· Pay safest way. Credit cards are safest way to pay for online purchases because you can dispute charges if you never receive your order, or if offer was misrepresented. Federal law limits your liability to $50 if someone makes unauthorized charges to your account, and most credit card issuers will remove them completely if you report problem promptly.

· Look for information about how complaints are handled. It can be difficult to resolve complaints, especially if seller or charity is located in another country. Look on their website for information about programs that require standards for reliability and assistance in handling disputes with which company or organization participates.

· Be aware that an organization without complaints is not a guarantee. Fraudulent operators set up shop and close down quickly, so fact that nobody has made a complaint doesn't mean seller or charity is legitimate. You still need to look for other danger signs of fraud.

· Understand offer. A legitimate seller will give you all details about products or services, total price, refund and cancellation policies, terms of any warranty, and delivery time.

· Think twice before entering contests operated by unfamiliar companies. Fraudulent marketers sometimes use contest entry forms to identify potential victims.

· Be cautious about unsolicited emails. They are often fraudulent. Recent legislation requires all marketing emails to include a working link that enables recipient to be excluded from future mailings.

· Beware of imposters. Someone might send you an email pretending to be connected with a business or charity. Others may create a website that looks just like that of a well-known company or charitable organization. If you're not sure that you're dealing with real thing, find another way to contact legitimate business or charity.

· Beware of "dangerous downloads." In downloading programs to see pictures, hear music, play games, etc., you could download a virus that wipes out your computer files or connects your modem to a foreign telephone number, resulting in expensive phone charges. Only download programs from websites you know and trust. Read all user agreements carefully.

IPNet Telecommunications backhaul networks for carrying traffic from customer to ISP, i.e. carrying traffic from RAN's to ISP's.

Ping or Latency A ping measures time in milliseconds that it takes for a packet to travel from your computer to a remote computer and back to you again. Just because you can't ping a given host, quite a lot of providers are beginning to filter ICMP (pings come under this protocol) traffic because it is commonly used to attack hosts and wastes a lot of bandwidth. Many providers also give low priority to ping (ICMP) traffic which may mean your ping at a command line isn't very good, but in say a game, things may be fine.

RAN Regional Access Node These aggregates many DSLAM's connections and then feed data to an ISP

RTT Round Trip Time - time it takes in milliseconds for a packet to go from A to B and back again. See ping.

SDSL Symmetrical Digital Subscriber Line - symmetrical meaning same speed up and down.

Units

There is a major difference between UPPER and lowercase

MB = MegaBytes Mb = Megabits kB = KiloBytes kb = Kilobits

MB/s = MegaBytes per second Mb/s = Megabits per second kB/s = KiloBytes per second kb/s = Kilobits per second

There is 8bits to a Byte, 8kb = 1kB

1Meg connections only transfer at 128kB/sec. or an 8Mb connection only transfers at 1024kB/sec or 1MB/s