(10-12-2012 04:55 PM)Machiavelli Wrote:  I wish I understood this stuff more. I have hi speed internet through my telephone. 3 mbs and it costs me 34.95 a month. I have dish network. Should I be looking to change service providers? Is that 34 bucks a good deal. I test out my speed and I download at 3 mbs upload at 1 mbs.

Mach, if you can get your computer on the internet through a cable modem you would get much faster speeds than 3mbs. While it might not make a big difference surfing these threads that have nothing but text, it will make a big difference when there are a lot of pictures in the thread.

The company in question is Huawei. They make serious enterprise level networking equipment. In the United States at the highest levels ... that is a Cisco monopoly market. Allow me to provide context for non-geeks:

The most basic networking level is your typical home wifi and/or wired router. It lets you share a network connection with multiple machines in your house. At this level you have scores of competitors .... TrendNet, D-Link, Netgear, Apple, Buffalo, Linksys, Asus, TP-LINK, Engenius, ZyXEL and probably another 6-12 people. You've probably heard of most of these companies. Price points as low as under $10 for some equipment.

Take a step up. At this level it tends to be small business equipment and small government .... supersized versions of what you use at your house. Instead of 4 or 6 ports ... this equipment has 12, 24, 32, 40 ports. And whereas your home equipment does port forwarding and little else ... these can do VPN, hardware firewalls, subscription based filtering services, etc. The competition drops in volume substantially. Now you're down to D-Link, Netgear, Linksys, Engenius, ZyXEL ... but now you're picking up enterprise only vendors. This includes Dell, HP, LG, Cisco ... and some interesting solutions like Vyatta, where they take a highly tweaked Linux software stack and drop it onto commodity PC equipment. Price points jump up to $50 for basic small equipment, $150+ for large basic equipment, and $500+ for feature packed hardware.

Take a step up. At this level you're talking big business, big government, military, enterprise level service providers. This is the equipment you'll find running datacenters. Now you're down to exclusively enterprise providers.... Dell, HP, Cisco, Vyatta. You've left the world of 10/100 wired ethernet, and even gigabit ethernet, and even 10 gigabit ethernet behind... now you're talking fibrechannel ... literally fiber optic cable. You're not touching anything in this space -- even at the really stripped down levels, for less than $1,000. It goes way beyond $10,000 and even $50,000 here.

Take a step up. At this level you're talking backbone provider equipment and private government (e.g. - military) networks. Sprint, AT&T, Level3, Cogent, Charter, Comcast, DukeNet, XO, etc. Now the only player left at this level is Cisco. Now you're talking multi-million dollar rollouts. This is where Huawei wants to compete.

And to be quite frank ... dammit somebody needs to compete there. Cisco makes even Apple look like an open platform by comparison. A standard gigabit ethernet card? In PC land that is $15. And this is Vyatta's business model. Take commodity PC equipment, throw a heavily customized Linux on it, undercut everybody on price with competitive performance with the power of the modern PC. And this works well ... except the very very low and the very very high end. In Cisco world, they change the slots/connectors for EVERYTHING. So even though it is the SAME gigabit card you have in your PC, it won't fit in Cisco equipment. So when you go to get one from Cisco ... instead of being $15 ... that is now $300. Cute model, huh? The trouble is, typical PC hardware isn't able to keep up at the very high end where Cisco dominates. You need custom hardware designed from the ground up. Super high throughput, super low latency equipment. A fundamentally different architecture entirely from PC world, quite literally. Cisco top end stuff runs RISC processors ... PCs are CISC processors. Fundamentally VERY DIFFERENT architectures.

Is it possible Huawei is hiding malicious code in their equipment? Possibly. They've already been documented to have phone-home type behavior. But let's be honest here ....... do you think Cisco equipment doesn't have US government back doors in it? Hmmmm? Due to the nature of this type of equipment being deployed on military networks ... it is unsurprising our government and our allies balk at Huawei. However, it is also unsurprising our enemies do the same at Cisco. The real person losing here is still the businessman ... because competition is desperately needed at the high end of the networking space.

I agree with the move DrTorch. I'm for helping American companies gain foothold in the market. If China is subsidizing it's companies, we need to counter in the economic war with China. Secondly, I would go as far as to say that any company in China that employs children to make products to be sold in the US, the US should not allow such products to be sold here. It's a common understanding and acceptable to most in the US (95% except those at Bain Capital) that children should not be involved in work such as making computers and making phones to be sold and used in the US. However, our budies on Wall Street after review of chinese phone and computer companies and in this case solar panel producers prospectus realize the profit margins are much greater with chinese companies primarily because labor costs are so low. Therefore, Wall Street in it's unabated way continue to invest and profit from child labor in China. Sure, in most cases the US does not want to stop this practice because Wall Street is in bed all day long with chinese manufacturer's. The profits are greater and the investments in such companies bear more fruit. Get it Dr. Torch? So when you answer your Iphone, or get online to type these messages, your most likely connecting with a product built by children in China. Do you have any children under 10? Can you see them working for 2 dollars a day in China? I find it outrageous.

Mach, I've got broadband Internet and my speeds are 16 down and 4 up with a ping consistently around 25ms. You can do better.

BY READING THIS POST YOU RECOGNIZE THAT IMATY IS THE LAST GREAT CRUSADER FOR TRUTH AND JUSTICE SO HELP YOU GOD.

(10-13-2012 06:53 AM)Vewb1 Wrote:  I agree with the move DrTorch. I'm for helping American companies gain foothold in the market. If China is subsidizing it's companies, we need to counter in the economic war with China. Secondly, I would go as far as to say that any company in China that employs children to make products to be sold in the US, the US should not allow such products to be sold here. It's a common understanding and acceptable to most in the US (95% except those at Bain Capital) that children should not be involved in work such as making computers and making phones to be sold and used in the US. However, our budies on Wall Street after review of chinese phone and computer companies and in this case solar panel producers prospectus realize the profit margins are much greater with chinese companies primarily because labor costs are so low. Therefore, Wall Street in it's unabated way continue to invest and profit from child labor in China. Sure, in most cases the US does not want to stop this practice because Wall Street is in bed all day long with chinese manufacturer's. The profits are greater and the investments in such companies bear more fruit. Get it Dr. Torch? So when you answer your Iphone, or get online to type these messages, your most likely connecting with a product built by children in China. Do you have any children under 10? Can you see them working for 2 dollars a day in China? I find it outrageous.

I have no idea of what point you're trying to make. And I don't care.

I am greatly concerned w/ the slave labor used in China. I doubt it's so much child labor as you write, so I suspect you made most of that up based on your wild speculation. Slave labor, including political prisoners, is well documented.

However, that really doesn't tie to anything I wrote. You just decided to post some non sequitor that you feel is important, even though there is no rational connection to anything, and certainly no solution.