Lets face it, you give me a 4G network, I am going to use more Internet bandwidth. In fact I recently upgraded one of my kids phones to an IPHONE and it came with an additional $30 a month fee. So this idea of Verizon throttling Internet bandwidth on my phone really pisses me off. So lets explore this topic a little bit. First question on the table does Verizon throttle bandwidth.  To answer this question, we ran a little experiment.

We took two company phones. They are both under the same plan. The phones are identical, except that each phone user uses the phone differently. The phones are also in the same physical location at the time of the experiment in Boston. So getting access to the 4G network is not a problem. They say a picture is worth a thousands words...

What is clear from this picture, Verizon is Throttling Internet Usage. Yet no one has ever been told they were being limited in there internet usage. We just got these phones, I find it really hard to believe in such a short amount of time we have hit the top 5% of all internet phone users. Perhaps I should explain what I mean by this.

On February 3, 2011 I saw this posted on www.tekgoblin.com

Verizon has enacted a new policy today that allows them to throttle “high” bandwidth users on their network well their words were “extraordinary”. Were not sure exactly what “high” or “extraordinary” means but it is probably over 2GB of data per month. This comes as the iPhone launches on Verizon’s network. The policy is said to only affect the top 5% of data users on the network. When these 5% of users hit the soft limit they will be throttled during peak times of the day.

Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand. Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95% of data customers aren’t negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users.

To read the original article here is a link to the site...

www.tekgoblin.com

So if you fall in the magic 5%, be aware Big Brother is watching you and will be slowing you down.

Anyone else out there notice their internet phone is moving a lot slower lately?

Michael Corey

Founder & CEO, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com

My Personal Twitter Account: Michael_Corey

3 out of 4 Cables Cut !

The Gremlins are back.

Once again undersea cables have been cut. 3 out of 4 cables have been cut.  This will effect Internet and phones all though Europe, Middle East & Asia. If the 4th cable gets cut this could be a total blackout.  A total black out.
This has happened quite a few times before. Here are some blogs I did the last time this happened….

Internet Outage Hits India, Middle East Again!!!!!!

Fifth Undersea Cable Cut ! ! !

I found out about the latest problem through an article in the BBC NEWS...

Severed cable disrupts net access

Internet and phone communications between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia have been seriously disrupted after submarine cables were severed.

It is thought the FLAG FEA, SMW4, and SMW3 lines, near the Alexandria cable station in Egypt, have all been cut.

A fault was also reported on the GO submarine cable 130km off Sicily.

Experts warned that it may be days before the fault is fixed and said the knock on effect could have serious repercussions on regional economies.

Jonathan Wright - director of wholesale products at Interoute which manages part of the optical fibre network - told the BBC that the effects of the break would be felt for many days.

"This will grind economies to a halt for a short space of time," he said "If you look at, say, local financial markets who trade with European and US markets, the speed at which they get live data will be compromised."

"If you think how quickly trades can be placed, if they are suffering from bad latency times, then by the time a trade is placed, the market may well have moved on."

The cause of the break is as yet unknown, although some seismic activity was reported near Malta shortly before the cut was detected.

In a statement released in relation to one of the breaks, France Telecom said: "The causes of the cut, which is located in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia, on sections linking Sicily to Egypt, remain unclear."

The French firm said it was sending a ship out to fix the line between Italy and Egypt, although it could take until 31 December to fully repair the line.

The main damage through is to the four submarine cables running across the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal.

It is thought that 65% of traffic to India was down, while services to Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Taiwan and Pakistan have also been severely affected.

To read the Remainder of the article....

Severed cable disrupts net access

Posted Michael Corey,

Founder & CEO, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com

I know its been a while since I last blogged. I was on a quick vacation to the Caribbean. I was lucky enough to book a quick one-week cruise on the Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas.  Those people, who know me well, know I love to cruise. This was my 23 Royal Caribbean cruise. This was one of the ships I had not been on before and I was not disappointed.  

Even though I had full access to the Internet, I kept it to a minimum this week. I originally started cruising, because it was one of the few places where I could vacation and work could not find me. For a good portion of my life, I supported critical Oracle databases for major Banks, Hospitals and even for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Having started with Oracle version 3.0, my career has taken me to work in many great organizations. Whenever I tried to vacation there was always a reason to interrupt it. So I started camping and cruising as ways to get a vacation with my family that would not be interrupted. It reminds of a story, before I get into my next blog entry.

I was camping in the Mountains of New Hampshire. When a park ranger finds me. Asks if I am Michael Corey who works for the ________. The financial institution will remain nameless.  I am then informed there is a major crisis at the bank and could I please go to the nearest phone to call in. I hike to the nearest payphone and call in.

