Focus 580; Whats New in Using Computers

Good morning this is Focus 5 video morning telephone talk show. My name is Jack Brighton sitting in for David Inge who returns tomorrow during this hour of focus 580 will be talking about computer technology a variety of issues that pertain to using computers technology that is coming down the pike and how that may affect us those people who use computers our guest for the hour is Graham Gibson. He is president of Computer Training Corporation around the Kansas City area computer corporation provides a variety of professional training and tutoring services around Kansas City and Independence Missouri and also operates a bulletin board system and Internet service provider home BSN home ISP. He joins us every once in a while by telephone to take your questions about using computers in a variety of other issues security wireless things that we will be dealing with or are dealing with as consumers in the computer realm. The point of this program is to answer your question so if you'd like to join the conversation all you need do is call us around Champaign-Urbana the phone number is 3 3 3

9 4 5 5 That's 3 3 3 WRAL. If that makes it easier to remember we also have a toll free line. Anywhere you hear us 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 again around. Peter Bennett any time during this hour you can call us at 3 3 3 W I L L toll free elsewhere. Eight hundred two two two. Well. Graham Gibson Good morning or good morning how are you Jack. Doing fine thanks once again for joining us. My pleasure. Maybe to start the conversation we could talk about some of the things that I know you were interested in and I think a lot of people as well in the computer realm and one of those is wireless. Certainly it's emerging as one of the leading technologies to allow people to escape the arborist charges of the telephone network. Right. You know the telephone network has always been designed on the concept of you pay for distance and you pay for

time and the mentality of the telephone companies is is kind of stuck in that mold. They always want you somehow or another to pay for this in some time. And the Internet is designed for. For one one charge to gain access. Basically full time. And over any distance. And so the wireless the wireless option gives you the ability to bypass the telephone company as a delivery mechanism you don't have to use their wires for high speed DSL and you also don't have to use the wires of the other entity they can get you high speed connections. The cable company. Now cable is actually a good fast reliable and inexpensive mechanism to get high speed internet for individuals at home. In the price class of a home user who's just using

casual amounts who also takes a cable service. It's a good deal. But when you start looking at it from the standpoint of business it starts breaking down fairly badly because of cable delivery of broadband is basically putting you want to party line and you're on the same network essentially that everybody else is on. And unless you take specific precautions you can find yourself with people browsing your machine that you think are just your neighbors. Right. We can talk more about that certainly and I want to ask you a couple questions about because I have a cable modem home as well actually and I'm not running a business but anyway in terms of wireless then if not the phone call. But even the cable companies who will be providing primarily the ISP as a matter of fact a new set of initials says it has developed w ISP for wireless Internet service provider and currently there are about seven hundred fifty five of these companies out there covering the broad spectrum

of the US real estate. I'm at a wireless based company basically puts up a pop up point of presence just like a telephone system hop but instead of getting all of the phones in that particular calling area they get all of the real estate around them for a circle of up to five miles radius. Now some are or some are designed on Three Mile cells particularly in a heavily populated metropolitan areas. Because if you make yourself too big then you limit the number of people that can use that particular cell. But generally speaking three to five mile radius around the transmitter site here in Kansas City for instance we started in March of 2000 with one transmitter site around our office and we now have nine covering close to. 40 percent of the Metro line. So anybody that's in range of those

transmitters can get this high speed signal that's beamed from our. Our network operations center to a tiny little card that is just slightly larger than a credit card. That card actually has the capacity to receive the signals as fast as 10 megabits per second but most people don't order Internet service that fast. It's fairly expensive to get 10 meg service but a mag a half or so at the speed of a T1 line. That's a very popular offering and for a business of anywhere from ninety nine to one hundred ninety nine dollars a month typically for a T1 which is like 1.5 megabytes. That's right and the one brought in traditionally from the telephone company is typically sixteen hundred eighteen hundred dollars a month when the local loop is considered which is the piece of wire they get from the ISP to you.

