Categories
Engineer internet ipv6

IPv6 traffic hits 2% of traffic at Google

IPv6 came up in conversation over lunch this week. Google reports that up to 2% of traffic to its servers are IPv6. It took about 4 1/2 years for IPv6 to hit 1% which it did around February of this year and I guess another 7 months or so to then double (timeframes are imprecise because I’m interpreting a graph rather than looking at the numbers behind it).

Traffic to Google isn’t necessarily representative of what is going on generally on the internet and I’m not sure there is one single source of data on this subject. However you can look at specific internet exchanges to see the trend on their own networks.

DE-CIX in Germany is the world’s largest internet exchange (IX) and a peek at the statistics on their website show a growth trend. As of today, 29/9/12 the 2 day average IPv6 traffic at DE-CIX is at 6.7Gbps which compared with the overall traffic level of 1,430Gbps is still a relatively small proportion.

Anecdotally different ISPs are at different stages of the game with IPv6 with some having to look at Carrier Grade NAT as an interim solution. Equipment aside the main issue is often the fact that automated provisioning and back office systems need redesigning to make IPv6 a scalable proposition. Whilst IANA stocks of IPv6 ahem IPv4 addresses are exhausted this is not necessarily the case within individual ISPs which is perhaps why we aren’t hearing more scare stories in the media.

Check out this paper on IPv6 readiness written back in 2010.

Chart below is the Google IPv6 traffic growth – links to Google’s own page.

Google IPv6 traffic stats

Categories
Engineer internet

iOS7 release causes internet traffic to double

traffic growth on lonap network due to ios7 upgradeiOS7 caused a stir in more than one way last week. Twitter abounded with all sorts of comments regarding how slow the Apple servers were responding to download requests from excited fanbois eager to checkout the latest slightly iterative functionality of their new iOS. When the dust settled it seemed that the majority of people had been sorted.

Taking a look at the effect of iOS7 on networks comes up with some interesting results. The graph in the header pic above shows the traffic over the Lonap core before, during and after the flurry wave (ocean?) of downloading. Steady state is around 30Gbps or maybe slightly more. Once iOS started to hit the fan this doubled to around 60Gbps.

It’s good that networks such as Lonap can take the capacity hit.

The growth in traffic comes as no surprise when you consider the size of the download. This seems to have ranged from around 700MB to nearly a Gig depending on the device with 3GB of space needed on your phone for the install. I guess you wouldn’t want to be eating into your mobile data bundle with that.

Categories
Business events internet peering

Joint Lonap/ISPA bash

Lonap and ISPA are having a bit of a bash in September. If you are a member of either org or not a member and but in the internet industry and potentially a member, we want to see you there.

It’s on 24th September at the Phoenix Artist Club in London. Check out the details here.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

#LINX82 – visible signs of growth of the internet

Sat in the LINX82 meeting. If you’ve never been, these LINX meetings are where the people who run the internet in the UK get together to chat – about the nuts and bolts of the internet.

Today we are discussing the Open IX developmental standard, getting an update on the US exchange, following the Manchester IX update yesterday. Traditionally an ISP’s connectivity to the rest of the internet is a mix of peering, where one network connects directly to another through a mutual not for profit internet peering exchange such as LINX or LONAP (both of which Timico is a member of) or  using a commercial provider of international connectivity called transit.

Peering is cheaper and over time represents a growing proportion of internet traffic.

LINX, which is the London Internet EXchange is expanding – to Manchester and the USA. I have been in two minds about this. Each of these regional exchanges are mutually independent – connecting in Manchester or the USA doesn’t mean you can peer with someone connecting at LINX in London.  So in one sense I had initially to ask myself why an organisation that set its stall out as a London exchange would want to also be elsewhere.

The LINX argument for its own regional expansion is that if it is to continue its growth in London it needs to be seen to be more of a Global player and the first choice for new members looking for a first connection in Europe. LINX competes with the likes of  AMS-IX (Amsterdam) and DEC-IX (Frankfurt) in this respect, both of who have been establishing bases overseas outside their original locations.

The long term trend is forecast to be towards more and more regional peering.  If you are in one city and want to connect to someone else in the same place why haul the traffic back to a hub such as in London that might be hundreds of miles away? You do need a critical mass of traffic for regional peering to be economic but the growth in the use of the internet is such that  the business case is beginning to become valid for more locations.

On balance, personally knowing the board of Directors at LINX and although I was originally sceptical, I have gone with the flow regarding this expansion. The numbers coming out of LINX certainly show real growth continuing to happen.

In the last three months LINX membership has grown from 469 to 477 companies and its connected capacity from 6.792 Tbps to 6.999 Tbps. This is a huge capability. Peak traffic remains at 1.618 Tbps. LINX is undoubtedly a major global presence on the internet to the point that the exchange has already connected its first 100Gbps port.

The internet industry. It’s an exciting place to be.

Categories
End User internet online safety

Government surveillance and the issue of personal privacy

The whole issue of government surveillance seems to have reached a crescendo over the last few days. It makes you wonder what the whole Draft Communications Data Bill was all about if “they” can already see everything.

I don’t even know whether encrypted communications are particularly secure anymore. I thought they were but does government secretly have the capability to do really advanced tech that is not in the public domain. Quite probably. We expect it of our own side and hope that we are better than the opposition (whoever they are) – the James Bond movie Skyfall confirmed that it goes on 🙂

I don’t know what to think about the whole privacy thing anymore though. Every online platform seems to know an awful lot about us. Tesco knows the intimate details of my lifestyle from what I buy from it. Google knows absolutely everything about what I’m doing with all my waking hours.

