Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com
I was asked to do a short talk on technology for the pupils of Oakham School. It presented some challenges – how to cram the subject into ten minutes or so. I decided that the best and most efficient way to do it was to make use of web technology to deliver the talk.
This short video is the result. I am sorry if you have heard some of it before. Otherwise enjoy.
So good they named it twice. Actually I was trying to think of a sexy title for network monitoring but I couldn’t. Network monitoring is the unsung hero of a communications business. A network has to have monitoring in place to allow staff to keep an eye its health but it isn’t what might be called an exciting product.
You would of course expect an ISP to monitor its network. Perhaps less expected would be for a normal business to do this. However as a business grows, so does its network and the truth is that the network is increasingly likely to become mission critical.
Monitoring individual nodes on a public network has been standard practice for a long time. However when it comes to a private network then traditionally this has been done from a device (monitoring server) within the network. This is fine but if that network is purely private with no external access then it can be difficult for a network operator to provide support.
A neat solution is via virtual server which is what Timico does for private networks requiring ongoing monitoring. A virtual server sits logically inside a customer’s private network but is accessible via secure command line from the Network Operation Centre.
This a hugely more cost effective solution than providing a standalone network monitoring server for each private network. It is also easier to provide resilience to the service by providing two separate virtual machines on two geographically separated bits of hardware.
And what gets monitored? The list is endless but here are a few ideas
There isn’t one single ideal solution for network monitoring. Best practice involves amalgamating a number of tools and providing suitable alert mechanisms.
What is done with the alert also needs to be considered in the light of the needs of an individual business. Some might get away with a next day fix and others might need a speedier solution particularly where health and safety is concerned or when downtime means loss of revenue.
If you need advice on network monitoring drop me a line at Timico.
I have sometimes observed at how complex the world of technology is and how difficult it is for small businesses to know whether they are making the right choices technically.
As a provider of practically every type of communications service you can think of (satellite is the one I think we have never provided although I’m sure that some one from Timico will now correct me) we not only have to juggle with the technology and the commercial complexities thereof but also with the regulatory minefields that are liberally scattered in our way.
As a good citizen I am actually happy to be seen to properly negotiate these minefields. My first Internet Service Providers’ Association meeting this morning brought it home in no uncertain terms the need to have friends that can help you through.
ISPA is or has had recently to deal with subjects ranging from
The list is endless and represents rich pickings for the legal profession hovering nearby. I trust that I will be able to provide readers of this blog with suitable insight into these subjects as we move forward.
I was recently rung by a salesman from the Daily Telegraph trying to sell me a low cost subscription to the newspaper. Other than the fact that it was probably going to cost me as much to get it delivered as the the cost of the paper I told the chap that his call was fruitless as I usually read his paper online.
As I was queuing up to buy a shot of caffeine at Newark Northgate railway station I noticed that the man behind the counter was snatching glimpses of the Beano comic in between serving coffees. One of the perks of the job at a newsagents cum coffee shop I thought 🙂 .
Now on the train where I am writing this blog post courtesy of the on train free WiFI (actual cost £128 return) I have checked to see whether the Beano, like the Telegraph, is also available online. To my delight it is .
I heard an article on Radio 4 the other day where someone was heralding the death of small newspapers. I guess what we are really talking about is the death of hardcopy. There will always be a place for printed matter but it must be moving towards niche status and it would be interesting to see what the statistics were for online versus hardcopy readership.
PS now I have a dilemma – Beano – hard copy or online?
It is 7 years to the day when the 9/11 tragedies happened in the USA. The event has different memories for us all. I was attending a SIP Summit VoIP conference in Austin Texas and Tuesday 11th September was the first day. The conference was abandoned after the first day and most Americans hired cars and drove home. In some cases it was a 3 day drive.
The experience of overseas attendees was a strange and highly stressful one as noone knew when they would be able to go home. I eventually made it out on the Saturday on a very nervous flight. The barman at the airport hotel where we were staying said that we were the first regulars he had ever had.
The event was quite significant from a technology perspective. The mobile networks in New York stayed working although it was virtually impossible to get a line. The fixed line network did not work – the Central Office (telephone exchange) in the area had burnt to the ground.
