The Bilderberg Group, an annual invitation-only conference of 130 high-influence politicians and businessmen is currently meeting in Athens, Greece.

Quite a lot of secrecy surrounds the Bilderberg Group – quite a lot of security goes into making sure that photos and recordings of the meetings do not get widely distributed, and combined with the high-profile nature of the attendees, keeping a low profile requires massive effort.

Unsurprisingly, the Bilderberg Group is the subject of many, many, conspiracy theories. It’s human nature; if you don’t have information about something that’s scary, you tend to assume the worst. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the human mind abhors ignorance, and will gladly make up something – anything – that sounds like it’ll fit. This is probably how Greco-Roman gods got started.

This has implications for IT – specifically, underlining the importance of having the right information to make the right decisions – but allow me to go forward a bit with the Bilderberg group.

Now, don’t get me wrong – the conspiratorial view of history is, in some cases, the right one. For example, The Butler Affair, Operation Valkyrie, Operation Ajax, MKULTRA, Guy Fawkes, and, of course, “Votefortheworst.com.” Does the Bilderberg group qualify?

Probably not. In 2001, an article in the Guardian, in part, gives Bilderberg’s side of the story, explaining that Bilderberg members prefer secrecy so that it’s members can speak more freely; that it is a high-powered meeting of the minds but has no more influence on world affairs than any other think tank like the CATO Institute, Brookings Institution, or Tellus Institute (though to be fair, that’s still considerable influence on world affairs.)

The best a shadowy evil mastermind could hope for is to make a persuasive argument explaining what he feels are the best governmental policies would be, and hope that world leaders find the ideas compelling.

“While furiously denying that they secretly ruled the world, my Bilderberg interviewees did admit to me that international affairs had, from time to time, been influenced by these sessions.

I asked for examples, and I was given one: ‘During the Falklands war, the British government's request for international sanctions against Argentina fell on stony ground. But at a Bilderberg meeting in, I think, Denmark, David Owen stood up and gave the most fiery speech in favour of imposing them. Well, the speech changed a lot of minds. I'm sure that various foreign ministers went back to their respective countries and told their leaders what David Owen had said. And you know what? Sanctions were imposed.’”

But the difference between Bilderberg and CATO, Brookings, and Tellus is that while other think tanks actually publish their findings, the levels of secrecy approaching the Bilderberg group border on Kafkaesque. The meetings are, indeed, secret, and the Guardian’s reporter for this year’s Bilderberg conference, Charlie Skelton, started out reporting on the Group in a light, humorous style, talking about how he managed to check into the wrong hotel (“this is who Bilderberg are up against,” he writes,) but over the course of a few days, is no longer making jokes.

Yesterday, he started writing on being harassed for taking photographs, and being questioned who “Sylvester McCoy” was by Greek police whose behavior was uncannily like Daleks (or perhaps, Cybermen.)

“All around me: "Delete! Delete photos!" followed by a lame tug of war for the camera with no great self-belief on either side, which I won. Camera back in pocket.

Then it became: "Get in the car!" Get in the car!" I wasn't about to get in the car. I remember saying: "One of you has a machine gun, you're shouting at me, I don't understand why, I took one photograph, this all seems a bit strange. What's going on here?"”

Today, he reports on being followed.

“But before I begin, please believe me when I say: I haven't gone nuts. I really haven't. Nine times seven is 63 and the capital of Italy is Rome. I know what I know. And I know that I'm being followed. I know because I've just been chatting to the plainclothes policemen I caught following me. As absurd as it sounds, I've just "made my tail".

They're watching me now. REALLY. They're sitting on the wall outside the cafe Oceania or whatever this is called, watching me type this sentence. I asked them in for a coffee but they declined. They laughed sheepishly when I called them Starsky and Hutch.”

And later,

I feel a bit like I've driven down the wrong alley and suddenly don't recognise anything, and people are staring at me and not simply to admire my hair. I'm jumpy. I think someone has been in my room and moved my laptop. I know this sounds bonkers, I know it does, but I took a photo of it before I left the room and it wasn't where I left it.

Listen to me. I sound like a fruitcake. Three days and I've been turned into a suspect, a troublemaker, unwanted, ill at ease, tired and a bit afraid.

So, is it any wonder that the Bilderberg group is the subject of numerous conspiracy theories?

In order to understand the world; whether the world of high finance and high politics, or the world of the Enterprise network, it is important that you have information, otherwise, you’re blindly groping in the dark for things that sound right. This is the familiar cause of “the network always getting blamed” for anything that causes a slowdown, whether it be network, server, or application.