The old joke about a bloke having an affair with his secretary after work and then rubbing snooker chalk on his collar so that his wife would think he’d been playing with his mates doesn’t work any more. She just needs to follow his movements online, or have the difficult conversation about why he switched his phone off for an hour (5mins? 🙂 ) on his way home from work1 .

The Domesday scenario here is that all this information is opened for all to see, accidentally of otherwise. Worst case is that our bank accounts could be emptied.

Aside from ferociously safeguarding your bank password details, though it seems that crooks use back door techniques for breaking into accounts these days rather than brute force password hacks, it seems to me that we need to up the profile of the whole issue of security of our own personal data.

I can’t see how we can stop people/organisations from collecting this data but if they lose it or expose it for others to see then the penalties need to be suitably robust. The world needs to fast track a move to an online security conscious culture.

1 On Sunday I nipped out to the pub for a swift one before dinner and forgot my phone. When I got home there was a text message from my wife asking which pub I was in! Nothing was mentioned though.  I did feel an element of freedom being out without the mobile phone but was also conscious that the clock in the window of acceptability was ticking away.

Categories
Engineer internet ofcom

Ofcom slow news – 98% of tablet owners use them to connect to the internet

August is normally a deadly quiet month. Almost to the extent that it would be very easy to say I might as well take the whole month off. This year seems to be different. We are rushed off our feet. It’s all good stuff. I’m not complaining. Just saying that we are very busy.

August is also normally a very quiet news month. The media resorts to headlines such as “Boy’s ice cream melts before he could finish it” and other riveting slow news day reports. The one bit of news that you could set your watch by every year in August is the Ofcom Communications Market Report. This year it came out when I was on holiday in North Wales and observing radio silence so I’ve only just noticed it. On that basis whatever I might say on the subject has possibly already been said.

Notwithstanding that the Ofcom CMR usually has some nuggets worth looking at. The first that stands out is the headline saying:

Total UK revenues from telecoms, TV, radio, and post fell for the fourth successive year in 2012.  These services generated £59.5bn in revenues during the year, a £0.1bn (0.2%) fall compared to 2011 as a £0.7bn fall in telecoms revenues was offset by increasing TV, radio and post revenues.”

This is interesting because our use of the internet is growing massively. This might lead you to naturally conclude that the revenues for businesses operating in that market are growing. Certainly this is true for Timico.

It is clear though that for the industry as a whole the model is changing. Old fashioned lines of business are changing. ISDN is being replaced by SIP trunks – telephony by VoIP. The cost of minutes has plummeted largely to a fixed monthly fee per subscriber. Broadband prices are also at rock bottom, particularly for consumers. The government is right when it says we have one of the most competitive markets in the world.

This is also true for mobile and whilst people might whinge about mobile prices the mobile operators are struggling with their gross margins. These large telcos are still seen as fat organisations paying fat salaries and there is probably some way to go on the cost cutting side before mobile markets reach the bottom.

Everyone in the game is trying to modernise their business model. The money must still be there. It is just going elsewhere. One clue is in the growth in TV, radio and post revenues. People must be using their internet connection to spend money. In our house we probably watch more TV over the internet that on the actual TV itself. Including the advertising. We also buy a lot more stuff over the internet than we used to, hence the rise in postal revenues. It’s mostly not downloaded. It comes in a van.

As the world moves more “onto the internet” the one thing that is becoming more and more important is the integrity and the quality of the internet connection. This is particularly true for businesses who are increasingly growing to depend on revenues that rely in one way or another on connectivity to make them happen. For example if you own an ecommerce site then every minute of downtime means lost revenues. Similarly in the physical retail world, most payments are processed using broadband connections. Lose the connection and lose the lolly.

However people might be spending their cash this represents a huge opportunity for the telco that can respond to change. They just have to look up and look forward and not dwell on what was.

One final note. Ofcom bless em do have a way of stating the bleedin obvious. They tell us that nearly all (98%) tablet owners say they use their tablets to connect to the internet. One wonders what the other 2% use their tablets for?!

Gotta go. Busy busy busy.

Categories
End User internet

I bought a barbecue

bbqWe used to have an Australian Gas Barbecue. It was great. My wife isn’t a big fan of barbecues because you never know how long the charcoal is going to take to get to the right temperature for cooking. With 4 kids to feed this was important. It was an expensive piece of kit but did a terrific job, passed scrutiny with Mrs Davies and we used to use it pretty often during the summer.

Unfortunately it eventually rusted away and the price of spare parts was such that I could almost have bough a new one instead so we left it to rot around the back of the playhouse at the bottom of the garden. It was taken to the tip last year.

To replace it we bought a stainless steel charcoal barbecue that turned into a fire pit once you had finished cooking. This, like its gas predecessor is also a great piece of kit. We have had marvellous evenings sat outside drinking beer and strumming the ole geetar. The wood smoke keeps the mozzies away – I’m particularly prone to being bitten by insects. They love me.

The downside of this charcoal barbecue is of course that it doesn’t get used as often for reasons you already know. That’s life Jim.

Now I have a big wedding anniversary coming up later this month and we will have 80 or so guests coming to lunch. In our back garden. We are pushing the boat out – barrel of TT Landlord, some posh pop and a barbecue (dress code – Hawaiian shirts). Unfortunately our charcoal barbecue is not big enough to cook for 80 people in a timely manner.

I’ve used this as an excuse to invest in a new gas barbecue. A Weber. Comes with a warranty for all parts and has “Flavoriser®” bars. Other than the fact that it needs assembling I am a happy Tref. Our guests shall have sausages 🙂

When you buy an expensive piece of kit you don’t do it without significant online research first. I feel I already know our barbecue in intimate detail  even though it doesn’t get delivered until next week.