What did remain up was the internet and students at Columbia University, which is where Professor Henning Schulzerinne did much of the development of VoIP signalling protocol SIP, were able to call home using their University VoIP accounts.
Internet Protocol, the IP in VoIP, was designed to run over networks resilient to nuclear attack. 9/11 was a good, if terrible, real life test bed for this.
The LHC is in the news at the moment. I am pleased to tell you that I gave a talk at CERN probably 15 years or more ago, about radiation hard circuit design using Silicon on Sapphire technology. The LHC was being planned at that time. It involved having to go to Geneva and dining in the executive canteen (restaurant) in the company of 3 Nobel prizewinners.
It’s all very well of course but how does this relate to the subject matter covered in this blog. Much of the R&D for the world wide web was done at CERN, culminating in the world’s first ever website in 1990 (pictured below – sorry I don’t have the source to credit other than CERN themselves).
For anyone worried about the end of the world happening when they switch on the experiment follow this link for reassurance http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/.
Number porting has always been a hot topic in the telecoms world. Why does it take so long? Why can I move a number from “service provider A” to “service provider B” but not from “service provider C”.
In the “old” world porting was (is) an expensive process involving one provider actually forwarding calls to another. The number is never actually ported, just diverted. Whilst the consumer doesn’t see the costs the network operator certainly does.
Way back in November 2007 Ofcom decided to make it easier for everyone, consumers and networks alike and mandated that the UK telecommunications provider industry sort itself out. What’s more Ofcom gave everyone until 31st December 2008 to get a database populated with numbers so that porting would be made easy – within 2 hours for a mobile number, for example.
This would make switching service providers really easy and provide for a more competitive marketplace etc etc.
A working party was set up that includes all major telcos in the UK together with representation of smaller businesses via ITSPA (Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association) and others.
This activity seems to be making progress. Portco, new company funded by industry to manage the porting process, is on the verge of being set up and a supplier/partner to build the database is near to being selected.
The initial requirement is for mobile numbers to be easily ported. Once the database is available the industry is being given until September 2009 to get it populated after which time mobile number porting should be a cinch.
Fixed numbers don’t have to be portable in the same way until the end of 2012 but I imagine that in reality it will happen a lot sooner because it is in the interest of everyone to make it happen.
Monday 8th of September is an important day for Internet Telephony Service Providers. This is the day by which they have to support Access to the Emergency Services by VoIP phone ie 999 must work when dialled.
There has been much debate amongst the global VoIP provider community as to how much regulation should be applied to VoIP. In the USA it centres largely on commercial issues. In other words telephone calls are taxed but VoIP calls were not taxed, at least initially. The argument was that VoIP calls are actually just computer to computer data traffic and not telephony as traditionally defined.
The incumbent telephony providers have fought hard to have VoIP calls taxed in order to remove the competitive advantage notionally handed to VoIP companies. Clearly it is in the interest of the VoIP provider community not to be subject to taxation. The justification for this is that it would stifle innovation amongst new market entrants. There is a case for this.
In the UK the argument is different. Regulation is not so much about taxation as personal safety. In this case Ofcom, the UK regulator, has mandated that if you provide telephony services that allow connection to and from traditional PSTN phone numbers you must provide access to the Emergency Services.
The Ofcom pronouncement comes with constraints including making sure that customers are aware that VoIP calls probably aren’t going to work if there is a power cut of if the broadband connection carrying the calls is down.
I am fully supportive of the Ofcom position. What is going to be interesting is how the regulator responds to companies like Skype who at this time do not support 999 access and as far as I am aware have no plans to do so. Buyer beware.
If your business uses Skype then you could do worse than check out all the cases of identity theft that have been occuring in the Skype user community. For those who don’t know Skype is a free PC based VoIP telephony service that also allows paid for calls in and out from the PSTN. It has always been tagged as an insecure service which potentially opens a corporate network to hacking.
Recently Skype users have been having their identities stolen, and their accounts being used to make illegal phone calls. What’s more if you periodically top up your Skype account using PayPal note that people have found their bank accounts being debited of funds to pay for someone else’s calls. This on it’s own is bad enough but the problem is compounded by the fact that you can’t ring up Skype to complain or get it sorted. Skype relies on email contact for support with apparently slow or non existent response.
