Is there interest to provide a primer so people can judge between the various types of wide area networking, especially between the NBN and Fraudband and wireless?

Anybody want to do it?

Like this basic stuff? [smiley=vrolijk_1.gif]

http://ccss.usc.edu/499/netprimer.html


Quote:

This course requires some background knowledge about networking and operating systems. In this material we will cover some networking basics that will help you understand how some security threats work and why it is difficult to find effective solutions against them. In all network communications one machine - client - initiates communication with another machine - server.

Neferti wrote on Jan 25^th, 2014 at 7:44pm:

Like this basic stuff? [smiley=vrolijk_1.gif] http://ccss.usc.edu/499/netprimer.html ...

Obsolete. Doesn't cover IPv6.

St George of the Garden wrote on Jan 25^th, 2014 at 5:54pm:

Is there interest to provide a primer so people can judge between the various types of wide area networking, especially between the NBN and Fraudband and wireless? Anybody want to do it?

Good luck with that. The honest don't need it; the others won't heed it.

It would be interesting to find out just how many people really don't know, though.

# wrote on Jan 26^th, 2014 at 10:02am:

Neferti wrote on Jan 25th, 2014 at 7:44pm: Like this basic stuff? [smiley=vrolijk_1.gif] http://ccss.usc.edu/499/netprimer.html ... Obsolete. Doesn't cover IPv6.

It was just an example!


Quote:

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the latest revision of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 is intended to replace IPv4, which still carries the vast majority of Internet traffic as of 2013.[1] As of September 2013, the percentage of users reaching Google services over IPv6 surpassed 2% for the first time.[2] Every device on the Internet must be assigned an IP address in order to communicate with other devices. With the ever-increasing number of new devices being connected to the Internet, the need arose for more addresses than IPv4 is able to accommodate. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing 2128, or approximately 3.4×1038 addresses, or more than 7.9×1028 times as many as IPv4, which uses 32-bit addresses. IPv4 allows only approximately 4.3 billion addresses. The two protocols are not designed to be interoperable, complicating the transition to IPv6. IPv6 addresses are represented as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by colons, for example 2001:0db8:85a3:0042:1000:8a2e:0370:7334, but methods of abbreviation of this full notation exist.

# wrote on Jan 26^th, 2014 at 10:07am:

St George of the Garden wrote on Jan 25th, 2014 at 5:54pm: Is there interest to provide a primer so people can judge between the various types of wide area networking, especially between the NBN and Fraudband and wireless? Anybody want to do it? Good luck with that. The honest don't need it; the others won't heed it. It would be interesting to find out just how many people really don't know, though.

If someone can dumb it down starting from basics and using non smartarse/technical language, I'll be all eyes.

Aussie wrote on Jan 26^th, 2014 at 1:04pm:

# wrote on Jan 26th, 2014 at 10:07am: St George of the Garden wrote on Jan 25th, 2014 at 5:54pm: Is there interest to provide a primer so people can judge between the various types of wide area networking, especially between the NBN and Fraudband and wireless? Anybody want to do it? Good luck with that. The honest don't need it; the others won't heed it. It would be interesting to find out just how many people really don't know, though. If someone can dumb it down starting from basics and using non smartarse/technical language, I'll be all eyes.

I tried to think this through, but just gave myself a headache. It's a really complex subject or, more accurately, set of subjects. That's why it's difficult to avoid "smartarse/technical language".

Someone more knowledgeable than I could put a lot of time and effort into producing something that's of no use to you at all. I guess the best place to start is with people asking questions. That's difficult because how do you know what you don't know? Then, of course, we just have to hope that there's someone around, willing and able to answer.

See where my headache came from?  :P

What do people understand by the terms:

Contention
Spectrum

Also

How do you get more speed out of copper, and what are the drawbacks?

I bought my first computer in ’79. Was great, could do programming, play a game. Took that computer with me and started my first business with it, then bought another computer. One computer used for data entry, one for accounts, invoicing etc. So, two stand alone computers.

Eventually—needed to connect the computers with some sort of network. I used Appletalk which used twisted pair wires like phone wires. One network wire connecting all computers and two laser printers running through the walls of the office.

