200
3. Satellite internet Equipment Cost $500.00
Total one time Cost $1100
Monthly Cost
1. Satellite Internet connection $100.00
2. Maintenance $100.00
Total $200
1st Year Total Cost = $1100 + 12 x $200 = $3500.
The above cost break up assumes that, internet kiosks will be set up inside already established business locations and there will be no real estate investment required.
Revenue Possibility-
Internet access can be sold on a per hour basis. If a user/customer can be charged $5 per 30 minutes of high-speed internet access, the kiosk will need to sell only 35 hours of internet access during the 1st year to recover the initial investment and break even.
Many locations, like ski areas, national parks, camp sites where city dwellers visit for pleasure will have enough customers willing to spend five dollars to catch up with their work or personal emails, check their voip voice mails, find driving directions or a pay a credit card bill they forgot to pay.
With the above cost and revenue possibility break up, it is possible to break even in a couple of months and then enjoy a steady additional stream of revenue after that.
Satellite internet connections can be bought from providers like HugesNet, a leading provider of Broadband Satellite internet connections.
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Get more pricing information on Broadband Satellite internet access at http://www.dsldealsreview.org/hughesnet. Amit is the editor of a DSL/Broadband Reviews website.
July 19, 2007
Buying a computer is an investment. The best return on your investment will be in finding an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that will accommodate your needs. Choosing an ISP can be overwhelming, as they all offer a number of Internet access arrangements. It is important to choose one that best suits your needs.
What is an ISP and what do they do? An Internet Service Provider allows you to connect to the Internet with varying degrees of speed or data transfer rate, usually for a flat fee. The data transfer rate is measured in kilobits per second (Kbps), megabits per second (Mbps), or gigabits per second (Gbps).
Terms you need to know, describing units of data, when choosing an ISP:
- Bit = A binary digit used as the basic unit of information storage in digital computing.
- Byte = 8 consecutive bits.
- Kilobit or Kb = 1,000 bits
- Kilobyte or KB = 1024 bytes
- Megabit or Mb = 1,000,000 bits
- Megabyte or MB = 1,048,576 bytes sometimes called one million bytes by the IEC (International Electro Technical Commission)
- Gigabit or Gb = 1,000,000,000 (billion) bits
- Gigabyte or GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. The IEC define a GB equal to 1,000,000,000 (billion) bytes
- BPS or bps = bits per second. A rate that shows how fast binary digits can be sent through a channel.
For clarity, the term kilobits and megabits are used when referring to network bandwidth. The term megabytes is used when referring to disk space or the size of an electronic file.
The more Kbps (kilobits per second) or (Mbps megabits per second) transferred by your ISP the faster you will download pages (text), and other material such as email, photos, music, and videos from the Internet. So, if an ISP provider tries to sell you their program (usually phone companies), be aware that a data transfer speed of 512 Kbps with a maximum of 700 Kbps is less than 1 MB of data transfer speed. If you want to download family photos, your computer is going to be slow.
Download guide:
- You can view approximately 20 pages on the Internet for each MB of download.
- An average four-minute MP3 (music file) is approximately 4MB.
- A 5-minute video or movie trailer can be 30 MB.
Connection to the Internet from slowest to fastest:
- POTS (plain old telephone service)
- ISDN
- DSL
- Frame Relay
- Cable Modem
- Fractional T1, T3.
The following key features that are important in choosing an ISP:
- Price and billing
- Performance
- Help and installation
- Security and service
Some ISPs are better than others when it comes to being efficient in all of these key areas, so you need to do your homework before you sign on with an ISP. An informational website to peruse is http://www.thelist.com that gives you a search of ISPs in your area by location/area code, country code, U.S. nationwide, and Canada nationwide.
Copyright ? 2006 by Pamela Beers. All rights reserved.
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Pamela Beers is a freelance writer who is on the lookout for ISP sales reps who don’t tell you the whole story when trying to sell you their program. Visit http://www.MerlinComputerRepair.com if you need more help with your computer or http://www.pamelabeers.com for writing and marketing tips.
June 2, 2007
A study conducted by ?The Economist? magazine, showed a strong correlation between the price of a ?Big Mac? in a country and it?s cost of living. The cost of living?rent, consumer goods, food, entertainment (www.ticketnest.com) is usually significantly higher in the US than in the developing world(and so is the price of a ?Big Mac?). However, ?Big Mac? index notwithstanding, the price of internet bandwidth in the third world is off the charts. As a point of comparison, a 1 Mbit/sec ADSL costs about 20 dollar for a home user in the US, and about 800 dollars in Pakistan. Needless to say, there is a strong need for a reduction in cost and improvement of quality of service.
