At 02:57 PM 10/2/2003, you wrote:
I have found a possible source of satellite bandwidth for this, assuming a critical mass of users could be accumulated to pay for it. Interested
On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Marshall Eubanks wrote: parties
should send me an email off list please.
If a critical mass of users could be accumulated to pay for it, I imagine Cidera would still be in business.
If Cidera had ever returned our calls or email to tell us the services they offered after they installed the dish on the roof of our datacenter and the server and satellite receiver in our rack, they might still be in business. :P From those I've talked to, I'm not the only one who never actually used any services from them because we weren't sure exactly what those services were or what they cost. Something about a DS3 of bandwidth for an ihave news feed for $350-500/month was mentioned before they installed anything and I agreed to it verbally. They were awfully anxious to get that dish installed. Perhaps due to loan covenants that they deploy x installations per month? -Robert btw- Installation of the dish and the PIII 1U server with mirrored HDDs were all given to us for free. I REALLY didn't get their business model and I still don't... Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection http://www.tellurian.com | 888-TELLURIAN | 973-300-9211 "Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one." - Francis Jeffrey
On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Robert Boyle wrote:
Something about a DS3 of bandwidth for an ihave news feed for $350-500/month was mentioned
At the last company I worked for, I replaced our terrestrial news feeds with Cidera. The first flyer we received from them they were called Skycache, but they changed their name by the time we got to contract to Cidera. (Should have been my first warning?) Only complaints I had about their service before I left were they wouldn't offer a filter before transmission service. It would have cut down on the transmit load and saved some time for my news server if they were filtering before it got to me. They were also slow in giving us the information to have a terrestrial backup, but eventually we got the backup information and it helped fill in a few more gaps. It was extremely nice to take the NNTP load off of our upstream links when we first set it up. As I understood it, they were not doing well on binary feeds towards the end there though. Few people have found a profitable model for doing NNTP services. Useful stuff is on groups.google.com. Most anything else is illegal in the U.S. I used to get a kick out of watching our newsgroups usage statistics. Any recommendations for someone I can outsource NNTP services to off list would be appreciated. It's one option I am looking at for my current company. Gerald
Only complaints I had about their service before I left were they wouldn't offer a filter before transmission service. It would have cut down on the transmit load and saved some time for my news server if they were filtering before it got to me.
I think they couldn't do this because it was a broadcast transmission, and not point to point. Any pre-transmission filter would be applied to everyone.
It was extremely nice to take the NNTP load off of our upstream links when we first set it up. As I understood it, they were not doing well on binary feeds towards the end there though.
I think they ended up filtering posts over a certain length over a year ago (?). They were approaching 45-50MBit/s, and when they implemented that filter they cut it back to about 30. Not exactly a full feed, but how much porn do you actually need? :) We ended up supplementing their feed with a text-only feed from one of our upstreams, just to make sure we weren't missing anything that someone might actually care about (i.e. non-porn). Adam Maloney Systems Administrator Sihope Communications
On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 15:55, Adam Maloney wrote:
It was extremely nice to take the NNTP load off of our upstream links when we first set it up. As I understood it, they were not doing well on binary feeds towards the end there though.
I think they ended up filtering posts over a certain length over a year ago (?). They were approaching 45-50MBit/s, and when they implemented that filter they cut it back to about 30. Not exactly a full feed, but how much porn do you actually need? :)
I don't want to start speculating on certain issues, but I worked there between 4/00 and 4/01 as one of the engineers responsible for maintaining the uplink servers and other satellite doohickeys, so I can speak factually on certain events and paths we went down. Although Mike Donovan or Lisa Peoples would be able to explain much of this better than yours truly, I'll give it my best shot (as I remember it). As the Internet grew, NNTP traffic grew exponentially. Binary attachments were the bane of our existence, but... so long as we had the transponder throughput to accomodate our recipe of HTTP/NNTP/AV/etc, we avoided filtering as long as technically feasible. Unfortunately, it quickly became obvious that while NNTP was what was paying the bills (hypothetically... since too many ISP's were apparently too damn cheap to pay their bills), it was also choking the 45MB we could fit through the transponder. At one point in time, we were trying to push 250-260Gb/day across the transponder (roughly 22-30Mbps peak, IIRC). This left very little for our other "products". When it started to smother the rest, we were forced to start filtering on incomplete multi-part binaries. Some of our clients started bitching (some did from the beginning), as they would miss the occassional multi-part binary and blame Cidera. This was *not* any fault of ours, as we would push out everything we had. As a usenet peer, we were victim to incompletes just like anyone else (even with our excellent range of peer sources... thanks to M.D.). The only other type of "filtering" that might have occurred was throttling on the uplink. I have no doubt that things had changed drastically since the day I was laid off in April '01 (coincidentally, the day our SysEng staff went from 2 to 1). NNTP continued to increase, and likely always will. Folks like Donovan, Peoples, McGuire, Krokes, Humphrey and the rest did their damndest to provide a kick-ass product at a fraction of the cost of conventional terrestrial lines. I miss that place and the work we did with a serious passion. It was just one of those ideas and opportunities that doesn't come across very often, and I was damn lucky to be considered a [very] small part of it. *sigh* Cheers to the happy fun ball. -- Jason Dixon Former Systems Engineer Cidera, Inc.
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31589-2003Oct1.html> This is how one of the last dinosaurs of the Internet age dies: The three remaining employees of Cidera Inc. arrived at their Laurel office Tuesday ... -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433
participants (5)
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Adam Maloney -
David Lesher -
Gerald -
Jason Dixon -
Robert Boyle