The FCC’s Plan to Bring Broadband to Rural America

The FCC’s Plan to Bring Broadband to Rural America

According to the June 30^th article in The Daily Item, by Tricia Pursell, The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is working on a new initiative to bring broadband Internet access to rural areas across the country.  As with any new initiative, there are some positive and some not so positive effects of this initiative.  Here we will attempt to look at both sides of this situation.

• This initiative will definitely make life easier for those who currently are unable to access the Internet from their homes. Take Susie Ewing for example. Susie works in Beaver Springs where she is able to access the Internet at a decent speed. This is a good thing, she says, because her job requires access to the Internet, but when she goes home at the end of the day, it’s a different story.  Living in rural McClure, she has no Internet access.
• Currently there are families in rural Pennsylvania that do have Internet access, yet their neighbors just a quarter of a mile down the road, do not. The FCC’s plan will help to even this out and make the Internet accessible, at a decent speed, to everyone; not just people living in rural Pennsylvania, but in rural areas across the country.
• The FCC has a history of bringing communication technology to rural areas. In the past, they used monies in their fund to support telephone communication to rural areas. By implementing this project and helping to make Internet access, another form of communication, to everyone, will help to move this country forward.

On the surface this all sounds great. But there are some underlying difficulties that should also be considered.

• Typically the FCC has not been able to distribute the funds equally. This issue will leave some people and areas without access in spite of their efforts. They state that they will not increase the size of their fund, which means that the whole process may take longer and leave many areas still waiting.
• Their Connect America Fund plans include subsidizing Internet service providers if ‘their costs to bring service to rural locations is way high above what the norm is.” This opens up a whole lot of questions as to who determines whether the cost is “way high above what the norm is,” and what prevents a service provider from taking advantage of this subsidy?
• The Universal Service fund, from which the Connect America Initiative fund comes, has been accused of being wasteful and inefficient in the past. There is concern that this will continue, but the FCC has answered that concern with its plan to require accountability from the companies receiving subsidies and will distribute the funds for access more evenly.

As with any new plan or initiative there are positive aspects and some negative aspects; the Connect America plan is no different. The people in rural areas who will be getting broadband Internet access for the first time, because of this initiative, will agree- there will be only positive aspects!

From 

    http://www.broadbandserviceproviders.com/

10 Reasons Your DSL Broadband Connection Cuts In and Out

Sometimes when accessing the Internet, you may notice your connection cuts in and out. This can be frustrating at a minimum and devastating at the worst. So, what can be causing it? If you find that out and fix the problem, you will find your next “surfing” expedition to be smooth sailing. Here are 10 reasons your DSL Broadband connection may be cutting in and out:

1. Distance: Speed of Internet access and clarity of connection depend on the distance between your home and the telephone exchange that is providing your service. The further away you are from the exchange the more likely there will be interruptions.
2. Equipment at the exchange: Your ISP/telephone company that provides your Internet service, must keep up with the advancing technology, if they have any equipment that would be considered out-dated in this fast-paced technological world, you could have breaks in your connection.
3. The Contention ratio: Find out how many other people in your immediate area share the DSL Broadband signal with you. This is the contention ratio. The more people who use the signal means there will be more uploads, downloads  and general traffic which can cause connection problems with your broadband DSL.
4. Equipment at home: With the amount of power a broadband DSL supplies to your home, you need to make sure your modem and router can handle the speed. Some people have found improved performance of their DSL broadband by trying a different modem or router.
5. Broadband contract: If your broadband connection seems slower than you expected it would be, take another look at the contract with your ISP. You might have signed up for a slower version of access. If that’s the case, you can contact your provider and change your contract.
6. Phone line: Broadband DSL is fast and if you have copper phone lines that have not yet been replaced by fiber optic lines, you may experience outages in service. Copper lines just can’t handle the speed.
7. Extension sockets: Double check your extension socket and make sure it is properly installed. Noise and crackles on the line can result if they are not.
8. Junction boxes: In the same vein, you’ll want to double check the condition of the junction boxes outside your house. If moisture gets in there, your modem can be upset and the connection reset.
9. Trees: Yes, trees can be a nightmare. When it is windy the branches can stress the line & which in turn will cause crackling and static within the connection.
10. Other wireless components: Is it possible that you’re using a cordless telephone and a wireless router? Since they use the same bandwidth, they could be interfering with the connection causing it to slow down, become noisy or cut out.

Once you’ve looked at all the possible causes for the disruption in your DSL Broadband connection, you will be able to take the steps needed to get it fixed.

What do you think of accessing blocked sites & hiding IP address using personal VPN services?