The issue with the developing countries is the lack of infrastructure. Our case study of Pakistan showed that all of Pakistan has only one backbone fiber line, resulting in bottlenecks. The lack of redundancy has its costs?in July 2005 the fiber wire got severed resulting in massive outages. The back up satellite connection was hardly a solace to the burgeoning IT industry of Pakistan.
A significant percentage of traffic in Pakistan is domestic, but it?s routed through servers in the US and Europe. A trace route from one Pakistan ISP to another yields a shocking pattern?packets traveling from Pakistan to UK, US, Singapore and back to Pakistan. The situation is exacerbated in the case of fiber failures, when the traffic gets routed over multiple satellite hops. The latency is about 700 milliseconds/hop (or about 1.5 seconds for every transaction). This not only adds latency, needlessly raising costs but chokes the connection slowing down genuine Pakistan to international traffic.
Internet Exchange Point is a facility to allow the exchange of traffic between multiple ISP?s. In general the ISP?s have to pay to the tier-1 providers or the governing body(say Pakistan Telecom Authority) for the carriage of traffic. Even if the traffic is local, without the Exchange Point, the traffic is routed over the international internet.
The peering arrangement allows local ISPs to exchange traffic on a barter basis, rather than on a cash basis?net neutrality being the key. Such arrangements bypass ITU protocol, regarding revenue sharing and allow net lower cost to all the ISP participants.
The exchange point essentially allows the ISP?s to segment the traffic, according to the destination and by pass the tier-1 providers. Results are dramatically lower cost and lower latency.
The entrenched incumbents in developing countries(such as Pakistan) have the most to lose from domestic exchange of traffic and are the biggest impediments to the adoption. The governments of such countries also have a vested interest in supporting the monopoly of Telecom companies, given the revenues and taxes received. The larger ISP?s also have a vested interest in using high cost of connectivity to hasten the exit of smaller or less capitalized players through attrition.
In conclusion, to reap advantage of internet exchange points, the telecom companies have to overcome their monopolistic ways and there has to be an effort to make a neutral body responsible for the traffic sharing facilities. The lower cost of internet will actually foster overall growth in overall traffic, which will compensate the monopolies? initial loss of international traffic.
For more information about Satellite Internet Exchange visit: http://www.nayasat.com/satellite-internet-exchange.html
A flower arrangement reflects our thought processes–from simplistic to subtly complex. Jill Murtha hosts http://www.classicalmesh.com and expresses her passion for flowers, their arrangement through writing and discussion. She works for For Less Corporation at http://www.ixs.net
March 22, 2007
Back in the dotcom days, when dialup Internet connections were everywhere, free ISP offers were inescapable. The deal was that you viewed advertising while your computer was connected to the Internet, and in return you got your Internet connection for free.
The rise of more expensive and technically-complex broadband connections, however, has almost entirely killed this business model. Some free ISPs remain, but they are struggling. Only demographics that are undesirable to advertisers use dialup nowadays, making it almost impossible for them to sell their advertising inventory for as much as they would like.
However, this varies widely from country to country. In America, for example, free ISPs like Juno and NetZero are still holding on to a significant market share, thanks mainly to very large geographical distances between towns making broadband impractical in some places. AOL dialup, although not free and not even very good, is also surprisingly dominant in the American market.
Many European countries, on the other hand, are in the middle of broadband price wars, with some telecoms providers such as the UK’s TalkTalk offering free broadband service as part of their telephone strategy. This broadband can often be of dubious quality and requires the customer to sign up for phone service with the provider, but on the other hand it doesn’t feature any advertising or deliberate crippling of the services in the way that many dialup ISPs did.
However, in the future, we could be heading for a return to the free ISP, thanks to the rise of wireless networks. Sending wireless signals around is essentially free, apart form the initial cost of the equipment, and as wireless technology improves it will become cheaper and cheaper to cover whole towns and cities with access to wireless broadband. It is possible, in the future, that subscription-based ISPs could die entirely, to be replaced by local governments and authorities handling Internet access, in the same way as water or rubbish disposal.
John Gibb is the owner of free ISP information For more information on free Internet Service Providers please check out http://www.Free-ISP-Information.Info
February 1, 2007
While working as an independent consultant at CERN (a nuclear research laboratory close to Geneva) in 1980, Tim Berners-Lee developed an innovative way of storing information in a program named Enquire.
Many of the fundamental concepts in this program were later used in the development of a global hypertext system - popularly known as the Internet or the World Wide Web.
The WWW was developed to increase the ease with which people could exchange information. This became a reality with the introduction of the first WYSWIG (What You See Is What You Get) hypertext web browser which was written by Tim Berners-Lee.
The advantage of the WWW over previous systems was the lack of a need for a centralized server. In short, this meant that it was just as easy to retrieve, as well as link to, a document that was down the hall as across the world.
