This morning during breakfast, I was reminiscing about all of my years in this business and thinking, “boy… have some things changed.” Not only have I witnessed the complete makeover of the industry, like when the Bell System divestiture happened, the rise and fall of many upstarts, and arguably the re-consolidation of AT&T, I have [...]
Netflix Evolves
June 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment
When we entered the CDN space a few years ago a central part of our “pitch” to the large online media providers was that Level 3 would help build the best distribution platform for them. Best in the sense that the performance and cost matched our customers’ needs. And we did this because we recognized [...]
An IP Engineer and Consumer View of Xfinity Traffic Prioritization
May 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment
When Xfinity announced their Xbox 360 application and said that the data usage would not be counted against our bandwidth caps, we became curious. We wanted to understand more about how the traffic entered our homes and how it might be treated in comparison to the rest of the traffic coming through the same plug [...]
Vyvx in Photos: From Stadium to Couch
February 27, 2012 By 1 Comment
In a previous post I talked about Level 3’s new Vyvx Solutions business. Ben also gave a little insight into a large event we were involved with. But I thought it would be interesting to show some photographs of elements of the video service. Above is the loading bay of a major sports stadium in [...]
Big Data and the Accidental Architecture
February 2, 2012 By 1 Comment
My wife and I have been lucky to be blessed with three healthy children. We knew we wanted to start a family when we got married and planned well for them. But, despite the fact that we knew what we were getting into, time and again I am surprised at how much different parenting reality [...]
The Myth of the Bandwidth Hog Part 2
December 21, 2011 By 7 Comments
The Internet continues to grow very fast causing network operators to complain that flat rate; all-you-can-eat charging models are no longer appropriate. Many commentators assume it is inevitable that volume of data will have to be used as a basis for charging consumers extra. The theory is that broadband is the same as other utilities. [...]
12 Voice Predictions for 2012
December 20, 2011 By 5 Comments
With 2012 quickly approaching, I figured I’d dust-off the old crystal ball and make a few predictions regarding the world of voice telephony over the coming year. 1. Mayan long-count calendar will be re-set to 2018 To the dismay of the hoards who had anticipated the final day next year (as preliminarily predicted by the Maya), [...]
The Myth of the Bandwidth Hog Part 1
December 19, 2011 By 15 Comments
It seems like every method we use to access the Internet, wired or wireless, has some sort of data consumption cap. Some of those consumption caps are used to set a limit such that an additional revenue stream can be created at higher data volumes. But other caps are used to set a level that [...]
What Do You Do With Your Old Network Equipment?
September 14, 2011 By 1 Comment
Last week, I watched a very entertaining TED talk titled “Wireless data from every light bulb”, delivered by Harald Haas. In this talk, I learned that Harald was using light pulses from bulbs in a variety of communications applications. One potential application he thought was relevant to today’s needs was to get traffic lights to [...]
The Global Internet Speedup?
September 13, 2011 By 5 Comments
There have been some very hyperbolic stories written over the last couple of weeks following Google’s announcement of a proposed enhancement to the way the DNS (Domain Name System) works. DNS is the system we all use, unknowingly mostly, that converts the web address you type into your browser into an IP address. That IP [...]