If you are a network admin, you might be aware of the various techniques used by students/ employees to gain access to blocked sites. Right from typing IP address instead of URL, using URL shortener’s, using various proxy servers available on the Internet – various methods might be used. A paid personal VPN service is also being employed these days to access blocked sites and hide IP address. Let us read more about personal VPN services, in this article.

What is a Personal VPN Service?

The personal VPN service is similar to the organization wide VPN (Virtual Private Network) employed by the network administrators. But in this, the user directly forms a tunnel between his laptop/desktop to the server hosted by the personal VPN service provider and encrypts all the content that travels between his computer and the server.

So, if a user wants to access a website (that can be accessed only from a particular country – tracked based on the Geo-location of IP addresses), he uses a personal VPN service, reaches their server, picks up a new IP address based on the servers location and from there he is redirected to the website (that he wants to browse) by the VPN service provider. So, instead of visiting the website directly, they visit the website through the server hosted by the personal VPN service provider.

For example, certain websites like Pandora, Hulu, etc can be accessed only from the United States. So, people outside the United States can sign up for a personal VPN service provider who has a server within the United States, connect to the server and from there browse those websites with a newly acquired US IP address! One more reason for using the personal VPN service is to browse anonymously without revealing your original IP address.

The price for such a service ranges mostly from 5 USD to 20 USD per month and most of them provide multiple VPN access methods like PPTP,SSL,SSTP, etc. Some service providers have a monthly maximum bandwidth cap, while most of them offer unlimited browsing. Many personal VPN service providers have multiple servers in multiple countries and enable the user to choose which country IP address they want to use for their Internet session.

Benefits of Personal VPN Service

In certain countries that have genuine websites/services blocked, users might use them to access these services. Data encryption makes it more secure to browse websites from public Wi-Fi hot-spots/ premises where Internet is shared. Personal VPN Services can also be used to browse anonymously (to a certain extant) without revealing your IP address and hence it is possible to hide your personal details/ browsing habits to search engines/ other e-commerce based websites.

Disadvantages of Personal VPN Service

Even though people use VPN and change their IP address while browsing websites, their identity could still be traced back – Its just slightly more difficult. The VPN Service provider might get their IP address blocked, for offering such a service. Some ISP’s block all VPN connections going through them (in certain countries) but a few providers might support browsing through Stealth SSL / SSTP VPN which are difficult to block. The bandwidth consumed is still the same, if not slightly more (for the users) and their computers need to encrypt and decrypt all the sessions which might put additional strain on the processors.

Besides, a Personal VPN service could be mis-used by users in the following ways:

1. Users accessing websites that are needed to be genuinely blocked in schools/ colleges/ offices etc like social networking sites. video streaming sites. etc.

2. Users can use this service to download MP3, Videos etc anonymously.

3. Users might use this service for illegal/ disallowed activities.

4. Users might make cheap VOIP Calls (as they can pick up another countries IP address and pretend to be in that country while making those calls)

Well, like it or not these services are currently available and as a network administrator you need to be aware of them. So, next time when there are too many VPN tunnels opened by employees (which are not controlled by the organization), you might as well want to check what they are doing.

A Conceptual Introduction to Static Routing, RIP & OSPF

In large networks, Layer-3 Switches/ Routers are important and inevitable. They help contain the broadcast domain by sub-dividing the network in to various segments. But once a network is segmented, you need to route packets between the various sub-networks. Routing protocols / methodologies like Static Routing, RIP (Routing Information Protocol) & OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) help you to do just that.

Introduction:

Wouldn’t it be a simpler world if a whole campus could be put on a single network? It would, but it would be a very congested network too! So, when you are planning a network for an enterprise company (or) a huge campus it is a good practice to segment the network into multiple sub-networks.

Layer-2 Network Switches are enough to communicate within a network (sub-network) but they cannot pass on packets to other networks. That’s where you need Routers / Layer-3 Switches (L3 Switches with routing capabilities are used more these days).

If there are only two networks and one path between them, it is easy to specify the routing table to the L3 Switch/ Router – Just forward all packets with a certain destination IP address range to the other L3 Switch/ Router. That’s it! But practically, there are multiple sub-networks within a campus and multiple links to (and from) each sub-network. Multiple links are required for both reaching destination networks faster and also for redundancy in links (in case of primary link failure).

That’s why we need Routing Methodologies & Routing Protocols. L3 Switches/ Routers form something called as Routing Tables where they store information on the various nodes in the network and the best path to reach each node. These Routing Tables can be formed manually (for small networks) using Static Routing (or) can be formed automatically (for larger networks) by using dynamic routing protocols like RIP, OSPF, BGP, etc.

