Hi,

On Fri, 16 May 2003, Adam Bower wrote:

...

From: Andrew Savory [mailto:lists@andrewsavory.com]

...

I'd hang out for the wireless broadband. From my experience, ADSL is bottom of the league table very slightly above 56k modem, with wireless at the top followed by cable modem.

I disagree with this entirely :)

Heh, I thought someone would :-)

I would put ADSL at the top as you can run servers and get static ip addresses, no port blocking etc, etc, and place cable modems and wireless far behind ADSL depending on what you dislike less (i.e. ntl and transparent webcaches (yuk), and wireless being unreliable in certain conditions but you can get static ips from some of the services and run servers)

Ok: wrt ADSL and static IP addresses: true enough (unless you can find a cable provider that does static, I'm not aware of any), but anything that *requires* static IP probably shouldn't be on the end of an ADSL line anyway. There are plenty of dynamic dns services out there, which resolve this particular problem neatly.

Transparent web caches: yes, they are an unpleasantness, but perhaps a necessary evil. Doesn't it make sense to make the most efficient use of the bandwidth available? Web caches are there for a reason, and if they aren't transparent then few people will use them. (Admittedly a badly-configured web cache can do more harm than good, but the NTL cache seems (for the most part) to be fairly well-behaved.)

Of course, wireless is no good when there's interference or a weak signal, and I wouldn't say otherwise. But when you have a good strong signal, it's a very neat solution.

(Arguably wireless shouldn't be used to solve the 'last mile' problem since we should reserve our radio bandwidth for where it's needed, but if there's no other solution then why not?)

Aaaaaanyway. Your mileage may vary.

Andrew.