August 2008 Archives

Comcast just announced that it will begin limiting bandwidth usage for their residential customers. In other words, they are going to limit the amount of information you can download.

A download is anything coming to your PC from another computer on the internet. That could take the form of the web pages you visit every day to online radio and video usage to programs you might download.

I realize this announcement hits residential but I also know that in the early days of DSL in Cincinnati, there really was no distinction. There are still churches and ministries in greater Cincinnati running on what is effectively residential DSL.

The big deal is that these "residential" users are multiplying their consumption by the number of people on the network.

No worries yet, Cincinnati Bell / Zoomtown and Time Warner Cable have not yet instituted such constraints. It wouldn't surprise me if they do in the future.

Cincinnati Bell is rolling out some newer affordable technologies. Time Warner Telecom (no longer related to Time Warner Cable) has had a similar and attractive T1 based solution for a few years now. Pricing is very comparable when you include telecom needs. May be worth taking a look.

I can hook you up with a good rep at Time Warner Telecom.

Now is not the time to panic, but it is good to be aware of what could be coming for us.

Stay tuned.

I'm really intrigued by a service called Open DNS. I'm intrigued because of it's claim to offer content filtering for free. I've installed it on my laptop and so far am pleased with my experience. I'm hearing at least a little controversy surrounding the service due to privacy concerns -- some entity has access to the site's I'm visiting. Not a big one for me because I more-or-less assume that people have access to that data anyway -- after all the internet is about network traffic being routed through a gazillion devices on the internet, many of which are very capable of logging my activity.

Anyway, back to the subject. I'm wondering if it is as high a quality a service as perhaps Safe Eyes, at least on the content filtering front. I resell the Ethershield product, but perhaps OpenDNS is just as effective?

Let me know if you have any experience that helps.

This probably doesn't matter to most readers of this blog, but if you are involved in web development and haven't heard, this is for you...