Internet : How It Works

How does the Internet work? The following two videos are good introductory material for answering that question. We used those for introducing our Department at TUHH to new undergraduate students. And couple of times I used also at ITB for the same purpose. The fist video (Warriors of the Net) is made by Ericsson MediaLab (?), narated in English and it's also available for download in several languages. The second video (Die Maus erklaert das Internet) is an episode from the "die Sendung mit der Maus" from the german WDR TV-broadcaster (sure, it's in German, but I think it's quite "selfexplanatory" :-D ).

Ka and Ku-Band

Just to refresh our memory regarding electromagnetic spectrum :-D

Over-Booking vs. Over-Provisioning

We might already be heard these terms, in particular if we are inside or at least talk about network-related-things in an ISP / NSP. Overbooking is "a term used to describe the sale of access to a service which exceeds the capacity of the service" (Wikipedia). Over-provisioning is exactly the opposite i.e. a term used to describe how much excess/free capacity are available compared to used-capacity. In the networking world, overbooked system, sometimes, is also called over-subscribed system.

Users/customers of a provider will not have anything against Over-Provisioning, right? :-D ... But the provider does! Why ? You know this already I think, it's more-or-less about trade-off between Quality for customers' side vs. cost for providers' side.

OADM BU

I noticed that several times, Pipe guys have addressed this "OADM BU" issue installed in their PPC-1 system. What is special in it ? How reliable is this kind of BU ? How much budget can we save compared to "normal BU" deployment ? ... Any idea ?!?

Beyond P2P : P4P ?

Know P4P already ? I've just known it yesterday as I skimmed some new PTC material. Here are some quotes taken from Alan Mauldin's talk:

Typical Fiber Attenuation Figure

Some times ago, I've been asked about this! I know that for an installed system, this shall be measured! If I can't do that but people still demand me to answer, what kind of attenuation/loss figures would you suggest me ?? Say that the system uses 1500 nm window and ITU-T G.652 fibers.

Onnet vs. Offnet

This post shall actually be published one day in March :-) I haven't remembered precisely anymore the thing I want to address except that as indicated by the title. Maybe I'll just go for a rough idea.

I was trying to model traffic (relations, matrices, etc.) between operators. To obtain realistic results I had to assume a quite high factor for onnet traffic. That onnet traffic shall be higher than offnet, it is intuitively justified, because the operators always try to increase their customer base with many attractive marketing efforts, pricing schemes or other policies. Rough speaking, I had to use onnet factors in the range of 0.60 to 0.75. This was, informally, justified by some technical persons in the operators.