Now that's download speed what about upload is it the same. It's typically wireless and symmetrical service it goes in both directions at the same speed. Now of course that price would not include services too. To allow you to resell I mean a resellers of course are going to use significantly more capacity in that case you're probably looking at five to six hundred dollars a month because of the resellers going to love that pipe all the time. I have but for for a business that's going to use it 95 then that that sort of scenario usually get a couple hundred dollar price. OK a couple questions about how this all works. You say that there are seven hundred fifty five current ISP that are providing wireless around the country probably growing pretty quickly. Yes. Now are these independent ISP is or are they you know the companies that provide you know cellular telephone service with the cellular telephone operators you have a way to bring Internet to you usually

through the cell phone. But it's very slow. Typically the speed of nineteen point two k bits per second which is roughly a third of the speed of a typical dial up modem. So I know you are companies are not really getting this technology. It's the ISP that are making it happen right now. Now what will happen is the same sort of thing that happened in the early days of cellular. I originally there were there were 50 or 60 cellular operators out there and then they started pulling together and growing and building national networks and that will happen with the wireless industry too. But at the moment wireless is a local phenomena and you put up a transmitter and you get the local real estate around you. And until that infrastructure is built out somewhat more substantially I don't suspect it will see many national networks. It's our plan here in Kansas City to to build our system out to 50 transmitter sites.

By 2003 which will cover the in the metropolitan area entirely and then we have a we have an alliance program called the Air Corps alliance that allows other wireless operators to share our Pops and allows their clients to roam through our network. And it also allows the sharing of frequency information because most of this wireless information is based on a unlicensed piece of spectrum that's called the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum. This spectrum was available because it is the same frequency in which microwave ovens operate so nobody wanted to pay a large chunk of money for a piece of spectrum that could be interfered with by anybody's microwave oven. Consequently the spectrum has been set aside for industrial scientific and medical use and these wireless transmitters are one of the many uses for that

spectrum. I know we have that we have gotten very good at making the transmission distances increase rather substantially. When the when the technology was originally established based on the specification called the ATO 211 spec the distance involved in the receiver transmitter was on the order of 450 feet. We now have. We now have these radios operating as far as 11 miles. So we've taken that original technology and pushed it out quite a bit although the practical working distance as I said is typically 3 to 5 miles. OK now given that you're using part of the electromagnetic spectrum you said two point four. Heard of something like that too. You know to send these packets over the air. The band with available in this region. Enough to

serve for example. Everyone I mean is that you or are there limitations on the number of people who can get wireless right. There are limitations on the number of people that can get it and typically a single wireless transmitter site can handle a maximum of 96 customers. Now the solution to the problem. Well what do you do when the 97 customer comes along is you cranked down the power of that station so that you are only serving the 96 and you pick up that other person in a new transmitter station. If you build near them. So by building more and more cells and then reducing the power transmitted to those cells you get eventually to the point where perhaps your 96 customers are in one apartment building. I the. And that certainly would be the case in very dense areas like New York City with a population density of 23000 people per square mile. Can I.

The closest urban center to youa population density is about twenty three hundred people per square mile. But in Kansas City it's only about 300 people per square mile we have a very geographically dispersed city. And so because of that it's wonderful technology for here and for for medium to light density areas and wireless is is a perfect solution because of the number of customers that are available from each telephone wire center makes it very difficult to recap the investment involved in installing DSL which is why DSL deployment has been very slow in a lightly populated area. Well it also would seem to that wireless Internet access broadband access would help a lot of the rule areas a lot more certainly and there are number of companies that are developing to service that market. In the Kansas City area there's a company called Cain at that is. Currently servicing communities like Baldwin Kansas with a population of about 20000. That kind of population

density works reasonably well for a single wireless transmitter in a town and then there's a company out of Iowa called Prairie I naturality as it is also developing the technology in a third company called invisible and that is also developing technology to service the rural market so there are a number of companies that are forming to service that rural marketplaces. It actually is easier to service a rural marketplace. Wireless than it is to service a major Metroplex because of the I the cell size is well suited for a small town compared to doing a larger area. And can the city I have 96 square miles to cover. And so the number of transmitters that I need is significantly greater than the number of transmitters that would be needed say for Emporia canvas or. Or a town like Springfield in Missouri. I've also heard the satellite technologies being used for broadband Internet access in fact

that huge corporation in some other big companies are launching these satellites from a ship in the. The Quitter to produce the launch cost to put up these broadband satellites. Do you know that's true. One of the things that's happening right now to solve the satellite problem which is a problem of time. When I get when you are charged you are working with a satellite. You have the distance up to the satellite and then the distance back down. This is this time that it takes to get the signal back and forth is called latency and for a transmission to a geosynchronous satellite one that stays over the you know as a as the orbit progresses. And that time lag is almost a half of a second and that's the problem with satellite technology today when you click on a link on a web page waiting half a second seems like forever in human

