hhw

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
645
Submissions
276
Member since
Jul 29
Entrepreneur, Systems Admin, Network Engineer, and Software Developer all in one. http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/han-hwei-woo/16/7ba/732/

Specializing in customized dedicated servers, private cloud, fiber, and bandwidth solutions. We leverage the backbone of the Internet to the fullest, and help companies scale up their infrastructure. http://astuteinternet.com

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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
There's far more room for improvement when per capita is high than there is when per capita is low.

And the climate certainly does care about cumulative CO2.

Would have, could have, should have. But didn't. Trying to hold others accountable without getting one's own house in order just comes off as the blatant hypocrisy it actually is. Until we do better ourselves, we are in no position to call others out.

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
Equinix doesn't own many of the buildings they have facilities in. Aside from Dallas Infomart, I don't really know of any where they do, but I do know many buildings they have facilities in that they don't own. Digital Realty much more commonly owns carrier hotel buildings.
Comment · 4 years ago
Network at the wholesale level is always measured in Mbps using 95th percentile, not in data transferred (average sustained, equivalent to 50th percentile because we're talking about 5 minute samples of interface counters over the course of a month). Note I used a small b in Mb. Depending on the variability of traffic patterns, that usually works out to be on average ~200GB* transferred per Mbps of 95th percentile over a period of a month. Meaning a TB would work out to about $0.35.

*A long, long time ago, I looked at about 1000 co-location customers' MRTG stats and compared their monthly 95th percentile Mbps to their average sustained data transfer in GB, and something like 90% of them were between 150GB-250GB per Mb and 98% of them were between 180GB-220GB. Many people assume 324GB which would require their traffic to be perfectly flatlined throughout the month, which obviously rarely ever happens.

Comment · 4 years ago
Pretty much any colo or dedicated/bare metal provider. $0.07 to $0.12 per Mb is the going rate for most carriers at any appreciable volume, and even the higher end carriers are less than 3x that.

To be fair, big tech despite their massive volume pay much higher rates than small networks because the carriers charge them enough to fully cover their costs to build out their networKs, while they make all their profits from selling their excess capacity to the little guys for pennies on the dollar.

Comment · 4 years ago
I think the point he was trying to make is that big tech can use privacy regulations to keep out new competitors, rather than encourage them, as compliance with privacy regulations can create a higher barrier to entry
Comment · 4 years ago
I think financially literate people in Canada don't pay anywhere near $200. I've always paid around $50/mo for the last 20 years, without ever going out of my way to shop for promotions, and have been able to have all the data usage I could reasonably use (previously excluded watching videos when not on Wi-Fi, but the most recent plan of a few years has enough data that I no longer need to), plus extra bells and whistles like free roaming in the US. This is with both a corporate plan with Bell the last 6-7 years, and a regular single individual plan with Rogers all the years before that, so wasn't even with a lower cost provider.

There are huge promotions multiple times a year because the competition is fierce between the top providers. When long-term contracts that subsidized phones were still around up to a few years ago, the buyouts to switch providers were so aggressive that you could end up with an extra few hundred dollars in your pocket on top of a new phone every 2 years when switching providers, or staying with the same provider and getting the loyalty/retention department to match offers. Yes, there may be better deals to be found down south sometimes, but not by enough of a margin to deal with cross-border banking, currency conversion, and much worse consumer protection laws for most people.

Yes, additional competition might potentially help drive prices down, but the low ROI on the huge amount of infrastructure required for such a small population might also result in worse economies of scale for all players resulting in the need to cut corners on coverage or service quality to remain competitive.

Also, I'm not convinced coverage is better down south. Anecdotally, I seem to hit way more deadspots driving down I5 through Washington and Oregon than I do on Highway 1 across BC to Alberta despite having much larger swathes of populated areas. I'm also shocked everytime I go to New York and get zero cell signal in every subway station including near Wall Street, when every underground transit station in Vancouver has coverage (admittedly Toronto does not have this though).

Comment · 5 years ago
Sorry, the website is pretty outdated. We're almost exclusively rolling out AMD EPYC3's these days, and we'd price any of those older configurations much lower than what the website lists them at. Nobody, other than spammers, ever orders through our website (although to be fair, our website may be to blame for that also). We get all of our business through word of mouth, and keep busy enough on that alone, so the website hasn't been a priority.
Comment · 5 years ago
From our experience, if we price too low we get people who expect the world for bottom dollar. $199 is more the minimum price point at which we’re generally willing to take someone on a customer, than a reflection of the price of a base configuration server. Anyone e-mailing us for a quote, if they seem like they’re on the up and up and we like what they're about, we will usually give a pretty good discount. Most business nowadays are for people ordering several servers at a time and they will always request a custom quotation anyhow, and we're pretty aggressive with larger volume orders.
Comment · 5 years ago
(Disclaimer) As a bare metal provider, I hope more people become aware what I've been saying for years: cloud is great for scaling down, but not that great for scaling up. If you want to have lots of VM's that don't warrant their own hardware that you can conveniently turn up and down, then cloud is fantastic. If you have a big application that needs to scale, you can get further vertically with bare metal, and if you need to scale horizontally, you need to optimize better higher up in the stack anyway, and the much lower cost for equivalent resources (without even taking any virtualization performance hit into account), more flexibility and thus more/better fitted performance of bare metal should have the clear advantage.
Comment · 5 years ago
No matter what, SK Telecom is going to be eyeball (ingress) heavy and no amount of engineering of Netflix traffic is going to help with that, as it's all inbound anyway. Not that Netflix's upstreams like Level3 or Telia would be peering with SK Telecom anyway. Reducing the amount of Netflix traffic can only help.
Comment · 5 years ago
1) It's impractical to test everyone for antibodies. There's enough empirical data to suggest that immunity wanes over time for most people that it makes sense to just give everyone a 3rd, booster shot. 2) It was always expected that vaccine immunity would wane over time. Nobody (of any relevant repute) ever suggested otherwise. 3) I don't doubt that you had side effects from the vaccine. But there's a strong probability that the side effects of an actual infection would have been much, much worse for you. You may potentially have an undiagnosed health issue that could have potentially been a comorbodity in an actual infection.
Comment · 5 years ago
Why focus on China and India, when on a per capita basis they have a small fraction of the carbon footprint that we have in Canada and the US? When we can get our per capita carbon footprint down below theirs, then maybe we'll have a right to criticize their environmental policies. But in the meantime if we're being at all objective, trying to point a finger at them makes us look like absolute hypocrites.
Comment · 5 years ago
Not all servers are web facing or live in data centres. There are tons of small businesses that run servers in a backroom. Those are predominantly Windows.
Comment · 5 years ago
This is not imperative to do in-house. My company (*shameless plug for Astute Internet) has expertise in those areas you describe, and will provide and/or support the edge network infrastructure for small ISP's in exchange for selling them some of those services (we're a mini-carrier and value added reseller) and charging a nominal retainer to be an available path of escalation 24/7. Due to our purchasing volume and industry knowledge, we are able to sell these services for the same or less than what our customers would be able to negotiate on their own, while getting a lot of support from us in the process.

Although this type of knowledge and expertise is rather specialized, we are able to focus on these specific areas without getting involved in the intricacies of the downstream side of our clients' networks, thus avoiding the need for us to have too much client specific or institutional knowledge. This has worked out very well with the handful of eyeball networks we're currently working with in the Pacific Northwest, and we intend to more actively extend this line of business down the coast in the near future.

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