All right. All right, here we go. You are tuned in to the global Bob Show. to Globalbob show, we are the crossroads of technology and politics. This is episode number 25. Let's kick it. So we're coming to you today from the beautiful Richard Cook broadcast facility. Really enjoy. Whenever I get to record inside your radio room here, sometimes my schedule does not allow for that. So I have to record in other areas. But today, this episode we are back in the radio room here that I'm named after my grandfather, Richard Cook, who was a pioneer and radio in this area. A little bit of nostalgia, whenever I record, I like to thank everybody that can pin us to tune in each and every week. Like, I really think everybody that spreads the word and also calls me throughout the week to try to get a scoop on what the next podcast is going to be about or give me ideas about the next podcast. So I really appreciate the interaction between myself and the audience. And that's why I put these together. It's actually why I started putting these together. You know, a lot of people that know me know that I've been in the business for a while and cybersecurity mostly. Now I'm pretty much focused on application security, which is, you know, still cybersecurity, but it's securing the applications. So if you want to get a hold of Globalbob here, be one of those people that interact, you can reach us on the Facebook page and Globalbob show out on Facebook, of course on Twitter, at Globalbob show. We also have a Gmail account, and you can send me an email globalbob@gmail.com. And of course, you can visit a couple of different websites. One is globalbob.org, which is kind of like my online resume presents. Everything Globalbob is on there. And the actual show is Globalbob show.com. So lots of ways to get a hold of your fellow field commander Globalbob here. And if I'm not cruising the old cyber Caddy around with the top drop, you can give me a call on my cell phone. And if I hear it rang, I'll pick it up. All right, so this is episode number 25. This is an important episode, because they say that a lot of podcasts don't even make it to Episode 25. Actually, a lot of them fade out well before that. So we're pretty happy according to Buzzsprout This is a milestone. So episode 25. Here we go. So whenever I was putting this together, you know, usually I get things locked in for the show. Probably the Friday before the show, try to record on either Sundays or Mondays so I can get this show out. A good time. On Tuesday, matter of fact, I can tell you the best time to get the show out is before my mom goes to the gym. Now if I don't get this show, uploaded and published, where it hits her, her phone and all the iPod feeds by the time she goes to the gym, well, I'm getting a phone call. And it's usually something well, you must had a busy week didn't see any podcast uploaded. So anyway, sometimes we do get busy. And we've had to skip weeks here either due to COVID or are busy schedule. So on this one here, I feel the need the Need for Speed cache I was waiting a while to to move that quote and to something in the podcast. And if you haven't been living under a rock, you know that that is one of the most famous movie quotes. Probably a movie famous movie quote of all time, but but that one's from Top Gun, the need for speed. And that's what we're going to talk about. This week we're going to talk about the internet and how its speeds have been ever increasing. And how a lot of times that people are talking about other internet, they talk about speed. But speed is really only relevant to what you're trying to use it for. So we're going to unpack all of this. And hopefully at the end of this podcast, you'll understand what is actually enter net speed. So it may not be exactly what you think it is. So stay tuned. Now we've covered the history of internet in previous podcast and where the Internet came from and how it came to be. But we were only talking more or less about the technologies that deliver the internet, like the World Wide Web, and file sharing and cloud resources and other services like that. But what I want to talk about specifically during this episode is internet speed. So let's just go ahead and throw a stake in the ground and talk a little bit about 1989. Because to me, 1989 1990 is when Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web. Now, before the World Wide Web was invented, we've talked about there were tons of services that were out there, but they were kind of government centric, and university centric, business centric. But when Tim invented the World Wide Web, this was going to be something that revolutionized the world by getting consumers involved. So that was in 1989 1990 1993. Was think I was about in 10th grade, then, yeah, had to be about 10th grade, and all of the internet traffic in the world for one month. How much traffic Do you think that was in 1993? Well, if you said nine gigs, you're right, in 1993, you take all the internet traffic for one month, and that only equaled nine gigs. So we're not transferring a lot of data. But then again, things were slower back then. We didn't have broadband, of which we'll talk about the actual definition of broadband. And not a lot of people had internet at their house. Now, thankfully, my parents have always been supportive of all of my endeavors, most of my endeavors, and at my house around that time, actually, I know, before that time, I ran what they call it a bulletin board system. And so my cousin and I, he had his bulletin board