Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (38953)	3/13/1998 9:18:00 AM
From: Steve Morytko	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

The cable modem connects to a shared LAN that has maximum throughput of 10Mbps on each segment your provider maintains. Everyone connected to this segment contends for access with only 1 subscribers data being serviced at a time. Your ISP may only maintain one segment but at some point it will make sense to break it up into multiple segments. They will most definitely over-subscribe the channel just like the rest of the world does on the more common Ethernet LAN. I wonder how many "cable LAN" (my own term as I don't know theirs) segments your ISP has and how many users on each? You mentioned that there is no problem in the local loop. If that's true you should be able to (assuming you have the 10Mb access) connect to an FTP server on the local loop in the dead of night and transfer a large file - say 10MBytes - and get nearly 10Mbps throughput. Do it 5 times. FTP server software is readily available on the net. ServU is very good for x86's. If you don't get this performance you might politely ask your ISP why not. You could try the same test when the "network" seems slow. Are you still getting reasonably good transfer rates? If not the problem is local. Traceroute is another useful performance measurement tool. Also, your ISP should be able purchase service from MCI/UUNET (in addition to Sprint) if this is "not adequate". But it begs the question - when will the customer be satisfied? Your perception of slow may be quite different from the next guy and as your explanation indicates there may be bottlenecks in the Internet that are beyond the control of your ISP (slow links along the way to slow servers; slow servers (on fast processors) as a result of poor application implementation/design, I/O bottlenecks, etc. The challenge to the local network administrator is to make sure there is minimal contention in their portion network and then provide "reasonable" access to external networks all the while balancing subscriber costs and profits (are they possible?) - a real challenge for a small ISP. If voice and video applications become popular the shared LAN technologies are going to have serious problems providing acceptable service. Ascend's (just to avoid the OT in the subject line <G>) xDSL solutions should create an infrastructure that is capable of solving some of these problems including: selling different rates of service out of the same box; having multiple hi-speed uplinks toward the core of the network; supporting enhanced protocols (QOS, multicast, ...). You may not have a better choice in your area for a while unless the phone companies get serious about xDSL deployment. I must say that your ISP's rates probably keep Joe consumer off their network with relatively high one-time and monthly costs. I am curious about what you find out. I may be relevant to Ascend too since, as I recall, they don't have cable products and cable would compete with the MAXTNT product lines. Steve