On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 11:13, Marty Ferguson wrote: > All... > & Jon Carnes take note. > > Robert Cringley exposes a useful but somewhat disruptive > application for this device. > > http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040527.html > > Ammend the closing paragraph with this. > ...a school or a church *or a non-profit Linux User group*... > > Marty >
Yep, we had a conversation off list last week about this. I agree with most of what he's said - and indeed he's stumbled across half our marketing plan. However, his take on the expansion of these Linksys units makes the assumption that the users in the net have diverse connections to the Internet. Unfortunately the reality is that most aggregate areas pretty much use the same one or two providers. In the case of the Raleigh area that would be Bell South (via DSL) or more likely Time Warner Cable. Thus the service would NOT be more robust and the folks sharing the connections of those with Internet access would actually bog down the overloaded limited neighborhood systems - and - violate the users agreements of those Internet providers. Other than that, I like his analysis, and he's right about the packet shaping ability of these little guys. We've already been putting packet shaping routers (at $400 a pop) out at SoHo customers to help with their VoIP. Unfortunately, that's only a partial solution. Another part is having a VoIP gateway at the ISP used by the customer (in our area that would be two gateways - one at TWTC and one at Bell). Both these measures help tremendously in delivering VoIP out to broadband users, but those users are still at the mercy of their neighbors random peak demands - which due to computer viral outbreaks can come in simultaneous waves. A recent virus did stress TWTC's internal network (a few weeks ago) and it caused severe voice quality issues with many of our SoHo customers. As a counter-point, our Direct Connect customers (those that get their Internet access directly from us) had no voice problems at all - though their data networks crawled to a slow snails pace till they rid themselves of the viruses. Our managed network gives voice priority and keeps the voice on its own private network which never touches the Internet. So until the viruses learn to act like SIP packets, and can ferret out the ip addresses of our Soft Switches, our voice traffic will remain unimpaired by such problems. It's unfortunate that they shipped the WRT54G with an obvious bug - <tongue firmly in cheek> maybe next time they'll use OpenBSD as the os instead of linux </tfic>. Should be a pretty easy fix though - just add a firewall rule to only allow direct port 80 and 443 connections from the LAN interface. Take care - Jon Carnes -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