system, I had my bulletin board system. And if I would have known what I've known now, I would have registered the domain matrix. Because way before the movie came out, I actually ran Cyper matrix BBs. That was the name of my BBs. And I never knew they're going to make a blockbuster hit called the matrix. So of course, you know, I didn't know anything about registering domain names and, and stuff. So yeah, that's one that I missed. But I ran cyber matrix BBs my cousin he ran. Forgot. Oh, Comptons warlords. That's right. So have you ever met this guy? He's definitely not a competent warlord. But I remember that he ran their website competence warlords, but where I'm going with this is, is that during these times, we ran a little piece of intermediate software called World War four, or WWE IV. And with WWI V or World War for one BBs could call another BBs and pass message traffic back and forth. And so this you know, before this if I wanted to send a message, say to Globalbob and I knew that Globalbob was on the cyber matrix BBs are another big one in my area was called crown jewel. Another one was Shatterstar. I mean, I can think of a lot of these BBs 's that are still stuck in my brain that are occupying space to this day, but you would have to log into that particular BBs and send a message to that person. And then when that person finally decided to log in, then they could retrieve their message. Well, with WWI V. You can log into a BBS say, a crown jewel BBs and send a message to global Bob. And each BBs would call the other and replicate that message. And so if I was a member of WWI V and, and my website was connected to and someone sent me a message, you can log into other people's bulletin board systems to get that message. Now, it worked. It was kind of cool. And but very archaic, but what it allowed me to do is make the case of why I needed two to three phone lines at my house at that time. And so basically what would happen is is that my BBs would use one phone line dedicated for distributing messages. The other one would be used for people to call in, so would their modem. So that was kind of cool, you know, but if you think about how archaic that system was, that means every BBs stored a copy of every other BBs as message. So that's back in the early 90s. And I like to thank my parents, as always, for being supportive of my endeavors and being my my chief sponsor there, because I went off to make a career out of it. But back to the 1993, there was only nine gigs of traffic that went across the internet. And then a couple years later, 1994, it only jumps to 150 gigs. Now knowing what I know about ISPs, I mean, you can get a via sat link or some of the cellular links, and they allow 150 to 200 gigs of traffic per month. So you can take one user now and they can transfer, no problem, all of the traffic that the internet had back in 1995. So at this time, you know, 1995, we got to talk about there wasn't a lot of traffic. But then again, we didn't have a medium to transfer traffic, a lot of traffic really. So we had these 56k modems. And that's what the BBS ran off of was 56k modems. And that was the hot modem to have now leading up to the 56k modem. You know, you had the 28 Eight modem which was 28.8 baud. And then before that you had the 14 for the 9600. And then the 2400 baud modem, the 1200 baud modem and I think the the slowest one I ever had, it was one that still had the cups on it that you put it on the phone to send and receive. And you had to press the button when someone called to actually connect them up. So I'd have this computer running in my room and someone would go to call in on jump over the desk and hit the button before before they disconnected because it was taken too long. And I think that was a 600 baud modem. So point six, so we jumped, you know, from point six to 14 to 28, you know, all the way up to 56 kilobits per second on the modem, which is mere, slow, I don't even know what you could even get over 56k line these days. But at that time, that was the hot modem to have. And you could actually listen to these modems connect with each other, and know what speed they connect that just by listening to the sound that it made. And you hear this in movies to think you got mail. There's a couple times you could hear the modem. And I'm like, Yeah, okay, I know what that connected that. So we didn't have, you know, the hardware or the pipes or channels to really transfer a lot of data, you know, 56k it was I mean, at that time, it was fast. But like I said, you know, speed is relevant. I mean, it was fast at that time, but very slow during these times. But something else too is during this time is that, you know, we weren't doing file transfers of a very large size, you wouldn't downloading movies yet. You weren't downloading songs. So a lot of the information that was going back and forth, if it was chat, it was you know, text base, which doesn't require a lot of bandwidth. Or you were bringing down some images from the World Wide Web or cruising some sites. So all of that is kind of, you know, not very bandwidth intensive. But that was really kind of the fastest thing that the homes had available was a 56k modem. And if you lived in town and had good clean phone lines, it would connect at 56k. Where I was at at the time, well, where my parents still live at and you know, we're out in the country, but not anymore. They're not out in the country. But out there, sometimes I could get a 56k connection. And other times I couldn't so you know your home users