Although the telephone company has many tools to troubleshoot problems with their lines and equipment, they cannot help you much with the phone wiring in your home. A weak DSL signal inside your home can be caused by long wire lengths, poor connections, multiple wires, multiple connectors, improper grounding and other variables. Your DSL speed will be better if you eliminate these issues. DSL modems are good at working around noise on the line, but do so at the expense of top download speed and latency (delay). DSL technicians tell us that many line problems originate from bad inside wiring, so splitting the DSL signal from the telephone line as early as possible would certainly eliminate this problem.

To do that, you can install an inexpensive pots-splitter where the telephone line enters your home or garage at the box called the Network Interface Device (NID). By installing a pots-splitter at the NID, the DSL signal from the telephone company to your modem is as short and uncluttered as possible. No longer does the DSL signal wind through your home over internal phone wiring — even though most telephone company installation instructions tell you to do that. Why do they recommend that? Because installing pots-splitters yourself inside the home saves the telephone company the expense of making a trip to do the installation right. Those “pigtail” pots-splitters you self-install don’t offer the optimum DSL signal path. The excess in-house line length, the phone jacks and the additional phone equipment in your home all contribute to noise and attenuation of the DSL signal — and therefore slower speeds.

Instead, to achieve the shortest, cleanest connection, you should buy a pots-splitter and put your DSL modem next to the pots-splitter at the NID. By installing the pots-splitter at your NID, you keep your home telephone wiring out of the DSL signal path, and consequently your line condition is now the responsibility of the telephone company. The telephone company can then easily use their central equipment to monitor and troubleshoot the condition of the DSL line to your home. They otherwise cannot do the best job troubleshooting the line if the DSL signal also runs through your house. With the DSL signal terminating at the NID, they have no excuse to deliver speeds less than the one offered under your service plan. If the speed is much less than promised, ask your telephone company to fix their line until it comes close to the DSL rate offered under your service plan.

Once you’ve installed your pots-splitter and modem next to the NID, you also need to install your Ethernet router there too. You might wonder how to use your computer when the Ethernet router is in the garage. There are a couple of solutions. You can use a wireless extender or use HomePlug devices. Although these add a little cost, your improved DSL speed should be worth it. If your wireless Ethernet connection is blocked by the walls, HomePlug devices offered by many vendors provide a fast, reliable Ethernet connection to any room in your home.

Moreover, during the past 10 years, nearly every business has saved extensively on travel and marketing costs by using video-conferencing. Yet live video traffic further stresses network hardware and bandwidth.

Web applications like email and SaaS-based ERP, CRM and other business applications don’t require a lot of bandwidth. But running voice and video traffic on a single, IP-based network with multiple real time applications is now commonplace. Unfortunately, businesses too often expand their networks piecemeal, in reaction to new application and performance issues identified by employees and customers.

More Network Challenges are Coming

In addition to the current challenges of data, voice and video, other challenging network scenarios are here or on the horizon:

• Traffic over unmanaged networks, such as a telecommuter connecting over a virtual private network (VPN) and mobile 3G networks.
• The logical next step towards cloud computing, with virtualization either on a third party cloud or an enterprise data center.
• Storage, servers, switches and routers combined into a unified, multi-purpose footprint in the data center.

To accommodate these new bandwidth intensive architectures and services, many businesses have upgraded their network hardware ad hoc, spending extensive time and labor on network administration. It’s easy to overlook the cost of labor when measuring IT productivity. According to McKinsey, labor is now the largest cost component of IT operations, eclipsing the sum of software, hardware and maintenance costs.

Many businesses alternatively choose to outsource much of their information technology. But on-premise networking equipment is still required, even with application outsourcing. System administrators can handle many network issues, but with voice and video traffic, some network engineering expertise is helpful. For instance, there are great variations in network demand throughout the business day, as call volume or conferencing traffic rise and fall.

