Category: internet

another catch-all really for internet related posts

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Business internet ofcom piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Mandelson’s Uncertainty Principle – evil genius at work or just plain incompetent? #DEAct

Mandelson’s Uncertainty Principle states that the costs to an ISP of processing a Copyright Infringement Report can only be known when that ISP knows how many CIRs it is going to have to process and that Rights Holders will not disclose this number until they know the costs.

If it was as simple as that we might be able to come to some arrangement but of course it isn’t.

The BIS consultation on Costs under the Digital Economy Act is not scheduled until October 2010. Work is going on now to prepare for this and yesterday Ofcom held a meeting with ISPs to take on board their views on the subject.

Continue reading “Mandelson’s Uncertainty Principle – evil genius at work or just plain incompetent? #DEAct”
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broadband Engineer internet

Broadband Fault – The Davies Household Grinds to a Halt

I woke up this morning to a fault on my broadband line. OK this kind of thing happens. There is a BT engineer coming tomorrow morning to fix it. Fine.

It does however bring home how reliant we are on the internet. I found out in bed at 6.30 am that that the “internet wasn’t working” (after I had been down to make the tea!). My wife’s instant reaction was “OMG what if I get any emails from potential eBay buyers asking questions about my sales items”.

“Don’t worry” I said, “in an emergency you can use my phone”.

Continue reading “Broadband Fault – The Davies Household Grinds to a Halt”
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broadband Engineer internet

I'm sorry there is a fault – the Davies household grinds to a halt

I woke up this morning to a fault on my broadband line. OK this kind of thing happens. There is a BT engineer coming tomorrow morning to fix it. Fine.

It does however bring home how reliant we are on the internet. I found out in bed at 6.30 am that that the “internet wasn’t working” (after I had been down to make the tea!). My wife’s instant reaction was “OMG what if I get any emails from potential eBay buyers asking questions about my sales items”. 

“Don’t worry” I said, “in an emergency you can use my phone”.

Continue reading “I'm sorry there is a fault – the Davies household grinds to a halt”
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Business internet ofcom piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Ofcom Draft Code of Practice for the Digital Economy Act #DEAct

Just ploughing through the 73 pages of the Ofcom Draft Code of Practice for the Digital Economy Act.

There isn’t much time for the industry to respond here and I’m certainly not in a position to give it a comprehensive review after 10 minutes of scan-through reading.

A few points do immediately jump out of the page at me though.

Continue reading “Ofcom Draft Code of Practice for the Digital Economy Act #DEAct”
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broadband Business internet

The BT Broadband Interviews – Part 1 – Markets

First in a series of videos recorded by BT as part of their launch of FTTC.

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Business internet

BT getting into content delivery with Content Connect

BT Wholesale looks like getting into the Content Delivery business with a service known as Content Connect.

You might wonder what this means and be saying to yourself  “the BBC is a content provider, BT ain’t”. Well content delivery and content provision are not the same thing and the problem for ISPs is that the delivery of content is very inefficient over broadband networks.

If a hundred people watch the same TV programme online the way the world currently stands is that that programme will be streamed 100 times over an ISPs “backbone”. This is made worse because you, the consumer of internet bandwidth, want more and more content.  All the time.

Major sporting and political events such as the Friday post election coverage have millions of people watching online using their PCs.  They even watch on their PC whilst watching different coverage on the TV in front of them.

BT Content Connect is, I have to assume, a product that allows ISPs to satisfy their customers’ content watching needs in a far more efficient way than is the norm today.  I imagine that this means BT hosting content servers deep in the network so that it doesn’t have to touch an ISP’s pipe.

When I have more info on this I will report back. In the meantime click here for BT’s online spiel.

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Business internet

BT Ethernet enabled exchanges

I’ve just posted a list of BT Ethernet enabled exchanges.  This is likely to be of interest to businesses looking to see whether they can get hold of either Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) or Metropolitan fibre Ethernet connecivity. 

The initial list contains exchanges enabled as of the end of 2009 with a list of those that go live this year below.

If anyone wants more info on this just mail me at [email protected]

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Business internet ofcom piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

#DEAct costs should be borne by rights holders – Ofcom meeting 1st June

The next Ofcom stakeholder meeting on the Digital Economy Act (DEAct) is taking place next Tuesday June 1 at 3pm at Ofcom. The meeting will be looking at Ofcom’s work in relation to cost sharing under the statutory instrument, on which BIS is currently consulting.

The DEAct was heavily weighted in favour of rights holders and we should be seriously concerned that the Code of Practice does not adopt a similar bias.