really topped out at 56k. Now, during this time, we started getting into what they call the ISDN line, which was still a copper telephone type technology. But with the ISDN line. It was a it was a dedicated line you had to be within a certain distance of where it originated from and there's a lot of things around it. And so it was very expensive. So a lot of your home users did not have the ISDN line. I think at one time the company the telco companies tried to compete with cable broadband when it came came out by lowering ISDN. But it just never to me it never really took off at the house. But at the place of business, it was it was phenomenal. And the ISDN line when it first came out, it would they were 128k lines, right. So 128 kilobits per second, which is moving some traffic, you know, at that time. So if you compare the two, the 56k modem to download a one gig file, right, so, if we were to go way on back to the 90s, and fire up the old 56k modem, I wanted to download a one gig file, it would take about 60 hours. I mean, that's a long time, 60 hours for one gig file, back then well, when ISDN came along, you know, anytime you can make something twice as fast, then it doesn't matter. It's twice as fast, even though it's still really slow. And the ISDN line at 128k, you could download a one gig file in a whopping 30 hours. So still not not fast compared to today's standards. Now, my dad's office with me hanging around, I always tried to convince him that he needed to get this latest technology for his business, when really, it was good for his business. But sometimes, I felt like he would say, yeah, we'll get that installed, just so I'd have something to play with and maybe keep me out of his hair. So we did have ISD in their 128k. And that was pretty neat. So something that I like to mention too, is during this time, when you would have your 56k modems and your ISDN lines, you didn't necessarily have like an always on connection, it was always on if you stay dialed in, but even with ISDN being a special line, I remember and it may be different in some people's areas, but you will get the ISDN line say from a company called GT, which you know, now they've all merged and split and all that good stuff. But you would get it from the phone company. But that would just give you the connectivity for that 128k to a system, then you had to go off and get an Internet service provider on top of that, which is totally different the way it works today. So you would order your ISDN line from the phone company, they would come out. They would do the installation, but when you hooked your computer to it, you had to go find internet service. And so my internet service was at home at that time was through prodigy and it really wasn't internet then I would probably say you know by the time I got to using a company called Delphi that was kind of real internet but anyways prodigy so I would use prodigy AOL Delphi, whichever mainly Delphi, at the house, and then at my dad's office, we would use Earthlink. And so the T one line you would connect up and then you would call into Earthlink and you'd be good to go. And that would get your traffic from your office or his office at the time up into the internet. Now. This was kind of cool because you know as the speeds increased at the business level, the houses kind of stayed the same so I could go to his office and download a one gig file in two hours. So getting it down a little bit but you know that's like I say when speeds relevant, you know you would go to his office and it'd be one gigabit file and two hours or to download that same file at the house it would take me 60 hours. Now, the T one line was really cool. And we found that off that T one line we were pulling about 1.5 Meg's per second best case, that's why we could download a one gigabyte file so fast. But if you wanted a T three line that was quite a bit of a jump so I never talked him into getting a T three line which would have gave me 45 megabits per second so I can download that one gig file and a whopping 4.5 minutes so we never did make the jump to the T three line but what we did do was get a T one line another one installed so at his office at one time we had two T one lines and we would bond them together to give us that three mags per second and that was a better bang for your buck at the time. And that's what we used and that was my first once we got those T one lines that was really my first four way or exploration of ipv4 as we know it today. And we've talked about in previous podcast your IP v four is your or unique IP address out on the internet, you probably have one assigned to your house and then you know you can listen to previous podcast understand. But that was where I got my first block of IP addresses and they gave me what's called a Class C. And this is offered just a standard T one installation, they say, Hey, how many IPS D Nina? Well, I don't know, I got 10 computers here. So give me 10. They said, Well, how about we give you a Class C, another thing had I known what I know now would have kept that class C. Because as we know, ipv4 addresses are drying up. And there is a huge market. And a lot of money to be had if you still have IP blocks that are portable, so I should have should have kept those IP blocks. But now, that was really the last of the copper technology, what I call copper twisted pair type technology, from the phone company, whatever you want to call it, you know came in on the phone line. Now in the 2000s to 2010 broadband really starts to