Network Quality of Service is Key

The major problems with most networks are well established. The big difficulties with voice and video quality are latency, jitter and packet loss. Poor audio quality is more annoying to users than poor video quality, since the human ear is more sensitive to noise and delays than the human eye.

To avoid the imperfections caused by latency, jitter and packet loss, a network must be properly designed and managed. There are three basic areas of focus. Capacity management refers to the amount of bandwidth available. Most local area networks have very high capacity, so bandwidth problems are usually only associated with the wide area network (WAN) or the interfaces to the WAN.

The key to making most efficient use of the WAN is to prioritize traffic in the routers and switches. In other words, voice and video quality can be maintained by giving them a higher priority than data traffic. Such prioritization has almost no noticeable effect on the data traffic.

Network monitoring helps identify potential issues related to peak usage and server capacity, so degraded performance can often be avoided, and less investment is made on bandwidth or equipment.

Enter the Multi-Service Business Gateway

Socrates once asked, “How many things are there which I do not want?” An excellent question, not just for philosophers, but for IT Managers, CIOs and CEOs as well. In the past there may have been three, four, even five or more pieces of equipment and associated software required to operate a business network. Today, there are single-source solutions containing both the hardware and the software needed to run a converged data, voice and video network. Known as a Unified Communications Gateway (UCG) or more commonly as a Multi-Service Business Gateway (MSBG), these solutions simplify and lower the equipment and administration needed to operate a high-capacity business network.

Businesses previously interested in IP-PBX solutions, are now combining a diverse range of voice and data functionality on a single appliance. Many businesses require LAN compatibility with multiple wireless IP handsets and access to multiple types of SaaS applications. “Application performance is a big concern,” says Jeff Dixon, Chief Strategy Officer of U4EA Technologies. “The impact of a non-optimal network includes loss of productivity among employees and potential loss of business.” MSBG solutions can identify network issues before they become a problem, eliminate software incompatibility and simplify network configuration.

The most likely people to use an e-pass are travelers who carry a PDA like the Blackberry. On the road, they want to get assigned seats and flight confirmation using online check-in. Since hotel rooms don’t have printers, a traveler can elect to have the boarding pass emailed their PDA. Being able to check-in electronically and get an e-pass is also convenient from bus, car or taxi, or in an emergency. But most travelers who use e-pass should still prefer to print a paper boarding pass as backup, if they can, just in case the electronic boarding pass doesn’t scan at the airport.

Agents Get Busy With New Procedures

A traveler with an e-pass arrives with the electronic boarding pass and reservation on their mobile device and can go straight to the security checkpoints. Secondary ID like a driver’s license or passport is still required. Instead of handing a paper pass to TSA security agents at airport security, a passenger shows the e-pass image on the screen of the mobile device.

When it’s time to go through the TSA checkpoint, the screener scans the mobile device with a handheld scanner. The scanner beeps when it recognizes the e-pass. At that point, the TSA screener can see the passenger name and flight information on the scanner. They next look at the passenger’s physical ID and compare it with the electronic boarding pass information on the scanner.

When it’s time to board, passengers queue up to the boarding checkpoint and point the mobile device image into another scanner. The scanner again beeps an all-clear signal, and the agent allows the passenger to board.

Passenger Feedback Is Mixed

The success rate of using the e-pass on mobile phones is mixed, because most mobile phones have a low screen resolution versus PDAs. As a result, there can be problems on mobile phones, with the scanners not scanning correctly at security and boarding.

There can also be hitches in procedures. With paper boarding passes, the passenger shows the TSA agent the pass before entering the metal detector. But since the e-pass is on a mobile device, it goes through the x-ray machine. So what happens when a screener asks to see a boarding pass? Some agents just let the passenger through. Other screeners require that the passenger get a token from the TSA agents who are examining the carry-on luggage.