ISPs are intermediaries that pass packets of information over their networks. ISPs neither benefit from, nor

Continue reading “#DEAct costs should be borne by rights holders – Ofcom meeting 1st June”
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Business internet Regs surveillance & privacy

A brief ISP take on the final coalition agreement #DEAct

The government published the final coalition agreement this week. The government proposes to:

End the storage of internet and email records without good reason;

This is good. The cost to industry was going to be enormous to do this. This might well also affect the government’s thinking in respect of the Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP). IMP is a whole different can of beans whereby ISPs were going to potentially be asked for all sorts of interception and tracking involvement by the Big Brothers.

Continue reading “A brief ISP take on the final coalition agreement #DEAct”

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Business internet ofcom piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

ofcom #deact market benchmarking

Section 8 of the Digital Economy Act requires Ofcom to report on the provision of lawful services, education and information campaigns, levels of copyright infringement and legal proceedings against infringers.

By January of 2011 the regulator must have set up an independent monitoring system so that there is data available to measure the success or otherwise of the Act.

Ofcom is proposing that monitoring should consist of three types of input: collation of existing data (eg existing industry reports, ISP traffic data and existing consumer research), consumer research and direct measurement of activity on file sharing networks.

Independant partners will be commissioned for the consumer market research and the direct measurement work with the tendering process beginning in June.

The market research will be conducted 4 times a year on samples of 5,000 persons each time. It will be interesting to see how accurate this research is. Will people tell the truth? I guess it will just be a contribution to the overall dataset.

The baseline data needs to be in place for the start of next year.

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Business internet surveillance & privacy

work life balance, the internet, politicians and the repeal of the #DEAct

You might be interested in reading my latest guest post over at broadbandgenie.

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Business internet

Timico Group is six times finalist for ISPA Awards – wahey

Today two Timico group companies have obtained a total of six nominations in the ISPA awards. Timico is finalist in both the Best Business Fixed Broadband and Best Internet Telephony categories. NewNet is finalist for Best Business Fixed Broadband, Best Consumer Fixed Broadband, Best Dedicated Hosting and Best Shared Hosting.

6 years ago Timico was founded with the ambition to become the first choice Communications Provider for business in the UK. Lofty ambitions and hopefully this endorsement shows that we are heading in the right direction.

The awards are in London on the 8th July. See you there. I’m the guy in the dinner suit.

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Business internet Regs

Boris Johnson promises WiFi for London

Mayor of London Boris Johnson has promised full WiFi coverage of London in time for the 2012 Olympic games. It would be ironic if the Olympic Games WiFi coverage was shut down because someone had been caught indulging in online copyright infringement. As Mayor will he be the one having to turn up in court?

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Engineer internet

100GigE – 5 years from initial idea to standard

Day1 of LINX69 had networking equipment vendor Brocade giving an interesting talk about the rollout timescales for the 100GigE standard.

The 100Gig standard has taken 5 years from initial ideas to fruition with ratification being expected in June 2010. Coincidentally the 40Gig standard will have taken the same amount of time with a parallel development aimed at the server market.

40Gig kit reuses some 10Gig elements which is what should allow it to fit in the appropriate part of the price/performance curve.

Whilst a number of vendors have announced 100Gig products it remains to be seen how rapidly some of these will be rolled out and adopted. During the last wave of network upgrades (1Gig to 10Gig) many equipment vendors had their fingers burned as industry uptake took a lot longer than anticipated. Nortel, for example had apparently predicted 2 million 10Gig port shipments by 2002 but actually took another 7 years to hit that volume. Somewhat symptomatic of the problems the Nortel business found themselves in methinks.

The upshot is that vendors are unlikely to rush out 100Gig products.

We expect of course that next gen technologies result in lower per port costs. Currently this is not the case for 100Gig due to high optics and component costs. Based on historical trends these are expected to drop in 2011/2012. For the moment 100Gig is therefore very much one for the early adopter.

The chart below shows the timeline between adoption of the standard for each technology. Considering that it takes 5 years to develop a standard and looking at the 2002 dot com bubble bursting date that the 10Gig standard was ratified  it is perhaps no surprise that 100Gig was delayed.

Ethernet technology adoption timeline - courtesy Brocade Networks
Ethernet technology adoption timeline
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Engineer internet

Is LINX getting too big?

An interesting question posed during the Board Election Hustings at LINX69 today was “is LINX getting too big?”