terms. It just doesn't seem to respond very quickly when it doesn't respond it's fairly quick. But there are a couple of issues there one is the total capacity of the satellite the satellite for instance is currently servicing North America has a total capacity of 16 megabytes it can't do more than that in total bandwidth and so on. Even if you're getting your 256 K chunk of that download speed when the total capacity gets 16 megs of everybody using it you start slowing down just as cable in with the 400 people surrounding you getting served by the the same fiber feed when they all get on while you can suddenly slow down quite a bit too. So. So that's a bit of an issue and what they're trying to do with these new satellites is it is loaded by low earth orbit. Instead of 23000 miles up a couple of thousand miles that will have a much faster response time. But satellites in that orbit don't

stay over you. They they have to be moving very quickly in order to maintain orbit. And so you need a lot of those satellites in a mesh network to make them work. And that technology is just now emerging. It's. It holds promise I certainly hope that it will be a solution. But from the standpoint of a of a Metro Network a terrestrial fixed wireless still is working quite a bit better. Yeah well with all these different options. As you know you've got DSL cable modems traditional you know phone modems wireless satellite I mean how does a consumer find their way through this thicket to make good choices about how they're going to access the internet. Well basically it's a question of how fast do I have to connect. Do I have to connect all the time. And also how secure does my transmission have to be. I dial up modem is an excellent solution for a lot of people I mean if you're just doing a little email or an occasional research paper things like that paying

less than 20 bucks a month to get on the Internet it's not a bad deal. Particularly considering that you basically can stay on all day on all nights with most service providers for that 20 bucks which is which quite frankly if you do that if they're paying you to be a customer Internet service providers look to have anywhere between seven to 10 people using the same phone line and since. Since commercial rates or phone lines are run in the order of 30 to 40 dollars a month if you're on that line 24/7 that that provider is paying you to be a customer. So the dial up is really quite a good offering if you are a casual user now. When you're when you're a little bit more involved do you say we have multiple machines you're running a home office or something like that or your. You're having to be connected to the net all the time then some form of DSL or

wireless makes sense if you're in business and if you're a home user cable makes sense. Now the question that the home users with cable have to take is to make sure that they do not have File and Print Sharing turned on and bound to the TCB IP protocol. I know that's a mouthful. So let me see if I can make sure simpler TCAP IP Transmission Control Protocol Internet Protocol is the set of rules that makes the Internet work. Without that set of rules not the first piece of email would occur. You know one could see a web page. It basically says how the signals are going to be routed from one computer to another. In that set of rules there are choices that you can make on your computer. You get to them by going to network neighborhood. Right clicking on it and going to properties and then selecting under the TTP IP protocol bindings and under that you should only have client for Microsoft networks checked off of your Windows machine

and not have checked File and Print Sharing because you have that checked. Then somebody that's a neighbor you know six blocks away could be browsing your machine and reading your files which just really isn't a very good idea at all. And they they I mean they may not even know that they're doing something wrong they're just drilling down on stuff on the they think is on their machine. So it may not even be something nefarious but you still don't want to know what have them know what your Quicken figures are. So that's a precaution that everybody that's using cable modem should take the. The other solution is to get a personal firewall. There are a number of very good personal firewalls out there. I like black ice defender. It does a superb job for the guy handling security for people that don't know a lot about security. A hardware firewall. I know that's a software for you and if you just go to a search engine and put in black ice it'll take you to their website.

OK well a couple of questions I'll follow up on that. We're you know actually approaching our midway point in the program already I want to reduce our guests were talking this morning during this hour focused 580 with Graham Gibson he's president of Computer Training Corporation of Kansas City. He also operates a home ISP and home PBS Internet service provider in the Kansas City area and we're talking about a variety of issues that pertain to computers internet access using both. And questions are welcome if you'd like to join us. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. That's around Champaign-Urbana. Anywhere else 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. We welcome your questions as well. But I have lots of my own so we'll forge ahead. And do the mentioned hardware vs software far wall what's the deal. Prince primarily cost a software firewall usually can be had for 30 to 40 dollars in hardware firewalls sometimes are several thousand dollars. If you're if you're a large business invest in a hardware firewall it's worth the investment.