This was a huge breakthrough in computing science.
The Web and the first web server were released to the hypertext communities in mid 1991, after being released within CERN in late 1990. In order to achieve a coherent standard for the WWW, specifications for URLs, HTML and HTTP were published.
The universality forced by these specifications, the non-dependence on a central server and decision by Berners-Lee not to profit from the WWW led to a high level of adoption of the technology between 1991-94. A ten fold increase in annual traffic was recorded on the first Web server during this period.
With the advent of the Web, a number of spin-off technologies have emerged. A vast array of server side, client side and database languages have been created to fulfill needs of businesses and individuals.
There are two types of programming languages used on the WWW: client-side and server-side.
A client-side language is executed in the users’ browser and is not dependent upon the Web server. Client-side programming is done almost exclusively with JavaScript.
A server-side language executes on the Web server. In recent years server-side programming has become more popular than client-side programming because it is independent of the type of browser that the surfer is using. Programmers refer to this as being ‘cross-platform’. Perl, PHP, ASP and JSP are popular client-side programming languages.
Databases have been developed to allow for ‘dynamic’ websites.
Dynamic websites allow for a high level of personalization when retrieving information.
Whenever you type in values in a form on a web page - whether those values are for a user id and password, the characteristics of your ideal partner or an author’s name - it’s a ‘dynamic’ web site. That is just a way of saying that there is a database being used to run the website.
Popular databases used include MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.
An area of the WWW that Berners-Lee has direct involvement is in his role as the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) which has existed since 1994.
The aim of the WC3 is to achieve coherent standards between all companies using web technologies such as HTML, CSS and XML. Prior to the creation of the standards detailed by the WC3, companies used different standards, which led to potential incompatibilities. The WC3 remedied this by creating an open forum - allowing companies to agree on core standards for WWW technologies.
The future of Berners-Lee’s influence on modern computing is in the context of the Semantic Web. ‘Semantic’ means ‘meaning’.
A semantic web is one where elements that appear in a document hold some meaning that can be automatically processed by a machine in some form of data gathering. Currently, documents on the WWW written in HTML hold no meaning they’re presentation based.
Tim Berners-Lee laid the conceptual foundation for the World Wide Web. It was his initial idea to create a way where information could be freely and easily exchanged. The standards associated with it and the lack of reliance upon a central server, gave the Web a cross platform advantage and independence, which led to its meteoric rise in popularity.
In turn, its popularity spawned and popularized many different programming languages, databases, markup standards, servers - as well as - viruses and worms.
However, while Tim Berners-Lee is the ‘father’ of the Internet, its development over the years is a result of the efforts of an extraordinary number of individuals. There is little question that 500 or 1,000 years from now, historians will look at the invention of the Internet as one of those rare, seminal historical events - much like Gutenberg’s printing press.
If you found this article educational, please visit my blog Creative And Unique Gift Ideas. There’s nothing educational about it but it is a lot of fun!
January 15, 2007
A recent survey of 6,000 consumers across the US, the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy found that 46% do not understand the term IPTV. So in order to help clear up the confusion and help you jump on the upcoming IPTV bandwagon, here is a list of eight things you need to know about IPTV:
1. IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television, which means you will be able to connect a box to your broadband Internet connection and receive TV channels on your regular television set.
2. You will have to subscribe to IPTV services at an additional cost or via a service package like Triple Play which most cable companies offer now.
3. IPTV will offer even more channels and you will be able to custom pick the channels that you want to receive to your set top box.
4. IPTV will be offered by your telephone or cable company and will most likely offer addition features or services such as VOIP (Voice Over IP) telephone service and a DVR (Digital Video Recorder).
5. IPTV will offer you the ability to use your cell phone to record your favorite shows. You could call or text message your box and have it record Desperate Housewives while you’re out shopping and can’t make it home in time. It will be the ultimate in time-shifting devices.
6. IPTV allows for 2-way communication between the program and the user. Say you’re watching Food Channel host Rachel Ray live. You could use your remote or keyboard to type her a fan letter or a cooking tip that she could read live on-air.
7. IPTV can help move PC-centric features over to your TV. You could be watching BET’s 106 and Park and get an IM from your home girl or see who is calling you with on-screen caller ID.
8. IPTV is not video on the web. Video on the Internet can be jerky, slow, grainy, and has to re-buffer a lot. IPTV will be as good as television and in some instances will be of HD quality
Mike Street is a pop culture ciritic and owner of http://www.GreasyGuide.com Having left BET in the winter of 2005 Mike Street is on a mission to change the media, bring enlightenment and play as many video games as possible. He is also the Executive Editor for http://ResidentGamer.com
September 23, 2006
The rate at which a network transmits or receives data is termed network bandwidth. Bandwidth and latency are two important parameters for measuring the speed of the networks. The higher the bandwidth, the higher the cost of the network. Hence, wastage of bandwidth is a key measurement criterion for optimizing any network.