We could now copy files from one computer to another or direct a print job to which printer we wanted for that print job. That was fine, bit slow compared to ethernet but would not be fine in a business with hundreds of computers and dozens of printers: Appletalk was a “noisy” networking technology with each computer and each printer constantly sending out “I am here” signal. At some point these “I am here” signals would slow actual traffic to a crawl. The network would be congested—very heavily contended.

You could do things to reduce network congestion by installing routers which would split one giant network into a collection of smaller networks which communicated with one another.

Wireless networking is a network technology that is prone to congestion as more and more subscribers are put on one tower. Making wireless network technology faster is only a temporary fix—make it faster, more subscribe and it becomes congested again. In the CBDs the networks would have the heaviest load during the day, in the suburbs the heaviest load is in the evenings—everyone wants to use the network at the same time—this is peak load.

If a wireless network offers a certain bandwidth you are most likely to get that full bandwidth by sitting under that tower at 3.00am on a clear, dry Sunday morning! When I had ADSL in my office it slowed right down late Friday afternoon as end of week reports would get sent to Head Office and others were emailing etc friends to organise weekend social activities.

After I retired and had to make do with wireless broadband I noticed it would slow down markedly late afternoon when kids came home from school and started playing multi–person (i.e. networked) games. Now most have left for 4G my network speed has gone back to its maximum, 20mbps down and 3-4mbps up. Quite useable. The black person in the woodpile tho is that wireless broadband uses elecromagnetic radiation sent through the atmosphere and so is subject to atmospheric conditions especially moisture.

Rain, humidity provide obstacles the signal has to pass through and more and more the signal has to be resent, slowing down the bandwidth and even causing the wireless modem to lose contact and I have to reset it, up to six times an hour on really humid days.

So all networks suffer from contention, but wireless networking suffers from contention the most, is frequently congested at peak times. Fibre optics networks suffer contention too, but at peak time a FTTH network might slow down by 10–15%. ADSL suffers more congestion than that at peak times and wireless, with its thousands of subscribers per tower suffers the most from contention.

Does this explain contention clearly enough? Contention = competition for network bandwidth.

I think so... very good simian  :)

Goodoh, monkey  :)

Looking at copper, still the most common broadband carrier but rapidly becoming obsolete.

Copper wire for telephone and ADSL comes as a twisted pair, the wires twisted around each other. The reason for that is that if the wire passes some strong electric field it would shift the voltage of the wires but since they are twisted this interference affects the voltage in both lines the same and it is the difference in voltage between the lines carries the signal.

If we want to increase the data carrying capability of the copper—increase its bandwidth—we can do that by increasing the frequency of the signal, or to put it another way use a shorter wavelength. That will work, within limits but eventually as the frequency is raised higher the signal interferes with signals in adjacent pairs and “cross talk” happens. Early in my working life this happened even with voice—I would ring a number—and find myself connected to a phone call between two other, unknown people. As we raise data signal frequencies this cross talk results in muddled data being received which meant the receiver had to tell the sender (electronic receiver/sender I mean, not people) to re-send the data which obviously slows the transmission of data.

So ADSL has a fairly limited spectrum (range of frequencies) and so a limited range of speeds.

Copper also has a fairly high impedance, needs power sources etc to transmit the signal over distance. The higher the speed (56K modem/ADSL/ADSL2/VDSL/VDSL2/GFast) the higher the frequencies the higher the need for better line and the shorter the distance the signal will travel before it degrades (over a Km VDSL2 is barely better than ADSL—there are charts of this in the main NBN thread.

To get the signal through with least degradation over distance the lines and joins need to be impeccable—one bad joint will seriously degrade the signal. The copper should be low impedance and for Australia there is some bad news: Whereas most countries that have run out FTTN (i.e. VDSLx) have wires of .6mm or more, Telstra wires are a mere .3 or .42mm. Nobody (bar Telstra management and the current NBN Co board) will call Telstra wires impeccable either.

