FCC to vote on net neutrality

Hello, Citizen of the Internet!  Today the FCC is going to vote on Net Neutrality, something we should all (for the most part) support.  It’s expected to pass.  The problem is, now, we’re not entirely sure what all is being proposed OR if the FCC even has jurisdiction over broadband providers (which may open a whole other can of worms).  So if NN is going to pass, there will no doubt be a massive landslide of lawsuits.  What IS expected to be a part of net neutrality are a set of rules keeping providers from outright blocking legal content on the internet.  Some speculate that while this will protect the customer, it may create a loophole that will allow broadband providers such as Comcast and AT&T to charge “congestive” services such as youtube and netflix a fee to pass data through their networks – something we’ve already seen happening.  All-in-all this is definitely something to watch – especially this close to the holidays.

Comcast tries to charge fee to Level Three; net neutrality and Netflix

Ok, so here’s the deal – Comcast, whom we all love dearly, has decided they want to charge Level 3, the company that helps stream Netflix, to deliver content to their own customers.  Wait, what?  Yup.  Check it:

On November 19, 2010, Comcast informed Level 3 that, for the first time, it will demand a recurring fee from Level 3 to transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’s customers who request such content. By taking this action, Comcast is effectively putting up a toll booth at the borders of its broadband Internet access network, enabling it to unilaterally decide how much to charge for content which competes with its own cable TV and Xfinity delivered content. This action by Comcast threatens the open Internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access markets as the nation’s largest cable provider.

Grasping straws are we, Comcast?  This is kind of the opposite of what we were worried about when the whole net neutrality debate started, but it’s equally disturbing.

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Studying for the CCNA? Here are some useful cheat sheets for pros and students alike.

As mentioned in other posts on this site, I’ve been working on my CCNA certification. Now it’s no secret that this is a difficult test, and while there are many tools out there that will help you study and prepare, the simple fact that you are going to have to know the material inside and out can be daunting. It is for this reason that I’m always hunting for a better way to break down the information.  Click the link after the break.

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What is DNS Propogation?

I have received this question many many times over the years as an internet … person… most recently from our new graphic artist contractor, a fine young man from Joseph Turner Graphics. And it’s a very valid question, since people are often told things like “Your website won’t be up until DNS propagates which could be as long as 72 hours.” 72 hours! This is the age of the Internet! 72 hours is an enormous amount of time. Why does it take so long? Why is the range so gaping? I mean if it was EXACTLY 72 hours, that’s more believable than “could be one hour, could be 12, could be 39, could be 72”.

Unfortunately, there is a reason. And it’s one that no one has control over.
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What in the world would we do without Akismet?

The world of online marketing is split into two separate and occasionally difficult to distinguish groups: The first has legitimate products and services and attempts to spread the word about their products and services to the attention of the masses. The second sprays the internet with unsolicited garble and hopes that enough suckers will click thereon to justify their sad existance. Predominantly, they peddle pills, porn, or poker.

This article is about the latter… and queue the Law & Order music…
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Automatically starting and broadcasting in Wirecast

Recently, one of the local radio stations here in town wanted to stream their stuff live over the internet. Being their ISP, we helped them quite a bit. You can read about that and how it was done here: Multiple parallel audio streams from multiple audio sources on one Wirecast license.. Recently, however, we have uncovered a huge flaw in Wirecast: it’s inability to recover from pretty much any error automatically, start automatically, or automatically broadcast. If you don’t have a 24/7 technician who can sit in front of the server and watch Wirecast around the clock, this presents a problem.

A HUGE problem. And Wirecast’s official answer is “it’s on the wish list”.

Nice. I’m done wishing. So here’s what I did…
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Google’s Android is not quite ready for the tablet platform

Google is saying that the current version of it’s mobile OS Android, is not yet ready for the tablet pc platform.  They have said that the current build Froyo is not a platform for iPad rivals, though they are hinting that they will have a tablet oriented OS soon.

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Multiple parallel audio streams from multiple audio sources on one Wirecast license.

We were recently presented with an interesting problem by a long time local customer and friend to many of us here at High Speed Web. WRHI is a local media center running some 6 radio stations. They stream these stations over the internet with us currently via RTMP, Adobe’s proprietary streaming protocol. This works great when streaming to flash enabled browsers, but when their customer base increasingly demanded mobile device compatibility, WRHI had a problem. With Adobe and Apple, the maker of the famous iPhone, iTouch, and iPad, in a pissing match over the future of streaming mobile technology, WRHI needed to be compatible with both. After some research, Wirecast was chosen as the streaming encoder and Wowza as the streaming server. These were chosen based on their flexibility and inter-compatibility. The bigger issue was streaming 6 streams from the same box. Their original solution had them running 6 separate streaming servers.

But that didn’t sit well with my inner nerd.

Plus Wirecast is $500 per license, and 6 licenses versus 1 didn’t sit well with my inner banker.

So here’s what we did…
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Monitor your IPs with SenderScore automatically.

In a world of increasing SPAM, IP reputation has become a must-know statistic if you want to be able to send an email to a customer, prospect or even grandma. So if you are running an ISP, as we are, maintaining a good IP reputation isn’t some nice frill that makes you feel good, it’s a necessity. The problem is, no one wants to tell you what the reputation is. Sure, you can monitor the hundreds of various block lists out there, and probably should, but that only tells you when the IP’s reputation has reached a critical low. Luckily, most big email providers are turning to ReturnPath their spam complaints, feedback loops, and all those other tedious tasks that need handling when dealing with customer level email delivery. This places ReturnPath in a unique position where they can monitor, generate, and, more importantly, display the IP reputations of our IPs.

And so they do. Enter SenderScore.
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ARIN’s new website looks funny… for a reason.

With almost 60,000 IP addresses, we here at High Speed Web are VERY familiar with ARIN and their website. We are constantly SWIPing and un-SWIPing network blocks and verifying our current SWIPs are correct. Recently, ARIN’s website underwent a startling change and to many it may appear much more disjointed and funky. This is because it isn’t really written for human eyes…
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