Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Here is a quote from the latest PrimeTel newsletter:

PrimeTel upgrades for even faster Internet speeds and provides 4Mbps / 512Kbps as an upgrade option for the PrimeHome and PrimeADSL2+ subscribers. The additional monthly fee for the PrimeHome subscribers is EUR65,92 while for the PrimeADSL2+ subscribers is EUR53,33. Read more

Anybody tried that already?

Note to PrimeTel : By the way, I’d much prefer an RSS feed from your site to those Greek emails that you send me. Thank you.

Web Worker Daily links to the article titled “AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010“. Here is a summary:

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

Well, thank you for pointing out the obvious, Mr. Jim.  The current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope indeed.  That’s why they will be upgraded, updated, redesigned, and multiplied to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content.  That’s how it was before and that’s how it will be in the future.

There is this nice concept that I’ve learned about back in the college days.  I don’t remember how it’s called, but it is very related to three terms: “supply”, “demand”, and “equilibrium”.  I’m sure that current economics aren’t as simple, and that there are many better concepts to explain things, but I liked the simplicity of it.  I am also a big believer in the ultimate power - natural balance.  Things can be pulled a little bit left and right, and that’s possible, but in the long term, everything will balance out.

Looking through that prism on the problem of ever increasing Internet traffic, that seems to be like a lot of demand.  If big companies, such as AT&T won’t be able to supply enough, it doesn’t mean that the Earth will stop revolving and wait for them to catch up.  This has been proved before and will be proved again, if needed.  If it will come to the worst, ISPs can be decentralized by self-managing network units (individual or small networks) that interconnect with each other.  That’s actually what happens in areas which are not covered by major Internet Service Providers.  People install their own wireless networks, connect to each other, and between those who can connect them further.  If there will be too much demand for solutions like this, they can be rather easily automated with hardware units and simple software packages.

As to the claims of how fast the traffic will rise, I don’t quite agree.  It will continue to rise at dramatic rates, but not as dramatic as:

“In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”

That’s just insane.

Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. “Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today,” he said.

HD is a promising technology, and it has its niche, but saying that everything is will go HD very soon, well… It reminds me of all those claims about radio disappearing when TV came along, and TV disappearing when Internet appeared.  HD will be pretty popular, but there are many areas where it is not applicable.  For example, it will take a long time before mobile phones will learn how to create HD content.

And not to forget the money issue, people are prepared to pay today than they used to before. And they are paying more.  Think about it.  Ten years ago not a lot of people had a dial-up account.  Which was a really crappy way to connect to the Internet.  And it was priced at about $20 USD a month.  Today I pay about $60 USD a month to my ISP, which brings me Internet, television, and telephony through a single cable.  And guess what - I am prepared to pay more.  And guess what - I am by far not alone.  I know more people today who pay $60 USD for their Internet connectivity than I knew before paying for their dial-up connection.

The Internet is changing.  If before it was mostly good for checking email and reading an occasional web site, today it is a powerful tool that solve a whole range of communication and entertainment problems.  Make it better and we’ll pay more.

Oh, and you’ll get paid from the other side too - web services, and the rest of the crowd who make a lot of money on the Internet.  10 years ago a service such as Flickr would be possible.  Or it would have been rather useless.  Today I now more people paying for a Pro account to Flickr than I knew before paying for their dial-up connection.  How’s that?  I’m sure Flickr is ready to pay more for better connectivity.

So, Mr. Jim, stop whining.  It’s not the end of the world.  It doesn’t even look like it. Quite the opposite.  It’s the golden time for the people who work in technology.  Let’s get back to work and make the world a better place.

(Can you pack any more technology terms into that title?)

Apparently, PrimeTel is working hard on improving broadband connectivity on the island of Cyprus.  In this blog post, Vladimir Ivaschenko links to this article, which explains:

PrimeTel is building a new, independent, privately owned Submarine landing station in Yeroskipos, Cyprus as per the global specifications of Reliance Globalcom. It aims to gain access to new international cables and capacity, and has secured 5Gbps of capacity globally with an option for further upgrades in the future. The project is expected to be completed by 2009.