Not all airlines offer the e-pass and not all e-passes display passenger seat assignments. Rules about advance check-in vary considerably, although most airlines allow online check-in 24 hours prior to departure. Continental has set up a webpage where a passenger can login and get the boarding pass image. iPhone users report that this works well. Other airlines email the image, so a passenger needs to know where email attachments are stored the mobile device, and then open up the boarding pass image on the screen.

Technology Meets International Standards

The Transportation Security Administration has been testing the e-pass system since 2007 at number of airports throughout the country. Nationwide expansion is now underway. Once e-pass scanners are deployed nationwide, the TSA plans to track wait times using e-pass data collected at checkpoints. As a safety advantage for all passengers, the new technology reduces boarding pass fraud, provides enhanced security, and improves customer service to passengers, says the TSA and the airlines.

The International Air Transport Association anticipates that its 240 members will be saving about $500 million annually with electronic boarding. Currently the e-pass works only for U.S. domestic flights. Passengers flying from an airport that doesn’t handle the e-pass will still need a printed pass. International adoption is eventually expected. The TSA paperless boarding passes are consistent with the global standard in the International Air Transport Association for bar coding of passenger boarding passes.

The consequences of these IBM decisions not only spawned the PC era, but also led to the creation of a new and highly profitable PC software segment. To help complementary hardware designers and software publishers create expansion hardware and software applications, IBM published the essential BIOS code for the PC. The BIOS remained copyrighted by IBM since they intended to use it to prevent unlicensed cloning of the IBM PC. Unfortunately for IBM the BIOS was soon reverse engineered by Compaq and others using a “clean room” process that avoided legal liability for copyright infringement. This gave low-cost makers of PC clones the last technology piece they needed to deliver inexpensive PCs. The resulting explosive growth of PC clone sales and adoption ultimately changed all aspects of computing, creating a wealth of new companies like Microsoft, Intel, Compaq, Dell, and subsequently drove acceptance of the PC architecture into more demanding server applications at the enterprise level.

Within 25 years over a billion PCs were sold. Still the leading computing architecture, the second billionth PC will be shipped sometime in 2008. How could such enormous consequences arise from a few relatively modest engineering decisions? The answer seems simple. Open architectures are vastly more efficient to extend, allowing many more individuals and companies to contribute and participate in accelerating the design, application, low-cost manufacturing and distribution of a product. IBM didn’t intend to create an open platform with the IBM PC. It just didn’t foresee that the BIOS code would be reverse engineered. In an attempt to regain control, IBM created a new proprietary system bus called the MCA and licensed it for hundreds of dollars. While this approach would prevent others from cloning new IBM PCs without a license, the MCA bus was adopted by virtually no one outside of IBM. Instead, the clone makers created their own standard ISA bus which was soon followed by an even faster EISA bus.

A similarly important milestone in the history of the PC was the introduction by Intel of the Peripheral Component Interface or “PCI” standard. Intel realized they should create a standard bus and support it with low-cost Intel chips. Intel designed the PCI bus to be fast, inexpensive to build, and royalty-free.  With Intel behind it, the jockeying between IBM and the clone makers about board compatibility ended. The enormously successful PCI specification and its successors since 1992 are still the dominant local bus system within PCs and servers. Today PCI versions continue to receive wide support from all PC manufacturers globally. The PCI bus from Intel was wildly successful in simplifying integration, further driving down the PC system costs, and vastly improving PC reliability for all consumers and businesses.

Starting with his own company, Levchin explained Slide’s business as “adding the meat to the bare bones of social graph.“ Levchin, one might remember, is part of the team that built and sold Paypal to eBay, which many investors felt eBay had no choice but to buy. Levchin seems to be going for a repeat, leveraging Facebook to build Slide the same way. With the humblest expression he can muster, Levchin deadpans, “I thank my generous hosts”.

The social platforms have begun to open up their APIs, giving application developers like Slide more leverage and potentially putting them in competition with the platforms. “Social software builders compete for advertising dollars ultimately” Levchin explains. He believes it’s simply a matter of who delivers the best applications for advertisers to engage with users. 

