Okay, this whole article is going to seem a bit Andy Rooneyesque. But I just can't help it. I have to say this. What happened to concern over page load times?

Back in 1996, I subscribed to my first ISP, GNN (soon acquired by AOL) for $19.95 per month. This, of course, is back in the days of metered service. I think it included 16 hours per month of use. Although it was slow, I do know that it was a fun time to be online (as long as you kept an eye on your watch). Page loading was slow due to the 14.4k modem, but the excitement was there. I was an information pioneer. Shortly thereafter, I heard about a company called EarthLink. They were giving unlimited dialup for the same $19.95. Then came the 56k modem. I was sold!

Now, fast forward a few years to 1999. I got DSL and boy was that nice. I was surfing and downloading (anyone remember Napster?) to my hearts content. DSL truly was, as the marketers were saying: "lightning fast", with "blazing downloads". Why? Well, pages were still relatively purpose-built without too much extraneous information, advertising was used more sparingly, and you had technologists keeping us marketers in our places. After all, the Internet was envisioned as this place of free thought and free information sharing. It was a new world and the early inhabitants respected it.

I should add that besides writing articles I've done a lot of things, particularly in this area of technology. I began my career in technology back in 1996 when I began working in global Telco at a company called Concert Management Services. It was a joint venture between BT and MCI to serve large, global corporate customers with networks and telco services. Then I was at UUNET, when, at the time, it was the worlds largest Internet backbone provider. From there, well, I went to work at EarthLink, my beloved ISP, to leave the wholesale world to get closer to the customer.

It was at EarthLink where we had to do a balancing act between ad revenues and customer experience. Our ad group, bless their hearts, worked so hard to get deals and folks like me in Customer Experience (that was what the product management group was called) shot them down half of the time. Why? We were looking out for our subscribers. We were concerned about intruding on their time. They were paying us for access, not to be barraged with ads. We were concerned with page load times. On our start page, we took tremendous efforts to ensure that pages were well-designed from both a performance perspective and aesthetically.

Finally...fast forward to 2008 and the point of this article. I am sitting here on a DSL connection in my Web 2.0 world waiting for the pages to load...Java, AJAX, rich media ads, embedded videos, blah, blah, blah...Yes, the marketers have done what the early inhabitants feared and developers have capitulated because they've become obsessed with pushing the envelope. My page load times are back to circa 1996 and what am I waiting for? I am waiting on flashy content that I am not even interested in, so-called targeted ad content, and whatever else. All I want is an experience like 2000. I want my page fully loaded in under 2 seconds. Let's take a cue from the classic blues guitarists: "Less is more" my friends.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Patrick_T._Fleming

Online gaming in the UK has grown enormously in popularity in recent times and appears to be in line to be the next big thing in the broadband industry.

Plusnet has introduced a broadband package aimed specifically at gamers as company surveys reveal that around 70,000 of their quarter of a million broadband customers are frequent online gamers.

This package is called Plusnet Broadband Your Way Pro and by reducing latency and ping, has managed to put gaming traffic, together with a facility such as Skype (voice over IP), at the top of your Plusnet connection's priority list.

Lower latency and ping make for much faster and more responsive game-play, an essential requirement for successful online gaming if you are not to get "killed" in the process.

And no more of those frustrating delays waiting... and waiting... only to be shot in the back by a sniper on the other side of the world.

There are now a number of broadband packages suitable for online gaming, and it's possible to compare broadband packages for gaming online.

In fact, gaming via broadband is becoming so widespread that it is highly possible that the dedicated console is on its way out, according to Gerhard Florin, EA game's head of international publishing.

This will substantially affect those who play online through their consoles.

With an increasing number of gamers playing through broadband, Mr Florin deduces that it makes good sense for all consoles to eventually be absorbed into set-top boxes and it won't even be necessary for players to know which gaming platform they are playing on.

These changes will result in the continuing expansion of online worlds and the possibility of billions of pounds being poured into the UK economy.

In fact, it has already been forecast that the market will be worth $13 billion in 2011.

This sounds a bit of a pipe dream until one looks at the broadband scene in South Korea, where just short of half of the population are avid gamers to the extent that three TV channels are dedicated solely to gaming.

Good gamers are as recognisable among the Korean people as football stars are in the UK. Don't know about the WAG's, though!

It is inevitable that gaming popularity will explode when a staggering 90% of the population has access to broadband with average speeds of 50-100 Mb instead of the current paltry 4.6 Mb (on a good day).

With the ever-increasing popularity of gaming in the UK, it is surely only a matter of time before those speeds will be the norm here too - consumers will demand speeds and access at this level and the market will have to respond positively to remain competitive.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Shirley_Stevens

It is rather a difficult job to critically analyse and report on an e-book in as much as the critical report has to be in such a way as not to hurt anyone. I have tried my best to make this critical report in such a way as not to harm the feelings of anyone concerned.

