If you have taken the time to understand the offering from various service providers you will have noticed how the services seem to be cheaper when you opt for more than one service from a single service provider. And you may wonder if this is just a marketing strategy to get the maximum possible business from you or do the service providers really do make a saving and pass on some of that to you.

That you wonder is quite understandable because modern technology in the field of information and communications has been moving forward fast and it is difficult for a lay person to keep up with technological developments. The fact is that there has been a growing convergence between various information and communications services. They all now require a similar hardware set up and software to leverage that fact has been developed and is being continuously refined making the convergence higher. This is bringing the various service types closer. Once the technology has created the momentum for convergence the realities of marketing the services give the convergence a further push. And you get bundled cable packages of various service types.

We tend to buy similar products from the same vendor. For example we will probably have a preferred vendor for home appliances, writing instruments, clothes and so on. In modern market driven economies marketing costs are quite high and spreading them over several products or service types makes a lot of sense. Therefore the marketing realities give a further push to convergence.

Finally there is one further cost saving that is fueling convergence. This is the administrative cost of managing and supporting a customer. With ever evolving service levels managing a customer well is a significant cost. When a customer subscribes to more than one service type a lot of these costs get reduced.

Therefore you know there are significant savings enjoyed by the vendor when a bundle of several service types is included in cable packages. These savings are passed on in various forms to the end user. It can be a very visible form such as a lower cost or a greater usage limit. Alternately the benefits can be passed on in a less visible manner such as the company might use more expensive hardware and give better service reliability which it can now afford thanks to the savings made due to convergence. You can find the best cable packages at www.bestcabledeals.org .



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

Wikipedia says that the Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. What you see in the title image taken from The Opte Project, is just a fragment of a much larger internet map. Obviously, it is impossible to map all computers connected to the internet. Thousands of them go down every day while new ones replace them. The fact remains -- internet is growing.

It is also virtually impossible to determine the "birthday" of the internet. A simple search on Google will give you plenty of different opinions: some say that it is over thirty years old while others argue it is more like twenty. And yet, for the purposes of this article, let's just say the internet was born on 6th of August 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee has introduced his idea of the World Wide Web at CERN laboratories in Switzerland. After all, to many casual users the whole complex structure of the internet is reduced to daily typing-in those three magic letters into their browsers -- WWW.

Let's go back and see what people thought of the internet before it was born. Interestingly enough, it seems that people cared about e-commerce more than they did about information sharing. The first video is from 1969 and it rather accurately describes the idea of e-commerce. Of course, the way it is visualized looks funny to us, but the concepts are accurate:

Article with videos you can find in blog (resource box)

The second video is a bit more recent -- it's a news report from 1981 talking about this great new (still pre-internet) invention of reading the newspapers on your computer screen. This one is not a concept but rather a report on existing technology. Still, it serves as a great example of how fast everything evolved:

So what does the internet look like today? Well, you can take a look at the visualization again, but that doesn't help much, does it? How about some numbers then?

Asa Dotzler, the founder of Mozilla's Quality Assurance and Testing Program, did some very simplified calculations. He says:

The chart is a mash up of about 40 different data sources from usage, to market share, to installed base, for browsers, internet connected computers, and operating systems. Working through all that data, I was able to come up with something that I think approximates the Web's user growth and browser changes over the last 13 years.

Probably most "real" statisticians would dismiss these kind of calculations right away, but this chart does not become any less interesting because of that. So here it is for your judgment:

What does this chart tell us? Well, first of all, there are around 1.2 billion (almost 1.4 based on Wolfram|Alpha) internet users world-wide. This is around 20% of the whole world's population. Also, it is rather interesting to note that while Firefox and other browsers were gaining popularity, it wasn't really at the expense of Internet Explorer. IE's usage simply slowed down, meaning that new internet users chose alternative browsers such as Firefox more often. However that's not what this article is about, so let's just leave it here.

In just under fifteen years the internet has become an integral part of our daily lives. As we have said before, nowadays the internet is (re)defining every aspect of our daily lives: form economy, to social life; from the way we do business, to the way we have fun. Most of us probably do not imagine going a day or whole week without internet access. To some of us it has become an actual addiction and there are even clinics that specialize in treating this disorder alongside with gaming and computer use addictions.

So what awaits us in the future? It's hard to predict, but there are some things that we are quite certain of. Obviously there will be an even bigger spread of internet-enabled consumer electronics. Having a tablet PC, PDA, or internet enabled phone is nothing new today, but what about internet enabled toasters and refrigerators? True, all this technology exists already, but it's not that wide-spread.

Technologies, enabling us to connect to the internet will evolve for sure. At the very least, existing technologies such as Wireless-N protocol and WiMax will become more popular.



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

Wireless Access is getting more and more popular for Internet connectivity these days. But by its very nature, there some huge risks inherent within the technology. We present you some of the useful tips on how you can achieve wireless internet security with some basic steps.

Wireless internet security can be achieved easily. It is very important to have a secure wireless connection because it is one of the most susceptible ways through which a user's computer can be infected with a spyware or a virus. Data security has been one of the big issues that have been always associated with Wi-Fi networks. Hackers are always looking for an unsecured wireless connection to take advantage of it.

Here are some of the steps you can take to make your wireless internet connection secure:

1. Whenever you setup a wireless connection, you must change the default login information. Make sure that the new login information you create cannot be cracked easily by hackers.
2. When you disable the broadcasting of your Service Set Identifier (SSOD), your wireless network cannot be seen by anyone and cannot be accessed by anyone.
3. WEP, WPA and WP2 are data security protocol that provides highly powerful security to your wireless network.
4. Make sure that firewall is installed in each and every computer present on the wireless network.
5. You must turn off your router as well the Wi-Fi internet connection if you are using it.
6. If you have a small wireless network at home or office, you can feed MAC addresses into your router as well as in your access points so that there is no communication whatsoever between hosts that are a part of a Wi-Fi network.
7. Disable assigning dynamic IP address by deactivating DHCP service. You can manually configure IP address, subnet mask and other relevant information in all the hosts that are a part of the wireless network.
8. You must also make sure that the remote administration service is not enabled. If it is enabled, anyone can access your Wi-Fi network.

The above mentioned steps can easily help you achieve wireless internet security. A secure wireless network is the best way to protect your computer from being misused by anyone.



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