Advanced Connections
The unsophisticated internet user just wants to be able to use his
personal computer on the internet using a dial-up modem.
More sophisticated users will want to:
The original design of the Internet assumed that each machine would have
unique address, and that these addresses would be assigned in some
logically structured manner. When it was discovered that the Internet was
so successful that everyone would eventually want to get connected,
it became clear that we would run out of addresses, since there are
at most 4 biillion unique 32-bit numbers, and there are more people
on Earth than that. Today, "personal" users generally do not have a unique
address; instead, the service provider's modem that they connect to has a
unique address, which the dial-up client borrows for the duration of the
connection. This makes it difficult to share the connection between multiple
machines.
This article describes the best workaround.
The growth of the Internet was driven by the inexpensive high-speed
modems made possible by DSPs in the early 1990's, and fueled by the
peculiar U.S. tradition of "free" local telephone calls.
But after a while, we always want more. In 1999, we can get much faster
connections for only a little more money.
High-Speed Data
Races Home is a set of articles from
Scientific American Magazine (October 1999) discussing what is
available.
Businesses would like to get increased robustness by connecting
to more than one Internet Service Provider (ISP). Certainly,
most ISPs (excepting the smallest) want to do this. This is
actually quite tricky. This article
discusses technical issues relating to dual upstream links.
Revision history:
$Log: advconn.htm,v $
Revision 1.3 2000/02/16 01:07:03 lars
Added dual-homing article.
Revision 1.2 1999/10/02 20:00:15 lars
Migrated more bookmarks to links in the website.
Revision 1.1 1999/07/26 14:52:10 lars
Brought "Connecting to the internet" up to date.