One of the toughest internet marketing is affiliate marketing. What with the uncertainty of what is profitable today may not be profitable tomorrow. One has to be continuously awake to happenings around to remain on top in affiliate marketing. Some time back an e book know as Affiliate Project X was released by the author of Day Job Killer. The APX had record sales and is still being sought after.

The Day Job Killer, written by the same author who wrote APX and also Adwords Miracle has also got the potential to shatter sales records. When I started to write this critical report of Day Job Killer I was in two minds. I had already in my analysis of Adwords Miracle mentioned that the author is an expert in what he is talking about. He has proved this again in his latest book.
My critical report of the Day Job Killer is below.

This e books is not even 100 pages and has been written in an easy to read and understand language. No old worn out or outdated information. Neither has he given any hype. The techniques are good and used by many persons already who have started making money with this system.

The Day Job Killer may not be liked by some people since the cost of pay-per-click programme advocated in the e book can put up great pressure on their earning. No doubt Chris details the ways of minimizing the ppc costs; but nevertheless costs are high and some people may not be willing to accept this.

The free methods advocated by the author are a little tough to practice; but if you do that and succeed the methods are really worthy.

As this particular product may not be beneficial for everyone it would be advisable to buy this if you have some cash to throw. But if you are able to buy and practice the methods that will no doubt make you money.



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One of the most popular choices today among those who like to spend a quiet evening playing old-fashioned family board games is "Apples to Apples." First introduced in 1999, it became a million seller by 2003-and has won several awards for its publisher, Mark Osterhaus.

Osterhaus markets "Apples to Apples" and other board games through his "virtual company," Out of the Box Publishing. The company does not have traditional offices. Instead, employees work out of their homes-some in California, others in Illinois, Michigan and various spots in rural Wisconsin-communicating by phone and on the Web.

Osterhaus can run his company from anywhere that he can plug his laptop into a broadband connection. And since September 2005, he has been working from a rural home 10 miles outside of Richland Center, Wis. For Osterhaus and other professionals, high-speed Internet access is a business necessity. Yet in many rural areas, traditional broadband options, such as cable or DSL, are simply unavailable.

For Osterhaus, the solution is satellite broadband. The game designer gets his service from a company called WildBlue.

"WildBlue allows us to be where we are living right now," Osterhaus said. "We are in one of the most beautiful areas of Wisconsin. I can see the cattle walking up and down the hillside right outside my office window."

For people who want to take advantage of the rural way of life and get out of the city, WildBlue is a practical option. When Osterhaus moved to the area, he did not intend to do business in Richland County (pop. 18,000). But while meeting with Richland Electric to plan electric service installation for the new home, a cooperative representative mentioned that a satellite broadband option was coming soon.

Soon afterward, Richland Electric set up a demo WildBlue installation in its offices. "I brought my laptop down, hooked up and was able to do everything that I normally would do out of Madison," Osterhaus said.

"Apples to Apples" and other Out of the Box products require quality graphics and other data-heavy materials that the company's employees share with each other over the Web-and for this purpose, WildBlue's forward channel is more than adequate.

"WildBlue is freedom," said Osterhaus. "You can move yourself wherever you want to be, and that is priceless."


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Every business needs bandwidth solutions of some sort. For many businesses that require large amounts of bandwidth finding just the right solution....from a cost and application standpoint....can be a confusing process. It doesn't have to be if you understand what to base your decision on.

Like anything in information technology, it really depends on how you will utilize this infrastructure. It certainly doesn't make sense to provision high capacity transport links if you will use them for a small fraction of the day or the traffic doesn't warrant it.

I think one of the hardest things about this arena is that many times the people requesting the bandwidth are confused about what bandwidth really is. There's a misnomer that bandwidth automatically equals speed. "Well my application is slow, I need more bandwidth". Many times if a study is done on exactly what your needs are, it turns out to be a very different story from the initial conversation.

With a plethora of technologies out there for WAN and Metro services, wired or wireless customers can choose to subscribe to always on, dedicated access methods or go for a most cost effective model with somewhat "shared" topologies like Multi-Protocol Label Switching. The idea here is that you have options and each solution can satisfy any number of requirements. There's never been a better time in the industry for choices.

The best option is the cheapest one that works. Dark Fiber and Metro Ethernet, if an option, should usually be looked at first to establish a price for negotiating. I think you should focus on negotiating techniques that work to bring these bandwidths within affordable reach.

No matter how much bandwidth you are using, you will get a better deal for it at a major Network Access Point (NAP) where you have more bidders for your business, and from which you can easily shift carriers, set up failovers and redundancy, etc.. Every high end user needs their own boxes to shape traffic at the NAP, and they need them in two different racks connected to two different carriers. Accept the hit of that and you'll quickly see that the ten to thirty thousand dollars a typical urban company requires to get two boxes into a NAP (admittedly on a single dark fiber route) pays for itself in bandwidth charges in pretty much a single year. Even just to PLAN to do it and show your spreadsheet to your carrier, a project that might cost five grand to do right, will result in more than that much per year off your bill.

