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Engineer internet peering

Trefor Davies elected to board of LONAP

@tref on a VoIP conference callYesterday I attended the Annual General Meeting and 15th birthday bash of LONAP – the London Access Point. LONAP is a not for profit Internet eXchange and is used by Timico along with LINX (London Internet Exchange) for peering with other networks.

In a world where uptime and resiliency of networks are important LONAP and LINX are complementary and together provide Timico and its customers with fast access to a large number of networks and content.

I am particularly pleased proud honoured to announce that at yesterday’s AGM I was voted onto the board. It’s an exciting time to be around. The type of service provided by LONAP, for those of you unfamiliar with the IX genre, is fundamental to how the internet operates. You may also have noticed that the use of the internet is growing rapidly. To be on the board at this time is to be in an environment where lots of change is happening all the time.  In a world that is moving so quickly it is important to stay at the leading edge and working with LONAP will help Timico to stay at the front of the pack.

The photo was taken by outgoing Chairman Seb Lahtinen – I’m at the LONAP social after the AGM and actually on a VoIP conference call. The restaurant, Belgo, had excellent O2 WiFi coverage and I spent an hour on the mobile VoIP client with a flawless “signal”. I’m not going to tell you what I was doing with the cuddly toy though seeing as it is Friday there is a Timico megamug for anyone who can tell me who gave it to me.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

10 replies on “Trefor Davies elected to board of LONAP”

Well, the dragon is a new FireBrick dragon, and his name is “Ignis” – we have an office full of them now (min order was 1,000 of them custom made in China). Seb was very quick to grab two as soon as I walked in to the room and did not let go of them all evening…

P.S. I took the pic 🙂

Thanks your Reverence.

All
Correction to the name of the photographer. It was of course our very own Adrian Kennard who might well have some spare dragons to dish out if you want to contact him for one 🙂

Dear Terry

The correct venue for such discussion is the LONAP mailing list so I apologise in advance to Tref for responding to you through the Blog, but I wanted to make clear the position on some of the points you make.

LONAP today has inter-switch link capacities ranging between 10GE and 40GE, and the busiest ISL link is less than half-utilised at its very busiest times. The busiest link is already scheduled for upgrade before it reaches 50% capacity, because LONAP’s technical team believe in over provisioning inter-switch capacity in order to rapidly deal with issues of scale or the failure on part of our inter-switch network.

Modern switch hardware gives Internet Exchange operators lots of tools for dealing with (preventing) traffic floods which are normally associated with MAC Learning or distribution of unknown-unicast traffic. Inter-switch capacity is one of our largest costs so it will come as no surprise that we manage capacity carefully on such links, whilst avoiding scenarios which would mean a member’s traffic is dropped or that LONAP can not deal with surges in demand.

LONAP has in fact coped with peaks which represent a multiple many times larger than our usual traffic in the past few years, typically when a UK sports team plays during the working day, or coinciding with a very popular software release. Our international trade association, Euro-IX, cites the LONAP bandwidth graph ‘spikes’ when demonstrating how well run exchanges can deal with traffic surges in the Internet core. We have almost 150 members who represent some of the largest networks present in the UK and receive good feedback at member meetings. We do not drop traffic on the Inter-switch links, because they are provisioned correctly.

I hope that we can meet tomorrow and talk about LONAP, and that after meeting some of the LONAP board you find us to be a dedicated group of volunteers who are working hard to make LONAP successful. There may be further concerns to consider but I feel that your first experience of us was based on an old opinion from 2010 which was inaccurate when first published, and feels as if from a bygone age of LONAP when read today. I hope we can change this opinion when we finally meet.

Andy Davidson (One of Tref’s new colleagues on the LONAP board.)

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