"bandwidth" entries

Four short links: 24 April 2015

Four short links: 24 April 2015

Jeff Jonas, Siri and Mesos, YouTube's Bandwidth Bill, and AWS Numbers

  1. Decoding Jeff Jonas (National Geographic) — “He thinks in three—no, four dimensions,” Nathan says. “He has a data warehouse in his head.” And that’s where the work takes place—in his head. Not on paper. Not on a computer. He resorts to paper only to work the details out. When asked about his thought process, Jonas reaches for words, then says: “It’s like a Rubik’s Cube. It all clicks into place. “The solution,” he says, is “simply there to find.” Jeff’s a genius and has his own language for explaining what he does. This quote goes a long way to explaining it.
  2. How Apple Uses Mesos for Siri — great to see not only some details of the tooling that Apple built, but also their acknowledgement of the open source foundations and ongoing engagement with those open source communities. There have been times in the past when Apple felt like a parasite on the commons rather than a participant.
  3. Cheaper Bandwidth or Bust: How Google Saved YouTube (ArsTechnica) — Remember YouTube’s $2 million-a-month bandwidth bill before the Google acquisition? While it wasn’t an overnight transition, apply Google’s data center expertise, and this cost drops to about $666,000 a month.
  4. AWS Business NumbersAmazon Web Services generated $5.2 billion over the past four quarters, and almost $700 million in operating income. During the first quarter of 2015, AWS sales reached $1.6 billion, up 49% year-over-year, and roughly 7% of Amazon’s overall sales.

How to identify a scalable IoT network topology

Range, power consumption, scalability, and bandwidth dominate technology decisions.

HVAC Air Group in an airlift. Source: Hvac en kabelgoot

HVAC Air Group in an airlift. Source: Hvac en kabelgoot

Editor’s note: this article is part of a series exploring the role of networking in the Internet of Things.

Three types of networking topologies are utilized in the Internet-of-Things: point-to-point, star, and mesh networking. To provide a way to explore the attributes and capabilities of each of these topologies, we defined a hypothetical (but realistic) application in the building monitoring and energy management space and methodically defined its networking requirements.

Let’s pull it all together to make a network selection for our building monitoring application. As described previously, the application will monitor, analyze, and optimize energy usage throughout the user’s properties. To accomplish this, monitoring and control points need to be deployed throughout each building, including occupancy and temperature sensors. Sensor data will be aggregated back to a central building automation panel located in each building. A continuous collection of data will provide a higher resolution of temperature and occupancy information, thus rendering better insight into HVAC performance and building utilization patterns. Comparison of energy utilization throughout the portfolio of properties allows lower performing buildings to be flagged.
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Mesh networking extends IoT reach

A suitable network topology for building automation.

XBee_Series_2_with_Whip_AntennaEditor’s note: this article is part of a series exploring the role of networking in the Internet of Things.

Today we are going to consider the attributes of wireless mesh networking, particularly in the context of our building monitoring and energy application.

A host of new mesh networking technologies came upon the scene in the mid-2000s through start-up ventures such as Millennial Net, Ember, Dust Networks, and others. The mesh network topology is ideally suited to provide broad area coverage for low-power, low-data rate applications found in application areas like industrial automation, home and commercial building automation, medical monitoring, and agriculture.

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Who will upgrade the telecom foundation of the Internet?

A conference report on the IP transition.

Although readers of this blog know quite well the role that the Internet can play in our lives, we may forget that its most promising contributions — telemedicine, the smart electrical grid, distance education, etc. — depend on a rock-solid and speedy telecommunications network, and therefore that relatively few people can actually take advantage of the shining future the Internet offers.

Worries over sputtering advances in bandwidth in the US, as well as an actual drop in reliability, spurred the FCC to create the Technology Transitions Policy Task Force, and to drive discussion of what they like to call the “IP transition”.

Last week, I attended a conference on the IP transition in Boston, one of a series being held around the country. While we tussled with the problems of reliability and competition, one urgent question loomed over the conference: who will actually make advances happen?
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Three organizations pressing for change in society’s approach to computing

Talks with the Association for Computing Machinery, Open Technology Institute, and Open Source Initiative.

Taking advantage of a recent trip to Washington, DC, I had the privilege of visiting three non-profit organizations who are leaders in the application of computers to changing society. First, I attended the annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s US Public Policy Council (USACM). Several members of the council then visited the Open Technology Institute (OTI), which is a section of New America Foundation (NAF). Finally, I caught the end of the first general-attendance meeting of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

In different ways, these organizations are all putting in tremendous effort to provide the benefits of computing to more people of all walks of life and to preserve the vigor and creativity of computing platforms. I found out through my meetings what sorts of systemic change is required to achieve these goals and saw these organizations grapple with a variety of strategies to get there. This report is not a statement from any of these groups, just my personal observations.

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Four short links: 9 April 2012

Four short links: 9 April 2012

Ebooks Numbers, Data Monopolies, Single Sign On, and Large Network Use

  1. E-Reading/E-Books Data (Luke Wroblewski) — This past January, paperbacks outsold e-books by less than 6 million units; if e-book market growth continues, it will have far outpaced paperbacks to become the number-one category for U.S. publishers. Combine that with only 21% of American adults having read a ebook, the signs are there that readers of ebooks buy many more books.
  2. Web 2.0 Ends with Data Monopolies (Bryce Roberts) — in the context of Google Googles: So you’re able to track every website someone sees, every conversation they have, every Ukulele book they purchase and you’re not thinking about business models, eh? Bryce is looking at online businesses as increasingly about exclusive access to data. This is all to feed the advertising behemoth.
  3. Building and Implementing Single Sign On — nice run-through of the system changes and APIs they built for single-sign on.
  4. How Big are Porn Site (ExtremeTech) — porn sites cope with astronomical amounts of data. The only sites that really come close in term of raw bandwidth are YouTube or Hulu, but even then YouPorn is something like six times larger than Hulu.

A discussion with David Farber: bandwidth, cyber security, and the obsolescence of the Internet

David Farber offers his big ideas about where the Internet is headed: how long it can last, slaying the bandwidth bottleneck, and waiting for the big breach.

Report from HIMSS Health IT conference: building or bypassing infrastructure

lectronic record systems need all kinds of underlying support. Your
patient doesn't want to hear, "You need an antibiotic right away, but
we'll order it tomorrow when our IT guy comes in to reboot the
system." Your accounts manager would be almost as upset if you told
her that billing will be delayed for the same reason.