As mentioned above, if we don’t have information about something important, we often make up something that sounds right. This is not a bad thing; the first step in scientific experiment is to make a hypothesis that fits the observable evidence. The second step is testing the hypothesis. Anything that stops at the first step isn’t science, and isn’t particularly useful. As such, being able to gather the evidence and test to see what effect changes on the network don’t just help you solve network and application problems faster – they are the only real method you have for solving the problems in the first place. Sunlight is the best disinfectant; the electric light the best policeman.

After being followed, detained, and with his room ransacked, Charlie Skelton had this observation about Bilderberg and the very, very high levels of secrecy around the organization:

I don't care whether the Bilderberg Group is planning to save the world or shove it in a blender and drink the juice, I don't think politics should be done like this.

Worse than not bothering to gather information is intentionally keeping people in the dark. And we see this in IT in some semi-rare cases, where those in IT consciously choose not to provide information about network performance to managers and executives, the theory being that IT personnel have more value to the company if they’re perceived as the only people in the organization who know what’s going on.

This theory, however, doesn’t hold water. If you provide network information to decision-makers in a format that they can understand, you end up proving your value to the organization. If you do not provide information to decision-makers, they’re going to end up, well, assuming the worst…

More accurately, Google went down for many users today, with a total failure of the Google search, Gmail, Reader, Docs, and Youtube. Most of these outages occurred because of a problem with anything touching AT&T’s network.

In order to communicate during the outage, journalists and bloggers covering the story flocked to Twitter. Ironic, if you’re familiar with Twitter’s history of outages.

I could go into a bit of a spiel about how cloud computing isn’t always the solution, or talk a little bit about the need to monitor and measure service providers to make sure that they’re keeping up with their SLAs, but I think it’s more important to understand what the hell just happened in a very important context.

Anyone who used Google Apps for work and was affected couldn’t get work done this morning. Anyone trying to search for information had other options, but the verb is “Googling” not “Livesearching” or “Yahooing.” And importantly, Web sites that used Google Analytics would be hard or impossible to access as the site would continually try to load information that was simply nowhere to be found.

Indeed, if Yahoo or even Microsoft had gone down, would it even have been newsworthy? But for many, Google is the Internet; or at least such a big part of the Internet that it’s hard to think of an Internet without Google.

This got me thinking about some other news that I had read recently about how the Obama administration is removing limitations imposed by his predecessor on prosecuting anti-trust violations; what surprised me was that among possible targets of investigation were not only the banks that were “Too big to fail” but Google as well.

I guess Google’s “too big to fail” as well. Sometimes, it does seem that the whole world is running on the back of one, very big, very powerful computer somewhere in a supply closet in Mountain View.

Network World’s Steve Taylor and Larry Hettick ended up talking to the CEO and Senior VP for Marketing of Vidyo, a company that makes high definition teleconferencing solutions. Vidyo’s differentiation? It uses the Internet.

This wouldn’t be such a big deal - Skype has had video capabilities for three years now – except that in the corporate environment, it eliminates the need for network capacity dedicated directly to teleconferencing, and allows desktop users – even ones connected to the network via VPN - to join in the conversation instead of relying on specialized rooms dedicated to teleconferencing, where network throughput can be controlled and limited.

That’s all well and fine, except that there is a tradeoff. (There is always a tradeoff.)

Vidyo’s solution uses scalable video coding, which, in essence, means that when networks become oversubscribed, the teleconference app will lower the bitrate of the video on the fly. This can cut down on problems due to lack of capacity, and as such, it can prevent some latency due to oversubscription, but it does not address latency problems directly. Additionally, latency is less predictable in Internet-based apps than apps that run on private networks.

Videoconferencing, of course, is notoriously susceptible to latency and jitter problems.

Still, having a little stuttering is better than having no videoconferencing capabilities at all, and a solution like Vidyo’s brings teleconferencing to more endpoints, cheaper. If performance, rather than extensibility, is of utmost concern, you’re probably looking at something more traditional in a teleconferencing solution.

Whatever the teleconferencing solution, however, networks need to be monitored to preserve telecommunications performance and to make sure that teleconferencing applications do not take vital resources away from business critical applications.

Tomorrow, at 1:00 EST, NetQoS will be hosting a live Webcast with a guest speaker from Forrester Consulting, who will be talking about the recent study we commissioned with them, titled: “The Total Economic Impact™ of NetQoS Performance Center.” – in other words, the return on investment of monitoring your network. 

