Ones and Zeros

At this moment some of my traffic is not working at all, other traffic is fine.  Definitely a characteristic of a routing issue.  Some traceroute work is showing that the traffic that’s not working has it’s last hop at IP address 152.63.0.130, named “0.so-6-0-0.xl4.iad8.alter.net”.  That’s a Verizon IP address (they bought alternet).

Either that router at alternet is not working, or the one it’s attempting to connect to isn’t working.  Probably the latter.  Or possibly there’s an actual wiring problem.  In any case, it’s not being worked around.

The story goes that the internet routes around problems.  Like a lot of stories, it’s only partially true.  In many cases due to economics, geography, and rights-of-way, there aren’t that many alternative connections to use.   Certainly not of the required bandwidth.  And depending on router protocols used, the “routing around” part can be more manual than automatic.

The ultimate answer is to use a mesh network.  But there are technical problems in making those protocols work well, and idea meshes don’t fit with the population densities and geographical constraints of where network demand is and how cables can be run.

Microsoft is aiming high with Bing, they’re trying to unseat Google.  Or at least make them uncomfortable.  But based on my weblogs, there’s a long way to go.  I got my first reference from Bing this last week.  Virtually all the people coming to OnesAndZeros come from Google or from a non-search engine link.

So, welcome Bing!  Competition is good for us web users, and good for Google too.

Two of the basic characteristics that a network has are throughput and latency.  That is how much data can you get through a network and how fast does it take to get that data through.

In the old days of networking it was sometimes better to move data on a tape or disk by carrying it (aka Tennis-shoe networking) than it was to move it across the network. Throughput might be high because the disk or tape held a lot of data, but latency was also high. In South Africa, one company found it was faster to strap a USB flash drive onto a carrier pigeon than to use the network.

Intel supposedly did this carrier pigeon trick in the 1980’s with integrated circuit masks between their Silicon Valley offices and Santa Cruz fabrication facility.  In that case it was throughput on highway 17 over the mountains that was the problem.

But over time the internet has gotten faster and more ubiquitous.  Now we can get it on our cell phones too.  At least, when AT&T’s equipment cooperates I can.  There’s a room or two in our house that AT&T just doesn’t reach.  We miss more phone calls when we’re in the living room.

Netflix is a case study in TennisNet, or PostalNet, vs Internet.  But even Netflix has a plan to move the the Internet too.  Driven by Moore’s Law, networking will eventually rule everything right?

Maybe not.  Let’s consider wireless as wired networking requires too much infrastructure.  Moving a signal a reasonable distance requires either power or an antenna to concentrate the power in a very specific direction.  If the latter, you also need to know precisely where to point that antenna.  Antennas have size requirements too.   Sometimes bigger is better.

Having high bandwidth also requires more power or better antennas for the same distance.  Due to these power/antenna issues, networking will either require some infrastructure of wireless cells in an area, or decent power and antennas for satellite communications.

Or another way to put it: there will always be areas where low-bandwidth is the only game in town.  In those cases, Netflix postal model aka the carrier pigeon model, might work better if you need high throughput.

When we moved into our current house (quite some years ago now) I decided that I didn’t want to run cat-5 wiring yet again. A few trials backed up that opinion. We decided to try this then new-fangled “WiFi” thing. I’d been using it at work and other places.

When I put our WiFi router in we had the only one within reception distance.

Now, of course, I think there’s one per house. Ok, that’s exaggerating. But it’s not uncommon to see 4 or 5 on my WiFi scanner at the same time. Most are only turned on for a while. I don’t understand this, ours is on all the time. After all, if you’re going to look something up on Wikipedia, check on an actor in IMDB while watching a movie on TV, check tomorrow’s weather during a commercial, or verify the lyrics to a song, you need a laptop that’s just sleeping, and an active WiFi connection. (All those examples are from last night.)

But, I’m not disappointed that my neighbors turn off their WiFi sometimes. It reduces the interference for us.

WiFi routers have an “auto channel select” which picks an unused channel out of the 11 or 15 channels (depending on what standard protocol set your router and computer know). This sorta works. Near my WiFi router there’s no substantial interference from the neighbors so my router defaults to channel one. But sitting with my laptop out on the deck, my laptop does see interference.

Unfortunately, most of the other WiFi routers my neighbors have also end up defaulting to channel one for the same reason. The result is WiFi congestion, low bandwidth, and even an occasional dropped connection. It makes me long for the days of pulling cables in the crawl space.

So hence my WiFi experiment. There are three non-overlapping channels for WiFi: 1, 6, and 11. The others overlap to some extent and the overlap degrades the bandwidth a little through the spread-spectrum link protocols. But having two or three of us all using the same channel stresses the spread-spectrum capabilities too far apparently.

I’ve now set my WiFi router to use channel 6, which isn’t widely used in my neighborhood. It’s still too weak on the deck to easily establish a connection for my older MacBook Pro laptop. (However, my wife’s newer laptop and our iPhones make connections easily there.) But the real test is maintaining a connection.

So far it’s working nicely. I’m just hoping our neighbors don’t catch on and change their channels too.

(Note: I’m using the term “WiFi router” pretty loosely here and just got uncomfortable with that.  Ignore this if you’re already familiar with networking equipment.  A “WiFi router” is a combination of a WiFi point-of-presence, a router (or more accurately in my case a hub), and a firewall. All three software devices are contained in one hardware device. This device is basically a specialized computer dedicated to these software programs. We see it as one thing since there’s one physical thing to see.)