The problem I now have, and this is really the point of the post, is that having made my buying decision and paid for the product Google is still bombarding me with ads for Weber barbecues. I no longer need these ads. There needs to be a box for me to tick telling Google and their paying advertisers that they are wasting their time. Someone else now has my money (B&Q).

I realise such a mechanism would be open to abuse – people who haven’t yet bought their barbecue might also tick the box thus denying sellers of Weber barbecues the opportunity to get their pitch across. This I feel is a risk worth taking. The feature is clearly a winner. It is surely just a matter of time.

I’ll finish off this technologically tenuous post by letting you know that the old charcoal barbecue will still get used, mostly as a fire pit I imagine. Anyone in Lincoln over August Bank Holiday weekend should listen out for sounds of a guitar and strains of cumbaya emanating from a back garden. It’ll be me.

Video below is of the barbecue betting its annual clean.

Categories
End User internet social networking

Google Author Ranking

Acting on advice I recently signed up for Google Author Ranking. Google is apparently changing the way it rates content for SEO purposes by looking for quality original content. One of the ways Google determines original content is by linking that content with a specific author.

Having gone through what appeared to be a hit and miss process in establishing the “Authorship” (you will notice a Google+ link at the bottom right of the main page of this blog) I’ve suddenly started to get a lot more Google Alerts highlighting mentions of my name. These links can be quite old but that doesn’t matter. It’s a sign that the Google system knows it’s me being mentioned in online articles.

So it does, at a very cursory glance, seem that getting signed up for Google Author Ranking is worthwhile. There is a long dialogue going on about what Google is trying to achieve in evolving its methods of search ratings. Not the least of the debating points is the idea that Google is trying to increase monetisation of its search product at the expense of traditional PR Agencies – check out this ZDNet article here.

Now I am a Google fan. I use a lot of the company’s products. However this does make you wonder whether the company is using its significant market power in an anti competitive way. Google is certainly being very clever.

One the one hand who can argue with changes that improve the quality of your search results. On the other hand tying people more and more to the Google ecosystem is in the long run likely to lead to less choice and a more costly product.  The market is too complicated and global for anyone to regulate against this as we did in the UK for example with the old BT monopoly of the communications market (we also seem slowly to be regressing to the old monopolistic state in the UK).

I’m not sure anyone would be able to articulate how you would make changes to a Google monopoly in any case. In the meantime I think we just have to get on and figure out how best we live in the Google world. What are we going to do? Stop trying to get online visibility just because we think Google is trying to make even more money out of us?

That’s all folks.

Categories
End User internet security voip

How to tell if a phone call is going to be a scammer

Most people have picked up scam phone call at sometime in their recent short lives. I’ve noticed that they all have similar characteristics in that when you pick up the phone there is always a second or two of silence followed by a foreign voice saying “can I speak to Mr Davies please?” (replace Davies with your own name obv). It’s down to the latency over the internet.

It’s also because they are using some cheapo poor quality VoIP service. Thinking about it, their conversion rate would be much higher if they spent a bit more cash on better quality comms. The quality of their internet access is particularly important although in their case it might not make that much difference as I suspect the packets are traversing the internet for most of their journey. A good quality VoIP provider will hardly touch the internet, if at all.

I’ve adopted the practice, upon hearing the noisy silence before the attempt at a con, of being very familiar “I thought it was you. I wondered when you were going to call”. This tends to confuse them momentarily. All these scammers sound the same to me anyway. It’s probably the bad line but it might always be the same person. Would explain how they always seem to know my name.

That’s how you tell it’s a scammer. It’s all about the noisy silence before they realise you’ve answered the phone.

A public service blog post from trefor.net

Categories
End User internet online safety security

The return of the “virus on your Microsoft PC” scam #speedytechies @TeamViewer

The “you have a virus on your Microsoft PC” scam is back. I thought they had locked up the people responsible and this was dead. Like everything related to the internet crime – spam, botnets they always find a way back.

I got home from work on Friday and took a call from Anna of http://speedytechies.com/. They apparently have thousands of staff servicing thousands of customers every day despite the fact that the website is only around 3 months old. Pretty impressive business growth.

Either that or Anna is lying and she doesn’t work for speedytechies. She sounded as if she was from India or maybe the Philippines – that general part of the world anyway.

http://speedytechies.com/ is owned by a small business based at a residential address in Houston Texas. You can easily find out lots of info about the business and its owner by shelling out a few dollars to an online resource that does this kind of thing. Not worth it because the chances are the scammer has nothing to do with this guy. Slightly suspicious that the website is only 3 months old though.

Anna wanted me to go to www.teamviewer.com so that she could take over my laptop to check out the virus. www.teamviewer.com looks like a legit site though it would be interesting to audit their list of paying customers to get a trail back to the scammers.

Anna gave me a phone number to call back if I had a problem: 18007137734. The line with Anna was not great so it might be wrong and don’t know where it terminates as I’ve not tried ringing it. Her line quality kept disappearing so she was probably using Skype or some similar OTT service.

I guess it would be possible to trace where Anna was calling from and compile a list of times that her ilk had tried the scam. It isn’t easy though for a punter and it would take a concerted effort from a number of stakeholders. It would be easier if the whole world was VoIP but it isn’t. Also the level of individual harm that will probably accrue from a single incident is not worth the effort it would take. This would have to be coordinated on a wide scale to build up a body of evidence for cross border efforts/cooperation to kick in.

That’s all for now. Ciao.

Categories
Engineer internet online safety security

How would Huawei spy on your network?

Last week the talk was about a story about former head of the CIA and the NSA, Michael Hayden, who thinks Huawei are spying on networks that have installed their kit. Link here to the Register story though it appeared in a lot of places.