The study illustrates the financial impact of implementing the NetQoS Performance Center within a global engineering and electronics conglomerate. Forrester found the ROI for this NetQoS customer was 266%, with a payback period of less than three months.

The ROI included productivity savings due to improved access to accurate network data, resulting in increased efficiency in network monitoring and problem resolution, avoiding bandwidth upgrade costs due to improved network management using the NetQoS Performance Center, and avoiding the cost of implementing an alternative probe-based management solution.

Patrick Ancipink, our Director of Product Marketing, will be presenting the Webcast along with Forrester “Total Economic Impact” consultant Michelle Bishop. 

For those who choose not to attend, tomorrow, at 1:00 EST, I will be personally calling each of you individually, and telling you all the spoilers for the new Star Trek movie.  So, the only way to avoid knowing what happens to the crew of the Starship Enterprise, thus ruining your enjoyment of the film, is to attend the Webinar.

By the moons of Qo'noS , I will do it, I swear. 

Do not tempt me.

"I can't fix any of them if I can't get an exploded diagram, a shop manual, a parts list, and order parts."

"Right now I've got 14k on my dialup, when it works!" the machinist lamented. "You can't download anything at 14k. It runs for two hours and gets halfway through one page and stops!"

Thus is the lament of a rural-area Vermont repairman mentioned in an Ars Technica article on rural broadband.

The good news is that, even compared to a few years ago, broadband options are looking brighter for rural-area residents. With technologies such as municipal fiber and independent DSL providers, bringing broadband to rural areas is feasible and, despite reports of only a few years ago, greatly in demand. And as the machinist quoted above demonstrates, because of clear need.

It is the kind of clear need demonstrated during the New Deal, which lead to the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Back then, electrification meant improved living conditions and the ability to participate in the modern economy – today, the same things are true for broadband. And the mere fact that expensive, relatively slow services like satellite broadband exist definitely show that there is a market.

But you may ask yourself: I live in the city. I have broadband. I get allergic smelling hay, I just adore a penthouse view… what does this have to do with me?

One of the reasons that housing prices skyrocketed in places like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, is because of high tech concentration – that is, typically, the places with the best high tech infrastructure have the best, highest paying jobs. It’s a rule of thumb that has been more or less applicable since the invention of the waterwheel. But many of our high paying jobs are in the high-tech fields – people for whom broadband is in high demand. However, no one works forever, and retirees can choose between living in the city, or moving out to the countryside. But as broadband has become part of our daily life, fewer retirees are willing to move – leading to less housing supply and increasing prices for the rest of us – if the place they’re moving to doesn’t have the broadband they need.

Similarly, anything which lowers the quality of network performance in a particular area can lead to lost property values, lost jobs, and lost income for a particular reason, one of the reasons that Time Warner’s broadband billing plans were criticized by Austin Mayor-elect Lee Leffingwell.

Broadband is simply becoming too important to leave in only a few hands. It has moved from communications tool to utility to near-necessity. We live in exciting – and frightening – times.

Sunday is Mother’s day in the United States, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to forget to call her. 

Sorry, Mom. 

My mom, if you’ll believe it, is a complete technophobe, who doesn’t really understand what I do for a living; she kind of understands what a “blog” is, but the technical nature of networking is something that she’s not really interested in; for whatever reason, it’s only been very recently that she’s gotten into computers.  It’s partially a generational thing, and it gives a good reason why Nemertes Research sees such explosive growth of Internet use.

That is, Mom barely uses the Internet – she uses it for genealogy and some photo e-mailing.  (Flickr’s a bit beyond her…) Still, she’s using the internet just slightly more than a few years ago.

Which made me think – is it possible that the exponential growth in Internet usage might have something to do with the generation gap?

While there are kids who are technophobic and TF2-fraggin’ grannies out there, by and large, Internet use is generational.  The boomers, by and large, don’t use technology as much as Generation X does, and the technologies they use are typically not replacing the analog technologies they grew up with, like the landline telephone and the television set.  Generation X is slightly more likely than Generation Y to be mere passive consumers of entertainment on the Internet, while Generation Y is the “Generation of Generation” – the guys putting up all those YouTube videos out there. 

So as the Boomers die off, and are replaced by the tech savvy Generation Y, perhaps this is the main explanation of why the Internet’s development is exponential.  If true, this implies strongly that in 30-40 years, the effect will level off. 

Hopefully it will, as I plan on making tons of YouTube videos about how my neighbor kids are causing a racket playing with Aerosmith in Holodeck Guitar Hero. 

Johna Till Johnson, president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research, writes in a column for Network World that “The Internet Sky Really Is Falling.” Nemertes Research, if you’ll remember, published a report saying that the Internet’s backbone simply can’t handle exponential growth with linear capacity increases.