What’s more your exposure as a business is exacerbated by the fact that in stealing your identity a Skype hijacker can also steal the business contacts you keep in your Skype account with who knows what consequences.
You can read more about the Skype problems on The Register and if you want to phone a VoIP service provider to discuss how to get a professional service call 08700 949600.
If you want to get faster broadband move to somewhere like Spain. Aha do I hear you say? Just the excuse you have been waiting for to make the move to a place in the sun? A bit drastic I’d say especially when I explain that the reason you might get faster broadband in Spain is because it almost certainly rains less there than in the good old UK.
It’s very interesting what snippets you pick up at Timico. Today, whilst gazing out the window at yet another downpour, I quizzed the tech support team as to whether there were any hot topics occupying their time. “Broadband” they responded. “We always get more broadband calls when it is raining”.
This took me somewhat by surprise but I checked it out and it is true. If you are a long way from your telephone exchange a bit of wind and rain can cause higher than normal noise on your copper cable, usually due to imperfect connections at the telegraph pole. That’s electrical noise – not something audible to mortals. It isn’t something easily diagnosed and ground based connections and leased lines do not suffer the same problem.
This noise can result in a temporary slowing of your broadband. Hence if you want faster broadband speed move somewhere where it doesn’t rain as much.
You heard it first on trefor.net.
PS if you do need tips on where to relocate the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.
The market for Ethernet circuits really seems to be moving forward apace. It is now generally cheaper to put in a 10Mbps Ethernet leased line than a 2Mbps E1 although there is still an element of geographic dependancy in some cases. If, for example, your business is based in London then the pricing for Ethernet is becoming very aggressive. It is now possible to get a 10Mbps circuit in London for half the price of a 2Mbps line which is based on an older technology.
The competition is such that it is now very much worth shopping around. As businesses depend more and more on the internet for their every day functioning then they are increasingly turning to leased lines. The usage doesn’t appear to be driven by any particular application or function. It is right across the patch.
Timico uses a number of major infrastructure partners some of who, at any given point in time, will have a good deal or offer on the go. It may well be the case that in order to provide the optimum price and technical tradeoff a network solution provided by Timico will have connections from a number of different network partners but which is transparent to the end customer.
Employees of large companies often whinge about the constraints placed upon them by their IT departments. These contraints normally centre around security best practice.
Small businesses do not typically have the same disciplines. Timico recently performed a security audit at the request of one of it’s customers. The results were very revealing.
Timico identified over ten major security faults at the customer’s premises. In fact this business was wide open. A malicious person could have sat in a car outside the office building, hacked into the network, accessed their important server information and disabled their network before leaving. These people do exist.
The fixes were relatively quick to implement in most cases. It’s just a question of discipline, with a little help from Timico. . .
I was taking a look at the Timico open order book and was staggered to see the diversity of types of company that we have as customers. I couldn’t identify what they all did from the name alone but those I could I wrote down.
Courier, damage management, domestic appliance distributor, baby goods shop, sporting goods manufacturer, printer, skip hire, transport company, optical goods company, nursing agency, drilling services, recruitment agency, dentist, property developer, golf club, martial arts company, travel agent, design company, estate agents, charity, solicitor, farm, training agency, personal friend of mine, petroleum company (big one J ), a domain name registrar, financial services company, tyre fitter, insurance broker, an university, sportswear marketing, graphic design, cooker manufacturer, Church of England diocese, flower seller, gas services, sprayer (?), blacksmith, bathroom vendor, wine reseller, entertainment agency, asylum seeker support company, bus company, computer services, enterprise agency, theatre, flooring, cladding, electrician, soft drink distributor, advertising agency, company from the Isle of Man (incidentally where I grew up), a cooperative society, aircraft company, conflict management, shipping agency.
The striking thing about all these companies is that whilst they operate in a very diverse set of markets they all need the same communications and IT products and services. The great thing from Timico’s perspective is not only that they want to buy services from us but that the diversity offers a degree of protection from any market fluctuations in a given sector.
My favourite was a school for cocktail bartenders. There’s always going to be a need for a good barman.
It always gives me a great buzz to sit in our NOC. It’s because when we started Timico only 4 years ago there were only four of us sat in the room of Tim Radford’s parents’ stable block (it was cheap and there was no room at the inn anyway). Now on a normal working day there are more people sat in the NOC than there were in that original room. It is a world away.