For the uninitiated the London Internet Exchange is a membership owned Internet Exchange where network operators peer with other network operators. This means that they pass traffic between each other free of charge. There is a cost for this – running the “exchange” involves buying and maintaining expensive bits of kit that all members connect to.

This cost however is far lower than the alternative of buying access to internet sites around the world from a commercial supplier – something known as internet transit. LINX membership in theory gives you access to around 70% of all internet routes.

LINX is growing rapidly. The organisation has 357 members with 22 new applications in 2010 to date. Network operators want to join because as LINX grows the benefits also grow.

The question at the hustings is valid though. The problem is that the internet was designed as a robust network able to withstand problems at any given single point. If those networks comprising the internet increasingly connect at a single place then this obviously counter intuitive to the way the internet is meant to work.

Now LINX does operate a very robust network – effectively two networks based on two different vendor equipments. It is becoming an increasingly attractive place to peer.

I can’t tell you what the right answer is. ISPs just need to make sure they have alternatives.

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Business internet ofcom piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Ofcom goes quiet on #DEAct Code of Practice

Ofcom seems to have gone very quiet since the initial flurry of consultation meetings following the passing of the Digital Economy Act. This is somewhat concerning in my mind.  Ofcom has to produce a draft Code of Practice by the end of May.

The DEAct is such a contentious subject that the last thing we want is to find  that this CoP is not objective and is bisassed towards one set of stakeholders over another. It is a lot easier to get changes made before the initial draft than afterwards.

It is also hugely important for Ofcom to remain transparent here and it would make sense to me for the regulator to be asked to identify how many contacts and inputs have been had with each set of stakeholders during the compilation of the draft CoP.

Ofcom responsibilites in respect of the DEAct can be found here. There is one meeting planned for 20th May to present these duties. Doesn’t seem to be to do with the CoP subject matter.

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Engineer internet

Google redirecting to Swedish site

For some strange reason as I travel down to LINX69 in London the on train wifi is directing me to Google’s Swedish website. It would be interesting to find out whether this is down to the service provider network being used by EastCoast Trains or something happening in the Google network itself.

I guess someone at LINX69 would be able to find out.

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Business internet

NetOps roll out BS6008 internally in trials

As part of our process of continuous improvement the Timico Network Operations team has adopted BS6008 as an internal standard. In the absence of 100% accurate measurement tools we are currently having to use best efforts (ie a teaspoon) which does prevent us from gaining official certification.

However I am looking at the business case for investing in new kit (scales) for next year which might qualify us for formal certification, or at least self certification if we don’t believe the additional investment in the certification test is merited.  We will just have to wait and see what is left in the tea kitty.

I realise that everyone will be intimately familiar with the details of BS6008 but just in case you aren’t I have reproduced the key bits of the standard below and also provided a link for the full document.

BS6008:1980 – ISO title: Tea — Preparation of liquor for use in sensory tests

Fill the pot containing the tea with freshly boiling water to within 4 to 6 mm of the brim (i.e. corresponding approximately to 285 ml in the case of the large pot and 140 ml in the case of the small pot described in the Annex) and put on the lid. Allow the tea to brew for 6 min, and then, holding the lid in place so that the infused leaf is held back, pour the liquid through the serrations into the bowl (5.2) corresponding to the pot selected.

Whether you like it black or with milk is up to you but at least the base drink will be top notch. Long live PG Tips. Also you might want to invest in a water filter – I don’t care but the girls in the office swear by it.

The number in brackets corresponds to an illustration in the actual standard.

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Engineer internet

2 recent slash 8 allocations brings IPv4 x-day forward by 5 months

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has just allocated regional registries RIPE and APNIC a /8 each this month.  For the uninitiated a /8 represents 2 to the power of 24 IP addresses or 167,77,216.

A /8 is the largest block allocation that can be made by IANA and these two have had the effect of bringing forward the x-date, the date for IPv4 exhaustion, by 5 months or so to April 30th 2011.

These blocks are subdivided into smaller subnets for further allocation to ISPs/organisations with smaller requirements  such as BT and Timico. Timico has a variety of block allocations ranging from  /16 to /20’s.

If you want to know more about IP addressing allocations check out wikipedia. The times they are a changing.

Footnote – a day later the date seems to have bounced back to September – don’t know what happened there.  Still not very far off though.

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broadband Business internet

Workers All Watching the Election Shennanigans Online from Offices

Internet traffic is up significantly this morning as bleary eyed election-watchers come into the office and pick up where they left off last night.