“We've been called everything from carrier shills to nut-jobs. (No, the research wasn't sponsored. And we never claimed your fillings were receiving extraterrestrial radio signals).”

Nemertes Research does some very good work, and I do not believe them to be any sort of carrier shill, and they are certainly no more insane than the rest of us Cuculidae. Yet, I think it’s a bit too soon to mourn for the Internet yet. Mostly because while I’m not questioning Nemertes data, I think they may be a bit too quick to come to a conclusion.

“The bottom line? We were right. YouTube recently announced it's discontinuing video delivery to certain geographies due to — ahem — lack of access capacity. And providers from telcos to cable companies are implementing "usage caps" to keep users from, er, consuming "too much" bandwidth. Seems the only thing we got wrong was the timing — we anticipated the crunch hitting in the 2011/2012 timeframe, but we're seeing it happening already.”

Not so fast.

I actually remember reading something about YouTube and video delivery to developing countries recently but I can’t actually remember where I did – Googling brought me to this quote from the New York Times “In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit,” from April 26, 2009.

Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there. [Emphasis added.]

“Tom Pickett, director of online sales and operations at YouTube, says the company still hews to its vision of bringing online video to the entire globe. In the last two years, it has pushed to create local versions of its site in countries like India, Brazil and Poland.

But Mr. Pickett also says that YouTube has slowed the creation of new international hubs and shifted its focus to making money. He says that does not rule out restricting bandwidth in certain countries as a way to control costs — essentially making YouTube a slower, lower-quality viewing experience in the developing world.”

The issue, it seems, is not with broadband capacity, the way that Johnson and Nemertes research are talking about, but with simple profitability. Remote locations are expensive to connect to when compared to industrialized economies, but this, in and of itself, is not related to the capacity of the Internet backbone overall.

On the other hand, there are countries like Estonia, which has 100% coverage of WiFi, and plans to roll out 100Mbps Internet to the homes of every Estonian citizen.

But what about those “usage caps?”

Well, to be quite frank, we did an entire series on why usage caps really don’t have anything to do with network capacity – but to sum up, not every ISP is putting on usage caps, and the ISPs that are typically also offer television and telephone services (technologies being replaced by the Internet,) and are rolling them out in generally non-competitive markets. Long story short, we wouldn’t consider the fact that some ISPs are rolling out usage caps as supporting anecdotal evidence that there was any sort of Internet infrastructure problem, simply because there are too many other reasons that ISPs may want to institute usage caps.

As a counter-example, Verizon and Cablevision are offering 50Mbps and 101Mbps, respectively, without caps, in the highly competitive New York area.

Finally, Johnson addresses the IPv4 address shortage.

Pretty much everyone's aware that we're running out of IPv4 addresses at an alarming rate, and despite more than a decade of massive promotion, IPv6 deployments are a tiny fraction of what they would have to be to meet the gap. A few people are also aware that due in part to increased multihoming, routing table sizes are increasing dramatically, to the point where they'll exceed Moore's Law's ability to keep up.

This may be true, but – and this is an important but – IPv4 address shortage already has a solution, and while it’s often hard to justify preventative measures in the budget, IPv6 adoption will increase when the need for IPv6 becomes more pressing. Upgrading later, rather than sooner, means that it will be an expensive, chaotic upgrade, but it by no means heralds the end of the Internet.

Nemertes did a good job with tracking the growth rates in capacity and demand, and based on research and evidence, came to the conclusion that demand will eventually outstrip capacity given patterns in growth. But by picking out these particular bits of anecdotal evidence, and failing to account for the possibility that these events aren’t related to bandwidth shortage and IPv4 depletion, Nemertes ends up undermining the argument that they are trying to make.

In this economic climate, (which, apparently, the economic equivalent of Siberian Permafrost,) companies may be tempted to cut back on travel and expenses.

But Interop’s already spent the deposit with Mandalay Bay, so they’re going to go ahead with it in a week and a half.

Anyway, it’s unsurprising that I, personally, will not be at Interop Las Vegas. Plane tickets, hotel stays and the costs of expenses in Vegas do not, apparently, justify two or three good blog posts about how, just like very year, our booth is cool and whatever. If Interop were held, in say, a less expensive city than Las Vegas, the place in America with the third largest Fool:Money parting coefficient it might be feasible. (The largest Fool:Money parting coefficient is Washington D.C., and Wall Street leapfrogged over Vegas with the credit crisis to get second place.)

