Blog de Joe Freeman

At the beginning of the Internet, people envisioned a shopping mall.  They had no e-commerce experience or history. The technology was too low bandwidth to deliver today's experience. Pictures and catalog content had to be delivered  "overnight"  to potential customers if you wanted an actual  catalog  experience. The analogy broke down due to technology and the unfettered access customers had to any website. MCI wanted to build an Internet Mall at the dawn of the Internet era.  They and everyone else knew that shopping would be big on the Internet and they envisioned that they could manage the mall front and that companies would lease space on the mall website. The technology was limited so the thing would only work if people would leave their computers on at night to download product catalogs. The project product people used analogies and patterns they were comfortable with when putting together proposals. The development team was pretty vocal that the in...

You can easily automate capturing broadband connection statistics with some Python code  running on a Raspberry Pi, a Mac or, a PC.  I used a Raspberry Pi 4 as my test appliance because it is cheap and can support 1GB/s ethernet connections. That means it is fast enough to service most residential or low-end commercial connections. I'm lazy and wanted the data to end up in a secure public cloud that could be populated and viewed from anywhere.  We can send our broadband statistics from 1 or more locations and graph the different locations against each other. Any tool could be used. Monitoring One or Compare Two  We wanted to compare two different internet provider's service levels.  One provider is a FIOS 1GB down / 1GB up.  The other is a cable service with 1GB down / 50MB up. The providers and the technology were different.  We wanted to know if the complaints about one of the providers were valid. Relies on Speedtest.net infrastructure We're going t...

How do your devices connect to the Internet?  How does that connection get to the information super-highway? The only way to know is to have some general understanding of how a connected device gets to the remote web site or service. ISP service levels are sold at performance levels, bits per second.  That does not guarantee you that level of performance from your mobile devices all the way to your internet services. Your network configuration combined with your neighbors and your ISP configuration can have a real impact on your effective throughput. People often say their wi-fi is slow when they talk about their internet experience.  Do they really mean it is wi-fi or the internet or somewhere in between?   We talked to someone in a beach neighborhood during the summer and they complained that their wi-fi was Slow .  They then said that a lot of neighbors had wi-fi problems.  These were single-family homes far enough apart that wi-fi may not...