One has to think about how Huawei might do this without the network operator knowing?

paul sherrattI had a chat about this with one of our networking gurus Paul Sherratt (pic inset – good looking boy) and this is what he had to say:

“They would write traffic tap/backdoor code into pre-shipped FPGA firmware or on an ASIC, hidden from any local intelligence agency code review body.  If for spying/traffic tap function, there would be some safeguards against activating the code if the router believes it is under test/non-production conditions.  There may also be some kind of ‘Hello, I am here’ call-out, which for example may be done by modifying a large DNS request packet contents and padding to the same length to avoid detection by looking at packet headers.

Whether that is even possible will depend on the hardware design – so that should also go through a full review by an intelligence body to determine if pre-shipped chips are an intelligence risk.  If they are, the only way to 100% prevent it happening would be to fully review the ASIC design and manufacture outside of China, which would probably rule out Huawei as a supplier.

It would be easier to implement in software/FPGA firmware, but easier to tackle from a security standpoint.  All software and FPGA firmware would be compiled after intelligence review and installed on network equipment after shipment.  If I were China, I may find it easier to get software engineer spies working for a more ‘trusted’ vendor not imposed with the same level of hardware and software review.”

It’s a tangled web innit? It feels as if we should be looking over our shoulder all the time.

As a footnote I used to work in the chip business. The company I worked for produced military ASICs amongst other things. it was quite common for chip designers to leave little messages or their names etched into the metal layers in empty spaces a chip. I remember once one of the guys leaving the words  “live fast die young” in the corner of a chip. They had to redo the metal mask and re-manufacture the whole chip. It was destined for a high reliability application where the notion of dying young was not too popular! Good times…

Categories
broadband Business internet Regs

Rural broadband roll out slips by 2 years – National Audit Office #BDUK

Rural broadband roll out schedule slips

The National Audit Office Last Week spilled the beans that the rural broadband roll out schedule for the BDUK funded superfast broadband project was going to slip 2 years to 2017.

This is not good news. It’s not good news for the rural communities that desperately need faster internet access and it’s not good news for the government which has repeatedly reaffirmed its commitment that the UK would have the “best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015”.

For those of us involved with this BDUK rollout it has been clear for some time that a 2015 completion was not achievable. Lincolnshire, which was one of the earlier counties to place its contract with BT already has a delivery completion date that ends in March 2016. Counties that are later in the contract placement cycle should expect to see 2017 on their schedules.

The slippages look to me to be down to a combination of red tape and resource. Red tape everywhere you look at it and resource constraints at BT. I’m told that Lincolnshire’s BDUK contract with BT slipped by 3 months as it got close to placement because BT couldn’t assign enough staff to the project (this could quite possibly have been because the delays caused by the red tape had knock on effects from elsewhere in the rollout pipeline).

The other comment made by the NAO relates to the fact that BT’s contribution to the pot would appear to currently be only 23% of the total as opposed to the matched investment that was trumpeted before this project started. Both BT and DCMS have vociferously denied that BT will come up short saying that not all of the projects have been committed to yet.

My own sources tell me that BT has seen a lower take up of superfast broadband in Cornwall than it had planned. This has allegedly affected the ROI model and consequently the amount of money that BT deems sensible to throw into the pot for subsequent rural rollouts.

You do need to look at this in two ways. Firstly the “Cornwall” model only worked in the first place because the EU funding brought the time to recoup BT’s investment down to 13 years (or so I’m told). A lower take up would push this time out further. You might take the view that 13+ years is a very long time to see a return on investment nowadays. However you might also think that this is a long term infrastructure investment for which BT will reap the benefits for decades to come and what difference does a year or two here and there make.

It would also appear from the NAO website that in June 2013, the government revised its target, and now aims to secure delivery of the rural broadband programme by December 2016, as well as 95 per cent superfast coverage by 2017. I missed that one. They kept it very quiet. The last time I heard was that they weren’t officially allowing County Councils to place contracts that extended beyond 1015 because of the need to have spent the funding by then but that they were giving an unofficial wink that it would be ok for them to do so.

I refer you to a post what I wrote1 in November 2011 saying there wasn’t much confidence in the industry that the government target (best superfast broadband in Europe by 2015) was in any way achievable.

The object here is not to gloat. In fact I’m not sure what the object is. Perhaps I’ll finish with some observations.

Firstly nobody should underestimate the importance of the UK having a fantastic broadband network. The competitiveness of UK PLC in the 21st century depends on it. This applies to both rural and urban areas. I’m pretty certain that the political classes understand this.

The red tape associated with dealing with any public source of funding is very thick and difficult to cut through. It is so in order to protect the hard earned (and seemingly easily taken from us) money that we hand over to the taxman from being ill spent.

Governments and the permanent administrative staff who toil on our behalf do not have a good track record in spending this money wisely when major projects are concerned. Who expects the HS2 high speed rail project to come in on budget? Certainly not the Mayor of London.

I don’t have the answer when it comes to red tape.

It has seemed for some time now that what is being done with the BDUK rollout is handing back a monopoly to BT. Realistically there is no one else in the game. Does it matter as long as the network gets rolled out? Some of this is down to the environment established by BDUK. Again we have to remember that the government does have a duty of care to ensure that the cash is wisely spent. Part of this is ensuring that critical national infrastructure, as is the broadband network, is in safe hands. In this case “safe hands” has been interpreted to mean “big network operator” which seems therefore to have locked everyone but BT out of the game.

It may well be that the economics of the countryside mean there is only room for one infrastructure supplier. There is healthy competition between BT and Virgin in more populated areas. There is now definitely no competition in rural areas.