Today sat in the NOC some of the engineers were setting up a MPLS PWAN for a customer. This particular PWAN had over 80 sites – a mixture of leased lines and ADSL. In itself it isn’t a big news item. It isn’t our biggest PWAN by a long chalk. However it is another new customer and an endorsment of what we set out to achieve four years ago sat in the stable block.
It is a good feeling to be at Timico.
Power consumption is, as I’m sure you are all aware, a huge issue when building data centres today. The data centre giants such as Google and Microsoft build their facilities close to sources of hydroelectric power in order to minimise their operating costs.
An ironic fact about data centres is that it takes almost as much power to cool the room as it does to create the heat in the first place. ie the cost of powering a server is as much as the cost of running the air conditioning unit to cool it down. This, compounded by the rising cost of electricity, is why people look to implementing “green” low power servers.
If someone could harness the excess heat of data centres and turn it into electricity to power the air conditioning then that would be a serious contribution to lowering power consumption and saving the planet. Credit goes to Chris Nicholls of the Timico Netops team for this idea.
I wrote recently about the effect of the Olympics on internet usage. At the time we had seen a 10% or so increase in ADSL based internet usage as people went online to watch the opening ceremony.
Well the success (hooray) of Team GB prompted even more people to watch the Olympics online. Timico saw a staggering 24% increase in peak ADSL internet usage. Ordinarily this would have caused a problem to our customers because Timico has a policy of not thottling usage – the increase in usage would normally have slowed the performance of their web access.
However in this instance we had had the foresight to order additional capacity as part of our standard planning process and were able to bring it forward so that it timed nicely with the success of Team GB.
Interestingly our customers with homeworkers showed a much lower increase in usage than those with connections into their offices – presumably this was because homeworkers could have the TV on in the corner of the home office and didn’t need to watch online.
Now that the Olympic Games are over everything is back to normal.
Not sure about the name “Team GB” though. What’s wrong with “Great Britain” – would have been far more appropriate under the circumstances. My kids, suitably enthused, have already put their names down as volunteers to help in 2012. I’d do the same if I could be sure of getting in to watch the beach volleyball.
No takers.
Nobody to save.
Still a few available.
Oh oh here come the pirates!
What a rogue.
It’s a constant battle.
Everyone needs a little help.
Ofcom to the rescue.
Sorry – it’s not what you think. That should have read fishing. The quayside Whitby. I’ll talk about phishing another time.
I just had a great email from someone called Williams Huang based (allegedly) at a domain name registrant in China. In it he told me that he had had a request from some unknown organisation to register the Timico domain name with the .tw, .co.tw,hk .asia, .net.cn and .org.cn.
Fortunately for me he had “checked to see whether this organisation was a genuine applicant and had the right to register the domain”. Finding that Timico was actually based in the UK he got in touch to give us first refusal on the domains. Phew what good luck!
Does this provide me with a dilemma? Actually no. It just gave me some good material for the blog. It might, however, play on the concerns of some businesses. What would you do in this case?
Hope you are having a good Olympics and whatever you do don’t respond to cold calls from the internet.
Leading edge technology of its time.
Sir Nigel Gresley was the designer of the A4 Pacific Class Locomotive.
The A4 Pacific Mallard still holds the world speed record of 125mph created on 3rd July 1938.
The A4 Pacifics cut the journey time between London and Newcastle down to 4 hours (from 5 days by horse and cart 🙂 . The coal tender had a walk through passage so that drivers could be changed without having to stop the train.
These pictures were taken at the North Yorkshire Moors Railway which still operates the Sir Nigel Gresley.
We had a Linksys reseller on the phone needing help with setting up his SPA9000. This is a small PBX for the small business market. It sitts very nicely below the Nortel BCM50 in our portfolio of communications systems for business.
Timico recently launched the SPA9000 in a Webinar held jointly between Cisco/Linksys and KeConnect. Yours truly said a few words. It is very satisfying to see the outcome of such marketing activities resulting in channel partners generating sales.
This particular partner needed help with setting up his SIP trunk. He hadn’t read the manual – ah well. That’s what we are here for. It took a few seconds. The solution worked. He is happy and has other customers lined up for the product/service.
