Author: Trefor Davies

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

Categories
broadband Business

Read All About It – Wheel Invented – Or a Call Upon the People of Lincoln to Vote for Superfast Broadband

With a population of only 110,000, Lincoln is not on the list of Exchanges to be enabled for superfast broadband in the forseeable future.

Of course, the wheel was almost certainly invented before anyone could read all about it. However I do get the feeling that we are somehow still in the stone age. This afternoon I registered with the BT “Race to Infinity”.  I want superfast broadband (whatever that is).  Here are the stats from Lincoln, my hometown.

Percentage of votes 0.77%
252 votes have been cast out of a total of 32,844

With only 16 days to go this spells disaster. Lincoln is not on the list of Exchanges to be enabled in the forseeable future. With a population of only 110,000 or so (at least within the general area) you would think that constituted a reasonable sized conurbation. Clearly not reasonably sized enough!

This does pose an interesting question. Lincoln is not in what is described as “the final third” – the 33% of the country that is broadband impoverished so I would find it difficult to see a situation where the government would fund connectivity under its recently published superfast broadband strategy.

How therefore does the government decide which communities it should fund?

I can envisage a four tier society

  1. Areas where the business case easily merits initial investment – ie those where “FTTC/FTTP are currently planned
  2. Areas outside the above that can only get conventional broadband and are not in the plan for FTTC/FTTP
  3. Deprived areas that are currently not spots or have very slow connectivity and are obvious candidates for funding
  4. the final 10% that BT said it could not service even with the currently envisage level of funding

Now either BT isn’t doing a very good job promoting the Race to Infinity or nobody wants the product.

My message to the people of Lincoln?

We are talking wheels here.  When the wheel was first proposed to Og (3rd cave along) 10,000 years ago he didn’t at first appreciate the benefits. It was only after ha started using it that he saw the light (lightening of his load anyway).

Get voting!

PS Og and 10,000 years are made up names and dates. I could have Googled it I suppose…

Categories
Business net neutrality Regs

Comcast Level 3 Netflix dispute update – calls made on US Government to regulate peering #deappg

Last week I posted on the Level3 Comcast Netflix dispute.  This is  where, despite an existing peering arrangement, cable operator Comcast wants to charge Level 3 for carrying Netflix traffic over its network to Comcast customers (hope you followed that one).

Calls have now been made by New America Foundation, Media Access Project and Free Press for the US Authorities to investigate this deal and to consider taking a regulatory position in respect of how such network deals are constructed.

The developing issue is that Comcast, with it’s 16 million cable customers is also a provider of content and that it has notionally been losing customers to alt content provider Netflix. By charging Level 3 additional costs for providing cable customers with access to Netflix content the assertion is that Comcast is potentially harming the market and breaking (unwritten)  net neutrality rules.

I’m not commenting here – just reporting.  Comcast is pointing to significant cost increases associated with carrying Netflix traffic. This is is going to be an interesting one to follow and the ultimate outcome could well represent a significant milestone in the history of the internet.

Categories
Business Cloud

Amazon is Down and What that Means for Public Cloud Confidence

Having noted the resilience of Wikileaks and thus the internet from concerted Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks we wake up this morning to a crisis in cloud confidence with the news that some of Amazon’s own European sites have been down. The reason cited? “hardware failure”.

As a network operator I know that no one is immune from such failures.  It is a surprise however that such a failure (we are not given any details) could bring a site such as Amazon down. The Amazon pitch is that their cloud is distributed over multiple sets of hardware and is supposedly able to live with the failure of any given server/drive.

The fact is that this puts out a message that Amazon’s service is not as resilient as they would like it to be.  It will quite possibly make businesses think twice about using a public service that is shared with so many other users.  If any one of those users is attacked it could affect everyone else with collateral damage.

I’m not sure that the cyber battles currently going on over Wikileaks can be described as full scale cyber warfare. The shot across the cyber bows is however going to make people think hard about their cloud strategies.

As a provider of services local to the UK  this actually does give me hope that the model of private clouds for business rather than the big scale low cost low margin world of Amazon et  al has the potential to be one of the winners.

Categories
Business fun stuff

Who will win the Nomura Varsity Match at Twickenham today?

Lincoln Rugby Club in the snow at the Lindum, December 2010

I’m off to the rugby today so this is a pre-recorded message. It’s the Varsity Match – the annual Oxford v Cambridge battle. Rugby isn’t really something you can play on a frozen pitch and apart from under-pitch heating or a covered roof there isn’t much that technology can do to prevent the game being cancelled if that is to be its fate. I don’t know at the time of writing.

Fortunately I’m not slumming it in the sub-zero artic conditions. I’m going to be having lunch in the Spirit of Rugby restaurant with a few drinks in the members lounge. The dress code is “number ones” so I will probably wear my Parliamentary Lions South Africa Tour blazer with perhaps my Pirates tie.

I’ve never been in the Royal Box before so I don’t know whether the seats are heated. Almost certainly not but don’t worry I will wrap up warm. As for the match? I don’t care who wins – I went to Bangor University where I am still a member of the Engineering Department’s Industrial Panel.

I’m sure that the sport itself will be the winner and I expect the internet will continue to grow without my help for a day.

The picture in the header is of my home club – Lincoln – games are off at the moment!

