Internet today what's left for hobbiests 2422

No, but they would make quite a song and dance, and it would be interesting to watch.

You see, while 10% of traffic may be corporate VPNs to the home; this segment is close to a quarter of revenues. This is exactly the thing the PHBs like to push; extra revenues for pretty blinkenlights.

Problem is, they cannot stop carrying the compebreastion's VPNs. They need them to terminate traffic; noone has enough internet coverage to deliver everything; and they would be in a regulatory jam if they even tried.

Hosting is also a commodity; so it is dead easy to set up a gateway host in a hosting center, and run VPNs there. There is a buyers market for these things.

I am migrating several of the smaller companies I have buttisted over the years to such a solution.

A fully hosted box, hardware and 3 GB data-month included, costs around $120-mo. I never see the box, it is in a bunker somewhere. I get to install the software of choice; they support anything where the OS producer supports network ghosted images. (P.t. QNX, 2xBSD, 3xLinux, 3xWindows, Solaris).

The box is a VIA Nehemiah at 1Ghz, 512M ram, 40G disk. Can get 2.6Ghz Pentium with 1G+120G for approx $50-mo extra. I don't see the point for a VPN over DSL.

They take $6 per backup tape, handled and stored for up to three months. I pay $100-mo extra if I want 16 GB traffic.

This is not a unique service. I know of four such hosting companies. They are all dotcoms that survived, and are still struggling, but business is improving.

I am building myself an OpenBSD environment to load onto such a box, and plan to roll that out as VPNs. When the news postings stop showing headers with "via.reistad.priv.no" and start showing "puff.reistad.name" it is operational. (after puff, the magic dragon. Yes, the hosting center is near the sea).

To the questions about published statistics; no I don't know of any that are good. The problem is; no PHBs know that this is important. They just want to push DSL, preferrably some premium solution at extra $$.

The moment the DSL market is saturated they will have to scurry for new business. At current rates the DSL-cable market has reached around 60% coverage in the primary adoption area; the "atlantic and pacific rims" (from Finland to Ireland in Europe, the NE corner of the US, the pacific coast, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, NZ and the SE corner of AU). Adoption is rising with ~15% per year. I guess we'll see scurrying for business in 3-4 years time.

It is interesting with the US, where ISP coops now are creeping up all over the place because the telcos are not delivering the goods. It is not the kind of business structure I would immediately buttociate with the US. Sweden, yes. Perhaps Japan.

-- mrr