explode. So during this time I was in college. And we quickly replaced the two T one lines that were really expensive at my dad's office with a cable modem, which was kind of cool. That was all during the 2000 2010. And then there was a company, I think they're still around, but they were called Road Runner. And they were using the existing cable lines to bring cable modems to the home. So I would say pretty quickly my parents house we got rid of the phone lines, while the phone lines for internet and replaced them with cable modems. Now at this time, the FCC defined broadband as a minimum download speed of four megabits per second. Now that is moving some traffic and also to it was cheap, right. So we'd have to bond to T one lines to make a three megabit per second circuit. But you would never get three Meg's off of that on a single stream, right because it was bonded. So the capacity was good for three mags. And we're going to talk more about capacity here in a bit. But you can only get 1.5 mags on a single strain. But with these cable modems, you could actually, you know, connect at four megabits per second. So during this whole explosion of broadband and all of these cable modems being deployed, that they say that in 2010, two thirds of adults have access to broadband. Now, when they say access, that just means exactly what it says access, this doesn't mean at your house, this doesn't mean necessarily at your business, it just means that two thirds of adults can, you know, get regular access to broadband, which was defined at four megabits per second. Now, we've talked about some of the, you know, a few of the changes that really made the internet start to explode. And we talked about the first one being the World Wide Web. And then we talked about, you know, getting faster speeds. But here comes on the scene about this time was the Wi Fi router. And I think to me, the Wi Fi router has driven internet speeds ever faster. For one reason. Now, if you think about it, back in the day, you would most houses would have a computer a desktop computer set up in you know a common area or library or, or in the dining room and everybody shared that computer. And if you got a cable modem at your house, or if you had a regular modem in your computer, you would hook it up to it. And it was kind of a shared resource. Now, sure, if mom and dad were in business, or if you were fortunate enough like me to have parents that would buy me any new technology that came out, you would have a laptop, but even then if you had a phone line at your house, you had to share that phone line. So when the cable modem came in got paired with a Wi Fi router, now you could have that one line come into your house and essentially be split amongst multiple devices. So dad could have a Wi Fi card in his laptop, and the kids could be on the internet doing their schoolwork and everybody use that line. So with that, you know you started seeing that there were multiple laptops and multiple desktops in a house because of the Wi Fi router. And when the Wi Fi router first came out, the only option you had was 2.4 That was it. There was no such thing as the five gig router and definitely not none of the new ones that are coming out. With the Wi Fi six, so you had your 2.4 router, which allowed you to essentially split that line. And it was pretty cool. I remember having my first one there at the house. And what was neat was is that no one else had them. So the range on them were ridiculously long, I don't know, maybe at that time, they had the power really cranked up or something. But I remember I could get on my laptop and be way at the back of the property. So anyways, the Wi Fi router, to me is what's really, you know, drove the Internet to have all these multiple devices connected to it, and then of course, led the path for IoT. But in 2015, the FCC now says the broadband is at a whopping 25 megabits per second, which is, to me even in today's standards, I mean, 25 Meg's, you can do a lot with that, I would say, pretty much go out on the limb and say that that's really about all someone would need if they're needing it for strictly business purposes. And we'll talk a little bit about that. But in 2016, the average American speed of broadband is at 33 megabits per second. So you know, when you see these commercials come on TV that says you know, gigabit speed and two gigabit speed, I mean, in 2016, we really, you know, the average length, 33 megabits per second, that's point three, three, of 100. So that would be point 033 of a gig. And now, you know, companies want to try to sell you the one gig and two gig speed, and you may not need that, and we're fixing to dive into that. So anyways, in 2017, Comcast and others start their quote, unquote, gig speed connection, when the average household is only at 33 megabits per second. So, and a lot of this is coming because of cloud services. So think about when you would go to work before, you'd have an email server at your work. And if the internet went out, you could still email, you know, folks at work. But now, I would say most businesses have their email stored up into the cloud or cloud services. And then of course, we got other cloud services that started to layer on to that, say, Google Docs, Microsoft, SharePoint, all of those. And so when you're not keeping all that traffic locally, and you're having to connect into those cloud services, then that's putting more pressure on the internet to have faster speeds. And so that was around 2017, when, you know, cloud services really