So I’m personally staying back in Austin – NetQoS will have a presence, however, in both Booth #663 and Pod #1 in the Cisco Solutions pavilion. We will be bringing along the camera, so even if you don’t make it to Interop, you might be able to catch some of our presentations later when we digitize the footage and put it on the ‘Net.

I still highly recommend you go, if you can – the presentations may be there, but trade shows are really about asking questions and meeting with your peers, being able to compare solutions by walking a few dozen feet rather than flying a few hundred miles, and, of course, seeing how each booth tries to top the next. For example, Bill Alderson will be flying in and delivering his presentation, “Top Issues Affecting Application Performance.”

The “Bottom Issues Affecting Application Performance” are, as usual, Wombat attacks and an oversupply of AOL CDs.

But I’m betting attendance at Interop will be down this year, and NetQoS won’t be the only vendor bringing along a videocamera so that non-attendees can tune in online. What this underscores is the need for corporate networks to handle video, as both one-way and two-way video increase in important when you need to convey audiovisual information without having the person physically in the room.

In the ultimate irony, I’m betting some of the biggest product announcements at Interop will be those that help you transmit, monitor, and manage video – or video traffic. That’s just a hunch, though.

And video is a tricky thing to manage. Not only does video take a lot of bandwidth, but when you think of “video,” you think of both teleconferencing and of streaming video such as YouTube. The problem is that “one-way” streaming video and “two-way” teleconferencing are completely different when observed from a network point of view, and have completely different requirements.

That is, streaming video is more concerned with throughput. The more throughput you have, the faster the data comes in, the more data you have, and the better the quality of the picture, both in resolution and in bitrate. Fatter pipes mean better quality. But with teleconferencing, the quality of the video isn’t the important thing – the quality of the interaction is. For that reason, sacrificing a little bit of visual quality is secondary to being able to have a conversation in real-time and interacting with the other end of the conversation without noticeable delay. For that reason, latency is the important factor in delivering teleconferencing. And fatter pipes do not always mean faster pipes.

What it comes down to is that knowing what type of video you’re hosting is important to knowing what the bottleneck in improving performance would be, and if you have multiple types of video, you need multiple types of visibility into the network.

Anyway, if you’re going to Interop, look out for our booth.

No, seriously, look out for our booth. It stalks the unwary and pounces when you least expect it. We asked a team of ninjas to design it this year.

We’ve produced a follow-up to our earlier “The Network Company” video, this time looking at LAN vs. WAN application coding, TCP Slow Start, and WAN Optimization. Instead of giving you a detailed run-down, I’m just going to go ahead and embed it right here.

I love any day when I get to smash citrus with a large blunt object at work...

Hello. Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home?

Network World, via Slashdot, has a story by John Cox talking about how a number of companies with Wireless LANs are finding that as Wi-Fi became more prevalent, they don’t actually use wired networking equipment quite as much; in fact, the article says that in these companies, “50% to 90% or more of Ethernet ports now go unused”

So the question is put to the reader: is it time to disconnect those Ethernet wires from our veins and go to Wi-Fi rehab?

Probably not.  Even under the best conditions, wireless links typically lose more packets than wired links, and “best conditions” under WiFi usually aren’t real-world conditions.  Intereference from phones, radios, and pesky little obstacles like walls can degrade or corrupt signals, causing dropped packets, increasing retransmissions, increasing latency.  And there’s also the delay increased with the various wireless encryption schemes.  (Of course, you could just not encrypt your over-the-air traffic… but I don’t think that story will have a happy ending.)

There are other concerns as well, with reliability and security, but performance is also an issue.  As far as browsing the Web goes, WiFi is fine, and the advantages and economies of scale may mean some cutting back and replacing wires with waves.  But choosing between wired and wireless Ethernet should depend on the application’s needs.  If you need 24/7 reliability, you’re looking at wired connections. 

Most of the examples in the article deal with colleges rolling out networks for student dorms, and students, after all, prize mobility and are more likely to have laptops than the desktop-based solutions of most corporate users.  Even so, I think that the physics labs will want a port or two around, you know, just in case CERN decides to send all the data they get from the Higgs-Boson to research universities around the world.

"The driver always comes down to economics, in my experience," St. Bonaventure's Kellogg says. "That's almost always the reason something either gets axed or pushed through. If you can't show the benefit for the extra cost, it just isn't going to happen."

At any rate, whether going with wired or wireless connections, it’s important to monitor the impact of any changes you make to the network and to baseline performance before you make the change.  Before figuring out how much it would cost to install new wireless switches, it pays to check out the performance of the current network.