PS yes you are right – it is unashamed name dropping 🙂

PPS thanks to Alex Murphy for the tickets

PPPS if the match is cancelled don’t worry – I’m sure we will stay warm and usefully occupied

PPPPS (and this is definately the last one) – it’s my birthday today – thought you’d want to know 🙂

Categories
End User fun stuff

Winter on trefor.net

Proper winters on trefor.net

It hasn’t been often in my lifetime that we have had real winters that befit our position so far North on this globe. I have to say that the only downer as far as I am concerned from this weather is the fact that the Lincoln Christmas Market had to be cancelled.

The photo strips below are from my journey to work, one of which shows the problems they were going to have with holding the market. You can click on the photos to get a fuller version.

Proper winters on trefor.net

It is a privilege to live in such a beautiful city.

Proper winters on trefor.net

Problems setting up the funfair.

Proper winters on trefor.net

Tudor house in Castle Hill.

Proper winters on trefor.net

Just a short walk from my house.

Proper winters on trefor.net

Frozen milk on the doorstep.

Proper winters on trefor.net

And finally the view across the fields just after sunrise on the A46 on my way to the office in Newark.

PS I’m not going to send out Christmas cards to readers – you can just come back to this post and look at the pictures 🙂

Categories
Business Cloud internet piracy Regs security

The Futility of Blocking Websites #deappg #wikileaks #censor

Mirrors, and the sheer hopelessness today of blocking websites.

A retweet by Guardian Technology Editor Charles Arthur caught my attention this morning:

RT @AustinHeap “#Wikileaks is averaging 13.9 new mirror sites per hour, or one new mirror every 4′ #censor” So that shutdown went well, eh?

Unless you have no access to media, and in which case you won’t be reading this post, you will have noticed the ongoing wikileaks furore. This is not a post about that subject. Wikileaks’ website is, however, coming under heavy Denial Of Service attack by persons unknown, and the response of its wide community of supporters is to mirror the site to provide alternative access to the content. According to the Wikileaks mirrors website (also blocked but available via IP address) as of 21.55 GMT last night there were 1005 such mirrors.

This does two things. Firstly it shows the futility of trying to block websites (prevention of inadvertent access aka IWF excepted). Secondly it shows the resilience of the internet, a network designed by the US Government to survive nuclear attack. Whilst the source of the DoS attack is probably a matter of conjecture, for those persons who question of the US Government’s approach to law and order it is somewhat ironic that it is this very built resilience is preventing the site from being taken down, or at least keeping the information live.

There are lessons here when we start to consider whether blocking should be applied in other areas such as sites promoting copyright infringement…

Categories
Business Cloud internet net neutrality Regs

Netflix, Comcast, Level 3 and Net Neutrality #deappg @edvaizey

The Net Neutrality debate in full swing: Comcast wants to charge Level 3 for the delivery of the Netflix content over its network because such content represents a disproportionately high amount of traffic. What gives?

There’s a very interesting row going on over the pond concerning who pays for network access that has a useful contribution to the Net Neutrality debate in the UK. I am a late arrival here but it is certainly worth recording.

In a nutshell US video streaming provider Netflix recently awarded its content delivery contract to global network operator Level 3. A great many of Netflix customers use Comcast as their ISP. Comcast and Level 3 have a peering agreement whereby they carry each other’s traffic free of charge.

Comcast now wants to charge Level 3 for the delivery of the content over its network because Netflix represents a disproportionately high amount of traffic.

Level 3 is trying to get the US Authorities involved with a Net Neutrality angle. Comcast does have a fair point to make because the Level3/Netflix traffic amounts to 27 x 10Gbit network ports – 2 times its existing traffic levels and 5 x the level of traffic that Comcast sends to Level 3.

This is a beauty and mirrors public conversations going on in the UK including Ed Vaizey’s recent announcement that ISPs should be left to sort out their own commercial arrangements for content delivery – an announcement that subsequently with retrospective caveats (clarifications?!) by the Minister.

I’m not going to provide any links to other sources here – a Google search for “netflix level 3” yields 585,000 results. This could provide us with a precedent that will influence other commercial discussions and, no doubt public debate in the UK.

Categories
Cloud Engineer internet ipv6

The Road to IPv6 (or How to Avoid the IPv4 Apocalypse)

Apocalypse IPv4

A paper by Trefor Davies and Chris Nicholls

The Problem
Regular readers of this blog will know that we, the world, are about to run out of the IPv4 addresses that are absolutely crucial to the running of the internet. This notionally apocalyptic event is almost certain to happen over the next three months, maybe even two.

The allocation of IP addresses is managed by an organisation called IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). IANA hands out these numbers in /8 blocks containing 16,777,216 addresses. Clearly you would have to be a big network provider to need 16 million IP addresses. Because of this IANA hands these large blocks to five regional registries that then manage the distribution of smaller blocks to their customers. In Europe the regional registry is called RIPE NCC.

Whilst I have myself been guilty of (playfully) scaremongering in respect of the exhaustion of the pool of Ipv4 addresses, it is only really IANA that is about to run out. RIPE will not run out for perhaps another year and even after that individual ISPs will have their own existing unused addresses to play with.

