Networking

You are used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?

Time Warner Cable Inc. customers — and, later, others — may have to, if the company's test of metered Internet access is successful.

On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.

AT&T (NYSE: T) on Wednesday said it would complete the deployment of its faster 3G wireless broadband service by the end of June.

The telecommunications company said the remaining six markets would be connected to its HSUPA technology, which delivers up to 800 KB per second in upload speeds and 1.4 Mb per second in download capabilities. The service will be available to customers who have supporting devices, such as notebooks with AT&T's Laptop Connect wireless modems. However, such high-speed services among carriers are expensive with rates of $60 a month or more.

More and more internet service providers are blocking traffic to P2P file-sharing services. Find out whether you've been targeted, and learn how to get around the restrictions.

With this in mind we've rounded up a number of tips and tools that can help you determine whether you're facing a BitTorrent blockade and, if so, help you get around it.

A server problem at the U.S. National Security Agency has knocked the secretive intelligence agency off the Internet.

The nsa.gov Web site was unresponsive at 7 a.m. Pacific time Thursday and continued to be unavailable throughout the morning for Internet users.

As web users' thirst for bandwidth soars, cable broadband purveyor Virgin Media is looking to squeeze four times the capacity out of its optical network, but without the expense of ripping out and upgrading its fibre.

The trend for online video content and popular bandwidth-heavy applications, such as the BBC's iPlayer, has led to concerns among ISPs that their infrastructure will soon be creaking under the strain.

A student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts has written an article about an otherwise unpublicized case of a band of students that kept a peer-to-peer filesharing network running on campus so that users of the network could illegally obtain copyrighted material. The story needs to be told, so I'm running it here.

A university data centre may not seem the place to adopt leading edge technology, given that publicly-funded institutes are chronically short of money.

But as Andrew McAusland, associate vice-president of instructional and IT services at Canada's Concordia University points out, universities have unique clients.

Somewhere between 1 percent and 3 percent of all traffic on the Internet is meaningless packets of information, used in distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) to knock Web sites offline.

Those are the findings of Arbor Networks, a network traffic analysis company that recently looked at traffic flowing between more than 68 Internet service providers to see how much of it was malicious.

"The thing that's surprising is it's consistently 1 to 3 percent," said Danny McPherson, Arbor's chief research officer. "It's pretty significant."

Pop Quiz: How many U.S. airlines currently offer broadband Internet access to all passengers?

If you answered "none," give yourself a pat on the back because you're absolutely right. But that is about to change. Right now, JetBlue -- one of the most wired airlines in the U.S. -- has one flight that offers limited e-mail service, but not full Web surfing.

Enterprise Management Associates is back again after a year of absence, this time on a monthly basis. We've really missed your dialog and comments, and hopefully we've been missed as well. As before, this column will focus on network management trends as they fit into the bigger IT management landscape - focusing from time to time on application performance, or SLM versus BSM, or new approaches to asset management, or trends like CMDB adoption as they may affect the NOC.