I would like you to consider the following points for discussion:

The government splits off the rural bits of the Openreach network. BT can keep the bits that compete with Virgin.

This network is run in the same way as Network Rail. Perhaps its management could be periodically put out to tender.

The government (us) funds a complete fibre rollout to all communities (Fibre to the Premises or FTTP) covered by this network.

The money for this comes from the scrapping of the HS2 project which sounds as if it could be hugely more expensive than is currently budgeted and in many people’s view a waste of time.

The fact that we were never going to achieve a 2015 date for “the best superfast broadband network in Europe” is almost a moot point. You can understand why politicians like to make statements that puts them in a good light. Although the will was still there I think they realised early on that it was a mistake so make this statement as the focus changed to “what constitutes the best superfast broadband network” together with some b”!!5&*t about putting together a scorecard to measure it. I haven’t heard anything about the scorecard in some time.

None of the political bluster really matters. At the end of the day the only sensible objective is for the UK to have a complete fibre to the premises network and to have this sooner rather than later. We can’t use traditional business case benefit methodologies to find out if this makes sense. I’m sure that this is how they worked out the ROI for HS2. Nobody really understands what benefits will accrue from a universal fibre network. This therefore requires a leap of faith on the part of the government and unfortunately this is a risk they are unlikely to take.

I realise that handing part of a private company back to what would effectively be public ownership sounds counter intuitive. People have criticised BT’s costs. Whatever people say about BT’s cost and overhead base it is difficult to imagine a scenario where a publicly owned company without a profit motive would do better.  BT does actually maintain that its cost per metre benchmarks very well against similar networks in other countries and I wouldn’t want to argue the point.

It could be a bullet we should bite. Service provision could be provided by BT, Virgin, Timico or any other ISP who cared to do the business. It would just be a matter of buying wholesale bandwidth off the new company and sending out a router. It would provide for a properly competitive market.

Government intervention is the only way this is going to happen and would have the added benefit of consigning the utterly pathetic 2Mbps Universal Service Obligation (or whatever it is called these days) to the recycle bin.

Discuss.

1 Some of my writing has been influenced by the plays of Mr Ernest Wise.

Categories
Engineer internet ipv6

Disturbing news re internet traffic growth forecast – prefix exhaustion

I’m doing some prep for a talk next week and just discovered a disturbing fact. I’m sure all of you will have read Cisco’s annual network traffic forecast. I covered it here.

What you need to know about is that Cisco reckons that by 2017, global IP traffic will reach an annual run rate of 1.4 zettabytes, up from 523 exabytes in 2012.

Somebody asked me what a zettabyte was and it made me wonder what comes after it in the big number naming or prefix stakes. I looked it up on Wikipedia and the answer is (of course !!) yottabyte.

The real problem comes when internet traffic outgrows yottabytes, which, dear reader, I assure you it will. I couldn’t find the name for the next one up. Wikipedia stops at yotta (1024 )! The world is facing prefix-exhaustion.

This is a problem akin to IPv4 exhaustion although the fix is far simpler. We have enough warning. We simply have to run a naming competition on this blog. It just won’t be acceptable to have more and more yottabytes. I could have a special mug produced as a prize.

I’m not going to bother with it yet (unless you really want to) but as we get nearer name exhaustion date we will have to give it some thought. It will also be a good excuse for another party like the end of the IPv4 bash I held a couple of years ago.

I would think it will happen sometime in the next decade – ie the 2020’s.

You heard it first on trefor.net…

PS I’d have put an image of the Cisco traffic forecast up but their flash code didn’t work and neither did the link to generate a jpg! We won’t get to yottabytes if we have errors like that now will we Cisco, eh? Probably just a glitch.

Categories
Business dns internet

Nominet Non-Exec elections & trouble at mill

cookies_thumbEmail from Nominet today concerning their forthcoming AGM & non-exec elections. Nice little earner if the £30k mentioned by one of the candidates in his Election Statement is right. You do have to put in 26 days a year though which is not an insignificant amount of time to be out of your own business.

I was prompted to look at the candidates because Nominet took the step of recommending two Non-Execs out of the four that have applied (for two slots). Guaranteed to make you dig deeper. I don’t bother voting at this type of election as I have no strong views on any of the candidates – let others have their say. The exception was for Seb Lahtinen who I seconded a year or two ago.

When you read the Election Statements you begin to realise why Nominet has specifically backed the two existing Non-Execs standing for re-election. One of the others is being sued by Nominet and CEO Lesley Cowley. Trouble at mill or what?

I’m not getting involved but read the statements here.

PS thumbnail pic is cookies – domain names/websites/cookies – geddit?

Categories
Business Cloud internet online safety piracy scams

Should we regulate the cloud?

Today I am at a CIO event in London discussing the topic “Too important to be regulated and too important to be left alone” (Forbes) – Should we regulate the cloud?

You could extend this question to encompass the whole internet. Really there is no difference between the internet and the cloud.

When you think about it, as the whole world drags its living and breathing self into the cloud, it is natural that we should expect laws that exist on terra firma to apply to the cloud. There is no reason why they should not. What is illegal on earth should also be illegal in the heavens. The notion of being robbed or assaulted is just as unattractive in cyberspace as it is in the high street.

It is reasonable therefore that regulations should apply.

Categories
Business internet

Paid for advertorials and links

Interesting to see this warning from Google re accepting paid for advertorials and links on a website. I must get at least one unsolicited email a week from marketing agencies looking at link building for their clients. The going rate can be as high as £150 a link. I don’t accept such requests. My last suggestion of £10k for a placed advertorial elicited no reply strangely enough.