Notwithstanding this it behoves all ISPs and network operators to get their house in order with Ipv6 which is the long since identified answer to the problem. Ipv6, a 128 bit protocol supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses compared the 32 bit IPv4 which only provides 4,294,967,296 (232) . IPv6 is expected to serve us for a very long time.

Few ISPs in the UK have announced IPv6 support. As we approach the IANA Apocalypse I thought I would share with you the engineering work that we have been doing at Timico in respect of IPv6

Perspective
Timico has been running IPv6 as part of our internal research and development activity for a number of years. The core of the network has been running dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 with external connectivity to the rest of the internet for most of this time. Attempts thus far to bring these services to our customers have been limited due to the lack of demand, vendor support and our core IPv4 operations taking precedence.

Continue reading “The Road to IPv6 (or How to Avoid the IPv4 Apocalypse)”
Categories
Business Regs surveillance & privacy

Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee Inquiry into Intellectual Property Rights delayed #deappg #deact

Last month the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee kicked off an Inquiry into Intellectual Property Rights. The Committee was particularly interested in discussing the implementation and effects of the Digital Economy Act (DEA). The Inquiry was intended to look at

  • Whether the new framework has captured the right balance between supporting creative work online and the rights of subscribers and ISPs.
  • Whether the notification process is fair and proportionate.
  • The extent to which the associated costs might hinder the operation of the Act.
  • At what point, if at all, consideration should be given to introducing the additional technical measures allowed for under the Act.
  • Intellectual Property and barriers to new internet-based business models, including information access, the costs of obtaining permissions from existing rights-holders, and “fair use.”

The deadline for responses was Wednesday, January 5.  DCMS has today announced that it will not hold any evidence sessions in public until judicial review proceedings surrounding the DEA are concluded (March-April 2011). The Committee has also extended the deadline for the submission of written evidence to 23 March 2011.

I does sound as if we are not going to hear back from this Inquiry until MPs go on their summer holidays (2011). If BT and Talk Talk are successful with their Judicial Review then at least this Inquiry would be a good preparation for a DEAct 2.0.

Categories
broadband Business ofcom Regs

Pros and Cons of @Jeremy_Hunt Superfast Broadband Strategy Document #digitalbritain

DCMS Minister Jeremy Hunt has finally announced the government strategy for providing “superfast broadband” to the final third. I’ve read the speech, the press release and the 64 page strategy document and this is my interpretation of where it is all at.

The government has the laudable aim for the UK of having “the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015. Moreover gov is not letting the grass grow under its feet. We have already seen work progressing on the 4 Big Society projects (initially three but apparently none included BT so a fourth was added).

Another positive is that the Universal Service Commitment of 2Megs is being rolled into the “superfast” activity. The investment in an infrastructure to just provide 2 Megs is a waste of money.

The announcement talks of a ‘digital hub’ in every community by the end of this Parliament. This is great. You do however have to read between the lines to see what is going on.
The idea of a hub stems from the concept of the Digital Village Pump as is now installed in Ashby de la Launde and is being looked at for the Cumbrian Big Society project. This concept brings a high speed fibre connection into a community and allows for that connection to be used to connect to a variety of means of terminating to local end users.

There are however some worrying indicators. In today’s announcement there are constant references to BT together with “cabinets” and “fibre connectivity to the nearest exchange”. DCMS has also now confirmed that in saying digital hub they do indeed mean FTTC. BT has said that it intends to tender for each project covered by the £830m of funding made available for this activity and that it will match any government funding. On the face of it this might not sound like a bad thing. BT has said that such an arrangement would allow it to extend superfast broadband reach to 90% or more of the population.

The real issue is something that Jeremy Hunt alluded to unwittingly in his speech in saying

  • “…unless you take extraordinary risks, you won’t survive in the digital world. I want our broadband infrastructure to make it possible for our entrepreneurs and investors to take those risks.”

It would appear that the government is taking a safe, non-risk based option here. The signs are that it is lining up BT to provide the digital hubs into these communities. Superfast broadband to 90% of the population would get the UK a long way towards Jeremy Hunt’s stated objective.

So is this a bad thing we have to ask ourselves? The problem is that BT is not a company that is going to take risks. BT is also too big to be able to innovate. Everything BT does has to scale, which is one of the reasons that the government will inevitably want to partner with it. In this case however scale = inflexibility and lack of innovation.

If, as reading between the lines suggests, we are going to see FTTC as the solution for the final third this has the following issues:

  • Once FTTC is in that is it. The end user will be stuck with a copper based solution for a long time to come. BT has said that it won’t be upgrading users to FTTP if they already have FTTC. Note that the residents of Ashby de la Launde already enjoy 100Mbps symmetrical FTTP with an upgrade path if necessary. My own view is that 100Mbps symmetrical is the minimum standard we should be aiming for. This is supposed to be a long term investment.
  • BT does not currently allow competitors access to its cabinets to connect their own services. This will prevent innovative communities and service providers from providing cost effective solutions to that last 10% that still wouldn’t be getting FTTC. BT’s preferred solution for this 10% is a copper based BET technology that facilitates the government’s 2Meg USC.
  • Even if competitors were allowed cabinet access, the backhaul for FTTC is expensive – on a wholesale basis up to 3 x the cost per Megabit as putting in your own fibre backhaul.
  • The government would effectively be extending to BT a monopoly status in these areas – something that successive governments have been working hard to erode – to the great benefit of UK plc it might be added.