To illustrate Slide’s benefits to advertisers, “Every single campaign that we’ve run in the world of Super Poke has been nothing but a smashing success for the advertisers,” Levchin contends. This raises the question of whether the application developers will eclipse the platforms, just as Yahoo made Netscape less relevant. “Since Netscape was based on standards, it is really Internet Explorer that made Netscape irrelevant,” says Peter Yared, CEO of iWidgets. “A better analogy is Windows and Mac OS.” Yared suggests. “The more applications, the more relevant the platform — until all the apps move to another platform like the browser, which is what happened to Windows.”

When asked, Levchin dismisses any question that social applications might be fad, saying that part of Slide’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. He simply believes the best applications will prevail, whether they come from the social platform owner or not. “The engagement that the user has when they’re using one of our apps is close to that of television except it is fully interactive,” he explains. Levchin thus contends that Slide is in good position to serve advertisers in the new ways they are now demanding. First Levchin says he has packaged the Slide user community into various “affinity groups”. This allows Slide to deliver better campaign results but without hitting a wall of privacy issues. He says that Slide “complies with their covenant with the users” while at the same time correlating “patterns of usage” into affinity groups they can offer to the advertisers.

Levchin also says that Slide has the right stuff as “Madison Avenue becomes more concerned with engagement metrics.” Engagement must not be intrusive, since spam is the biggest complaints users have about Facebook and MySpace. As people reach attention deficit, applications like SuperPoke can become a nuisance even between friends. Levchin has some ideas about how to address the problem. “Our plan is simple and obvious and I suspect it’s a human one, to create tools or levers for the users that make it easy to control the spam.” Many aggregators like Friendfeed are also trying to solve this problem but no company yet offers an outstanding solution.

Virtual goods are also getting Levchin’s attention. “I’ve seen with my own eyes the first time in Asia for me where people make billions of dollars selling virtual goods,” he says. Whether this translates to similar opportunities in the United States is a still a matter of speculation. But it may at least be an alternative business model to the presently large focus on advertising revenue.

Combs’ cites the project’s rapid popularity as the initial milestone. Over the following months, he received emails asking about his plans for the project. He realized it needed his full-time commitment. His employer at the time had little interest in an open source network analyzer but eventually Combs found the right partner. Today CACE Technologies is the project sponsor, a change he cites as the second significant milestone — as well as CACE becoming his employer.

A third milestone was the build-up of the user and developer community. “We attracted people who stuck with Wireshark — people smarter than me”, he claims. “And we needed an infrastructure including CVS and mail lists that could leverage their talents.” Combs explained that most Wireshark contributors work for larger companies than CACE. The parallel architecture of Wireshark makes their participation easier, letting them work simultaneously on their own pieces, such as protocols.

The Asterisk Project

Mark Spencer, founder of Digium and the Asterisk project, was in San Francisco for the Open Source Business Conference in April and gave us his thoughts. As Spencer explains, Asterisk was started from a real business requirement — his own company needed a phone system. “Telephony” he recalls, “was a large market with no Microsoft-like monopoly, and back then phone systems were expensive.”

To keep a complex development project like Asterisk running smoothly, Spencer set up an issue tracker, something he still considers a significant milestone. Asterisk has many contributors to manage, he explains. He initially targeted a technical audience with Asterisk, adding further, that he designed the code base to support “extreme customization”.

Spencer likewise encouraged the developers to earn income from the Asterisk ecosystem. Digium sponsored the first Asterisk conference to provide them an opportunity to do commercial business and discuss how to move the project forward.

The Mondrian Project

The MySQL Conference in Santa Clara offered an opportunity to speak with Julian Hyde, founder of the Mondrian project. Mondrian is an OLAP cube that Hyde wrote as a skunk project with his company’s permission. Mondrian, he explains, is based on an OLAP standard he created — one which is similar to the Microsoft OLAP product.