The other type of unsolicited email I get is from marketing agencies offering to improve my own SEO performance. This type of email usually comes with a detailed footnote explaining that their email is not spam and that they follow all the guidelines about making it easy to unsubscribe etc. As often as not I still mark them as spam. They only come in to my trefor.net email address which is at the moment relatively clutter free.

Fortunately this blog gets linked to from many sources and whilst I’m sure there are lots of things I could do to increase the traffic I’ve got other things I can be doing with my time.

Ciao

Categories
Engineer internet ipv6

A few observations on the Cisco Annual VNI Report 2012 – 2017

Trefor Davies thumbnail pictureI live in my own little world. It’s a connected world but relatively contained. I have a modest 2,461 followers on Twitter, 455 friends on Facebook and over 5001 connections of LinkedIn.

All this comes in to perspective when you read Cisco’s annual Visual Networking Index, a body of research that charts the growth of the internet and forecasts traffic patterns over the next five years. The latest issue is just out and comes with a ton of data. I’ve distilled a few points that jumped out of the router at me and shared them below.

Connected people and IPv6

According to the forecast by 2017 3.6 billion people will be connected to the Internet, up from 2.3 billion in 2012. Also by 2017 there will be 19 billion networked devices, up from 12 billion last year.

That’s a lot of people and a lot of devices. The fact that there are around 5 times more devices than people is a reflection of the growth of machine to machine connectivity. Nobody is going to be carrying around five networked devices, although having said that I carry four but don’t use me as an example of Mr Average.

It’s interesting to note that the number of IPv6 connected devices is forecast to grow from 1.6 billion in 2012 to 8 billion in 2017. On the face of it this suggests that most of the growth in connected devices is going to come from IPv6 which shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Metro versus long haul

Cisco reckons that metro traffic will surpass long haul traffic in 2014 and will account for 58% of total IP traffic by 2017 and will grow nearly twice as fast as long-haul traffic from 2012 to 2017. This is not something that your average man in the street will have to think about but it does help us to understand the trend towards regional peering exchanges.

Historically most ISPs connect to the internet at a few major hubs. London is one such hub. However as more and more traffic is local traffic it makes more sense to connect this traffic near to where it originates. For example the traffic between two servers “taking to each other” in Leeds would historically have been tromboned to London and back. It obviously doesn’t make sense to pay to cart data hundreds of miles and back if it can be done more directly. Now ISPs with a reasonable density of customers in Leeds can connect via the IX Leeds Peering exchange. The same applies for Manchester. In time as traffic levels grow the business case for smaller metropolitan areas will work we will see other locations appear on the connected map.

WiFI/mobile

Wi-Fi and mobile-connected devices will generate 68% of Internet traffic by 2017. It wouldn’t surprise me to see this number upsided. The only fixed internet connections in our house are the Xbox and my home office VoIP phone and the XBox is likely to go wireless when the new one comes out later this year. I would guess that most wired internet connectivity is going to be business based.

There’s more info on the Cisco blog here together with links to tools that allow you to play with the numbers. It’s well worth a browse.

Returning to my opening lines and the number of people I connect with, all these statistics do highlight the changing nature of our world. We are going to have to continue to adapt as more and more of our daily lives become electronic and connected.

I think these are exciting times from both a personal and business perspective. Exciting because of the wave of change sweeping across our personal lives that will hopefully enrich and enhance the quality of our lives. Exciting from a business perspective because there is money to be made out of all this growth.

That’s all folks…

1 no idea actually how many because it only tells me 500+ and I couldn’t figure out how many and I wasn’t prepared to spend any time finding out how to do it.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

Vodafone GlobalNet C&W integration #LINX81

Just had an interesting talk from Matt Jansen of Vodafone GlobalNet. Matt was originally with AS1273, ie Cable and Wireless which has been acquired by Vodafone. The C&W brand has disappeared.

The interesting aspect of the talk was that Matt described the process of integrating the Vodafone and C&W networks. Voda and C&W have networks all over the world but the steps being taken are largely the same as those taken by Timico during the integration of our own acquisitions, albeit on a much smaller scale.

We are talking about rationalisation of existing pipes and suppliers, removal of duplicate services etc. Of course the savings that may be achieved by Vodafone are on a much bigger scale that Timico’s own efforts but the principle is the same.

Although the internet is driven by complex technology the high level principles are fairly simple and apply no matter the size of the network.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

#LINX81 internet plumbing stats

I’m at LINX81. I go to a couple of LINX meetings a year as it’s a great place to catch up with what’s going on in the world of internet plumbing. Laymen will probably not understand the allusion to plumbing. The internet is made up of lots of “pipes”. A pipe is usually measured as a multiple of Gigs (1x, 10x, 100x) is connected to a port, one at each end of the pipe (obv).

In the internet plumbing world the bigger your pipe the bigger your bragging rights. It’s all about shifting data. Timico I’m pleased to say uses 10Gig ports at its peering exchanges – LINX and LONAP. There is only one 100Gig port at LINX and that belongs to BT. I understand there are more in the pipeline.

The internet as you may know is made up of tens of thousands of autonomous networks. The chances are your favourite website is not hosted by the same network operator that provides you with your connectivity. What your ISP does is it connects its own network to every other network on the internet which it partly does via peering exchanges.

A peering exchange is a point at which networks connect to each other for the sharing of internet traffic. Being a member of LINX brings us lots of benefits. You can get an idea of this from the LINX stats:

468 members (39 new applications in 2013 so it’s growing)
1135 connected member ports
362 member-facing 1GigE ports
631 member-facing 10GigE ports
1 member-facing 100GigE port
over 1.618 Tb/sec of peak traffic (swoon)
6.792 Tb of connected capacity (so notionally plenty of headroom)
58 member countries

Peering at LINX connects us to a large chunk of the internet at relatively low cost. More from LINX81 as it happens.

