Greetings list members;
I concur with what Marius writes below;
On Sun, 2013-06-30 at 10:38 +0300, Marius Petrescu wrote:
Packet radio found APRS and survives, but unless we
find a clear advantage
over existing internet services, the 44 network will disappear.
We have always had two issues at hand:
1) network administration/engineering
2) application/sysadmin
While this thread appears to discuss some very valid solutions for #1,
we often concentrate too much of our thinking in this and ignore
solutions for #2, and it's somewhat (from what I've seen) cut off our
toes.
Our knowledge base and resources for network engineering is top-notch as
proven by the various suggestions in this thread but none appear to
address the fact that "hey, we built this superb network infrastructure
for you (the end user) but we haven't given you any new services to use
it with". The end user, many who aren't as computer literate as we are,
will see this as possibly having to make further investments into an
already dying system to which most who used to use it have become SKs or
simply have no desire to reinvest into something they've already decided
to leave packet as a mode of operation.
We need something positive in which we can not only provide the easiest
solution for network connectivity with the lowest investment costs (none
if possible!) to the end user with some sort of enhanced services for
them that's cross-platform compatable. We also need to look at what's
already in place and somehow enhance them so that the typical end user
can use their "natural resources" from their OS and/or web browser on
packet to do all that they do now in a dumb terminal screen. Without
this, we can build the most robust network in the galaxy, but what good
would it do without end points making use of it? An ISP for example
would have no users if the users couldn't do anything on it or have been
forced to use the same limited resources for years.
I have been testing the PPTP offering Jesse's been experimenting with
and it's worked very well and at 100% performance every time I've
rebooted my machine. Configuration for the end user requires only 4
simple steps (gateway, username, password, no forced data compression)
it comes right up. This on high speed such as 802.11 would be very
attractive I would think to an end user with possibly little investment
cost in gear (as previously noted).
IP under FlexNet is very slick as well and with it's dynamic
auto-routing of ax25 destinations helps keep the virtual circuit
required alive to pass IP through the best possible RF path available...
similar to how BGP/OSPF/etc perform on the internet backhauls... and
even at slower speeds such as 1k2 baud, you can still transmit SMTP
based mail at a somewhat reasonable amount of time even while FBB
systems are autoforwarding. While this scenario may not be ideal for our
discussions... it works and it works well for what it does. I've even
done web browsing with limited graphics over 1k2 baud/Flex without issue
(obviously higher speeds is nicer and 802.11 would resolve that!) but
again, the services is what the end-user driving force is as APRS has
proven and since the IP stack with standard application based protocols
appears to be cross-platform compatable, that makes it very attractive.
Long story short; let's look at the "whole" picture not just the
"big"
picture of building a network infrastructure while we're at it.
--
73 de Brian Rogers - N1URO
email: <n1uro(a)n1uro.ampr.org>
Web:
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