But if you're just a home user basically you just want want people on your machine and the software will do a perfectly good job of keeping the casual hacker off. Most of you know it's a question of how much security do you put up of your bank you put a lot more attention into your vault than if you just somebody that's trying to keep people from walking in the front door of your house. So use appropriate measures to protect your data now. The best thing that anybody can do of course is to have good reliable backups. And unfortunately there are many people out there that think their original source disks represent a backup and they don't and the hard drives have gotten so big today that backing them up on a floppy is just about impossible. We're recommending to clients now that they get removable hard drives to back up their data. I or Again I get a. Tape of some sort because anything short of that they just won't back up. And that's an accident waiting for a place to happen.

We have a caller waiting on let's talk with them this is someone on a cell phone on line number one. Good morning you're in focus 580. Good morning. Good very informative program. I live out in the country about five miles from my internet server. I've got a 56 cable modem but unfortunately I can still get more than 26 for yes. The problem is that telephone technology is severely affected by distance and the distance that you're operating at you're almost certain to have one or two loading coils or an amplifier in your line. And when those components are in place you're basically stuck if there is a trick that works in some telephone dialing areas. If you order digital caller ID I would say the features that are associated with that sometimes force the phone company to come out and put a new interface on your house.

Because since it's a digital service it doesn't work very well if you're dirty analog phone lines and then a month later cancel it they never come back and take out the old wire. Terrific address. Could I go with the satellite at least to improve my download speeds. Oh absolutely. The human satellite for instance currently uses telephone return your signal goes to their their control center by telephone slow because of course you're requesting your elves and so on. And then the return speed comes back to either 200 or 400 k but the second 400 gains a pretty good feed and the the service is fairly reasonable So now you can also couple it up with a satellite television receiver killing two birds with one stone so for somebody that that's in your position right now I think that probably a good solution the Ultimately some wireless

provider will get to you. Okay terrific. Thank you sir. Thanks for the call. Just returning briefly to the issue far walls I have heard from some friends of mine who can attract the stuff that you know one of them has a piece of software they can actually track the people trying to hack into their computer. Yes and apparently there are people out there 20 do this all the time. Exactly. Just just just either for grins or malice or whatever. It will a lot of them are just looking for somebody that hasn't been careful enough to lock the door. Yeah and when they find a machine they'll download the contents just to see if there's anything interesting there. A lot of times are looking to pirate software or a lot of times are looking for financial data. Sometimes they're just out and out spying sometimes or just being nosy sometimes or just doing it because they can. You know it's it's a sad commentary on the fact that there are a lot of people out there that seem to just

have too much time on their butt. The fact of the matter is that today anybody can be a hacker All you need to do is go and grab. Some of the software that the good hackers have written so that other people that don't have any skill in that area can go and snoop on machines and that software is widely available on Fortunately the. You know the reasonable levels of a caution that you can take. First of all if you don't need to be connected to the net 24/7 need you don't have to have your computer on all the time you can. You can keep it off until except for when you're on it. Although it's actually better for the machine to be there to be left on it. It's from a security standpoint it is best to turn it off. So if you if you have concerns about that area I'd get at least a personal firewall 30 or 40 dollars is

is not very much to spend in order to. To basically lock the door. Now when you start getting a little bit more sophisticated and have a large number of machines you can hide behind what's called iMap addressing a nap stands for Network Address Translation. It takes a real IP number of the Internet Protocol number that your ISP loans to you that actually has your machine's telephone number on the network. And take that number and translate it to a number that is not radical because that number is not right out of all your machine cannot be brought out. So. They can't come any farther than the little device that's doing the nav translation. There's a very good one made by links that's made specifically for use with cable modems. But it also works with the cell on wireless and it's about $100. You can find it in the Best Buy and the

if it's called a cable DSL modem that has naps translation in it and it also does another trick called DHC P and the other set of alphabet soup. DCP stands for Dynamic Host Control Protocol which is a mouthful but what it means in short is that it's a machine that will hand your computer a valid address on request so you don't have to know anything about setting the numbers of your machine. So if you get a little box you can plug it in between your DSL or cable modem and put as many as two hundred fifty six machines on your network anywhere you want and they'll automatically respond and get the right addressing almost any competent a computer technician can set that sort of thing up for you and it's a good way to keep your machines from being browsed by somebody else because you're no longer at an address that they can see. I actually got one of those. A few months ago to use with my cable modem

