NetEqualizer News Blog

Top New NetEqualizer Feature Ideas

The recent success of our P2P Locator Technology has given us even more encouragement to roll out additional NetEqualizer features. Of course, we want to devote the most attention to those features that meet the needs and demands of our customers.

So, we’ve listed some ideas and features below that could potentially be added to an upcoming mainstream NetEqualizer release. We’ll decide which features to focus on in part based on your feedback (click here for our survey).

Here are a few of our works-in-progress for the NetEqualizer:

1. The option to send an SNMP trap to your SNMP monitor during a network event.
2. The option to receive email notification during certain specified network events.This could include when:
   1. Bandwidth utilization is high – This would happen when your bandwidth utilization is extremely high and might indicate the need for an upgrade in bandwidth
   2. Errors occur on an interface card – This would be used to detect if there was a problem with one of your Ethernet or fiber connections
   3. A new P2P user is detected on your network – This would make even better and more efficient use of our new P2P Locator Technology
   4. YouTube has been viewed from cache – An email would be dispatched every time a YouTube video is served up from our NetEqualizer Caching Option
3. A form of active directory integration to specify a rate limit on a user by name rather than IP address. For example, you could say John Smith is limited to one-megabit downloads. As of now, you would need to know John Smith’s IP address. With an integration of active directory, you can specify him by name.
4. A standard pre-written quota utility (source code) with each system. Right now, the NetEqualizer just comes with an API (see the NetEqualizer User Quota API). However, this new utility would be something you could plug IPs into from the GUI and have a monthly quota enforced right away. Initially, it would be a very simple tool, but it could be expanded. In other words, this would be a good working program using our API to get you a head start on expanding and writing a full-bodied quota tool.

Would any of these benefit your network? Let us know what you think with this short survey.

Tech Talk – YouTube Caching

We recently began work on a series of videos to better explain many of the features and functions of the NetEqualizer. We’re calling the series “Tech Talk,” and we hope to expand on the collection frequently. This month, we’re releasing a short feature on the NetEqualizer Caching Option (NCO). Stay tuned for more!

$10,000 IPv6 Switchover Contest Update

After several months of submissions, the $10,000 IPv6 switchover contest introduced in March has now been closed to new entries. As planned, predictions of the worldwide IPv6 switchover date were taken until June 29. We’d like to thank all of you who participated and provided your input.

And now we wait.

If and when the worldwide switchover (as defined in the contest rules) occurs, the lucky winner will be both announced in our newsletter as well as notified personally. In the meantime, keep the discussion of the IPv6 switch going on our blog! And for those of you still getting a handle on the IPv6 switch, be sure to take a look at our recent article, “10 Things You Should Know about IPv6.”

Best Of The Blog

Just How Fast Is Your 4G Network?

The subject of Internet speed and how to make it go faster is always a hot topic. So that begs the question, if everybody wants their Internet to go faster, what are some of the limitations? I mean, why can’t we just achieve infinite speeds when we want them and where we want them?

Below, I’ll take on some of the fundamental gating factors of Internet speeds, primarily exploring the difference between wired and wireless connections. As we have “progressed” from a reliance on wired connections to a near-universal expectation of wireless Internet options, we’ve also put some limitations on what speeds can be reliably achieved. I’ll discuss why the wired Internet to your home will likely always be faster than the latest fourth generation (4G) wireless being touted today.

To get a basic understanding of the limitations with wireless Internet, we must first talk about frequencies. (Don’t freak out if you’re not tech savvy. We usually do a pretty good job at explaining these things using analogies that anybody can understand.) The reason why frequencies are important to this discussion is that they’re the limiting factor to speed in a wireless network.

The FCC allows cell phone companies and other wireless Internet providers to use a specific range of frequencies (channels) to transmit data. For the sake of argument, let’s just say there are 256 frequencies available to the local wireless provider in your area. So in the simplest case of the old analog world, that means a local cell tower could support 256 phone conversations at one time.

However, with the development of better digital technology in the 1980s, wireless providers have been able to juggle more than one call on each frequency. This is done by using a time sharing system where bits are transmitted over the frequency in a round-robin type fashion such that several users are sharing the channel at one time.

The wireless providers have overcome the problem of having multiple users sharing a channel by dividing it up in time slices. Essentially this means when you are talking on your cell phone or bringing up a Web page on your browser, your device pauses to let other users on the channel. Only in the best case would you have the full speed of the channel to yourself (perhaps at 3 a.m. on a deserted stretch of interstate). For example, I just looked over some of the mumbo jumbo and promises of one-gigabit speeds for 4G devices, but only in a perfect world would you be able to achieve that speed.

In the real world of wireless, we need to know two things to determine the actual data rates to the end user.

To keep reading, click here.