Pondicherry is not a big city. It is more of a tourist spot, and a place wehre politicians fight for their superiority within their 1 KM zones in which they would be elected. I have never cared to learn what it is called in English, but in Tamil, they call it Toguthi. Well, so, the only standard ISP in Pondicherry just like in most parts of India is BSNL, and both at my home and at my office I am stuck with BSNL broadband, since the only other good one available is Airtel and it has a very very limited coverage here in Pondicherry.

Untill a few months ago, the connection at my home used to give problems every once in a while, and I used to get heavy bills for the usage though I doubt that I have used it much in those days, but right now, with the unlimited connections both at home and office, there is hardly any downtime.

Untill recently. At the office, for the past few days in the afternoon hours a strange phenomenon is occuring when the internet goes off every 150 seconds and comes back after every 150 seconds. This simply acts an an on off cycle with a frequency of 150 seconds. I got fed up with this today and went directl to the exchange, and they asked me to bring the modem stating that it si a modem problem. Bloody hell, a modem will not act like this, it is the problem of the bloody port to which our line is connected.

They are just refusing to check it, and when I came back to the office I found that net is working without the breaks, but with latency of upto 5 seconds per ping. I wonder how that works, there is a delay of 5 seconds or over 5000 ms for every request that is sent every second. Maybe the people programmed ubuntu know what they have been doing, and its correct.

Well, what is the best way to get connected to the internet? People these days do say that there will be satellite downlinks all over India in the next 2 years, and India would be the next server farm, and that you will find one in every home. If BSNL doesnt improve its service, people will start hosting their servers on BSNL, and that would come down as another black mark for India. The Land of Bad Servers.

A fully dedicated server has got a lot of resources that it can be shared amoung so many sites. But certain clients do not wish to let their sites bein a shared environment where others can overload, and that overload can affect your site, and your downtime could nto be compensated easily by anything.

But at the same time, they might find a dedicated server for a few sites that they have to be quite expensive, and that they might not need so much of resources. What do they do? They go to virtual servers.

You buy a server, and a Virtuozzo or a Xen license, install it on your OS, and you have your virtual serers on a dedicated server ready You can have as many virtual servers as your operating system permits. In linux, it is virtually unlimited, and you can create as many virutal enviromnets as you like, but a windows server has got its limitations. It also, does depend on your license.

You could go for openvz for linux, the open source server virtualization software, and since it doesnt come with any licnese fee, it would cost you a lot less, though that gain would vanish away when you employ specialists in that line of server administration.

You can set the Processor, Memory and hard drive resources, and unlike in a shared environment, you will have these resources always on the standby for you, and no one else would be using it, even if its being unused. So, virtually, except for its physical configurations, it is a dedicated server.

Various applications of server virtualization will follow this article soon.

In international voice telecommunications, least cost routing (LCR) is the process that provides customers with cheap telephone calls. Within a telecoms carrier, an LCR team will be choosing routes from between twenty to over one hundred suppliers for five hundred or more destinations across the world on a weekly or even daily basis to maintain a competitive cost base and acceptable call quality.

A telecoms carrier will buy and sell call termination with other carriers. A carrier such as Telewest or France Telecom will be interconnected with other telecoms carriers and so will have a number of routes of different price, quality and capacity to a given country. In the de-regulated EU, these will be licensed alternative operators (e.g. Cable and Wireless / Energis in the UK or Jazztel in Spain) or the ( PTT)’s of other countries, such as T-Systems (Germany), Telefonica (Spain), NTT (Japan) or Telstra (Australia), who establish offices or a point of presence (POP) in a major telecommunications hub city such as London, New York, Hong Kong or Amsterdam. The major US carriers, Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and Global Crossing in the US also have POPs in these hub cities. There are also niche carriers which specialise in providing termination to a small number of destinations, sometimes through the use of grey routes.

The carrier-carrier market is not trading in the same sense that stockbroking houses trade with each other. Whereas brokers and banks may buy and sell the same stocks or bonds with each other in the same day, carriers have to be very careful not to do that. If carrier A buys Venezuela from carrier B who buys it from A, one call will come in to carrier A, go to B and go back to A again, over and over until all the circuits are taken up with one call. If it does terminate on an overflow route, the carriers may bill each other many times over for the same call. This is called looping and is very undesirable.

The LCR team in a carrier follow a cycle: the buyers negotiate with their suppliers and get a new price schedule; the prices are loaded into the software to calculate and compare termination costs; a route is chosen, fixing a cost-for-pricing; and new prices are issued based on the costs-for-pricing. The new routes are implemented on the switch and finally the traffic volumes and margins are monitored through reports from the billing system. Loss-making traffic and odd routings are investigated, and either the billing system has its data corrected or routing and pricing action gets taken.

Carriers sign interconnect agreements with each other specifying the terms under which they will do business. As well as the usual terms of payment and dispute resolution, these will include the terms of price notifications. The industry standard is currently seven days for price increases while price decreases take effect on the day of notification. Because the margins in the carrier-carrier market are around 5% – 10%, re-routes or price increases must be made quickly to a destination where the current route is going to increase in price. Since the price increase itself has seven days’ notice, it must be issued within twenty-four hours of the cost increase to avoid losses. This puts a significant pressure on the carrier’s LCR team, who must process the offers from their suppliers quickly and accurately.

I have been using the same modem for about a year now, and for the past few days since I got my unlimited data transfer internet connection, I am surprised at the work that it is doing. Im downloading all sorts of stuff, and my computer is plugged to a 2 hour backup power supply as well, and Pondicherry not being a very bad place wehre power goes down for over 2 hours at a streatch, the computer and the modem have literally been running for over 2 months at a streatch now since july 1st when my plan changed to unlimited 512 kbps from 2 Mbps limited.

If you are outside India, you might laugh at this cos probably you might be on a 10 Mbps connection while reading this, but in India owning a 512 Kbps connection is like owning a Rolls Royce. I sit before this computer for about 6 hours a day, and therefore the AC runs here for 6 hours a day, and for the remaining 18 hours, the door is locked, and so are all windows, and the heat is almost unbearable when I enter the room in the evening after office. No AC, no ventilation, and all the heat that is released by the cpu and the modem have no means of getting out of the room.

Well, anyways, I am quite happy with the performance of the modem, as I know that the computer has to perform, after all it is a server quality cpu that I have got, and the monitor is always turned off, as I use it only when I am working on the PC. The modem is working in its full effecienty round the clock for the past 2 months, during which time it has not been turned off even once, and BSNL too has been able to supply data all this while (i think i am sure that there has been no downtime or anything), though at the office it is a different story.