To minimise crosstalk vectoring was developed:

Quote:

In a typical copper loop, Peeters explains, the signal is transmitted over a copper pair to minimize the electromagnetic interference. ”But still, part of the signal of one customer’s wire often leaks into another customer’s, and that’s when you get what’s known as cross talk,” he says. Cross talk limits bandwidth by corrupting the signals that are transmitting information. Cross talk is theoretically easy to completely eliminate, as long as you can estimate how much one line is leaking into another. Then you can cancel out that interference with calculations performed by hardware installed in the cabinet, Peeters says. Cross talk estimation uses what’s called an error vector, which is sent from a user’s home equipment back to the cabinet. The receiving equipment there knows what the signal should look like, and the difference is a good measure of the amount of cross talk between a wire and all the wires around it, Peeters says. In the new VDSL2 scheme, the cross talk for every line in a cabinet is estimated using these error vectors and then processed to minimize the interference for them all. ”Computation for VDSL2 vectoring can be demanding,” Peeters says, because there’s a large matrix of cross talk measurements to consider. ”For 48 lines, it requires as much processing power as a PlayStation 3,” he says. But due to the decreasing cost of silicon and the high cost of digging for fiber, he estimates that the cost of installing VDSL2 with vectoring is still no more than one-third the cost of running fiber all the way to the home.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/copper-at-the-speed-of-fiber

Can we use vectoring with Telstra copper? With its relatively high impedance, poor quality wiring and joints I am not sure vectoring would actually be introduced here. (note the article quoted puts vectoring at 1/3 the cost of FTTH—beginning to be not worth doing here!

Sortius is not hopeful of vectoring working here:

Quote:

First, I’ll  look at AT&T’s vectoring & what their plan is. AT&T have slated US$3b to upgrade 1 million customers to either pair bonded/vectored services or to FTTH/FTTB. The upgrade is minimal at best, servicing a paltry 1.7% of their customer base, yet the per service cost is around US$3000, not exactly cheap for something they’ve already spent billions on deploying, & will have to spend billions upgrading soon. There’s also the whole bonding with vectoring, something that just wouldn’t be possible with Australia’s copper network: there just aren’t enough high speed data capable pairs for people to run bonded services.

http://www.sortius-is-a-geek.com/why-youll-never-get-vectoring/

(Sortius spent a fair bit of his working life working with the actual copper—sure check what he says but will find he is spot on normally.)

GFast won’t happen here, needs like 8 bonded good pairs per premises, a lot here don’t have ONE good pair—the dreaded pair gain!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lWtEA86pwQ4/UDchbd5QwXI/AAAAAAAAO2o/rPdlqNHC_9U/s640/Meerkat3.jpg

What is Neferti trying to say???  :o

I have given up trying to work that out.

St George of the Garden wrote on Jan 28^th, 2014 at 1:47pm:

I have given up trying to work that out.

Must be the ol' mysterious female thing where nothing else matters but real estate and established class systems!!  8-) 8-) Wait, ...I might get banned for that  ;D ;D ;D ;D  :-[

Well well, from ZD Net comes news of a trial of FTTB (Fibre to the Basement) with a special exemption:


Quote:

NBN Co and the retailer must both agree on the test customers taking part in the trial, and NBN Co is responsible for installing a splitter in the premises that will be inserted into a wall socket with a data line and a voice line. NBN Co will also connect an approved ADSL or VDSL2 modem in the premises for the test of the service. The conditions of the agreement state that NBN Co "will have no liability for crosstalk at a pilot site caused by, or contributed to by, the FttB pilot". The participant in the trial is also not allowed to make any claim on crosstalk in relation to the pilot, NBN Co said. Crosstalk over the copper line degrades the quality of the service on VDSL, but the government has said it would eventually explore the use of vectoring to reduce the crosstalk and improve broadband speeds on VDSL. Telstra and Alcatel-Lucent have already begun testing vectored VDSL.

http://www.zdnet.com/au/nbn-co-seeks-exemption-for-vdsl-interference-7000025538/

Vectoring just is not going to work for FTTN here, and probably won’t work on all MDUs either. All depends on the state and thickness of the copper within each MDU.

St George of the Garden wrote on Jan 28^th, 2014 at 12:37pm:

...we can do that by increasing the frequency of the signal, ...

