Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 30 Jun 2006 22:29:11 GMT
I just saw a press release that claims that Verizon has started turning up FiOS customers in my neighborhood. I don’t think they’re in my neighborhood quite yet (although there’s been a lot of Verizon work a couple blocks away), but it’s getting closer.
I wouldn’t say no to an extra 3-5x bandwidth for the same price.
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 27 Jul 2005 04:07:57 GMT
I was complaining to someone yesterday about my DSL bill, since I’m paying $80/month for 1.5/384 service. Out of curiosity, I took a look on Verizon’s business DSL website and noticed that they don’t sell 1.5/384 in my area anymore; the default is now 3.0/768 for the same price as before. So I called them up this morning and they’re doubling my line speed for free. It’ll take a day or two before it takes effect, but in a day or two I’ll either be:
Anyone want to take bets on which one it’ll be?
Update: Well, I got my answer. I found this in the logs this morning:
Jul 27 00:22:35 guam kernel: wanpipe1: ADSL starting training 0x2 ...
Jul 27 00:22:35 guam kernel: wanpipe1: GP_LINK_DOWN, Training State
Jul 27 00:22:51 guam kernel: wanpipe1: Cell Delination successful
Jul 27 00:22:51 guam kernel: wanpipe1: GP_LINK_UP, State Trained
Jul 27 00:22:51 guam kernel: wanpipe1: ADSL Link connected (Down 3360 kbps, Up 704 kbps)
Jul 27 00:22:59 guam kernel: wanpipe1: Link connected!There was also a “congratulations on your upgrade” email in my inbox. So it looks like the speed upgrade went through without a hitch. I have to say, this is the first really nice experience I’ve had with Verizon DSL in years. I’m feeling a lot better about them then I used to–six months ago I was getting 768/128, now I’m getting 3.0/768 for the same price. I’m not feeling ripped-off any more.
A quick download test verifies that the speed really is faster–I’m getting 298 KB/sec from ftp-mirror.internap.com. Smokeping shows that my link’s lower-bound latency dropped overnight, and this morning’s latency graph is much less noisy then it was yesterday. Both of those are good for VoIP.
Update: I did a quick comparison with my old speeds. I was getting 1792/442, now I’m getting 3360/704. That’s an 88% increase in downloads and a 59% increase in uploads. Not quite the 2x boost that you’d expect, but still quite nice.
Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 08 Mar 2005 07:23:21 GMT
It’s sort of an axiom of programming that features that aren’t continually used or tested won’t actually work. A similar rule holds for system administration–any feature that hasn’t been tested since the last upgrade is probably broken. An obvious corollary suggests that systems get more reliable as their user load increases–more users means more features are used more frequently, and broken features will be spotted sooner. And the corollary to that is that any server wedged under a desk in someone’s home office is probably flakier then hell because it’s probably just sitting there collecting dust and not getting used.
I’m not convinced that that applies to my home gateway box. It’s a busy little beaver:
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes prot opt in out source destination
234M 75G all -- dsl0 * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0
47M 1001G all -- eth0 * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 In the 25.75 days since I last rebooted this system, it’s received over 75 GB via its DSL link and around 1 TB over its main Ethernet link. If my math is right, that’s an average of 3.6 Mbps on the Ethernet link and around 270 kbps over DSL. I wasn’t keeping outgoing traffic stats when I first booted this box, but more recent estimates make it look like there’s almost as much outgoing traffic on dsl0 as there is incoming.
CPU load is similarly heavy–the box has averaged 51.9% idle since it was rebooted. My rule of thumb for years was that any production box that was under 80% idle was due to be upgraded soon, because it was probably pegging the CPU during peak times during the day. If the box was under 70% idle, then it was time to start scrounging for an immediate upgrade. By those metrics, this box is way overdue for a major upgrade. Fortunately for my wallet, those metrics don’t really apply to this box–it’s spending a lot of its CPU time on tasks that aren’t particularly critical. Also, Linux 2.6 made some changes to /proc/stat that procinfo doesn’t seem to have picked up on; once you factor those into the equation, the box is really closer to 75% idle. Subtract off the non-critical usage, and the system is probably only 10% busy. I’ll probably upgrade it later this year if my virtual-server project works out, but that’s more for security and reliability then pure performance.
Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 11 Feb 2005 21:52:02 GMT
As regular readers know, I recently turned up a new DSL circuit at home, replacing an older, slower line that Verizon had refused to upgrade for months. As part of the upgrade process, I needed to buy a new DSL modem. Instead of using an external DSL modem (DSL-Ethernet bridge would probably be more accurate, but “modem” seems to have stuck), I decided to buy a Sangoma S518 PCI ADSL modem. I had two main reasons for preferring this internal modem to a generic external model:
I chose the Sangoma model instead of a cheap, generic card because the manufacturer strongly supports its use with Linux, and a number of people on the Asterisk-Users mailing list have recommended it. I paid $115 plus shipping from BSD Mall.
Read more...Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 10 Feb 2005 05:08:58 GMT
I can’t believe it. After months and months of trying to upgrade my DSL, everything is finally up and running on my new DSL line. The line wasn’t supposed to go live until Friday evening, but Verizon sent me mail today with my IP address and claimed that it’s up and running. And, indeed, it is.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite as prepared as I thought I was; I’d forgotten to change the DNS TTL on scottstuff.net, so people may have a hard time getting through to this site for a couple days. Oops. Other then that, though, everything seems to be up and running perfectly. The sample size is still kind of small, but smokeping suggests that my average ping time has improved drastically–I was seeing numbers from 25 to 800 ms before. Right now, the line looks flat at 30 ms. That’ll probably break a bit once traffic picks back up on the website, but I should be able to keep it under 100 ms, easy.
I’ll post more details later tonight or tomorrow, along with a review of the Sangoma S518 PCI ADSL card. I have to put the kids to bed first, though.
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 09 Feb 2005 23:21:15 GMT
My DSL modem showed up yesterday, so I dropped it into my gateway box and fired it up. It immediately reported that it was unable to train; there was nothing to talk to on the other end of the phone line yet. Since my official install day is still a couple days out, that didn’t surprise me. Then this morning, I saw this in the logs:
Feb 9 08:19:22 guam kernel: wanpipe1: ADSL Link connected (Down 1792 kbps, Up 448 kbps)
Feb 9 08:19:30 guam kernel: wanpipe1: Link connected!
Feb 9 08:41:03 guam kernel: klogd 1.4.1#11, log source = /proc/kmsg started.The gap between the second and third lines is the problem–the box went down, hard, right after the DSL line came up. On the other hand, it looks like I’m provisioned above 1.5/384 on the ATM side. Assuming a 20% cell tax, this gives me a usable connection of around 1430 kbps down and 360 kbps up, which isn’t too bad. Now I just have to keep the thing from crashing. I’m rolling my ADSL drivers back from the beta version that I’d started with to the most recent release; hopefully that’ll be good enough to fix my problem.
Posted by Scott Laird Sun, 06 Feb 2005 00:43:01 GMT
I have a date now for my new DSL line: February 11th. My new DSL PCI card is in UPS’s hands, too. I’m starting to believe that my months-long DSL upgrade quest is nearly complete.
Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 03 Feb 2005 00:36:10 GMT
My DSL upgrade saga took another step towards completion today, when Verizon installed a new phone line at home. Amazingly enough, it’s already in their DSL database, and Verizon’s DSL sales website allowed me to order DSL. I don’t have an install date for the DSL service yet, but I’m two steps closer to the finish line.
I was surprised that Verizon’s business DSL department gives you a choice of buying a new DSL modem ($99) or providing your own. I took the opportunity to order a Sangoma S518 PCI DSL card instead of an external box. Supposedly, their Linux drivers are solid (Sangoma has been involved with Linux practically forever), and there are a couple big advantages to native DSL interfaces, rather then DSL-to-Ethernet bridges. The biggest advantage is buffering–right now, my DSL modem has at least a couple seconds worth of buffers on it. If I send outbound traffic as fast as I can, I rapidly get to the point where nothing makes it out in under 2 seconds. So, even if I use extreme care in setting up QoS prioritization rules for VoIP traffic, the VoIP packets will still end up stuck in the DSL modem’s buffers. To combat this, I’ve been forced to rate-limit my outbound traffic to about 75% of the theoretical limit; even then it can really suck at times. Several people on Asterisk mailing lists have commented that their S518 has really made their VoIP performance shine.
In addition, since the S518 is directly talking to the phone company, it can tell exactly what speed I’m currently provisioned at and can log problems via syslog. My current nasty DSL box can’t do anything but blink lights at me when there’s a problem.
All in all, it looks like a decent improvement, especially since it’s only $115 or so online.
Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 22 Jan 2005 16:22:18 GMT
I feel like I’m finally entering the third act of my DSL upgrade drama. This started over a year ago when I realized that I really wanted faster service then the 768/128 link that I’m paying $80/month for right now. Last June, I asked Verizon to turn up my DSL’s speed, with predictable results–they ran around in circles for over a month, with different departments giving me different answers, ranging from “we already turned it up” to “we lost the order” to “we can’t do that, you need to cancel DSL, wait for it to go dead, and then re-order.”
Amazingly enough, the “you need to cancel” camp was correct–Verizon is unable to increase the speed of my current DSL setup. I played as many cards as I could, pulled the few strings that I have inside of Verizon, had off-the-record conversations with installers, and concluded that I had three choices:
I looked into cable modems, but there’s no way to get a static IP address out of Comcast around here, and I need to run a number of servers. I considered moving my mail, web, and Asterisk servers off onto a hosted system somewhere–that’d let me use Comcast with a dynamic IP, but the cost and complexity of it all just makes it impractical.
So, yesterday, I finally decided to go with plan #3. I ordered a new phone line. It ends up costing me $29 to get it installed and $20/month. Hopefully I won’t have to carry both lines for more then a month. It’s supposed to be up on February 2nd; as soon as that happens, I’m ordering new 1.5/384 DSL service on the line. I’ll cancel the old DSL the same day that the new one comes up–I just need to swing DNS over to the new IP and then wait for a few short timeouts. So, hopefully, this whole saga won’t cost me more then $100 up front. The nice thing is that it’ll end up saving me a few bucks in the long term–with 3x the upstream bandwidth, I can move more phone services over to VoIP, so I can turn off more features on the phone line. That could save me almost $10/month. It’s not a lot of money, but every bit helps sometimes. Besides, it’s mostly the principle of the thing.
Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 22 Jan 2005 16:03:58 GMT
Yesterday morning, when I arrived at work, I noticed that my laptop couldn’t connect to my home email server for some reason. Attempts to ping my home web server showed 90% packet loss. That’s kind of an unusual situation for a home network–I’ve had DSL go out quite a few times over the past 5 years, and I’ve had routers crash, but this is the first time that I’ve seen crippling packet loss. My best guess was that something strange had happened with a VPN that I’d set up between home and work, and that something was flinging non-rate-limited UDP or ESP packets at an insane rate.
Since 90% packet loss effects our home VoIP service as well, I had my wife hit reset on our home router/firewall PC. That fixed the unusual 90% packet loss, replacing it with 100% packet loss. When I got home last night, I found that the system had dropped into the BIOS setup screen with a “the previous boot didn’t complete right, so you probably want to change some BIOS settings” error. Grr. I changed the boot time error settings to tell it to ignore all errors, but this will probably happen the next time I need to do an emergency reboot.
Of course, it goes without saying that yesterday was the slowest day of the month, in terms of traffic to my blog. Traffic is way up this month–my average number of visits so far this month is only slightly behind the single best day from last year. My previous high was 595 hits, followed by 524 hits in second place. This month, I’m averaging around 540 hits per day, with a high of almost 800. Yeah, except for yesterday, which was barely 350.
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 06 Oct 2004 03:32:49 GMT
Apparently there’s at least as much money in unpopular, non-bestselling works then there is in blockbusters. That’s the theme of Chris Anderson’s ”long tail” article in Wired. Rhapsody streams at least one copy of their top 400,000 songs every month. Less then half of Amazon’s sales come from the top 130,000 titles in their inventory. The majority of their sales come from books that physical stores don’t (and can’t) carry.
When you’re in an environment where shelf space isn’t a limitation, where it doesn’t matter how big your catalog is, then increasing the number of choices that you provide increases sales and increases profits.
Wired’s article has inspired a lot of writing today. Kevin Laws at VentureBlog has a great article showing that most of the successful .coms (Amazon, eBay, Google, CafePress) can be understood in terms of the long tail–they all stretch way further into the tail then anyone ever did before, and that’s where they found their profits.
From a cultural prospective, the whole long tail thing makes me more optimistic for the future then I’ve been in years. It points out that there’s a market for niche goods, no matter how small of a niche it is. The Walmartification and Hollywoodification that we’ve seen over the past few decades may just be a temporary phenomenon driven by the economies of scale that don’t really matter for digital goods. A lot of smaller markets that have become more obvious lately–groups like hardcore gamers, radical early adopters, anime fans–aren’t just aberrations, but a sign of things to come. The Internet makes it possible to profitably cater to small audiences.
