Category Archives: Hardware

SNR Margin & Attenuation Rates for DSL

SNR Margin

In general, a higher signal to noise ratio will result in less errors.

  • 6bB. or below = Bad and will experience no line synchronisation or intermittent synchronisation problems.
  • 7dB-10dB. = Fair but does not leave much room for variances in conditions.
  • 11dB-20dB. = Good with little or no synchronisation problems
  • 20dB-28dB. = Excellent
  • 29dB. or above = Outstanding

Attenuation Rates

In general, attenuation is the loss of signal over distance. Unfortunately, dB loss is not just dependent on distance. It also depends on cable type and gauge (which can differ over the length of the cable), the number and location other connection points on the cable.

  • 20bB. and below = Outstanding
  • 20dB-30dB. = Excellent
  • 30dB-40dB. = Very Good
  • 40dB-50dB. = Good
  • 50dB-60dB. = Poor and may experience connectivity issues
  • 60dB. and above = Bad and will experience connectivity issues

RAM Types

SIMM
Comes in both 30 pin and 72 pin sizes.
Fast Page Mode DRAM
Fast Page Mode DRAM is plain old DRAM as we once knew it. The problem with standard DRAM was that it maxes out at about 50 MHz.

EDO DRAM
EDO DRAM gave people up to 5% system performance increase over DRAM. EDO DRAM is like FPM DRAM with some cache built into the chip. Like FPM DRAM, EDO DRAM maxes out at about 50 MHz.

SDRAM
SDRAM (Synchronous DRAM)
Almost all systems used to ship with 3.3 volt, 168-pin SDRAM DIMMs. SDRAM is not an extension of older EDO DRAM but a new type of DRAM altogether. SDRAM started out running at 66 MHz, while older fast page mode DRAM and EDO max out at 50 MHz. SDRAM is able to scale to 133 MHz (PC133) officially, and unofficially up to 180MHz or higher.

DDR (Double Data Rate SDRAM)
DDR basically doubles the rate of data transfer of standard SDRAM by transferring data on the up and down tick of a clock cycle. DDR memory operating at 333MHz actually operates at 166MHz * 2 (aka PC333 / PC2700) or 133MHz*2 (PC266 / PC2100). DDR is a 2.5 volt technology that uses 184 pins in its DIMMs. It is incompatible with SDRAM physically, but uses a similar parallel bus, making it easier to implement than RDRAM, which is a different technology.

DDR2
DDR2 SDRAM or double-data-rate two synchronous dynamic random access memory, is a part of the SDRAM (synchronous dynamic random access memory) family of technologies. It is an evolutionary improvement over its predecessor, DDR SDRAM. It comes in varients of DDR2-400, DDR2-533, DDR2-667, DDR2-800, and DDR2-1066. It uses 240-pins.

DDR3
DDR3 SDRAM or double-data-rate three synchronous dynamic random access memory, it is an evolutionary improvement over its predecessor, DDR2 SDRAM. It comes as DDR3-800, DDR3-1066, DDR3-1333 and DDR3-1600 speeds and also uses a 240pin socket. However it’s notch location is different to that of DDR2.

Rambus DRAM (RDRAM – RIMM)
RDRAM is a serial memory technology that arrived in three flavors, PC600, PC700, and PC800. PC800 RDRAM has double the maximum throughput of old PC100 SDRAM, but a higher latency. RDRAM designs with multiple channels, such as those in Pentium 4 motherboard.

SODIMM
SODIMM’s are generally used in notebooks, they come in the many variants listed above. Note that the notch on the memory tends to be in a different spot based on the different types.

Draytek Joins 802.11n (Draft) Club

I was looking at some of Draytek‘s CPE devices today and low and behold they have a new model on the horizon. The soon to be released Draytek Vigor 2820 Series is now offering 802.11n (Draft) capability. Plus as usual the plethora of high grade features I expect from Draytek.

While I personally consider Draytek to be a little lacking in longterm firmware support, they tend not to need it based on their devices just working well from day one. Did I mention the great features. e.g 32 VPN Tunnels, Easy configuration, WAN fail over, WAN load balancing, USB port for 3G mobile broadband Internet access and printer server, QOS.

Basically if you don’t want to spend the money on a Cisco devices, which will prob ably be overkill anyway, then Draytek are pretty damn good devices. Now yes you will say I use a Billion at home and all be it they are good devices, but Draytek blows it away on ease of configuration.

Telstra Marketing Spin

Just remember Telstra launched this wonderful thing called NextG, low and behold this is nothing but a marketing ploy for a name. Reality is that NextG is nothing but WCDMA 850Mhz (also refered to as UTMS 850Mhz)

Question is Telstra trying to push NextG as the replace ment for it’s CDMA network, and use the fact that NextG is actually a CDMA standard to bypass certain government requirements?