This sounds very cool, and I hope that the project will be completed on time and that we all, broadband users, will benefit from it. (Not that it will stop any of the local forums whining about Cyprus connectivity options or anything.)

Here is an insightful bit from this comment in this Slashdot discussion:

Someone I know went for a job interview with (I think) Vodafone. Their open-plan office was set out according to the OSI model — physical layer people at the end, application people at the other end, and everyone in order in between!

Talk about integration of technology and corporate culture…

I’m far from honest myself, but at least I don’t charge for my lies. Plenty of people do, however. One of the commonly told lies that I come across rather often these days is the one of Cyprus web hosting. Some companies are telling lies out loud, others are just being overly silent about the truth. But the fact of the matter is that Cyprus web hosting is almost non-existing. There are only just a few companies providing web hosting in Cyprus (PrimeTel and CytaNet, for example), and in most of the cases, their offerings don’t make sense financially. That’s one of the biggest reasons for most of Cyprus web sites being hosted outside of Cyprus, in countries like USA, UK, Germany, and Netherlands.

Still, most of the web design and development companies in Cyprus offer “Cyprus web hosting”. Here is just one example, that I found (ironically, I found it through AdSense block on my own blog) - CyprusWebSpace.com . Here is a partial snapshot of their front page.

If you are using Firefox browser with Flagfox plugin, than you will immediately notice the United States of America flag in the bottom right corner of your browser window. If you don’t have the plugin or don’t trust the information that it provides, or use a totally different browser, here is how you can arrive to the same results:

1. Go to DomainTools.com
2. Type cypruswebspace.com in the Whois Lookup form at the top of the page and press the Search button
3. Scroll down the resulting page to where it says “Server Data”
4. Find the line with the American flag and a description “Texas - Dallas - Theplanet.com Internet Services Inc”.
5. Bonus point : look at the map, provided by GeoTool. The area you see is pretty far from Cyprus.

Now, there is always this argument, that the web hosting company runs its own web site on a different server from the one that it uses for its customers. It is a theoretically valid point, but the one I haven’t seen in practice just yet. Most of the web companies offering web hosting in Cyprus only have a single server (usually it is a shared or dedicated server, or a VPS account), which they use for all of their hosting needs.

There is also another argument to this point - what exactly is a Cyprus web hosting? Is it hosting on the web server which physically resides in Cyprus, or is hosting on a web server, which is assigned one of the Cyprus IP addresses? And it is, in fact, an interesting point. There is significant difference between the two. If the server is physically located in Cyprus, then chances are, that it will have a lower latency, meaning that web sites on such a server will appear to respond much faster to visitors who are also in Cyprus. This is what matters for many site owners. On the other hand, Cyprus IP address of the web server might be more important to other site owners, since some search engines use this information in scoring their search results (that is considering, for example, that web sites residing on servers with Cyprus IP addresses are more relevant to Cyprus related queries than web sites residing on other web servers).

Technically, it is quite possible for a web server to be physically located in one country, while carrying the IP address, which belongs to another country. But situations like this, aren’t so common, and that is specifically the reason why search engines (and other tools) utilize the information of IP address location.

So, back to the issue of Cyprus web hosting. How bad is it? Let’s see. Examine the first 10 or so results for each of these queries at Google, using the method above:

• cyprus web hosting
• cyprus webhosting
• cyprus hosting

Impressed? I am. Results:

• Companies with web sites physically located in Cyprus: 0 (zero).
• Companies with web sites hosted on a server with Cyprus IP address: 1 (one).

How do I know about this one company with Cyprus IP address that it doesn’t have the server physically located in Cyprus? Because I am an employee of that company (disclaimer and blah blah blah). And even if I wasn’t, finding this information is rather trivial with any traceroute tool (here is one, for example).

So, keep this stuff in mind before you pay for you Cyprus web hosting next time. Maybe this Cyprus offering is not so Cyprus after all. But then again, maybe you just don’t care…