Picture of SPA9000
It also rains in Spain
but are they as well prepared for it?
You won’t find anything like this in Las Vegas.
Nor this.
Nortel has launched the SCS500. This communications system effectively provides companies with a cross between the features offered by Timico on their Nortel AS5200 hosted VoIP platform and the Nortel BCM phone system.
Timico has found that many companies want to use Instant Messaging in their business but beyond insecure consumer products such as MSN and Skype don’t know how to do it.
Timico’s VoIP for Business service provides IM and is great for businesses where there are lots of distributed locations or many homeworkers. Our real world experience shows that as companies get bigger their needs change and we then sell them a Nortel BCM.
The SCS500 adds neatly to the portfolio with IM and other Unified Communications features. We can now cover pretty much every need of every sized company in our customer base and target market.
All credit to Nortel they have been making great strides to the extent that the Financial Times newspaper recently rated their stock as a “buy”. Their leading position in the Unified Communications market is a reflection of this.
This a picture I pinched from the Nortel website. It shows the SCS500 soft client. I don’t know who Chris Leary is but a larger image would shou you that he needs a shave 🙂 .
I recently wrote about access control and the different ways that we can open doors at Timico. Well this has gone one step further and certain individuals on the approved list can now send an Instant Message that will open the front door.
It is somewhat mind boggling where this is all going. It is quite possible to envisage a scenario where say the cleaner appears at your home front door whilst you are at work and needs to be let in. You have an application running on your PC that rings when the doorbell rings. Upon hearing this you look on your home website to verify that it is indeed he or she and open the door with a click, or sms or IM – whatever is easiest from where you are sitting.
Readers might be interested to know that the Olympic opening ceremony stimulated an increase of almost 10% in internet usage last Friday afternoon.
It will also be interesting to hear whether the consumer ADSL customer community will have seen any changes in the performance of their connection as their ISPs begin throttling to cope.
Before we set off on our camping holiday (destination unknown) I sat down at my daughter’s pc to print out some campsite options in Yorkshire.
I was somewhat bemused to find that her homepage was set to BBC iplayer.
Look out ISPs everywhere. Your bandwidth forecasts are inadequate.
My trusty E71 got me to the first campsite on the list and that is where we stayed. I also used it to write this post.
Nokia E71
Nokia kindly sent me an E71 to review. I’m not a gadget man but I have now had a series of Nokia E Series’ which I hope qualifies me to comment on this latest one.
I some time ago decided that I would use Nokias for email rather than RIM. BlackBerry at the time did not support WiFi and offered no hope of a VoIP client. Windows mobile devices did not cut it. For me they did not seem to be very good phones to me; clunky with a poor user interface and not a very good battery life.
The E Series came along and with it the business mobile range for the future. I thought the E60 was good and was somewhat surprised when it was canned. I put it down to progress. It wasn’t perfect. Pages downloading from the internet frustratingly seemed to do so twice. I put it down to some strange caching process. Still the screen was very clear and I could lie in bed on a Saturday morning reading the paper over my home wireless network.
My replacement, taken in order to run mobile voip clients on the latest Nokia device, was the E65 which I thought was great and is what I have been using since it came out. It seemed to be a stabler device although it still locked up from time to time. I eventually worked out that if email was synching some of the other buttons wouldn’t respond – crucially the address book. It still seems to download web pages twice.
Cosmetically the paintwork on the E65 rubs off so it doesn’t necessarily stay looking good but this isn’t what turns me on. I would happily carry on using the E65.
Enter the E71.
What I like about the E71?
Old fashioned PDA footprint but is a lot slimmer and slips in the pocket very easily.
Good weight – the Blackberry’s are too light for my liking
Good screen
You can listen to your text messages
On board satnav
WiFi – you can also get software that turns it into a WiFi hoptspot.
Battery life seems reasonably good
What don’t I like about it? I need to get a Bluetooth car kit. It isn’t really fair on the device because most modern cars probably have Bluetooth built in but mine is a “Classic” and so I have to switch SIMs to my E65 which has a generic Nokia interface that fits into the car.
If that is all I can complain about I think the Nokia E71 does very well. In fact it looks to be a huge step forwards as devices go. Well done Nokia.