and hooked up both my Mac and PC to the to this this cable modem router thing and both of them have Internet access and I didn't have to set up some kind of weird network that would try to link the Mac with the PC. Right right there worked very well. Yeah. Well phone calls again I'll mention the phone number of people have questions about any of this stuff or anything else related to using computers 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 that's the champagne Urbana number toll free anywhere you can hear is 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. And while we're talking national numbers I mentioned that how my AP is a national system we have dial up and twelve hundred cities across the United States are great and if they somebody wants to find out if we have a number in your area just go to my AP website about how my AP dot com and hit the location but I don't think we have a phone number here. Well very good there's a lot of other good resources on your site and noticed you're affiliated with the Project Gutenberg for example.

Yeah we're a Project Gutenberg mirror site and we also are a we're the two cows affiliate in Kansas City two cows is an excellent source of shareware software. Good good. Well if anybody wants that to I've got it written down as well. Home home aja speed dot com com very good. We have a couple of callers lining up here. We'll go next to a listener. On line number for sure from I guess is that right. Good morning on focus 580. Yeah thank you. Hey I have a question about pay back up for the home user a home business. Is there a cheap solution out there. Well unfortunately the tape backup solutions are almost as much as getting a removable hard drive which has come to be my favorite way to do it. You can get a hard drive in a tray that will slip into your machine and back up your entire machine. I don't know what and how big a drive you have but you know you can do a 20 gig drive on a removable tray for less than $250. And by the time

you sister is typically a hundred seventy nine and a bunch of tape you're in about the same neighborhood. The removable drive is is much faster. The the only thing is that if you want to you have an offsite backup you need two of them. So that might pose an additional expense but it's it's a good fast way to do it on tape. Seagate makes an excellent tape backup unit that will do either eight or 20 gigs and the tapes are readily available. If you check with your local computer dealer they can set you up. Well Paul I apologize the last caller we're getting some really bad telephone line noise so I had to drop that to avoid that. We have another caller will get right to you in Champaign on number one. Good morning. Your own focus 580. Hi you just answered a question about using the digital caller ID to increase your line speed. I was curious as to how much you would expect to increase if you have 56 came out.

Well typically 56 K modem will will attach an add an average to working distance of 5000 feet in about 43 K.. I said no. If you're getting 43 to 45 k that I would say that that's probably what your your net gain is going to be. So it's usually connecting around 31 I might see an increase. Yes you might you might go as high as far as 43 to 45. OK great thank you. Thanks the call. Now these speeds with ruin a lot of numbers but they relate to quality of service in a variety of ways for example optically we talk about streaming audio and video on the Internet. Right which we're doing and you know I'm involved in a lot of attention to our highest bandwidth stream that we're. We heard on the Internet right now on the show is 64 kilobits per second which is to my ear a considerably better sounding than our radio era signal on the AM band 64

K is a high quality audio signal by wire line. It is the the channel speed for an ISDN channel and interestingly enough almost all ISPF provide their service through an ISP calling bank that provides an ISDN connection and then drops back to the various speeds of analog as it goes. So every time you're calling the end you're basically connected to a 64 K port and then the the Service backs off to whatever speed your phone line can support it. And for the chap that was called in earlier that was twenty six four which is. It may not matter really real fast. You know it's about two point six K. download speed. And to give you an idea on on wireless we typically see 80 to one hundred twenty K download speeds. So there are big differences

in speed when you're talking about dial up vs. any form of broadband. Broadband in general is defined as three hundred eighty four K and above which makes it a quality of service good enough to handle video streaming with a full frame rate and that it the frame rate issue is keeping the picture from being jerky when you have slow frame rates. You'll see a picture but it will kind of move in steps rather than being a nice smooth picture. Regular television transmission is basically doing 30 frames a second and so that's what you're trying to approach is to get that 30 frame a second speed. And that's possible at speeds between 384 can't megabyte when you get slower than that. ISTM for instance at one hundred twenty eight K will do. 15 frames a second all right below that single channel ISDN to a good 56 K dial up. Will do about seven frames a second.