The Bank had recently put in a new backup system. I had wanted to run a full fire drill of the new state of the art backup system, but was told by bank operations that was not necessary. When they refused to work with me to run a full fire drill of the new backup system, I wanted to build an alternate backup scheme. My manager thought that was a complete waste of time and money. I was a hired gun (Oracle Consultant) for the bank at the time. I was an employee originally, when I turned consultant they became one of my first customers. The Manager I was working for thought I was just trying find ways to increase my billable hours.

That is a problem with doing business that charge by the hour. The longer it takes the more money it costs you. One of my competitors uses a charge by the hour business model. Where we do all out work remote DBA work on a fixed price model. Its incents my people to do the job right the first time versus a Time and Material engagement where the longer it takes the more money the business makes. I told the manager at the bank that was not the case at all, that I felt so strongly, that I would create this alternate backup method on my own time. The number one concern of DBA is the protection of the data. Back then Disk failure were common. This database was much too big to mirror the entire thing. It was one of the largest Oracle Databases in the world at the time. 

Here is a blog entry that talks about the importance of Fire Drilling your Database Backup.....

Have You Fire Drilled Your Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server Database Backup

A few weeks later I left for a one-week vacation. Camping in the mountains of New Hampshire, where I felt they would not be able to find me. Well the park range found me. I wonder what they told the park ranger to make him look for me in the first place. When I finally get to the payphone and call in. I am asked by the Bank manager if I had in fact created that alternate database backup scheme. I had. They had a failure of the database system, when they went back to recover from the new state of the art backup system, they were unable to read past the first tape.

It just illustrates the importance of fire drilling your database backup. To make sure it will work when you need it. As I think upon this a few quick thoughts come to mind.

One I am very lucky at Ntirety to have a wonderful team of people around me. I feel we have the finest group of Database Administrators in the world. I feel I can take a vacation and not worry about the databases we help manage. When I talk to the customers of our remote database administration services the biggest thing we do for our customers is take the worry away from the management of the databases. When there is a problem, they know there is a team of seasoned database administration experts there to help. The problems with the database we manage just go away and more importantly stay away. 

The in-house DBA actually gets to take a vacation and not worry.  Better yet the park ranger is not looking for them, The in-house DBA  very quickly become the strongest supporters of ours with our customers base.  The Internet is what made a service like Ntirety’s Remote DBA service possible. Before the Internet came along it was possible, but not very practical. So lets take a look at why the Era of a U.S. dominated Internet is almost over.

The New York Times published an article August 29, 2008 by John Markoff titled “The Era of the American Internet is Ending”.

To quote the article….


“Suppose the Internet was entirely confined to the U.S., which it once was? That wasn’t helpful,” said Vint Cerf of Google.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. “Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,” Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. “We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us.”
Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States.

“Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”

But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to economic development. “It’s no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs,” said K C Claffy, a research scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. “You wouldn’t want someone owning your roads either.”

Indeed, more countries are becoming aware of how their dependence on other countries for their Internet traffic makes them vulnerable. Because of tariffs, pricing anomalies and even corporate cultures, Internet providers will often not exchange data with their local competitors. They prefer instead to send and receive traffic with larger international Internet service providers.

This leads to odd routing arrangements, referred to as tromboning, in which traffic between two cites in one country will flow through other nations. In January, when a cable was cut in the Mediterranean, Egyptian Internet traffic was nearly paralyzed because it was not being shared by local I.S.P.’s but instead was routed through European operators.

To see my previous blog entries that covered this.......

Fifth Undersea Cable Cut ! ! !

Internet Outage Hits India, Middle East Again!!!!!!

I had a field day with the undersea cables being cut. I kept imagining a company who had chosen a competitor of Ntirety. There database went down, and when they tried to reach their offshore provider of remote DBA services they received the following message “All lines to India are busy, please  call back later”. Sound like they may have this problem fixed in the next 5 -10 years. What are the odds of a failed database when the Internet Lines are clogged or busy. I guess its only your business you are risking.

Later in the article it made this statement…..

China, for instance, surpassed the United States in the number of Internet users in June. Over all, Asia now has 578.5 million, or 39.5 percent, of the world’s Internet users, although only 15.3 percent of the Asian population is connected to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, a market research organization.

By contrast, there were about 237 million Internet users in North America and the growth has nearly peaked; penetration of the Internet in the region has reached about 71 percent.

 Click Here to read entire New York Times Article

Posted by Michael Corey

www.ntirety.com

MoneyGram Just sent this email out to its community..... 

Protect Yourself Online

At MoneyGram, we take the protection of our customers’ personal information very seriously. A few simple tips can go a long way in protecting your personal information online:
 
·        Do not supply your eMoney Transfer login ID, password, or other sensitive information in response to an email you receive.  MoneyGram will never send you an email asking for that information.
·        Do not click on a link in an email to get into your eMoney Transfer profile.  Open a new browser window and type in https://www.emoneygram.com and log in to your eMoney Transfer profile directly.
 