started to be adopted. So from 2017 to 2018, you know, speeds jumped from 100 to 200 megabits per second, on average. And if you go back to what we're talking about that one gig file, so in 2017, we're able to download that one gig file, and less than four minutes. And to me, that's, that's really good. So four minutes to 200. Meg's, of course, you know, two minutes at 100 megabits per second. And then we all know where we're at 2022. You know, broadband is available to about 90% of Americans with an average speed of about 74 megabits per second. Now, that is, I'm sure that statistic would get pushed up a little further here in the next polling, but, you know, that's, that's still a lot of traffic. So what are we talking about all of the speed? When you see the advertisements on television, and they offer a one gig or two gigabit per second speed? You know, do you really need that? And when I hear folks say, hey, Commander, Bob, I'm going to upgrade my package to the one gig package, and I'm going to pay X amount of dollars per month. I asked, I said, What do you really need a one gig package? And of course, at their house, they say, Oh, yes, I do zoom and, and teams meetings, and I do a lot of video conferencing. So I need to have fast internet. And instantly, what I tell them is, well, what do you call in fast? Like, what's your measure of fast? And nine times out of 10? They'll say, I actually, I believe 10 times out of 10. Unless there's someone from industry, they'll say, Well, I want the fastest download speed. Okay. Now you realize that you're only as fast as the connection on the other end. So if I have a one gigabit per second line, and I'm streaming Netflix, to my TV, I'm not gonna it doesn't matter. Netflix is not sending down traffic that could get to that one gigabit per second. It is a string means service. So when you have a streaming service, it's only going to come down as fast as what it takes to deliver that traffic. So if that's your measure of speed, and for easy calculations, let's say a Netflix stream, uses 10 megabits per second, and you have a one gig line, then great, you can have approximately 100 televisions at your house watching Netflix at the same time. Now, do you need 100 televisions at your house watching Netflix at the same time? Because if not, then you would be just as good off of a 10 Meg, a bit per second line. So when you think of that type speed, think about the download speed, the upload speed as the volume of traffic that can be handled, it's not going to make Netflix, you know, load any faster, I mean, maybe a fraction of a second. And once it's streaming, then it's buffering, right? And so if there's any disruptions and things, then it's fine. Now, if I talk to my fellow gamers out there, you know who you are, y'all know my position on games, I just don't play him. I don't know why. I've tried to get into games a couple of times, about the best game I got into was Grand Theft Auto, I bought an X box just for Grand Theft Auto, and maybe Guitar Hero or GarageBand, whatever one it is, but I'm not really big into gaming. But if you ask those folks, what what do you want in an internet connection? They'll tell you, I want a fast internet connection, like, Okay, what's fast to you? I want low latency. Now, that may be a term, we haven't talked too much about low latency. And I know that you all have probably called your ISP before complaining about your internet speed. And they say, Well, let us log in and run some diagnostics, or they have you run the diagnostics. And they have you ping something. And a lot of times they say, Hey, Ping 8.8 dot 8.8, or ping quad, eight, and 8.8 dot 8.8 is Google's DNS servers. And when you see the ping reply, right, and it says 15 milliseconds, 30 milliseconds, 100 milliseconds, when you're reading those numbers off, that is the latency. That is the how long it takes for a packet to go from your computer. And nine times out of 10, people are doing this on a Wi Fi connection, which you should never do speed test or ping test on a Wi Fi connection. Because that is usually where the bottleneck with speed. And latency is is actually at your Wi Fi router. But anyway, so you're pinging from there, that is the time it takes for that packet to go from your computer, through your Wi Fi router through your ISP router up to your ISP, and then it makes its way through all the various networks and finally ends up at Google. Google says I got it and it responds back. And when it gets back to your place, you see that milliseconds out that is the round trip time. So if you have internet that is 50 milliseconds from Google, or one of the Google servers, then that means it is traveling the speed of light minus a little bit because it's going through a medium, but for all intents and purposes, the packet is traveling at the speed of light. And that is the round trip time. So between you and Google, it takes 50 milliseconds for that packet to get to Google and Google to respond back. Now I know that's kind of a lot but think, but what I want to leave you with this is is that speed is irrelevant. So my gamers, they would rather coerce gamers, I mean, they want as much speed as low latency as possible. But for them, if they had to choose one or the other, they would, they would classify their speed as the speed of the packet to get to that server and back. So they want the low latency, not necessarily the high bandwidth. And I'll give you an example of a couple of different technologies that have various speeds where one isn't