Not exactly clear there.

Perhaps add something to the effect that the data signal is submodulated onto a carrier. It's the carrier frequency you're talking about.

I was thinking of mentioning the pattern of the square waveform.

OK will go back later and beef that up.

St George of the Garden wrote on Jan 28^th, 2014 at 3:05pm:

I was thinking of mentioning the pattern of the square waveform. OK will go back later and beef that up.

That level of detail would probably serve only to confuse the less technical. I'd also leave out PSK, TDM/FDM and the like, even though they're relevant.

Beginning to see where my headache came from?  :)

You are over thinking the issue.

BASIC as F*CK

St George of the Garden wrote on Jan 29^th, 2014 at 4:28pm:

You are over thinking the issue. BASIC as F*CK

?

**

“The performance of data uploading features strongly in a variety of case studies of iiNet small business customers,” the company wrote. “In all cases, upload performance is the key to their purchasing decision. Nowhere in the strategic review is there any consideration of upload performance to the small business sector of the economy, or at all. Any business utilizing broadband will confirm that upload performance is ‘mission critical’ and yet little attention has been given to this issue, which is strategically important to the Australian digital economy.”

Source: paragraph 17, http://delimiter.com.au/2014/01/29/policy-vacuum-iinet-slams-politicians-nbn-fail/

Yup, upload speeds the key.

Yet, while the NBN Strategic Review (SR) seemed to triumphantly debunk earlier revenue forecasts and a planned IRR of 7.1 percent as over-ambitious – and suggested that the proposed multi-technology alternative offered better return on the government's investment – close examination of the figures in the review suggest that this conclusion has only been possible through egregious manipulation of the truth.

Source: paragraph 2, http://www.zdnet.com/creative-maths-taint-nbn-strategic-reviews-revenue-argument-7000025705/

Yeah, DRAH, some of the manipulation involves:

1. Artificially slowing the rollout—this pushes back the completion date and means the NBN is deprived of revenue.

2. Making up a figure for the total cost of rolling out the NBN, so the cost went from $43Bn to $73Bn but this is a made up figure to try to make fraudband look better.

3. The cost of Fraudband was rather more than Turncoat said, hence the need for 2.

4. Leaving out the cost of acquiring the copper and the HFC networks

5. The cost of 3. is understated, does not include the two audits that will be necessary to determine the exact state of the copper and identifying exactly what wiring goes where and which pairs are real pairs and which is a “pair” made up using one good wire from two broken pairs (which rules out xDSL.)

6. Because of 5. the cost of remediating the copper is unknown (but we know it will be substantial!) The cost of Fraudband will be much, much more than the figure in the Strategic Review.

Points 1-6 are fully supported by a reading of the extracts of the Hansard of the Estimates Committee that I posted in the main NBN thread.

http://delimiter.com.au/2014/01/31/bt-hikes-fttp-demand-prices/#commenting

news UK wholesale telco BT Openreach has substantially increased the prices it is charging customers for extending fibre broadband from local neighbourhood ‘nodes’ all the way to premises, in a move which calls into question the Coalition Federal Government’s plan to use the service in its Coalition Broadband Network plan.

It would cost even more here—longer distances. And it is a silly concept—trench, run fibre all down the street, connect the house at the end of the street but none of the other houses—what a complete waste!

St George of the Garden wrote on Feb 3^rd, 2014 at 7:39pm:

It would cost even more here—longer distances. And it is a silly concept—trench, run fibre all down the street, connect the house at the end of the street but none of the other houses—what a complete waste!

"Productivity"  Oh yehhhhhhhh, party time for life  :o :'(

Hey george: can a mansion be crowd sourced for the first news ltd journo to con turnbull into saying the aforementioned word i wonder???????????

