arbor on SWiK

Crain's Detroit Business

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:47:11 -0700

Crain’s Detroit Business: Southeast Michigan’s premier local business news & information Web site …. www.arborsearch.com Search engine for Ann Arbor area .

www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20060306/STATIC/60306004

Michigan Yellow Pages - Michigan business listings - USDirectory.com

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:43:06 -0700

Michigan Yellow Pages: Find local Michigan businesses in US Directory’s … ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES, SMALL 2165 W Stadium Blvd, Ann Arbor, MI 48103

http://www.usdirectory.com/Electrical-appliances-small/Michigan/4236200500-1.htm

Find Business in Michigan

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:38:27 -0700

If you are trying to find a business in Michigan, there are a few websites where you should start your search. You can start with a yellow pages search, simply type in www.yellow pages.com/state-MI. or you can go to Yahoo yellow pages and search Michigan.

http://www.squidoo.com/findbusinessinmichigan

Free electronic waste recycling in Ann Arbor

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 06:18:20 -0700

For those people who read my blog and happen to live around Ann Arbor, there are two free electronic waste recycling opportunities coming up.

Tomorrow (April 28, 2008) from 10am to 4pm at the Best Buy on Lohr Road
Saturday May 10 from 9am to 2pm at Pioneer High School

Keep that mercury, lead and other nasty stuff out of our landfills by taking your electronic junk to one of these places. It’s finally time to get rid of that 14″ CRT and the 486.

ShareThis

Shocking: New Facts About P2P and Broadband Usage

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:24:27 -0700

Not a day goes by without someone bemoaning the evils of peer-to-peer networking, painting visions of a network apocalypse brought on by pimply-faced file stealers. And to make their case, naysayers typically present some hard-to-argue-with stats. This week, however, we came across a set of numbers that show more traditional video sources (streaming and flash video, for example) are now an increasing component of bandwidth on consumer-focused broadband networks.

As part of the research I’m doing for another piece, I had a long conversation with Danny McPherson, CTO of Arbor Networks, which makes all sorts of network-management and traffic-shaping tools. Arbor is used by dozens of ISPs around the planet and, as a result, McPherson is privy to details about traffic flows and usage patterns across many broadband networks.

McPherson shared with me some interesting stats and facts about broadband usage and peer-to-peer networking usage patterns. Given that Arbor makes a living selling its technology and products to carriers, it is prudent to maintain a degree of skepticism about the numbers. That said, they are nevertheless interesting enough to share.

On fixed and mobile broadband networks where consumer services are provided (i.e., NOT interprovider or typical dedicated Internet access for commercial enterprises):

10 percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth.
0.5 percent of subscribers consume about 40 percent of total bandwidth
80 percent of subscribers use less than 10 percent of bandwidth

This supports the arguments made by some of the larger ISPs, including Comcast. In a recent interview, Comcast Cable CTO Tony Werner told me his company would try and deal with the tiny number of subscribers who use most of the bandwidth by slowing down their connections during peak times. (Personally, I find that to be a distasteful solution, and I believe that folks should learn from newer ISPs like Free.fr and better architect their networks so they can provide more bandwidth for all — without imposing any penalties.)

The P2P stats are the ones that came as a complete surprise. Like you, I have read many reports that suggest P2P applications account for the majority of the traffic on high-speed networks. But McPherson???s data suggests otherwise:

20 percent of traffic is P2P applications
During peak-load times, 70 percent of subscribers use http while 20 percent are using P2P
Http still makes up the majority of the total traffic, of which 45 percent is traditional web content that includes text and images. Streaming video and audio content from services like YouTube accounts for nearly 50 percent of the http traffic. It shouldn???t come as a surprise to anyone — streaming TV shows from Hulu and videos from YouTube have been on a major upswing, as noted by our colleagues over on NewTeeVee.

So, what do you make of these numbers?

A few words about Arbor Networks

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:51:33 -0700

As I’ve announced in a separate posting, I’m going to go work for SitePen. I wanted to say a few things about Arbor Networks, the company that I’m now leaving.

There are many plusses to working at Arbor Networks. There are a lot of smart people at Arbor, and Arbor does a good job of ensuring that the new folks coming in are also people you’d want to work with. Pretty early on in one’s career, you learn just how important it is to have good people to work with, and Arbor has lots of them.

Arbor’s engineering staff is almost all located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which remains my favorite place to live. I’ve traveled to many places and Ann Arbor suits my tastes well (YMMV). There are more than 60 people in the Ann Arbor office now.

Arbor has clearly reached a scale where it’s no longer a “startup”. It’s a private company, so I won’t mention financials. I’ll just say that the company is very solid and well-run.

Many people leave companies because they’re disgruntled about the work environment or company politics or some such. I’m leaving Arbor because doing so is the best move for my career.

If you’re into computer networking or security, I’d highly recommend checking Arbor’s job postings out. It’s a growing company with a lot of good things going.