It seems fairly clear to me that BT will probably win the majority of tenders. For one thing today’s strategy document effectively hands it to them because the government has said that it does not see any reason to change the way fibre rates are calculated.

  • “First, that the decisions of the Valuation Office Agency are made independently of ministers. It is not our role to decide who is liable for what under the business rates regime. Second, that the existing rates regime has been tested in court numerous times and no ruling has required any change to the regime. Third, that while in general we favour a low tax environment for new investment; it is right that non-domestic property should continue to be taxed to provide the essential public services we all rely on.”

This means that only BT is likely to be able to submit a competitive bid – all other network operators will be required to pay rates on their connectivity.

There are also other issues that weigh the scales in BT’s favour. Third party access to BTs poles and ducts has been mandated by Ofcom and we await a proposal from BT in January telling us how they are going to do this. BT’s most recent offer to NextGenUs (Ashby’s network operator) required them to use BT engineers (and consequential high labour rates & uncertain availability ) to do all the work. NextGenUs were also being quoted 21 days repair time for any problems. This is not a viable business situation. They would almost certainly repair their own problems within hours. It is very important that Ofcom negotiates hard with BT re this. Ofcom’s reputation in the industry for being another department of BT does not augur well.

If, as it appears, that BT is being lined up to take most of the cash available for NGA I can understand why the government is taking this approach. Let us not however delude ourselves into thinking that this is the best long term strategy for UK plc. This strategy is not an example of innovation and risk taking. It is anti competitive and is likely to be a step backwards from the progress of recent years. FTTP and true open access are the only sensible long term solutions.

Categories
broadband Business UC voip

The View from My Window is All White #uksnow #voip

snowy view from our back window

With snow being today’s theme I thought I’d stick some pictures up.  The header photo (click to enlarge) is the view from my upstairs landing window into our back garden.  The kids were off yesterday and trashed the pristine snow. I was chairing a panel session at the ISPA conference in London.  The show must go on.

The conference was remarkably well attended considering that some people from “up north” were completely snowed in.

The point of this post, much as we like snow when it is at its pretty stage,  is however to show the picture of the Timico car park.  This is normally chock full with cars but we are in one of the areas heavily hit (the Lincoln Christmas Market has been forced to cancel for the first time ever). Not a problem though. Staff have been able to work from home using their VoIP accounts and broadband connections.  Sorted.

There is also an interesting story concerning one of our customers who has just recently installed VoIP in a couple of pilot sites. Because of travel to work problems and staff shortages they have shut a number of offices and wanted call diversions put in place by BT to direct traffic to their open offices. The offices piloting VoIP did this in a matter of seconds.  Those relying on BT to manually perform the divert have been told that it isn’t going to happen due to the huge demand caused by the snow! This certainly shows the right and wrong ways to perform Disaster Recovery.

I don’t normally use this blog to plug Timico but this one was too topically and relevant not to and really I’m just plugging the technology.

Here’s the view from the office window.  It has since started snowing again. The picture right at the bottom is my jeep when I got back to the trains station last night. Snow? Bring it on 🙂

timico carpark in the snow

snow covereed jeep at Newark Northgate railway station last night
snow covered jeep at Newark Northgate railway station last night
Categories
Business ofcom piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

#DEAct event at House of Commons #deappg

I attended the DEAct workshop at the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon.  Held in the Jubilee room off the Great  Hall of Westminster, this put together once more rights holders and everyone else in a session that had been organised by Eric Joyce MP in order to be able to put together a summary of the two positions for MPs to take away with them over the holidays.

There is an immediately an observation here in saying “rights holders and everyone else”. It is more than just the ISP community that is objecting to the Digital Economy Act. Consumer and human rights groups are also also in opposition to the Act.

In a sense this meeting was just a rehash of all that has been said before. It was held, however, because with the ongoing Judicial Review and the Parliamentary inquiry (that should have been held before the Act was passed) do present real opportunities to make changes.

The two positions can be summarised quite easily:

  1. Rights Holders are appealing for fairness in that unlawful copyright infringement is taking away revenues and is effectivley stealing – they equate copying a file to taking a CD from a store without paying.  Whilst there are philosophical arguments around this most people agree with them and sympathise.
  2. RHs see the implementation of the (delayed and as yet unpublished) Ofcom  Code of Practice as a means to give the population a wake up call – a jolt to remind them that it is “wrong to steal” and point them in the direction  of legal means of acquiring the copyrighted material.

Those opposed to the Act say:

  1. The process defined in the Act is fundamentally flawed in that it assumes that the broadband account holder is responsible for the copyright infringement – something that would be very difficult to get past a court of law
  2. Those accused of infringing are being asked to prove their innocence which goes against all our democratic principles of fair play – the Code also does not allow for an appeal until too far into the process and then not before a judge

There are many other issues such as who pays and the practicalities of disconnection and website filtering as technical measures but in a sense these are almost side plays to the fairness and human rights aspects.

The reality here is that someone is going to be hurt whatever happens and the judgement that must be made relates to the fairness of who gets hurt.  Is it fair to open up Mrs Abercrombie next door to the possibilites of fundamental injustices versus is it fair to let the rights holders industries suffer and decline.

