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To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (4991)	8/16/1999 10:13:00 AM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Hello Frank, > Scott, would you do a rollup of the significance and the nature and > being of: Akamai, SandPiper, InterVU, etc.?... and how they fit > into the context of what I posted? I am unfamiliar with these > entities, as you can see. I'll do my best and see if I can provide my insight. No promises! ;-) I've been following this particular group for about a year now. Not the specific companies, but the technologies that they are implementing and services they are offering. What these companies are becoming is the "networks above the network" ... almost like the CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, WB, etc. of the radio-waves world that we see on TV. But only in some respects. When a large content provider wants to provide content to a huge audience, there are inherent problems in the standard Internet model of simple "client-server". The content provider will commonly think that they need to have huge server farms, or lease them from someone who co-locates. They also then realize that to service all these web requests they are going to need to have huge amounts of bandwidth coming to those server farms. Often, this is the way that a "standard" content provider will try to solve the problem ... throw more hardware and bandwidth at the problem. And then you start to add multimedia ... ;-) The other solutions that have been developed in the labs, and that are now moving to implementation, are multicast and caching. What Akamai, Sandpiper, InterVU, and others have figured out is that they can co-locate servers throughout the infrastructure of the Internet, and provide a distributed content caching and splitting system which moves the content closer to the end-user ... closer to the last mile. And they are agnostic of carriers ... they co-locate based on where the customers are ... not who the ISP is. By using interesting tricks with DNS and modified HTML (and soon WPAD) they can transparently redirect a users browser (or streaming media player) to the "closest" server, rather than back to a large server farm. As these companies have started to get their networks into place, they are signing content providers left and right ... look at the Akamai home page to get an idea of their customer base: Yahoo! CNN GO Network, etc. This is how to serve up content ... The last part of the solution is the "pre-loading" of the servers/caches. For example, when the content provider (let's say CNN) modifies content, they signal Akamai and the new content is pulled into the distributed Akamai servers world-wide. The game in all of this is to get content that is in demand as close to the end-users as possible ... and keep rotating that content based on age and demand. There are a few more companies that are soon going to be doing this same thing, yet using satellite to broadcast the content to their caches and servers ... Oh yes, and there is another huge value in this ... the demographic data that you obtain simply being in the stream. (I have to say at this point that this is the Object Routing that I have been stuck on for years. And these are features that you just can't do with packet routing. ;-) So it seems that if @Home already has these high-speed connections, close to the edge, and is familiar with caching and serving content, then they could try to compete in this new market, or will be a target for one of them ... Does this make sense? Does it help? Scott C. Lemon

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (4991)	8/17/1999 1:12:00 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

Re: Cellular Solutions for a Rural Location Hi Frank, Per your request I am posting my nearly complete recipe for 'toll' quality cellular telephone service in a difficult setting. The difficulty is the distance, 8.8 miles and the intervening topography, a forested ridge that makes Line of Sight an iffy proposition. For the benefit of other threaders, a bit of background. I recently put into service a Nokia 252 analog cell phone. While the quality was more or less acceptable when I was outside my residence and facing the base station tower, the quality was not acceptable when I was inside the house. I ascribe most of that difficulty to the construction of the residence, which has a layer of foil covered foam insulation on the sidewalls, acting as an electromagnetic barrier. When I took the phone onto the roof, I got a high quality signal, so the solution was to place a directional (Yagi) antenna on the roof. Here are the particulars: Larsen Yagi Antenna........................10 dB Gain 32' RG8U Cable, 2 fittings...............- 2.3dB Loss Transistion Whip, 1' RG58, 2 fittings..- 1.1dB Loss Nokia "Car Kit", assumed loss...........- 1.0dB Loss Total Gain:................................ 5.6dB Gain This has yielded a consistent quality that has been regarded by the recipents of my calls as a near if not completely "toll quality" call. I am quite satified that we have achieved a success here. The only quibble I have with the system at present is a minor echo that can only be detected at my end. With the help of wireless_wonk I am investigating a few possible causes and remedies. He pointed me in the direction of an interesting discussion of this arcane subject: webproforum.com I recommend this to anyone who likes reading well written technical information that is 'layman' accessible. One bit of arcana that I find interesting is that certain pine trees in our area have a needle of such a length so as to serve as a perfect 1/4 wave antenna/reflector in the 824-996Mhz spectrum, when covered with ice. WW has pointed out that the potential loss from such a fine forest is on the order of -6 to -9dB. So I may have to wait until spring to make a final judgement regarding the antenna system. If there is a problem, the judicious use of pruning shears, chain saws or wildfire may be appropriate, just kidding about the latter, of course. :-)) Ciao, Ray FWIW, all well educated commentators stated that my original hope of re-radiating the energy of the Yagi via a second antenna inside my office would not work. At least not without very expensive amplification and the possibility of creating more echo/timing problems. So, tethers 'r us.