Hey, go the interwebs mate yehhhhhhhhhhhhh  ;D

BatteriesNotIncluded wrote on Feb 4^th, 2014 at 1:12am:

Hey george: can a mansion be crowd sourced for the first news ltd journo to con turnbull into saying the aforementioned word i wonder??????????? Hey, go the interwebs mate yehhhhhhhhhhhhh  ;D

Oopsie, double post umptity umpity lol   8-)

last post from me on this very important thread, promise:


dJOS
Posted 06/02/2014 at 4:30 pm | Permalink | Reply
@Renai I think calling it the CBN is even being too kind as it’s not really a Network anymore, just a whole sort of general mish mash* of obsolete technologies pressed together pretending to be a network!
I think a more appropriate label would be the MBM (Malcolm’s Bloody Mess).
*credit to Douglas Adams for this phrase


source: comments, http://delimiter.com.au/2014/02/06/nbn-dead-says-jason-clare/

...it continues of course..,

tinman.au
Posted 06/02/2014 at 5:01 pm | Permalink | Reply
True dJOS, it’s not actually a network, it’s just a policy pretending to be a network.
Best case for it’s name would be Coalition Broadband NetworkS
dJOS
Posted 06/02/2014 at 7:48 pm | Permalink | Reply
I’d say it’s flawed ideology pretending to be a nationally significant policy.

http://delimiter.com.au/2014/02/21/pressured-turnbull-agrees-aerial-fttp-trials-tasmania/

opinion/analysis
I’ve been saying for quite some time that NBN Co must seriously consider deploying more aerial fibre, based especially on the TasCOLT trial. As I wrote for Delimiter 2.0 in mid-November last year (paywalled):

“NBN Co’s Strategic Review process gives the company an unmissable opportunity to re-evaluate the early decision to deploy its FTTP network primarily through Telstra’s underground ducts. The company and its new Coalition masters must now seriously consider deploying more fibre aerially on power poles in an effort to speed up its rollout substantially.

… Tasmania has form in this area. The State Government’s TasCOLT project saw several thousand households in several metropolitan areas in the state receive aerial fibre deployments constructed by state-owned energy utility Aurora Energy in 2006 and 2007. According to a report published in 2008, the model was successful, and Tasmania gained key learnings from the deployment that would aid in future rollouts.

Now the state is proposing that that concept be extended throughout the NBN rollout in Tasmania, in an effort to ensure that it receives FTTP broadband across the state under the NBN, and not inferior FTTN options. It’s a model Tasmania has proposed before — back in 2007 and 2008, when Kevin Rudd’s first Labor administration was examining a nationwide FTTN rollout in partnership with industry, as the first NBN plan. And now it’s back.

The thing which NBN Co’s team of executives, analysts and consultants needs to realise when considering the aerial FTTP model, as compared with the underground FTTP model which it has largely been pursuing so far, is that the model makes a hell of a lot of sense not just for Tasmania, but for the wider national NBN rollout in general.”

So with the TasCOLT experience already live to some 1,200 premises in Tasmania since 2008 or so, why the hell do we need to do further trials? It’s not like the results of that trial are not already available.

One further thing I will add: It is rather audacious of Turnbull and Hodgman to try and chalk this one up as a Liberal victory. Hodgman has only just recently drunk the FTTP “kool-aid”, after all … it was Giddings that worked on the TasCOLT project back in 2005, when the Premier was Tasmanian Minister for Economic Development. And she’s been very active since that time.

That’s almost a decade that Giddings has been pushing to get FTTP in Tasmania, and if aerial FTTP does come, it will have been almost entirely on her watch. I don’t recall Hodgman having done a lot for Tasmanian broadband in that time, and it’s a little cute of Turnbull to claim that he was persuaded by Hodgman on the issue. My view is that the fact that the issue is such as huge one on the State Election might have had a teensy weensy little bit to do with it.

# wrote on Jan 26^th, 2014 at 10:07am:

St George of the Garden wrote on Jan 25th, 2014 at 5:54pm: Is there interest to provide a primer so people can judge between the various types of wide area networking, especially between the NBN and Fraudband and wireless? Anybody want to do it? Good luck with that. The honest don't need it; the others won't heed it. It would be interesting to find out just how many people really don't know, though.

Put me in the 'really don't know" column....

;D

[url]    http://delimiter.com.au/2014/03/14/reversal-switkowski-admits-tassie-nbn-contracts-specified-fttp/    [/url]