If you're on a twenty eight modem you're lucky to do three frames in seven frames per second nobody is really going to want to spend a lot of time watching that oh it's you know it's not really terribly entertaining. You need to be about 15 frames a second to have a have a usable picture and almost all video conferencing 15 frames a second is the minimum that they accept a standard with another call it include them in our conversation. Someone in Urbana next on line number one. Good morning you're in focus 580 County. You just aren't in Project Gutenberg. Yes. Could you tell me that you are all that you have for that. Yes w w w. USA stores dot com slash g d l w w w ws a stores stores dot com dot com slash. G d l g b l.

Right although you can go to the home ISP web page is a link there and it is a link from ISP dot com or home ISP dot com Yes the we have an extensive system of links out to others services and resources called the Midwest portal and a large number of digital libraries including the Gibson digital library is there. Would you mind if we listed it in our Project Gutenberg newsletter. Go right ahead. I just happen to be the founder. Very good Haven't you listened while you were talking and I didn't see that on our list of sites. A grand service to the world I'm glad it exists out there. I'm happy to contribute. Thanks very much. Maybe you can send me some more details for the newsletter at P.O. Box dot com. All right. Actually would work better in reverse if you would write me I'm Graham G or a e m e g r a e m e e m e. At home ISP dot com and speed. I get about 1000 emails a week and it's hard enough just to follow those rather than

oh I know that they get the same thing right. I'll put a couple bangs at the front. Thank you. OK thank you. Thanks very much for the call. Yeah the Project Gutenberg is very interesting very interesting resource on the web that has actually started. And if you want to say something about it you know I could have asked our caller actually way back at the the early part of this whole thing. Yes it was as one of the very first services on and the project has has grown tremendously in scope. The first few years there were only a very limited number of texts in the Bible some Shakespeare a few original log classic works. But now there are literally thousands of books online. And one of the unique things about the GTL is that it's designed to allow you to read all those books online rather than just allowing you to be able to download them which is a slightly different approach.

And it also has links out to great many other library resources. So for people that are interested in books and library resources it's an excellent site. There actually are a great many library resources that are available that a service that we run called the Midwest portal which has links to literally thousands of other systems and other resources new sources and you know search engines and so on a lot of people that use our system use it as a launch page so people are interested in resources on the net the midlist portal is a good place to get it which was with the oral for that Middle East portal dot com. OK good we have it. Following a band of talk with let's include them when number one. Good morning I say this is big. OK good where you said you know I didn't mean to hang up on you. I thought we were done in things that I wish you would still hear I can tell you a couple things. We're coming up on our 30th anniversary in two weeks from tomorrow

and we're going to have about 30 600 books by then we're going to do about a thousand this year just in this one year and I get this where we're doubling every two years or something the whole size of the library and there are we do about a fifth to a quarter of all the books that you can download from the internet. So they're coming up between 15 and 20000 total that you can download and some are pretty small and some are pretty big. Well that's terrific I'm glad I'm glad you added that to a conversation and this is something that you know started right here in Champaign Urbana. Yeah that started the materials research lab over the University of Illinois July 4th 1971. Well very good. We did the Declaration of Independence kind of July 4th thing this kind of happened by accident. Thematic connection there good word we're expanding into graphics and music and a couple of videos and stuff like that now that bandwidth is going up. But most of our stuff is just plain text you can read it on any computer in any program.

Now I have a question about the information that's out there such as what you're describing with Project Gutenberg and that is as good as technology changes. How does the accessibility of this information how is that affected. Well we have sites on every continent. So it's pretty much accessible now from anywhere. You used to be that if you were trying to download one of our books down to the bottom of a you were going to have trouble. Yeah lots of packets would get lost and you'd have to retry and retry and retry all night and then you might get it you might not. So that's one thing we have dozens of sites all around the world now and we probably add one on the average of every month. We just put up one in Greece one in Turkey one in bulk area going all across Europe. We've got a couple in Africa a couple in South America Taiwan the Scandinavian countries England Canada you know just kind of throw a bunch of darts at a map. Well very good. Well we should talk to you on another occasion. Sure you got my e-mail address there.