The fact is that Mrs Abercrombie will get hurt. There is also a very real scenario where the country will go to all the efforts prescribed by the Digital Economy Act and also incur the huge costs with a result that will have zero impact on levels of online copyright infringement. This Act is all about stick and no carrot.

What is certainly clear is that with the evolution of the internet and the world wibe web the world society is going through a huge change. Much of this is for the better but as in all situations of change it is not to everyone’s liking.  When Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny it put many home weavers out of business but did not kill off the weaving industry. It just changed it. Like my analogy or not this is where the creative industries are at now. The biggest problem for them I fear is that it is not obvious how their business model is going to evolve.

In carrying out their inquiry into the DEAct the government should not only recognise this but also that sticks don’t work and they should concentrate more on the carrots.

PS as a postscript I am given to believe that the issue of public intermediaries (ie libraries, universities etc) caught under the act is going to be treated sympathetically. It would be very bad press for this not to be the case at a time of cost cutting. It unfortunately potentially also open up big holes in the effectiveness of the Act. We can only wait and see here.

Categories
Engineer ipv6

Stop press ipv4 pool down to 2% as 4x /8s allocated in November

The title says it all. I’m travelling at the moment with only an iPad to create posts with but I note on the wire that the IANA address pool is down to 2%.

I will need to revise my exhaustion date but february is either looking good or too late. My main concern is that I need to get the Apocalypse IPv4 party organised but am unclear about the date.

The end of the ipv4 world is nigh :))))

Categories
End User net neutrality online safety Regs

MP Claire Perry calls for opt in system to regulate child access to internet porn @claire4devizes

The protection of children whilst using the internet is a highly emotive subject. There can be few who think it a bad idea. I have 4 kids who are heavy internet users. I don’t want them to come to any harm.

New MP for Devizes, Claire Perry, last week called for a change in regulations to require all UK-based Internet Service Providers to restrict universal access to pornographic content by implementing an opt-in system that requires verification that a user is over 18 for access to such material.

From a philosophical standpoint the fundamental principles of what Claire Perry wants are 90% ok – the 10% that are not ok being the right to privacy of people who might want to legally surf online porn but are not inclined to want to reveal their identity in order to do so. The problems come from the practicality of what is being asked for.

Website filtering is governed typically by the inclusion of a blacklist somewhere in the ISP network. User requests to access websites are compared with the blacklist and if the site is proscribed then access is denied. In the same way if an opt in is required it would happen at this stage. Parental controls usually involve a password being used to allow or deny the access.

Continue reading “MP Claire Perry calls for opt in system to regulate child access to internet porn @claire4devizes”
Categories
Business dns Regs scams security

Nominet and the pseudo-judicial roles of ISPs

I met with the Police Central eCrime Unit last year as part on an ISPA group that wanted to understand the issues that police have in fighting internet related crime and to see whether there is anything that we could do to help.

The police’s biggest problem is the speed that things can happen at over the internet versus the amount of time it takes the judicial system to crank their mechanical organisational cogs. PCEU staff can, for example, be following a suspect criminal, either physically or electronically, and sometimes have very little time to pounce. A gang might be planning a fraud using online resources – facebook pages, gmail, skype etc. Access via a service provider to look at these resources takes a court order (RIPA) which takes time to organise and by the time it has been effected the crooks are often long gone.

If the police did not require judicial consent to access these data then the whole process could be speeded up and more criminals prevented from harming us. The problem is that even if it was clear to everyone concerned that providing the police with what they ask for was the right thing to do the act of doing so puts the ISP in breach of data protection laws. If the suspect criminal happens to be innocent (or otherwise) this potentially leaves the ISP open to legal action. We can’t have ISPs being asked to perform the role of the judiciary because they don’t have the same legal protection or training.

Now enter Nominet stage right. I have coincidentally just written about Nominet after attending the .uk registrar’s recent 25th birthday party. Nominet is proposing to change its

Continue reading “Nominet and the pseudo-judicial roles of ISPs”
Categories
dns Engineer internet

the internet – think global act local – a brief Nominet history of uk domains

This is an extract from Nominet CEO Lesley Cowley’s speech at last week’s Nominet 25th Birthday party. She very graciously sent be a copy at my request because it contained some really interesting snippets worth sharing – so here goes:

25 years ago, the first .uk domain names were registered by a few individual internet pioneers. There are some interesting facts about the early days of the UK Internet:

  • the first domains were not in the format we currently recognise – they were in reverse order with the uk on the left, not the right.
  • Also, for a brief spell, some of the first domains were registered directly at the second level – such as bl.uk, jet.uk & nls.uk
  • and, for another brief period, registrations could be made under .gb as well as .uk, before .gb was closed to new registrations. Threads about whether .uk should actually have been .gb continue to this day!

As things became consolidated uniformity crept in and the .uk domains as we now know them came into being.

Continue reading “the internet – think global act local – a brief Nominet history of uk domains”
Categories
Business events surveillance & privacy

Sponsorship from BT Genband Timico and Thinkbroadband for trefor.net Christmas bash

I am happy to announce that BT, Genband, Timico and Thinkbroadband have stepped forward with sponsorship for first annual trefor.net Christmas tweetup.

