Home Appliances, Wireless, FCC, FDA and more

Recently I was provided the opportunity to “get my geek on” in the home appliance category. As our 5+ year plan for a kitchen renovation started a couple months ago, I was tasked with finding new appliances by the boss (wife).  This was a very enlightening exercise.  If you have read up on technology trends over the past decade, no doubt you stumbled across an article or two regarding built-in WIFI in home appliances.  It’s really only recently that this is starting to show up in the appliances peddled at your local Lowes or HomeDepot.  See Samsung’s latest creation - - as an example. Not only does it have WIFI, but a picture frame. Odd or not, it’s out there, and it actually makes some sense to me.

At a recent meeting I had a “hallway” conversation opportunity with Julius Knapp, who is the current  Deputy Chief of the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) .  The informal conversation started on the soon to be release Network Broadband Plan, and moved into the motivation of behind the plan. Among many other things, there is an open acknowledgement that there will be a monstrous increase in wireless devices everywhere, including homes like refrigerators.  The Samsung mentioned above would be a wireless network element in the unlicensed spectrum, but we should expect there to be built-in licensed wireless chips in appliances.  See Amazon’s Kindle as a prime example. 
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Your customers expect your website to be available to them at all times – no matter where they are in the world. In this age of “anytime/anywhere” connectivity, keeping your site visitors engaged with fast page loads, high-quality rich media, and instant response to every interaction is critical. At the same time, your company has tight infrastructure budgets to control. So, how do you maximize your customer’s experience while maintaining your bottom line?

             

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1. Effective defence takes many different layers and many different approaches. Make sure you have a layered approach to security to ensure you are as protected as you can be.
2. Patch, patch, patch. Make sure you incorporate regular patching into your IT maintenance. Making sure systems are patched as soon as possible will make sure threats are kept to a minimum.
3. People can be a problem too! Arguably the biggest security threat to a business isn’t malware writers or Trojans – it’s the staff.

1. At a time when both Cingular (now AT&T) and Verizon Wireless are competing on the network (“fewest dropped calls” vs. “it’s the network”), what does the iPhone portend for the future and how is Verizon Wireless going to respond to the iPhone? Will the iPhone usher in an era where the network is irrelevant and it’s all about the handset?
2. Are communications services of the future going to be defined by the customer equipment? If so, will they be exclusive, proprietary equipment like the iPhone? 
3. What will the role of iTunes be? In his keynote, Steve Jobs said the iPhone can be synched up with your computer through iTunes. Is iTunes going to keep a copy of the contents of everyone’s computer on iTunes? Talk about a treasure trove of information.
4. How do two leading proponents of net neutrality –|Google and Yahoo!

People often talk about the evolution of the internet with regards to social media, news, content or multimedia, but the actual process of progression and growth is far more technical. It involves the inner workings of the web, which include protocols, addresses, bandwidth, security and capacity, and the latest development in this space is the introduction of IPv6. IPv6, which stands for Internet Protocol version 6, is here and should be adopted as soon as possible. Google already runs a number of its applications on IPv6 and earlier this week added YouTube to the new protocol due to the additional security benefits it provides for its users and capability to stream a wider choice of content.

The challenge is educating customers on the benefits IPv6 offers and motivating them into upgrading from IPv4. The benefits are clear, IPv6 is four times larger in address space which means more capacity and faster connections. It also has security in-built enabling an enhanced, more secure connection and network.

Global Crossing has been promoting IPv6 for almost a decade: since 2001 it has been adopted by 20 partners and 40 customers. But despite this, many are still using the IPv4, which means they are still vulnerable from a security angle.

One of the issues concerning late adoption levels of IPv6 is there are very limited drivers to move away from four even though the capacity is running out, many people have private addresses and are therefore not filling up the public networks. Further to this, many wireless handsets don’t require an IP address and this is also having an impact on the uptake of IPv6. Another major challenge is to ensure the migration of the infrastructure across the spectrum.Read more and comment...

• Markets within the US were open with government defined demarcation between Inter-eXchange-Carrier (IXC), Local-Exchange-Carrier (LEC) and the customer site.
• Mid-Tier US enterprises did not purchase carrier delivered managed services for sites within the US as they opted to leverage their own resources.
• Larger US enterprises were outsourcing their entire communications infrastructure to large integrators (e.g.

Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is your friend....

...except when it's your enemy! Most of the time it's your friend because it's chock full of great features, but the best feature it has is congestion avoidance. Simply put, congestion avoidance was designed to allow a data transfer flow over an IP network to adapt to the size of bandwidth available while minimizing the loss of packets. Packet loss implies loss of efficiency, so TCP also minimizes waste.

Sometimes TCP is not your friend, though, and that has to do with the way the protocol acheives that efficiency. If you want all the gory details of how TCP works I would highly recommend TCP/IP Illustrated by Rich Stevens, although the wikipedia entry linked above offers a reasonable summary. The key thing to understand is that congestion avoidance is acheived through the use of adjusting the size of the TCP window and that because TCP is very chatty the latency between the endpoints is a large factor in how quickly the window can be adjusted. As a result, the maximum data transfer speed is governed by window size, packet size, and round trip latency.

I found a very handy simplified algorithm for calculating TCP throughput over on Brad Hedlund's blog.

Throughput (bps) = TCP Window Size (bits) / Latency (s)Read more and comment...

1. The FCC’s jurisdiction is unclear and potentially boundless.  This amorphous jurisdiction can only lead to more uncertainty and confusion and negatively impact investment in IP. 
2. There is a vibrant competitive market in the Internet ecosystem for backbone and hosting services.  The FCC needs to be sure that any rules do not negatively impact that competition. 
3. The proposed rules, specifically the rule that prohibits carriers from charging content providers for prioritized access, undermine the FCC’s objectives with regards to the Internet.  If content providers cannot pay for prioritized access, then they may not be able to offer high-capacity, high-resolution applications such as telemedicine, distance education, etc.  (Some parties believe this rule will eliminate CDN providers.)