bruceb news

The request was deceptively simple:

Six very small offices want to share a single Internet connection. Each office wants to have a secure network for its own computers, not shared with the other offices. The offices want to share a single big Toshiba eStudio printer/scanner.

That shouldn’t be so hard, right?

It is remarkable how quickly networking becomes complicated. I don’t have any special instructions today, just a couple of anecdotes to help you understand why you might need help with your home or small office network.

Most people have simple needs: a single Internet connection for a single office; a router to let all the computers share the connection and connect to each other. […] continued

If you live anywhere in the U.S. other than a big city, you likely have one choice – and only one choice – for broadband service.

If you live in a rural area, there is a good chance that you cannot get broadband service of any kind.

Dane Jasper, founder and CEO of Sonic.net, wrote an article a few days ago that provides a useful reminder of how the U.S. got to this position, where we lag behind many other countries in broadband penetration and speeds.

In a few words: there was robust competition in the 90s. The copper lines to your house were recognized as a natural monopoly, since you only have one phone line to the house. […] continued

Previously:
Whining About Wireless

I’ll tell you a story about my own experience. You won’t learn anything and there’s not a happy ending, but perhaps it will give you a little perspective on why I’m not urging you to ditch your wires and set up wireless everywhere.

I’ve had a wireless access point at the global headquarters of Bruceb Consulting for a long time. When my wife and I got our matching Vostro V13 laptops last year, we started to rely on wireless more than ever, so maybe we just began to notice a problem that had existed for a long time. […] continued

Previously:
The Increasing Need For Bandwidth, Part 1

You should know the basic details of the Internet connection at your home or business.

Find out the speed of your existing service. If you have a DSL line – typically from AT&T or Sonic, occasionally from smaller players – it has a rated speed. For example, Sonic has four tiers of DSL service, from very slow 768K to 6Mb download speeds. That roughly matches the AT&T tiers. Comcast has several levels of service from 12Mb up to 100Mb download speeds.

Test the speed. At a time when there is as little activity on the connection as possible (no one streaming movies or running torrents), go to Bandwidth Speed Test or Speed.io Speed Test and see what they report. […] continued

Many small businesses and homes will feel the need to increase the speed of their Internet connection in 2011.

In the late 1990s, we began the serious movement away from our dialup modems and started signing up for DSL service as it became available in selected areas. Moving from a 40K connection to a 1.5Mb connection was such a staggering improvement that many people still think of plain old DSL as a “broadband” connection, ten years later.

Our need for a constant flow of data to the multiple computers in our home and businesses has outpaced that DSL connection. If you still have a 1.5Mb DSL line, it’s time to consider upgrading it for more speed. […] continued

Previously: First Rumbling Of The Coming IPv6 Transition

In the early 90s, a bunch of smart people in a position of authority got together and put together a replacement for IPv4 named IPv6, after many committee meetings and a few false starts. Since the immediate issue was the shortage of numbers looming on the 20-year horizon, let’s look first at what they came up with to make sure we wouldn’t run out again.

Recall that there are 2³² possible IPv4 addresses, or about 4.3 billion addresses. With IPv4, a single address is assigned to a particular device at a particular time and we ran out because more people wanted more devices than anyone anticipated. […] continued

You’re looking at a graph that will get an inordinate amount of attention in the global technical community and cause tremendous disruption for the next few years. Let me give you a very broad overview of an issue that you hope will be solved long before you ever have to know much about it.

The Internet is built on IPv4 addresses, a scheme created in the early 1980s. You’ll recall that when you type in a domain name (“www.bruceb.com”), your computer looks up the name in, roughly, giant telephone books before your browser is sent to the “real” address – the IPv4 address. […] continued

I stand by my reconsideration of Firefox, but I think my criticism of Internet Explorer was unjust. Some of my browsing problems were likely not caused by IE at all. They appear to have been caused by OpenDNS, some settings deep in my office network that affected my Internet browsing.

Consumers and small businesses don’t spend much time thinking about the DNS servers that are working behind the scenes for them. Every time you type an Internet address into your browser (“www.bruceb.com”), the computer consults a DNS server to get directions to that site. The name is translated into an IP address (“72.167.232.68”) and your computer travels down digital highways to the numeric address. […] continued

Wireless networks are convenient and likely to be the way most of us get our network and Internet connections in the future.

Wireless networks are a huge pain and nearly incomprehensible.

Both of those things are true.

Wireless technology has come a long way since the first consumer routers with wireless access points appeared on the market almost ten years ago. It wasn’t that long ago that it seemed like everyone had one of the ubiquitous blue Linksys routers like the one above. Now we expect wireless connections everywhere – our homes, our offices, hotels, restaurants, swimming pools, national parks, wherever we pull out our notebook computers – and we’re far less likely to have any idea what color the access point is that provides the connection. […] continued

BROADBAND

While high-visibility battles are fought over health care and regulation of financial institutions, there are equally important things happening at a lower level, as federal agencies begin to reassert themselves under the leadership of people who believe in the mission of those agencies instead of seeking to undermine them.

The Obama administration recently called attention to its plan to extend broadband coverage and speeds, which (of course) includes a nicely-designed FCC web site filled with information and links. Even if you don’t spend time reading about the broadband initiative, you might want to visit the site and test your Internet connection speed – certainly not the only place to test connection speed but it’s convenient and easy. […] continued