The party starts at 1pm on Friday 17th December in the platform bar of the Betjeman Arms in St Pancras Station. Get there early to avoid the crush – thanks to our sponsors the bar will now be free until the money runs out.

The guests already signed up come from a wide range of communities of interest including internet engineering, VoIP equipment, Parliament, DEAct, rural broadband, ISPs ITSPs, regulatory specialists, embedded software developers, oil and IT industry executives,consultants and the media.

If you haven’t already done so please sign up here

Some people who have expressed an interest in coming but unable to make this one have asked when the next one is going to be?  The end of the IPv4 address pool or  “Apocalypse IPv4”  party is already in planning for the Feb/March timeframe. The date for this one is TBC pending the exhaustion of the IANA address pool and will be the subject of a further announcement.

Expressions of interest from potential sponsors for the Apocalypse IPv4 event are now being taken. This should be of interest to carriers, equipment vendors and anyone else in the IPv6 space.

Categories
Cloud datacentre Engineer peering

Notes from London Internet Exchange (LINX), including Telecity and Datacentre Market Growth

I usually attend the quarterly meetings of the London Internet Exchange (LINX). At the risk of boring readers you do find some fascinating facts at these get togethers.

LINX has 383 members with 56 new applications in 2010. That’s huge growth. Members come from 50 countries – so despite having London in its name LINX is very much international in its orientation.

LINX has 304 10Gig ports and carries over 776Gbp/sec peak traffic – roughly the same amount of traffic as around 160,000 Standard Definition video streams or 40,000 High Def. Traffic is up 22% in the last three months!

LINX members can reach around 78% of all websites in the world through their London connections. Interestingly historically LINX traffic has been fairly smooth whereas an individual ISP will see spikes based on high profile events such as the Olympics and the Football World Cup. Now even LINX is starting to see the effect of these events. The Chilean mine rescue is one example. People watched it on TV at home and then carried on using the internet once they had arrived in the office.

At LINX71 datacentre operator Telecity have just told us that they are selling out colocation space as fast as they can build it. They currently have around 23MW in the UK with a further 21MW in build.

Mind bogglingly they say that Google has as much datacentre space in Liege in Belgium as does Telecity in the entire UK.

More interesting facts as the surface – you read them first on trefor.net

Categories
End User phones

iPad, Galaxy Nokia N97 and the HTC Desire HD

Samsung Galaxy tab

I have just swapped my 2 year old Nokia N97 for a HTC Desire HD. It is mind boggling what you can do with these handsets now. My biggest problem is that with so much in there trying to understand how it works requires significant levels of skill.

This is pretty different to my other new acquisition, the iPad which in all fairness has less functionality loaded at Tzero. I realise it isn’t a direct correlation but it is the iPad I have been using for comparison, especially in respect of ease of use.

Startup is more straightforward with the iPad, even down to inserting the SIM, though this is not a major issue. After a while I gave up trying to learn the Desire HD intuitively and settled for reading the tips easily available in an icon on the front screen. Unfortunately I deleted this when I was only on tip four. I don’t know how I did it and can’t find out whether it is retrievable. I’m sure it is probably available online but I haven’t had time to look yet. So I’m a few tips short of a full deck when it comes to learning how to use the phone.

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Cloud Engineer peering Weekend

New #LINX added value service – chutney peering at LINX71

Timico CTO Trefor Davies and Entanet CTO Steve Lalonde try out new chutney peering at London Internet Exchange (LINX) meeting

The internet is a continuously changing body of many thousands of networks small and large connected together, mostly for the greater good.  The functionality provided by the internet is growing at a mind boggling rate. The London Internet Excange (LINX) as one of the world hubs where these thousands of networks meet to exchange traffic has just expanded its remit to include chutney peering.

Chutney peering is very similar to the peering of  internet traffic. The photo in the header (courtesy of @thomasjelliott – click to see more) shows the worlds first ever chutney exchange at a LINX meeting. The two peers are Timico CTO Trefor Davies (left) and Entanet CTO Steve @routerfixer Lalonde.

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Business Cloud net neutrality ofcom Regs

Net Neutrality: An ISP View

Net Neutrality and whether the government should regulate ISPs to guarantee an open and fair internet for all has become a trending topic. As an ISP my natural inclination is to say that there should be no regulation. A government’s job is to regulate only where necessary. ISPs are easy targets because the whole world is moving its operations online and ISPs are the conduit to that world. We are constantly warding off regulation.

Ofcom has said that there is not enough evidence for them to come up with any proposals for regulation in this space.

At the same time ISPs, in particular mobile ISPs have said that in order to be able to invest in the growth of their network infrastructure they need to be able to charge premium rates for premium services. The nature of these services has yet to be determined, at least publicly. Mobile network operators are expecting a hundred fold increase in bandwidth demand over the next three years and in their minds they need somehow to be able to pay for this capacity. O2 has been very vocal about this.

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Apps Cloud Engineer storage backup & dr

@tref on Twitter…Tweetnest Archive, For Future Archaeologists

Picturing the scene in centuries to come, when Internet archaeologists are able to sift through the zillions of trivial minutiae — including @tref on Twitter — to try and piece together evidence of the early life on the internet.

