What’s the price of the Linktropy and Netropy products?

This is the most frequent question we get, and we’d love to just post all of our prices online. But prices differ by country. So if you are in the US or Canada, just contact us by phone (1.310.477.9955 x1) or email (sales@apposite-tech.com), and we promise to send you a quote for the product you’re interested in, or the entire price list, quickly and without hassle. Outside the US and Canada, please contact our local sales partners (http://www.apposite-tech.com/about/distributors.html).

What is WAN Latency?

In computer networking, latency is the amount of time it takes for data to travel across the network between client and server. It’s usually measured as a round-trip time (RTT), the elapsed time from when a packet is sent from an end node, reaches the recipient, and an acknowledgement is received by the sender.

Many people, even networking engineers, erroneously believe that this delay is caused by router hops across the network, with each router taking time to process the packet and forward it to the next one. While this may be true on the LAN where devices are physically close to each other, over the WAN the latency is predominantly caused by distance – or to be more exact, by the amount of time it takes an electromagnetic signal to travel between the two locations.

Winnie's Pregnant

As we were catching our breath after racquetball a few days ago, I asked Steve, “So, how’s the construction business lately?” We usually talk about business or politics while cooling down, and politics seemed especially fraught lately.

He sipped his water and shook his head. “I’ve got a problem,” he said glumly.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He frowned, toweled the sweat from the back of his head before finally replying. “Winnie’s pregnant.”

I stared blankly. I didn’t know who Winnie was, but she’s not his wife.

Silicon Valley South

When people ask where Apposite is located, in an attempt to be humorous I often answer “Silicon Valley South.” To which I usually get a blank stare. So let me state clearly, we’re in Los Angeles. Right smack in the heart of West LA, between Santa Monica, Westwood, Beverly Hills, and Culver City, amongst all the movie stars. You can see the always congested intersection of the 405 and 10 right out our windows. The unasked question then is, “What the hell are we doing here?” And that takes some understanding of Apposite’s history.

Way back when, in the nether reaches of history, when people were required to have a beard, unkempt hair, and chalk-stained pants to be allowed to use what wasn’t even yet called the Internet, Silicon Valley was just a cheap place to build a chip foundry among the orchards, and Los Angeles was the center of networking protocols development.

Why We Don’t Make a Software WAN Emulator

As a manufacturer of WAN emulation appliances, we’re often asked, “Why don’t you make a software version that I can install on a Windows PC or even Linux?”  

The short answer is that it is not possible to make a good network emulator in software, and making a bad one would only hurt our reputation for quality products.

Fundamentally, a network emulator is a packet timing system (plus queuing, but timing is the problem here). Obviously, adding WAN latency is a matter of taking a packet in and holding it for that amount of time before sending it back out again. Less obvious is that bandwidth emulation is also a matter of timing - simulating a 45 Mbps WAN link when connected to a 1 Gbps LAN requires accurately spacing the transmission of individual packets to match the bandwidth constraint.

Fair Pricing

Making WAN emulation easy is not just a matter of producing intuitive, simple to use network simulators, but ensuring that Apposite is a responsive, easy-to-work-with partner. And though that doesn’t end with making the products affordable, it does at least start there.

Our pricing model is simple. We set a fair, highly affordable price for all our products, and that’s the price. “But where’s the discount? Cisco gives us at least 40% off list price,” is a common refrain from shocked customers.

We’ve been in IT long enough to know how it’s supposed to work: we show you a marked-up price list, you reiterate to the sales rep the immense size of your budget and he offers a big discount if you order now.