Of course, someone still has to actually build the thing that the niche wants to buy. No matter how many people want a Treo 650 with WiFi, it’s still not going to show up in stores next month. As the business world adjusts to the long tail mode of thinking, we’ll probably see manufacturers who can profitably build a dozens of variants of their products and do small runs without having big distribution problems.
I’ve been wondering how this applies to products that aren’t actually products, though. Case in point: home internet access. I’ve been fighting for six months to get faster network access at home, but I’m running into the niche problem: I don’t want the same thing that most consumers want, so companies don’t seem interested in selling it to me. DSL and cable companies want to sell me an asymmetrical link with a dynamic IP address and a gob of filtering to protect me from whatever is eating Windows boxes this week. I want to buy a link with a decent upload speed, a static address, and no filtering. Both Verizon and Comcast view my market as being too small to bother with–I’m in the long tail, and neither of them looks past the big hits.
The thing is, though, this is completely insane. Because neither network provider is actually selling a product. Sure, they’re selling access to their immense wiring plant and a bunch of network gear (along with really bad support), but fundamentally, the only difference between what they want to sell and what I want to buy is a configuration file. I mean, Amazon at least needs to keep track of a zillion different books in warehouses, and Rhapsody needs to have disk space for 735,000 songs. Verizon doesn’t need that, because the thing that differentiates between the different DSL products that they sell is autogenerated. There’s no fundamental reason why they couldn’t add more speed grades to their DSL portfolio, along with static addresses, looser (and stricter!) filtering, bigger address pools, varying upload vs. download speeds, and then simply charge a premium price for “non-standard” settings, all available via a web interface. If they weren’t a Bell, with all of the ingrained Bell mindset, they could roll something like this out in a matter of weeks. There’d be some support and training costs, but they’d more then make up for it with increased revenue. That’s the point of the long tail. Instead, they view it like different DSL packages are competing with each other for shelf space, and they’re cannibalizing their own sales, alienating their own customers, and providing a safe niche for leaner, faster competitors.
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 18 Aug 2004 05:01:44 GMT
I want to dump my analog phone line at home. I’m just not sure if I can.
This has been building for a while. I’ve been using Asterisk for over 4 months. At this point, my home POTS line is both the most expensive and least reliable part of the whole system. It’s currently costing me over $33/month, and that’s just for incoming calls and outgoing local calls. I’ve been sending long distance calls to NuFone for over 4 months, and they’ve only charged me $10 for the privilege. That’s less then my average monthly long-distance bill used to be.
According to Asterisk’s logs, I average around 400 minutes of incoming and outgoing local phone service per month. At $0.02/minute, that’s only $8/month. I’m paying that much just for Caller ID on my POTS line. If I could drop the POTS line, then I could save around $25/month. That’d be a nice addition to my DSL speed, or it’d cover cellular data usage with a Treo on most networks.
Besides simple cost, I’m just generally unhappy with telcos. Today’s big point came from Telepocalypse. Plan on phone line charges going up another $4/month in the near future. That, coupled with my Verizon DSL upgrade saga, really makes me want to dump Verizon altogether. See TeleTruth’s “dirty phone bill” for another quick take on what’s hiding in a typical phone bill.
Unfortunately, I just don’t see how I can do it for a reasonable cost. I’m in Comcast cable-modem territory, but they want $50/month for service for non-subscribers, and they don’t offer static addresses with residential service. They might offer them with business services, but those start at $95 and go up. I’d be amazed if I could get a static address (and the ability to run servers) out of them for under $150/month. I don’t seem to have any alternatives for home broadband; it’s either Verizon DSL or Comcast cable modem. Or a T1, but that’s way more then I’m willing to spend.
There does seem to be one way out–I could move the mail and web server out of the house and into a colo server. Several providers advertise dedicated P4 boxes with reasonable amounts of RAM, disk, and network connectivity for around $50/month. I could conceivably drop the DSL and POTS line and move to a $50 server and $50 cable modem, and come out slightly ahead, but I don’t see it being worth the trouble, even if I’d have 4x the bandwidth.
Finally, even ignoring all of the connectivity problems, I’m still left with one problem–how do I dial 911 without a POTS line? 90% of the time, we have a cell phone handy, but they’re never really handy in emergencies. I haven’t seen anyone discuss how to dial 911 is a pure roll-your-own VoIP system. Do you just redirect it to some local phone number? Or do you just leave the POTS line plugged in and trust that they’ll leave it live for 911?
Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 07 Aug 2004 00:17:52 GMT
Chapter 3 in my continuing DSL upgrade saga. Chapter 2 saw our intrepid hero trapped in bureaucratic hell, unable to move forward to a higher speed without canceling the current service and waiting for Verizon to re-install the new service. Since I wasn’t looking forward to 2 weeks without service, I decided to wait a while before cancelling my service.
Silly me. I assumed that, because they’d cancelled the upgrade, they wouldn’t keep billing me for the new service. No such luck; my bill has been $10 higher then it should have been for the last three months. I called once before and they claimed that they’d fixed it, but my bills haven’t reflected any change. So I called again, and was informed that I’m stuck with the new rate. Since they no longer offer my old rate, they can’t give it back to me. Typical Verizon. I was starting to warm up my “can I speak to a supervisor” speech when the rep surprised me and offered a credit for a month’s free service. After doing a bit of bit of quick math, as long as I cancel my current service within the next 5 months, I come out ahead with the credit. So, I now have a deadline running–cancel my current frame-relay-based DSL service before the end of the year, or end up paying extra for service that I’m not receiving.
Hmm. If they charge me for a new DSL modem, I wonder if I’m better off returning it for credit and getting a Sangoma S518 instead. A couple people on the asterisk-users mailing list have had really good luck with it, because it lets you do more reliable traffic shaping on your Linux box, rather then play games with the buffers on the DSL modem. It’s probably not worth the hassle, though.
Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 18 Jun 2004 21:38:58 GMT
The Verizon DSL saga came to the end of a chapter today. I spent way too much time sitting on hold (although at least I can get work done that way), and concluded that:
Ugh. As suggested last night, I have a “legacy” frame-relay DSL setup. They’re deploying ATM-based DSL now. In order to upgrade, I need to switch services.
Technically, this is easy–ship me a new modem, swing my line from the old DSLAM to the new one, and update a couple database entries. Unfortunately, they don’t work that way. They don’t have a button for “rebuild link” in their order-entry system. Just “delete” and “add.” And there’s at least a 2-week gap in between the two.
You know, if they had competition, then they wouldn’t act like this. Oh, wait–they *do* have competition–I could go with Covad or Comcast. Except, Verizon seems to be lying to Covad about my wiring or something, either that or routing my wires in weird ways. I’m wired into the BOTHWAXB CO, apparently. According to Verizon, I’m 7800 feet from the CO. According to the database that they give to Covad, I’m over 30,000 feet from SWLLKWAXA. Uh, yeah, guys. Whatever. If the numbers that Washington’s PUC puts out are valid, I’m wired into the single largest CO in the state, and I’d really expect Covad to have a presence there.
So, at this point, I have three things to try. First, I have a friend who was, until recently, one of the DSL installers for Verizon in my area. He’s now working at a desk for them, but he can probably get me in touch with someone that can make things go smoother. Second, I’m going to talk to Covad again, and see if they can explain the database issue. Third, I’m going to talk to the PUC (er, “UTC” in Washington, apparently).
You know, who’d have guessed that it’d be this hard to give people more money?
Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 11 Jun 2004 21:16:28 GMT
So, I’ve been trying to upgrade my DSL at home for over two weeks now. Verizon has switched packages, and I can go from 768/128 to 1500/384 for $10/month. Since I’m currently limited by the uplink speed for a lot of things (VoIP, SSH from work, web serving), this is basically a 3x speed upgrade. My line supports it, my hardware supports it, and I’m only 7800 feet from the CO.
Easy upgrade, right?
Oh, wait. I said Verizon, didn’t I?
So far, nothing has happened. I’ve spent over 90 minutes on the phone with Verizon people. No one can quite explain why I haven’t been upgraded. The first one thought it should happen in 24-48 hours. Monday’s answer was 2-3 days. Today’s first offer was “5 days or so,” but after escalating and sitting on hold for most of an hour (frankly, the only thing that office speakerphones are really good for), they’re claiming that it should be up later today. Which is good, since they’ve been billing me for the higher speed since the first.
Nuke ‘em from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
Update (June 17, 2004): Still broken. Today’s tech pulled out a page on the excuse calendar: “Need to upgrade from Frame-Relay DSL to ATM DSL.” Unfortunately, according to DSL Reports, that’s code for “you’re screwed.” They’re saying that I need to cancel my current DSL service, re-order new service on the same line, and put up with dial-up for a month or so while they straighten it out. Technically, it’s about 5 minutes worth of work, but they’re a telco. Did I mention that they’ve been billing me for the higher speed for almost 3 weeks now? It’s just about time to pull out my “Complain to PUC” card.