Categories
Business internet travel

Rubbish connectivity on train

Sat on the train and can’t get anything done. Some bloke behind me talking very loudly on his phone. Keeps ringing up to try to invite “CEO”s to a dinner in a month or so. He is a former CEO apparently. None of the people he is trying to reach are in and he only gets their PAs. Very distracting.  I could move seats I suppose but the train is fairly full and I can’t be bothered.

Also the internet connectivity on this train is totally rubbish. The WiFi is like sludge and the cellular connection no better.

Usually I like to use train time to get stuff done. Rant over.

On the plus side it is a beautiful spring day and Mervyn King has told us all not to worry and that everything is going to be ok with the economy. He has nothing to lose of course but I am inclined to believe him.

I spoke with a customer this morning who said that things had started to move forward at their end. I think he is right. Having been to ISPA and ITSPA council meetings recently I note that membership is on the up and businesses in the new industries are growing. You do wonder how much of the recent recession is down to the negative hype of the media.

Anyway I’m not going to solve it all. I’m just going to wait until I get a signal and upload this post.

Ciao…

Categories
Engineer internet ofcom social networking

The speed of obsolescence & the increase in the speed of light

pirate_flag_thumbWe do live in very interesting times. Last night the twitter stream told me that the internet in Syria had stopped working, or at least the traffic in and out of the country had died off which is the same thing. This morning it was included by the Guardian in their Boot Up links. I thought to myself last night that once it had hit twitter the news would be everywhere. I saw a couple more references to it on twitter this morning and thought to myself “they’re a bit behind the game – that was last night’s news”. I figured it was too old and publicly available to write a blog about it & I wouldn’t really have been able to add anything anyway.

Then this morning I saw someone retweet a link to a post by @TheRealRevK about how Ofcom was about to screw the voip market in the UK by, amongst other things (in it’s 500 page consultation). If you know Adrian (the reverend himself) you will know how passionate he is about these things.  I had thought about writing a post about this subject myself – it came up at dinner last week at Convergence Summit North. I didn’t have the time as I was out of the office for much of the week. I’m not going to do one now as I can’t add to Adrian’s post.

The world is changing so quickly. It’s daft that I don’t feel able to write about something that hit the headlines only a few hours ago and it certainly makes you think about what you do write. Google has been giving this a lot of thought with its Google Authorship Ranking (Google it). When I did the pigeon v rural broadband race a couple of years ago it was covered by the BBC and as far as  I could see scraped by approx 32,000 websites around the world. That’s them taking someone else’s news in the hope that it would make their own site interesting.

Google Authorship is designed to give credit to the originator of the news. I’ve added links to my Google+ profile from both trefor.net and philosopherontap.com and linked back from the profile to the sites. In theory over time my Google+ profile will be linked to my many sites as I write guest posts for them (ok maybe it won’t) and this will increase the level of credibility given to me as an author and originator of content.

This doesn’t take away the fact that I will still have to find original stuff to write about which ain’t necessarily easy in this world where the speed of light and information distribution is constantly increasing – you heard it first on trefor.net.

PS the speed of light bit is entirely made up as an attention grabbing bit of sensationalism – had I not made this admission I know many of you would otherwise take it as read from such a creditable source! 🙂

Categories
End User internet

notatthisaddress.net #notatthisaddress

Trefor DaviesI have just taken possession of notatthisaddress.net. The .com and .co.uk were taken but I’m cool with that. I’m a .net kinda guy. This to me is a cool domain name and must have loads of uses. I thought about using it as my default address for registering at tradeshows. Myname at notatthisaddress.net sounds good, snoop cocked, spam avoided.

However I’m beginning to think that is a sheer waste of a good domain name and I figured that you dear blog readers might have better ideas. There are thousands of geeks out there with great ideas who might be able to suggest some good uses for it.

Usual prize of a Timico Megamug for any good suggested uses unless I’m meeting you in person soon in which case it could mean a beer. If you’re teetotal I’ll drink the beer and you can have an orange squash.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

Submarine cables at #euroix #ixp

Good talk at Euro-IX on submarine cables from Alan Mauldin of TeleGeography.

The world is still very much increasing it submarine cable capacity. Interestingly the drivers for new builds are not capacity exhaustion. It’s more likely to be down to a range of things including Route Diversity – new physical paths being valued, Cost Optimization – use of new technology may lead to long-term unit cost reductions, Competition — still room for new competitors in some markets where high prices persist, Build-vs-Buy Strategy – become an owner, not buyer, of capacity, Peer pressure, ego, national, & corporate pride and First cables (for some island nations).

I quite liked the national/corporate pride bit. It follows on from a chat I was having on the subject of size pipes during the break. In our internet world the capacity of your network connection(s) is a bragging point.

Chat up line of an internet geek: “Fancy coming back to my place to see the size of my pipe?

Timico customers are taking 10Gbps connections. I’m looking forward to our first 100Gbps connection.undersea cable capacity

I lifted this chart from Alan’s presentation (thanks Al). It shows that we, the world, currently have roughly 70Terabits per second of intercontinental internet capacity. Impressive. We aren’t using it all yet of course but the only way is up.

Interactive submarine cable map here. I think I may have linked to this before but no harm in doing it again.

Another interesting interactive map is of the world’s internet exchanges here. This shows you where the meeting points of the internet are. The places that ISPs connect to/at to carry your internet traffic. When you send an email or click on a web page the data will travel through one or more of these places.

It doesn’t cover private connections but these will largely be done at the same locations. That’s all.