A network bandwidth monitor helps monitor the usage of bandwidth. Network bandwidth monitors run on computers for 24 hours a day and continuously keep track of the parameters of network usage. This tracked information is then stored in an internal database for future analysis. Network bandwidth monitors can trace out what applications and servers are using the network bandwidth. They help receive bandwidth and network usage data that optimizes the efficiency of the network. Network bandwidth monitoring is a very critical activity of an enterprise network administrator. With network bandwidth monitoring, a network administrator gets instant reports about the usage of bandwidth by each application and host. This report helps to make decisions about access planning or capacity planning. Network bandwidth monitor software can visualize the state of the network, and it automatically gives alerts of any problems on the bandwidth. The analysis of the data helps future planning. The monitor can be configured to send e-mail messages.
Most network bandwidth monitors function with any SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) devices, such as gateways, routers, NAS (Network Attached Storage), printers, servers and more. All the information gathered by network bandwidth monitor software can be viewed, printed and saved for further analysis and bandwidth planning. Network bandwidth monitor software also monitors the traffic between the Internet and computer. Monitoring network bandwidth is extremely beneficial for those who access the Internet on a transfer (monthly) basis. A network bandwidth monitor, with a single click, identifies top applications, top protocols, top trackers and more. A network bandwidth monitor can set up a profile for precise monitoring, tracking the limits of bandwidth that are set by an Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Bandwidth usage is highly variable from time to time, and is very difficult to measure precisely. Network bandwidth monitors are tools which enable the precise measurement of network bandwidth and its usage patterns.
Network Monitors provides detailed information on Network Monitors, Network Traffic Monitors, Network Bandwidth Monitors, Network Monitor Software and more. Network Monitors is affiliated with Network Monitoring Tools.
July 29, 2006
Sometimes, your business takes you on different trips to various states around the United States. You may be based in New York – however, your business could also take you to Miami, or anywhere in the world for that matter. The great thing is that even if you are far away, you can still access your files, information and basically your entire office – through the Internet. Instantly access any information that you might need for your overseas business trip by using any computer, a modem and a telephone line through international dial up access.
There are different companies that offer international dial up. With this type of access to the Internet, you can easily access any information in your home office computer wherever you are. You have access to all your important files from your office to you wherever you may be.
International dial up usually comes as part of standard dial up packages. You can ‘dial in’ from wherever you are using your ISP’s international access numbers. Now, you can keep tabs on your work, even when you’re on business trips abroad, check you email as often as you want, and update your website.
With international dial up access, you can confidently travel to any place in the world. You will always have instant and easy access to your files. The drawback is, like any dial up Internet connection, you may have to wait a while to log on, because this method of connecting is usually very slow.
Dial Up provides detailed information on Dial Up, Free Dial Up, Dial Up ISP, International Dial Up and more. Dial Up is affiliated with Dial Up Access Numbers.
July 4, 2006
Network cards are the backbone of any network. The Network interface card or the network card is a hardware device that allows a computer to be connected to a network, and through the network to other computers and devices. It is installed in one of the free peripheral connect interface (PCI) slots of a computer and includes a port in which the networking cable is inserted. There are different NICs for different networks even if the computer is the same. For example, if a computer is to be connected to an Ethernet LAN, it must be equipped with an Ethernet network card and if it is to be connected to a wireless LAN, a wireless network card needs to be installed.
Wireless network cards allow you to do away with traditional networking through cables. These are gaining popularity as Wi-Fi hotspots are mushrooming all over the world. Most new laptop computers are now available with pre-installed wireless network cards that are an integral part of the hardware. Wireless network cards that fit into the PCMCIA slots are available for older laptops and similar cards are also available for regular desktop computers.
A wireless network card can communicate only with a wireless router or a wireless access point. It is important that the wireless network card or adapter should work at the same speed and with the same coverage as the wireless router. In addition to the communication software that is embedded in the network interface card’s (NIC’s) ROM, the computer also requires networking software to be installed for the network to be functional. Both the software and the NIC have to adhere to the communication protocols of the network to which the computer is to be connected.
Wireless network cards have increased the mobility by allowing people to work from any location which is Wi-Fi enabled and have also helped in doing away with the hassles associated with installation of traditional wired networks.
Wireless Networks provides detailed information on Wireless Networks, Home Wireless Networks, Configuring Wireless Networks, Wireless Network Cards and more. Wireless Networks is affiliated with Wireless Internet Services.
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