Mondrian’s popularity took off when an industry analyst highlighted it in an article. “Open source” Hyde tells us, “provided a multiplier effect, allowing people with the same interests to converge on one project.” But the milestone was when people started to use it, he adds. Hyde explains that using SourceForge was not a watershed but it helped get visibility. Awareness attracted Andreas Voss, for example, a developer with whom Hyde agreed to provide cross-support, giving Mondrian a technical boost through JPivot’s navigational capability.

Even with Mondrian’s success, Hyde didn’t want to start a company. Instead he looked for someone to back the project. He met Richard Daley of Pentaho at a conference, and was impressed with their business model and professionalism. Hyde now has two roles there: architect of the roadmap and community advocate. “Engineers at other companies using Mondrian are full-time contributors” he explains, and “these people have a strategic interest in stable Mondrian code.” Having a commercial sponsor helped the project achieve maturity and industry strength, including regular releases, Hyde says.

Hyde is looking ahead to another milestone. He would like the open source community to help adopt OLAP4J, because, he explains, “the commercial world has failed to provide us with a standard.”

Lets start with cable, which still leads the U.S. in total broadband subscribers. Many cable subscribers are not happy with the performance of their broadband and say they would switch to DSL if given the choice. As a result, DSL is recently outpacing cable adoption. In the third quarter of 2007, about one million additional homes subscribed to broadband cable for a quarterly growth rate of 3.3%. Each of the major telephone carriers handily beat the cable growth rate with new DSL subscribers.

Globally, telephone companies continue to improve the use of their existing 1.3 billion copper subscriber lines. Broadband DSL subscribers worldwide outnumber broadband cable subscribers four to one. About 65 million broadband DSL lines were turned on globally in 2007. That’s more than the number of households in California, New York and Texas combined. In China, DSL remains the favorite. According to the Xinhua news agency, China has 122 million broadband users, the highest in the world. Sixty percent of them access the Internet over broadband DSL. 

Shanghai Telecom provides fixed line broadband to three million subscribers. About 85% of them access the Internet at more than 2 Mbps, considered the lower end of broadband in China. By comparison, “broadband” in the U.S. as stated by the FCC is “at least 200 kbps in one direction”, an embarrassingly dated definition that’s due for a rewrite.

The Chinese government plans to restructure six existing fixed line and mobile units into three operators with both fixed and mobile network assets. China Netcom with 114 million fixed line customers, including more than 18 milion broadband customers, will join mobile operator China Unicom with 118 million TDM customers.  China Telecommunications with 222 million fixed line customers, including 35 million broadband subscribers, will merge with China Unicom 41 million CDMA wireless subscribers. China Mobile Communications with 332 million wireless subscribers will merge with national fixed line operator China TieTong Telecommunications 20 million fixed line customers, including more than 3 million broadband subscribers. 

This suggests even more growth for DSL in China, and at higher speeds than the U.S.  China is not alone in offering better bandwidth. India also sets a higher broadband definition for carriers. Recently the Indian telecom regulator, TRAI, notified all Indian service providers not to use words like “up to” and has instructed them to unambiguously indicate the minimum speed to customers — at least 256 kbps in case of broadband subscription plans. Most US-based broadband providers still use the vague “up to” language in their contracts and marketing.  

According to a 2006 consumer research report, a third of U.S. households are still stuck with dial-up, and another third lack Internet access of any kind. More than half of DSL subscribers in the U.S. do not receive throughput of 200 kbps in both directions. Compared to China, the U.S. telephone companies are making slow progress on improving the DSL capacity of their copper lines. Patterns of Internet use in China are different than the U.S. Nearly seventy percent of Internet users in China say they use instant messaging, compared to only 26 percent in the U.S. Far more Internet users in China say they download video and music. That’s probably because China has more bandwidth and fewer lawyers, a pretty good tradeoff. In the final analysis, U.S. subscribers might just have to quit their DSL and cable, and subscribe to 3G.