For more information on how to protect yourself from online fraud, click here.
 
If you suspect that you are a victim of online fraud, please call 866-450-9897 for assistance. 

As I look at this notice. Its so full of common sense.....

Do not supply your eMoney Transfer login ID, password, or other sensitive information in response to an email you receive.  

Let Me say this a little differently...... 

RULE 1. Do not supply your login Id, Password of other sensitive information to any email you receive.  

Do not click on a link in an email to get into your eMoney Transfer profile.  Open a new browser window and type in https://www.emoneygram.com and log in to your eMoney Transfer profile directly.

Let me say this a little differently........

Rule 2: Do not click on an emaiul to get into any account you have that has sensitive information. Its always better to go to the site directly.

This is just common sense advice if you want to navigate the web safer.

Posted by Michael Corey

www.ntirety.com

To quote the delta press release ….

ATLANTA, Aug. 5, 2008 – Delta Air Lines (NYSE: DAL) customers traveling throughout the continental United States will soon be offered the added convenience of broadband Wi-Fi access onboard the airline’s domestic fleet of more than 330 mainline aircraft.

Delta is joining with Aircell®, a 17-year leader in airborne communications for business and commercial aviation, to install the company’s Mobile Broadband Network on the carrier’s domestic fleet. The system, Gogo™, will enable Delta customers traveling with Wi-Fi enabled devices, such as laptops, smartphones and PDAs, to access the Internet, corporate VPNs, corporate and personal e-mail accounts, as well as SMS texting and instant messaging services.  Gogo will be available to customers for a flat fee of $9.95 on flights of three hours or less, and $12.95 on flights of more than three hours.
 
“Delta remains committed to providing a travel experience that maximizes the time our customers spend with us onboard by offering them even more productivity options,” said Richard Anderson, Delta’s chief executive officer. ”Our customers asked for in-flight connectivity, and we’re responding by rolling out the most extensive Wi-Fi network in the sky.  Beginning this fall, our passengers will have the ability to stay connected when they travel with us throughout the continental U.S.”

To read the entire press release….

Delta Press Release

What do I have to say? It about time. I don’t know why this has not been done sooner. I can go to eastern Europe and get wifi, I can go to remote parts of China and get WIFI, why not when I am on an Airplane. This is great news. No we can help our clients deal with Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server databases when we fly the friendly skys. I see a new company policy, Fly Delta first above all other airlines. No longer does DELTA stand for "Don't Even leave The Airport". Flying just got even better.

Posted by Michael Corey

www.ntirety.com

I am Sorry All Lines to India Are Busy Right Now, Please Call Back Later! ! !

Does this sound Familar, it should A fifth cable has been cut severly impacting Internet capabilty to India and the Middle East.

I can hear what my off-shore competitors are saying right now "Yes I Know this has been going on for a very long time, but don’t worry. Our U.S. Based team is well equipped to handle the workload."

I know there are only 5 of us in the U.S. and 100 in India. But really we have you covered, really we do. Those 5 Database Administrators in the U.S. all wear red capes like superman and are capable of handling anything that comes along.

Think of all the money you are saving going off shore for your database administration support. Really what are the chances of your Database breaking right now in the middle of a 5th underwater cable being cut and putting you out of business? We all know lightening never hits the same place twice. Really what were the Odds of 6 cables getting cut?

I just can’t imagine calling or emailing for help and getting the response from my remote database administration provider…


If this is a database emergency, please call back later when service is resumed

I am not sure who is the author of this Map. It shows where the 5 cables are that were cut that are impacting Internet connections to India and the Middle East.

When I read the comment on Engadget on the fourth cable being cut, I just could not believe it. It Stated, “For the fourth time in a week, an undersea communications cable has apparently been cut (or "failed due to a power outage," as some sources suggest), and while no official reports of subversion have surfaced just yet, things are beginning to get suspicious. Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA Group, has had two cables damaged in the span of a week -- a quandary it has never dealt with until now.”

To read the Engadget Article Click Here....

I saw some interesting comments on this topic I Love Bonnie.net, here are the comments that caught my attention most:


We’re supposed to believe that these were most likely caused by an anchor from a ship fighting a storm. This author finds it hard to believe that this anchor was drug behind a boat from Egypt to Malaysia.

So everyone is scrambling to try and figure out why this would happen. Here are some of the possible reasons that I have found while looking around the Internet:

* U.S. Government
* Israeli Government
* Aliens
* Underwater Monsters
* The Cloverfield Monster
* Rudy Giuliani

www.ntirety.com

Posted Michael Corey, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com