"Victorious" was made by William Foster & Co of Lincoln

For the very few of you interested – the uberest of geeks – you can now view my twitter archive, created using tweetnest and stored on the growing more useful every day resource trefor.net.

I am somewhat gutted that the first 2k or so tweets are not listed – presumably a “feature” of twitter.  That’s a part of my online life lost forever (I can hear a few uhuh!s already).

I can picture the scene in centuries to come. There will be internet archaeologists expert in sifting through the zillions of trivial minutiae to try and piece together evidence of the early life on the internet. Where are the lost tweets? they will say.

Someone will no doubt come across some DVDs (or floppy disks) and have to take them to the science museum to have them read. Who was @tref? Presumably the guy that started the pangalactic blogging revolution that is trefor.net. Bearded professors will hold conference sessions discussing the subject and one day one of them will rush into the room crying “I have just found out who discovered the Third Law“.

I dream. It is dark on a Thursday afternoon and nearly time to go home 🙂

PS the header photo is just something I dug out that seemed to be remotely technologically archaeological. It is a steam traction engine that I saw at the British Ploughing Championships held in Lincoln last month. The “Victorious” was made by William Foster & Co of Lincoln sometime after ww1. Quality.

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dns Engineer

Nominet 25th birthday party

Baroness Rennie Fritchie and Nominet CEO Lesley Cowlie cut Nominet's 25th Birthday Cake

Nice party at Somerset House last night to celebrate Nominet’s 25th birthday. The header picture is of Nominet Chairperson Baroness Rennie Fritchie and CEO Lesley Cowley cutting the birthday Birthday Cake. Sorry it is a bit dark. It’s my phone’s fault.

The Nominet story is an interesting one as it maps the short history of the internet and I will cover this in more depth at a later date. What did stand out for me though, amid the good fun and champagne, was the absolute national importance of Nominet as part of the UKs critical infrastructure. It isn’t exaggerating to say that the .uk suffix is vital to the UK economy.

Nominet is a not for profit organisation but does generate lots of cash which it appears to be able to spend sensibly. The Nominet Trust is one beneficiary as are online educational initiatives such as Knowthenet.org.uk. The usefulness of the latter is going to depend on how ubiquitous the brand becomes and the willingness of other sites to promote it. The site includes a threat test that helps teach you about the dangers out there for internet users.

The Nominet Trust is UK registered charity founded to provide support to organisations and projects working to increase access to the internet, online safety and education and is funded by the registrar.

The birthday cake, by the way was delicious:)

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Archived Business

Sunday Times/Microsoft Techtrack awards – Timico

Sunday Times/Microsoft Techtrack Awards Timico

On Tuesday night I attended the 10th Annual Sunday Times/Microsoft Techtrack Awards at Vinopolis on the South Bank. This is the fourth year running that Timico has appeared in these rankings – no mean feat as they are based on a 5 year compound annual growth rate. We hit the heady heights of fourth place in our second year on the list.

Couple of points of interest from the evening.  The first was the fact that the net worth of the 100 companies that appeared on the first ever list was £500 million.  This year the list is worth £2.5Bn.

Secondly it was amusing to note that one of the main topics of conversation was EBITDA.  Also every other guest seemed to be a financial adviser! They can keep away from me – I have 4 kids to pay for:)

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Apps Business net neutrality piracy Regs

ISPA Conference coming up on Wednesday 1st December

It’s one of the busiest times of year for people in the internet game. Customers you put on now have the greatest effect on next year’s bottom line because they will be with you for the full 12 months.

It has also never been a busier time to be in this industry. What with the world of technology moving into the clouds and blind political wizards waving dangerous wands from ivory towers high above those same clouds.

2011 promises to be a watershed for ISPs. We should find out whether we really will be saddled with the Digital Economy Act and other leaden weights such as the Intercept Modernisation Program (Big Brother is watching you). New business models will have to come to the fore – potentially the only way to get “superfast “ broadband to the “Final Third”. Net neutrality will become a hot topic for discussion as carriers try and find ways of keeping afloat amid the wave of content flooding homes and businesses around the land.

This almost feels like an end of year speech but it isn’t. It is an advert for the Annual ISPA Conference. If you are in a line of business associated with the internet this is one worth taking the time out to attend. It is a meeting point for everyone in the business and very definately worth coming.

Check out the details here.

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broadband datacentre Engineer

Next Generation Broadband: The Digital Village Pump

Google satellite image of Ashby de la Launde in Lincolnshire

The story of Next Generation Broadband Access into the Final Third has to be all about the Digital Village Pump. The phrase has a certain flow to it but this is not about water. This DVP is about bytes.

The concept is that you run a fibre into a village and it terminates into a secure “datacentre” owned and run by the local community.  In the picture below the DVP is tucked away nicely at the back of a building in the centre of the village.

Digital Village Pump set in a modern day utilitarian "datacentre"
Digital Village Pump set in a modern day utilitarian “datacentre”

The DVP is air cooled with minimal ongoing maintenance and running costs.

How you get the fibre into the village in the first place is going to be different for each community.

There is very often an existing fibre run in an area – serving a school for example. It is not untypical for such runs to have multile strands of fibre, most of which are unused. This just needs identifying. It maybe a wireless feed.

