networking Essays (835 words) - Least-cost Routing, Teletraffic, ACD

BANDWIDTH ISSUES ARCHIVES Internet Everything Wednesday, January 20, 2010 A study by L.E.K. consulting, a business strategy and marketing consulting firm, recently conducted a survey on media consumption habits; and what they found turned out to be a bit of a shock. According to the survey, 32% of users listen to an average of 5.8 hours of Internet radio a week. That?s huge. The reason it is huge is because unlike a lot of high-throughput downloads; streaming radio tends to be a constant drain on bandwidth. Sure, a 5GB file is a lot to transfer, but it saturates the available bandwidth in the pipe for a limited amount of time. What?s interesting about this is that we?re increasingly in a world where if the medium can be digital, the medium will be digital. And this requires thinking about the network in ways that a lot of enterprises haven?t thought about the network before. http://www.networkperformancedaily.com/bandwidth_issues/ Handovers and Routers: encyclopedia In voice telecommunications, least cost routing (LCR) is the process of selecting the path of outbound communications traffic based on cost. Within a telecoms carrier, an LCR team might periodically (monthly, weekly or even daily) choose between routes from several or even hundreds of carriers for destinations across the world. This function might also be automated by a device or software program known as a "Least Cost Router." The LCR team also has to take route and call quality into account. The quality of route to a destination can vary considerably between suppliers and even from week to week from the same supplier. Quality is usually measured by the Answer-Seizure Ratio (ASR = call attempts answered / call attempts), Post-Dial Delay (PDD) and the Average Call Duration (ACD). If the average call duration is very low, it is taken to mean that the call quality is so poor that people cannot have a conversation and hang up. This matters to calling card operators because people do not re-purchase card services that give a low ACD. In case of significant discrepancies in ACD values across available routes, the carrier shall prioritize the routes offering higher ACD [1]. A low ASR is taken to mean that callers cannot get through to the other end and hence that the route is congested or is of low-quality. The low ASR is not as bad asACD, because it suggests at least a proper answer supervision (i.e. correct signaling), and therefore the handover mechanism can reroute calls via other available routes. Secure Connections: wikipedia Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with the SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/ Transport Layer Security) protocol to provide encrypted communication and secure identification of a network web server. HTTPS connections are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems. HTTPS should not be confused with Secure HTTP (S-HTTP) specified in RFC 2660. The main idea of HTTPS is to create a secure channel over an insecure network. This ensures reasonable protection from eavesdroppers and man-in-the-middle attacks, provided that adequate cipher suites are used and that the server certificate is verified and trusted. The trust inherent in HTTPS is based on major certificate authorities which come pre-installed in browser software (this is equivalent to saying "I trust certificate authority (e.g. VeriSign/Microsoft/etc.) to tell me whom I should trust"). Therefore an HTTPS connection to a website can be trusted if and only if all of the following are true: 1.The user trusts that their browser software correctly implements HTTPS with correctly pre-installed certificate authorities. 2.The user trusts the certificate authority to vouch only for legitimate websites without misleading names. 3.The website provides a valid certificate (an invalid certificate shows a warning in most browsers), which means it was signed by a trusted authority. 4.The certificate correctly identifies the website (e.g. visiting https://example and receiving a certificate for "Example Inc." and not anything else [see above]). 5.Either the intervening hops on the Internet are trustworthy, or the user trusts the protocol's encryption layer (TLS or SSL) is unbreakable by an eavesdropper. Reliable connections: In order for you to provide your clients with fast connections that are reliable as well as accurate, there are telecommunications companies that provide wholesale VoIP services at the business level. Because these services are offered at a