Categories
Engineer engineering internet

Fearghas nods off

Many of you will know Fearghas McKay as a solid hard working lad who is thoroughly dependable and very knowledgeable about his subject. Such is his commitment to his job that he often works through the night at home and then turns up for a full day in the office the next day.

All this hard work does eventually take its toll.  I mischievously filmed the lad sleeping like a baby at UKNOF24 held at Timico yesterday.  Poor old Fearghas completely missed Jesse Sowell of MIT’s retrospective on the WCIT meeting. Ah well. Lucky for him he wasn’t snoring when I was filming.

I gave out some wonderful Timico Megamugs at UKNOF but I do have a few left and seeing as it’s Friday afternoon I’m going to have a caption competition. Lets have some suggestions for captions to accompany this video.

Categories
Engineer internet Net

PCI compliant networks

Trefor DaviesPleased to tell you that as of today, Timico, NewNet and PowerNet have been listed on Visa Europe’s website as having a PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant network.

Check it out here.

Our PCI compliance project began in mid-July and all paperwork and network scan was sent to Visa Europe on 14 November.  The team met pretty much every other week since July, sometimes for all day workshops, to tackle this project.  It’s a great credit to everyone that the project was completed in such a short space of time.  I’m sure they will all agree, it wasn’t easy.

The cross disciplinary team was lead by Leslie Young and comprised Nick Luckcuck, Ian Christian, Will Curtis, Faye Hemingway, Dean Bruce, Tom Grace, Jared Moore and Calum Malcolm.

Anyone out there needing a PCI compliant network should check us out. Press release with more spiel here.

I’ll do another post to cover the type of work we had to do to achieve compliance.

Categories
Engineer engineering internet

#UKNOF24 is at Timico in Newark next week

UKNOF24It’s a day for writing posts about being excited. This time I’m excited to tell you that next Thursday Timico is playing host to UKNOF24. Many of you will know what I’m taking about but more will not.

The UK Network Operators Forum acts as an open forum for operational, technical and engineering information exchange related to networking technologies and practices. On Thursday we will have 120 or so of the UK’s top network engineers in our Newark Conference Centre.

Its a very packed agenda including a curry the night before sponsored by LINX and beers afterwards. UKNOF is open to anyone involved in the networking game. It isn’t just ISPs and commercial network operators. You could be running the network of your own business.  Next week we will hear about subjects as diverse as 100Gbps optical networks and the market for VoIP/SIP.

If you want to come you can register here.

Categories
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.

Categories
Engineer fun stuff internet

TalkTalk break records for downloads with 557GB per sec on New Year’s Day

Trefor DaviesTalkTalk is a highly successful provider of communications services – broadband, phone lines etc. I noted an entry in the Twitter stream this morning that showed they had seen record traffic levels on New Year’s Day – people upgrading firmware on new gadgets, using the gadgets etc.

We know this because TalkTalk CTO Clive Dorsman blogged about their network peaking at 557GB per second of traffic – that’s around 4.45Terabits per second which is impressively massive and three times to peak usage seen on the LINX network. I can only dream of having that amount of capacity at Timico.

Clive goes on to sell TalkTalk broadband services in his post. That’s OK. I occasionally chuck in a reference to a Timico service (great value & service etc – check it out here). “TalkTalk Superfast Fibre Broadband … costs £10 per month for up to 38MB or £15 for up to 76MB, allowing downloads up to eight times faster than the UK average.”

The only tiny element of doubt I have about all this is that I don’t believe that FTTC speeds of 76 Megabytes are available. In fact the TalkTalk product pages correctly quote speeds of 76 Megabits per second.

I suspect that Clive’s post was written by a PR person new to the tech game. I guess these things happen. I’m sure we are all guilty of the occasional cock up.

Btw this is only a bit of fun but I attach a screenshot of the post here for reference in anticipation of the corrections to the TalkTalk blog and the pursuant challenge for me to provide evidence. Also if the real number is 4.45Terabits per second – as I said that is massively impressive.

Categories
Engineer internet

Why adjacency matters

Check out this post of the Timico website as to why adjacency matters. If you don’t know what I’m taking about you will learn something:)

Categories
Business internet Regs

ISPA on the up – Facebook is new member

Trefor Davies Good news for the Internet Service Providers Association ISPA with Facebook joining its membership ranks. The trade association is becoming increasingly relevant in a world where there is a constant threat of regulation. We have to be careful that regulation does not stymie the explosive growth that has characterised the internet since its inception.

The argument is often a difficult one to get across. For example the debate over preventing access to pornography to children or how to approach the issue of online surveillance for the prevention of crime. On the face of it none of us want our kids exposed to porn and we all want to stop crime but there are wider ramifications to our personal rights and privacy that need to be well understood before anyone signs up to some of these proposed measures.

We have to have a grown up approach to the subject of internet regulation and have to be sensible to the fact that in a world that has moved online the problems have moved with it. It is fair that those that we pay to we pay to protect us should expect our cooperation when they ask for help in doing this. It isn’t always palatable to say no though sometimes it needs doing.

ISPA has over two hundred stakeholders and therefore has a difficult job in treading a line that is seen to be acceptable to all. The trade body by its very nature has also to work in very close cooperation with government departments, often helping to shape draft laws before they hit the public eye.

ISPA does a very good job of this and is also streetwise enough to understand how to approach “problems” such as the Draft Communications Data Bill that can sometimes be thrown out of left field1.  It is therefore an an endorsement of the organisation that the likes of Facebook and Google want to throw their weight behind it and I look forward to working with the ISPA team in 2013.

1 that’s the “on” side for the cricketers amongst us, at least the right handed ones.