WiFi is easy — as long as you have the wireless spectrum all to yourself. For most, people’s experience with WiFi is simply a matter of going to their local Best Buy, buying a consumer grade wireless router and plugging it in at home. If they live in a suburban area where the houses are
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I grew up in the Midwest and therefore far away from any earthquake fault lines. Now that I’m spending some time in Thailand, I experienced my first earthquake a few weeks ago. Fortunately it wasn’t nearly as devastating as the quakes that have rocked Japan over the past few months but it was jarring enough
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At CES 2011, Cisco Systems came out with several new announcements. One of the biggest announcement that was co-introduced by Verizon wireless was a new 4G wireless WAN interface for Cisco ISR G2 routers. The new card can be installed in a router and use Verizon’s new LTE network for access. If the 4G signal
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When you think technology, you might not think of Cambodia. But this might very well change in the future. I had the opportunity to visit several cities within Cambodia last week. Being a network engineer and interested in technology advancements in emerging countries, I decided to spend some time investigating the current economic and technological
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Suddenly you find yourself longing for the old-days days when you had a small and efficient farm with a few pigs, chickens and cows.
The moral of this story: If you want to be happy, keep your farm simple!
There are many companies and other means of acquiring used and refurbished Cisco equipment on the Internet. These include highly regarded businesses that buy up used gear, inspect and test it, then resell it. Often times, this used gear can include extended warranties in case of failure. Other methods of buying used equipment are from auction sites such as Ebay or online classified ads a la craigslist. I have used all of these methods for acquiring Cisco Systems equipment. Here are three situations where I felt purchasing used Cisco equipment was justifiable.
That means that the cost savings built-in to a 3G to 4G upgrade are non-existent and this is where WiMAX shines. Starting from ground zero, WiMAX is much less expensive to deploy compared to LTE. Fewer WiMAX towers need to be built and the equipment on average is less expensive. That means that service providers that do not have 3G deployed can much more cost-effectively deploy a 4G network. So look for countries such as Thailand to keep WiMAX alive for years to come.
I was working for a firm in Chicago a few years ago when we had two Cisco Supervisor modules on separate Catalyst 6500 series switches die in the same night. The hardware was located in two different locations with completely different power sources. Knowing the failure rate of this equipment, having two failures in one night is very rare. After a lengthy investigation by the Cisco technical assistance team, it was determined that the failures were due to a similar solar flare that hit our site with cosmic radiation.
These types of wireless security exploits make for good news because they get business managers all in a panic because they don’t understand what WPA2 and all wireless encryption methods are for. Wireless encryption is implemented so the wireless connection from your end device (laptop, iPad, etc) is AS secure as a wired connection. Up until now, the wireless part of a WPA2 connection was far MORE secure. Remember, once the data is dumped off onto a wired connection, the vast majority of the time wired traffic is not encrypted at the network level unless you are tunneling traffic. So with this new vulnerability, your internal users can possibly sniff and manipulate traffic…just like they can now on your wired connection. Is this new vulnerability a problem? Well, it’s not good, but it’s also no the end of the world.
Based on these tests, if I were to choose a DSL provider, I would go with 3BB for the far superior download test. If I really relied on frequent uploads, I would choose the TOT DSL connection. Lastly, if I needed a mobile Internet solution, I would have to go with AIS’s Edge…although 3BB’s upload speeds were fairly close and seem to burst at higher speeds.
In my last post, I talked about my wireless provider in Thailand, AIS. AIS has a very good blanket of 2G Edge across the country…and even over the boarder into Burma, Laos and Cambodia from my experience. I’ve used the data plan for checking email and light browsing. I also have used it to upload
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This week is the start of Cisco’s largest IT and communications conference where network engineers from all over the world gather in Las Vegas (this year) to receive training from Cisco as well as to talk to other engineers about news, trends and technology.
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