necessarily comparable to the other. So you can have a high speed high latency network. If you mess around with some of the satellite technologies now not Elon, which we talked about his being lower in orbit, but your traditional satellite technologies you can get about 100 megabits per second across that. Well, that 100 megabits per second will also have 789 100 milliseconds of latency so slow lay under a second for your laptop to go up through the Wi Fi router up to the satellite 22,000 miles out in space turnaround come down, make his way to Google servers. Now for some of my folks that don't understand, I mean, 900 milliseconds of latency is an eternity. I know it's less than a second to make that travel. But that isn't an eternity. But I can download it 100. Meg's per socket, so I can have 10 TVs coming across that satellite link on a good day, streaming Netflix. But if I were to switch to a different connection, that had lower bandwidth, right, so maybe it's only a 30 meg line, but it also has low latency, well, I could stream three TVs at the same time. But without low latency the kids could play if I had kids, kids could game all day long. And really enjoy that low latency. So you can have low bandwidth, low latency, high bandwidth, high latency, and of course, the combination of all in between. Now, what I want to tell you is is that you got all this up in your head, you're like, Alright, Globalbob, you've talked me out of it, I don't need the one gig or the two gig connection. But this is what I do, What connection do I need? So I would say if you're zoom, if you're you know, working from home, those kinds of real business purposes of the internet. I mean, I think now one of the cheapest connections you can get from your cable modem folks or your TV provider is, I think around 100. Meg's per second. And really, that's good. So, you know, a family of three, you know, chances are, you're only going to be streaming three streams at the same time. And you'll eat up 30, Meg's of your internet and have plenty to spare. But if you're if you're doing a lot of video conferencing, not necessarily the bandwidth, which I've had this call before, I'm doing a lot of video conferencing and I need the fastest internet possible know what you need is the lowest latency internet possible. Because we've all been on those zoom calls where the person their mouths moving, but the audio is choppy, and they're kind of like a robot type. Well, those are networks that could have some latency in there. Now, the latency a lot of times can be coming from Wi Fi interference, because that's what everybody has, I don't know too many people that actually have things hard connected. I think I have my TV in the living room hard connected. But so a lot of times when you're calling your ISP and you're complaining, hey, my Zoom calls are cutting out and my stuffs buffering? Well, if you think about the, where these calls are coming from a lot of the neighborhoods, I mean, they're just saturated, everybody has the 2.4 and the five gig routers, and everybody's kind of talking all over everybody else, because there's a finite amount of frequency that's available. And so when you want to do your business purposes, I would say I know it's kind of going back a little bit, but you know, run a hard line connection to your television, because when your television streaming over Wi Fi, then that could really bring the whole network down. Because without getting in too much of the technicalities of it, when you have a Wi Fi router, it can only transmit to one device at a time. And so if you got multiple devices that are on there, they do do a good job of what they do is the time multiplexing, right, which as each device is going to transmit at a certain time, but But even then, a lot of devices can can cause issues. So for your business setup, just go ahead and run a hardwire to your office and plugged directly in. And then try to do what you can to get that latency down. And like I said, you can ping Google and, and others and kind of you know, adjust your setup and see if maybe you need to move closer but but for the video conferencing the real time stuff, you want to have that low latency. Because what do you care about bandwidth, right? I mean, if you're downloading a one gig file, as we gave the analogy, and it takes three minutes instead of three seconds, well, what does it matter? And we see a lot of this too with cell phones, right? I mean, the 5g Right, fifth generation is all the rage. We did a podcast about that. And they you know, talk about three 400. Meg's right to your cell phone, but to me, I don't care, right. I'm going to take and snap a picture or I'm going to send an email and we'll put the cell phone in my pocket. If it takes five minutes to get there five seconds, I don't care. So what I want to leave you with here is always a little bit of history of the internet. And in this case history of the delivery of the internet it and also let you realize that you don't need to have necessarily one gig to gig connection you can get by with far less, please telecom companies don't come after me. But just look at it by the numbers and really what you're looking for is that low latency, internet. So with that, I will say, See you next week. I appreciate everybody drive along with me. And of course, if you have any questions, comments or concerns, please reach out via the methods that we talked about, or give me a shout. Cell phones. Hope everybody has a wonderful week and I will see you all here next. Week