Think of it like any other high end purchase. You demonstrate that you're not a pushover, that you have options, that you understand the options and how to increase the number of options, and you bargain based on the bottom line of the cheapest solution you can find. When they tell you it will "cost too much to have your own boxes and dark fiber to the NAP", you snap back the lowest number you can justify, call it "insurance", and rule it out as a cost factor. When they tell you "we can monitor boxes far better than you can", leverage that into quality of service guarantees in the contract with real dollar penalties for failures or slowdowns. When they tell you "our facility is state of the art", GO THERE and count up the number of non-bulletproof windows and visible insecure perches that someone can shoot the servers from, grab the corded phone and walk over to the rack, pulling it right out of the wall and looking astonished: "how am I supposed to give someone instructions over the phone? They can't even walk to the rack! You expect them to scribble it down while cradling the phone in their neck and then go over to the box and do what I said?!?!?!?"

Basically, you must point out every deficiency in their facility or service and refuse to acknowledge that your own home-built solution would have any inadequacies, or that the competitors all have the same problems. In a high end negotiation, you must have NO mercy.

By the way, once you've got a contract with your carrier, you must be very nice to them, in total contrast to the way you leveraged like mad in the first negotiation. Don't nickel-and-dime them after you've agreed on terms, don't let your bandwidth payments get late. These people hold your crown jewels. As mean as you are to the salespeople, be that nice to the geeks.

Technologically, you should consider Storage Area Networks (SAN) if you have multiple locations in the same city, and the use of SAN links over IP which is increasingly common. Basically, the entire city becomes a vast RAID hard drive. You should also understand some of the good business reasons to adopt very high bandwidth such as reducing the number of over-the-Internet transactions which slow things down and may compromise security in favour of internal intranet transactions. Also, having as few layers of software as possible between the hard drive and the user is a major plus.

Also consider the price difference between Sonet equipment versus Ethernet. These days layer-3 ethernet switches are more and more capable for usage as a router. While Sonet traditionally is quite expensive vs Ethernet (especialy for the hardware).... dark fiber and ethernet solutions from carriers are getting broad industry support. Although I do favor Sonet for its better debuging capablities, error counters, alarms etc. Ethernet in wide area environments seems to do the jobs as well. Ethernet would save you the need to buy a decent router able to terminate Sonet and give you the choice to go with a decent layer-3 switch. Another option is 10GigE WAN PHY.....it still has all the advantages of Sonet combined with Ethernet, gives you the ability to use cheaper layer-3 switches, looks for the carrier as a normal Sonet service and works over long distances.

To look at the tradeoffs, you'll have to start by finding out what is available at your end user location. Within North America, the alternatives include ATM OC-3/12/48, SONET (and Next Generation SONET) probably more likely OC-12/48/192, and Metro Ethernet at 100 Mbps (a little slower than OC-3), 1 Gbps (about OC-24) and 10 Gbps (OC-192). Things that aren't available need not be considered.

What are the availability requirements? If you are thinking of SONET, find out if it will come to your premises as a star or ring or dual ring. Metro Ethernet might be faster but not necessarily physically diverse. Sometimes, you can be creative and use a short free-space link to get access to a physically diverse medium.

For more background and insights I suggest reading "WAN Survival Guide" and "Building Service Provider Networks" by Howard Berkowitz. Both are excellent resources.

I have worked with many customers to design infrastructure solutions that incorporate high-end DWDM or CWDM connections between datacenters. Now, this is a business solution and the common user would never dream of having a connection such as this, available to them. Other customers that I work with will incorporate leased lined anywhere from a T1 to OC3. Those connections are very much sized for purpose with a percentage of growth factored in.

The practice that I go through is to evaluate need. What are you trying to accomplish? Is it transactional based or are you replicating data for DR? Are you simply connecting two or more remote offices for the purpose of a Citrix solution? Each of these questions will result in different answers when all is said and done.

Remeber that redundancy is ALWAYS a factor in business oriented solutions. Especially as it pertains to data replication and DR/HA failover to "hot" datacenters. We are starting to see more and more of this type of configuration. I have a few customers that are fortunate enough to have multi-ring DWDM infrastructures to make their valuable data available in the unfortunate event of a disaster.

As corny as it sounds, I have to say that your ultimate solution depends on the intended usage of that bandwidth. I would also say that there really is no generalized "ideal" bandwidth solution. It all comes down to intent and budget. With today's technology in WAN (TCP/IP/FC/FCIP/IFCP) acceleration (Juniper, Riverbed, Cisco), you can transfer vast amounts of data in a smaller pipe. It really is cool technology but still requires cost justification to implement.


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