Another important function of the Dynamic Routing Tables is to automatically adapt to the change in network topologies (like link/ device failures, addition/ deletion of nodes, etc) by first identifying that change quickly and using alternate routes (links) / devices to reach the destinations.

Static Routing:

The process of specifying the routing tables for every router manually by a network administrator (in a small network) is called Static Routing. Basically, if there are only a couple of Layer3 Switches in the network, it is easy to specify the routes for packets to be delivered to the other network manually.

Static Routing is simple to implement and is fast as it doesn’t require any extra processing capacity / additional bandwidth. But it does not route packets around failed links/ devices and hence does not account for redundancy. So, a small network without any need for redundant links might find Static Routing useful.

Distance Vector Routing (Vs) Link State Routing:

Dynamic Routing is divided into two major categories – Distance Vector Routing & Link State Routing.

In Distance Vector Routing, each L3 Switch/ Router maintains a table of distances/ hops to every node from its perspective of the network and the least cost route between any two nodes is (mostly) the route with the minimum distance or minimum hops. In Distance Vector Routing, each node shares its table with its immediate neighbor more frequently (like every 30 seconds) and when there is a change in the network topology. Example: RIP

In Link State Routing, each L3 Switch/ Router maintains a complete network map of the local area that it is present in, with all the routers maintaining an identical database. The least cost route between any two nodes is calculated using many factors including maximum bandwidth, minimum delay, maximum throughput, etc. In Link State Routing, only the topology updates are exchanged between the routers when there is a change in network topology (or) every 30 minutes (less frequently). Example: OSPF

RIP (Routing Information Protocol):

* RIP is a open standards based distance vector routing protocol.

* RIP is an Intra-domain routing protocol used within an autonomous system – AS (where all routers are controlled by the same entity).

* In RIP, all the routers / L3 switches create a unique routing table with information like -  lowest cost links to each router in its network, next hop router(s), etc.

* RIP uses hop count/ distance as its link cost metric.

* RIP allows for convergence around failed links/ network topology changes, but recovery is in the order of minutes.

* Total number of nodes (Routers/ L3 Switches) supported by RIP is limited due to finite hop count restrictions in the protocol.

* Periodic updates of Routing Tables (every 30 seconds for example) happens even when there are no changes in the network topology.

OSPF (Open Shortest Path First):

* OSPF is an open and standards based routing protocol.

* OSPF is an Intra-domain routing protocol based on link state routing.

* In OSPF, the entire network is called an Autonomous System (as it is maintained by one entity). The Autonomous System is divided into different areas (sub-networks).

* In OSPF, there are some special types of routers based on their function – Area border routers connect two or more areas, Autonomous System boundary routers connect two or more Autonomous Systems, etc.

* The Router/ Layer 3 switch maintains the complete network map of all the nodes in the area that it is present in. The routing table is the same for all the routers in a given area.

* Link State Advertisements are exchanged between all the routers in an area – Every router receives the LSA’s of every other router within an area.

* OSPF updates the routing tables of all the routers in an area immediately when there is a change in the network topology – which is faster than RIP, and also periodically (every 30 minutes for example) – which is less frequent than RIP.

* OSPF calculates the link cost in terms of minimum delay, maximum throughput, maximum bandwidth etc. So, it is not strictly based on the hop count and OSPF gives higher priority for faster links (for example).

* OSPF supports Variable Length Subnet Masks (VLSM), which gives it the ability to work with different subnets and hence conserve IP addresses.

* OSPF provides for authentication of messages between the Routers/ L3 Switches (through MD5).

* QoS (Quality of Service) metrics can be applied to OSPF based on bandwidth calculations (for example), to avoid high latency paths.

Create a PPPoE client connection

You can install the PPPoE client just like you install any other dial-up networking connection. To create a PPPoE client connection, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Control Panel, and then double-click Network and Internet Connections.
2. Click Network Connections, and then click Create a new connection in the Network Tasks pane.
3. After the Network Connection Wizard starts, click Next.
4. Click Connect to the Internet, and then click Next.
5. Click Set up my connection manually, and then click Next.
6. Click either Connect using a broadband connection that requires a user name and password or Connect using a broadband connection that is always on.
7. Type the Internet service provider (ISP) name that your ISP provided, and then click Next.
8. Type the user name that the ISP provided.
9. Type the password that the ISP provided.
10. Type the password one more time to confirm it, and then click Next.
11. Click Add a shortcut to this connection to my desktop.
12. Click Finish to complete the wizard.