How that community then distributes the connectivity is up to them. It isn’t necessarily feasible to expect people with no experience of data networks to do this themselves but the idea is that they engage a management company to look

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broadband Business

UK’s First 100Mbps Symmetrical Superfast Broadband network goes Live in Lincolnshire – Property Prices Rocket

I have seen the light and it is in Ashby De La Launde.

This revelation appeared to me this morning in a house surrounded by fields of potatoes, carrots and other parts of my 5 a day diet too numerous to mention. I am talking about the UK’s first true superfast broadband network. 100Mbps symmetrical in fact.

Check this 30 second video out.

The network has a 100Mbps feed which is then distributed around the village using 32kms of fibre that was put down in only 14 weeks – quicker in fact than it took BT to put in the 7 metre connection to hook it up with their own fibre network.

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Business ofcom Regs surveillance & privacy

#deact initial obligations code due tomorrow or next week

I’m told (the ISPA council meeting) that we can now expect the DEAct initial obligations code either tomorrow or next week. It was originally due in July. 

Not sure how engaged Ofcom will be between now and April when it is due to be implemented because the outcome of the BT/TalkTalk Judicial Review & DCMS inquiry could render the code meaningless.

I guess we may find out more from the DEAct event at the house of commons on Tuesday 30th November

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Business ofcom piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

#DEAct costs will run into £hundreds of millions – is this a good investment?

Last night I participated in a meeting at the British Library chaired by Eric Joyce MP  discussing the effect of the Digital Economy Act on Public Intermediaries, ie libraries, educational establishments, local authorities etc.

The initial rollout of the DEAct is as we know targeted at the 5 ISPs with over 400,000 subscribers. There is however no guarantee that this position will not change once the implementation phase is over especially if it is seen that customers rush to the apparent high ground of smaller ISPs. The concern amongst the above referenced institutions is that it will encumber them with enormous costs.

To bring things into perspective the University of London has 135,000 students. It won’t take a huge lowering of the 400,000 threshold to bring them into scope. Also the definition of who comes into scope is somewhat vague. The University might be described as both ISP (it provides a service and allocates IP addresses), a subscriber (it takes services off another ISP – JANET) and a Communications provider. The latter would leave them out of scope but the first two brings them in.

Ofcom has yet to publish the updated version of the DEAct Code of Practice and we are therefore still in the dark. Ofcom also declined to attend last night’s meeting. The regulator is late delivering the CoP.

The big philosophical problem is that the Act was constructed with the basic assumption of a simple relationship between ISP and consumer. One sells broadband services that the other buys. In the case of the University a notification letter suggesting that their IP address has been identified as “the culprit” in copyright infringement could point to any of their 135,000 students and even then might be wrong.

With the highly mobile nature of a student it would be nigh on impossible for the university to introduce the same tracking systems that serve ISPs and thus be able to maintain records of who might have been the infringer. It has been estimated that the introduction of mitigation measures such as filtering would result in an annual cost of £8m (excl staff) notwithstanding the fact that these measures would probably involve P2P blocking – Universities are big users of P2P for legitimate purposes. My own guesstimate of implementation costs for the University of London alone would be in the region of £500k up front plus a recurring annual maintenance and support charge.

One 94 Group university has estimated that even excluding any IT staffing time, the cost of the appeal process for a single university could be as high as £40,000 pa, at a rate of one notification per 400 students. At a national level that would equate to £32 million per annum.

The same problems apply to other Public Intermediaries. The complexities of narrowing down the location and offending PC to a specific user present a challenge disproportionate to the notional benefit. This is at a time when the Government is cutting down funding available to such institutions. This must surely weigh heavily against the inclusion of Public Intermediaries within the scope of the Act. It is at the very least a political contradiction.

Note the estimated Government figures for costs to industry of implementing the DEAct are as follows:

  • Cost (upfront) to ISPs (annualised): £8m per year
  • Costs (ongoing) to ISPs: £8-25m per year
  • Annual average costs to mobile operators: £19m per year
  • Annual costs of sending CIRs: £3m per year

The BT/TalkTalk submission as part of the request for Judicial Review suggested that the real costs were more in the region of £100m pa excluding the potential costs of implementing website blocking and other technical measures.

Assuming that the threshold will be lowered the total cost of implementing the Act could run into hundreds of millions of pounds a year, 75% of which, as it stands, would have to be paid for by the Rights Holders.

Hmm.

Categories
Business piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Government response to TalkTalk petition says infringers won’t be disconnected #DEAct

Just for reference the Andrew Heaney of TalkTalk petition against the Digital Economy Act has had a response from the government.

“It is clear that online copyright infringement inflicts considerable damage on the UK’s creative economy including music, TV and film, games, sports and software. Industry estimates place this harm at £400m pa.

The Digital Economy Act includes a number of measures to tackle the problem and we expect these to be successful in significantly reducing online copyright infringement. However this is an area of rapid technological change and developing consumer behaviour. The Act therefore includes a reserve power to introduce further “technical” measures if the initial measures do not succeed. These technical measures would limit or restrict an infringers’ access to the internet. They do not include disconnection.”

I’m not sure the technical measures were ever specified but at least this, together with the inquiry discussed in the previous post, is evidence that he huge furore following the passing of the act is starting to show some effect. Long way to go though.