I sure do now. Good day. Thanks thanks so much for calling us. All right. One of the things that's interesting about the question of downloads and one of the reasons that we maintain these mirror sites is that when you start discussing broadband speeds the bottleneck that can occur at the network access point is rather phenomenal. Our backbone connection to the net is 100 megabits per second. So if somebody else had a hundred. For second connection you would think that I would be able to go one click click on their link and just have it instantly. But because of the congestion that occurs in the four network access points one near Vienna Virginia one Chicago one in San Francisco and Dallas. At the the the bottlenecks that can occur in handoff from one ISP to another are fairly phenomenal and the comment about getting packet loss to Chile is an example of that. It really helps if you have an

incredible connection to the net and then if that connection is also echoed out at several other points so that you can trade packets at more than just the public access points. That's called private appearing and it's one of the reasons why some a species are better than others. I privately peer with about 60 sites now so that we don't have to go in to hand off to the net and packets that were flowing for instance. Sprint is located in Kansas City and we privately peer with Sprint so any of our traffic that is going from a customer of ours to customers friends goes immediately to our our network center here rather than going and getting kicked out to Chicago or Dallas to get there. I see so you go directly through their system as opposed to going through the actual backbone of the Internet. That's right. Yeah good. And by avoiding having to go to the backbone. Yeah. You not only save money from the standpoint of

transit. Because the Internet service providers pay for their transit through the network access points but you also get a much better connection and it's much faster. The trick is to be. Equals as far as trading data because it is very expensive for the big guy to connect to the little guys so there's a big advantage to the little guy and a big cost to the big guy to do this. And so these private pairing arrangements tend to only be made between the larger networks. But it is a significant factor in how fast your internet connection is. We just have about three or four minutes left in a sort of let's call real quick will get them in 3 3 3 9 4 5. 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. I just wanted to sort of ask. As we look ahead we're going to be seeing a lot more wireless a lot more satellites a lot more wires being added to the Internet there's this thing called Internet 2 which perhaps some people have heard

about. Yes. In the bandwidth available is going to be increasing. I don't know quite a bit. I'm not sure exactly how much yet. There are there are reports and speculations out there that say that the average Internet service provider will will have at least 100 megabit per second connection. The larger guys will have a thousand megabit connection and the typical end user will have a 5 to 10 megabit per second connection. When those kinds of connection speeds are available basically all human information is immediately at your fingertips for the click of a button. That. That has rather astonishing implications I would say. Yes. It will. It will change everything but that unfortunately it will increase this whole question of the digital divide. You're not someplace where you can get that kind of connectivity or get it cost effectively. Well then you're going to have a situation of information have's and information have nots.

Well this is a major issue because is there going to be enough bandwidth for everyone who wants to participate in it. And there's an ocean of bandwidth on the backbone. Yeah. There's fiber crisscrossing the country a dozen times over and the amount of capacity on that fiber is absolutely staggering. And going up all the time as they figure more ways to modulating. The problem is the last mile connection. We're still basically an infrastructure of copper to the home and until fiber or wireless leapfrog zapped that limitation or cable then we're basically stuck. I think good news is that the technology is marching on all the time just as we went from 300 baud modems to 56 K modems. So too will we go from 10 megabit per second. Wireless connections 200 megabit per second wireless connection. It's just a question of how fast it develops the next wireless spec..

8 0 to 11 A is set to two run at speeds of twenty two megabits per second so there are there are improvements on the horizon immediately that that specification has been released and products are now starting to be manufactured under that spec. One of the interesting interesting things for consumers and we just have like about a minute or two left so we'd have more time to explore this is how we're going to be presented to the media that's going to flow through this and how that will affect broadcasting television. Obviously the right of other media that now will be available through an internet connection. Well there's going to be this great convergence of the ability to get data and a great many more program sources but as the number of program sources go up the credentialing of that program source goes down. One of the problems of the Internet right now is that people still believe things that they see in print and that's why a lot of these scams work. The if it's not a case of if you're at a new

site that that necessarily is a new site being held to a high journalistic standard. And so people do need to take with a grain of salt what they read what they read and. And check their sources and know their facts and other sources. Well that's a good place to end on and we're here at the univere time so we'll have to do that. Our guest has been Graeme Gibson he's president of the Computer Training Corporation and you can find his website actually several of them but certainly one you could start from would be w w w Don't hold on speed dot com or w w w dot Midwest portal dot com and you can find out the variety of connections he's got there with his own ISP and other sources on the web and Graeme Gibson. Thanks once again for talking with us. My pleasure. All right we'll talk to you soon. Thanks Rick.