Noon-time traffic on Timico’s ADSL network is up approx 25% on the same time yesterday. This percentage seems to be reasonably constant for all major online events. Similar burst have been seen in the past for the Olympics, the Ashes Cricket, US President Obama’s inauguration and the last budget speech. Video streaming almost exclusively acocunts for the increase today.

This does suggest that there is a community of people in the work place that regularly accesses online video for the big events. One wonders whether this is with the knowledge and consent of their employers.  Most of Timico’s customers are businesses. I doubt that they have TVs in the office so this may be to a certain extent a B2B ISP issue.

2 hours later – traffic growth is now up by 33%.  In my experience this is a record for an event.

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Business internet

Smart 421 business process change and Hotel California

Continuing with our season of guest guitarists I present for your entertainment and delight Mr Hugh Hyndman, Solution Architect at change consultancy Smart421. Hugh was in today as part of a team brought in to assist with a major new project upon which we have embarked.

Timico has grown from very small beginnings with four of us in a room at the stables at Langford Hall to a company with around 140 (ish) staff scattered around two main locations – Newark and Fareham, the home of NewNet.

Having bought 4 ISPs en route we find that the processes that sustained us as a small company, ie blood sweat and tears, are no longer good enough to take us to the next level. That isn’t to say we don’t have processes but if we are to double or treble in size over the next few years we need to have the infrastructure to support the growth.

Having been through a couple of business change processes in the past I find this one reassuringly familiar and probably far more exciting, having a personal stake in the outcome and also having seen before the effect of such a project on a business.

Hugh, I am very pleased to say, is one of the more competent guest guitarists we have had in. He gave us a very recognizable rendition of Hotel California. Note the perfect Bm chord (4 strings only).

Hugh Hyndman of Smart 421 plays Hotel California at Timico
Hugh Hyndman of Smart 421 plays Hotel California at Timico
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Business internet piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Why copyright needs reforming #DEAct #ge2010

The difficulty of implementing current copyright legislation has been highlighted during this election campaign. In the first place both Labour and Conservatives appeared to use a copyrighted image in their campaign without permission – reported in the Telegraph.

Secondly BPI spokesman Adam Liversage was allegedly caught advising his wife via twitter on how to infinge someone’s copyrighted images.

Thirdly today twitter is chirruping away like crazy about how the French Hadopi organisation is having to rebrand because its logo uses copyrighted font.  The Hadopi Law, if you are not familiar with the name is the French three strikes equivalent of the Digital Economy Act.

I’m not an expert on copyright but it seems to me that if the organisations and individuals mentioned above find it hard to not break the rules then what hope everyone else.

We could do with a repository to collect similar stories to build up a body of knowledge in respect of this.

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Business internet ofcom piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Ofcom #DEAct definitions meeting – more work needs doing

Ofcom held a DEAct definitions meeting with ISPs yesterday afternoon.  Although I couldn’t make this one I have discussed the progress made with some of the attendees.

My view is that Ofcom has been given a task, the generation of the draft  Digital Economy Act Code of Practice, that is impossible to fulfil to everyone’s satisfaction in the three weeks that the regulator has left to complete it.

The meeting did not nail the major issues in terms of definition of who is and isn’t an ISP or Subscriber. Some of the definitions are highly complex and subject to different interpretations. The natural order of these things, believe it or not, is to brush the problem areas under the carpet and assume that this will be ok.

However in this case using the “carpet technique” potentially leaves huge holes in the legislation that will make it completely ineffective. 

For example nobody believes that the intention of the Act is to kill off the  WiFi hotspot market.  Is a WiFi hostpot operator a subscriber or a Communications Provider? The latter potentially as it is selling/providing services to custmers.  It is impossible in a many cases to be able to identify the subscriber on these hotspots so infringement notices go to who? 

So whilst it isn’t Parliament’s intention to kill off WiFi hotspots if they don’t do so then these connections will become defacto standard targets for those wanting to continue to download copyrighted material.

Marry in haste and repent at leisure (or words to that effect).

Also good luck to the people at Ofcom because they are, in my experience, by and large intelligent and able folk. We only have to wait 3 weeks to see what they come up with.

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Business internet ofcom piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Digital Economy Act appeals meeting at Ofcom – notes #DEAct #debill

I went along to the Digital Economy Act appeals meeting at Ofcom today. I did so partly out of concern that smaller ISPs were not being given a voice at this important stage of the post DEAct game.

The Ofcom Boardroom (R11.01) was hardly big enough for the 35 or so people there. Organisations represented included ISPA, Timico, Which, Consumer Focus, Ofcom, AAISP, DCMS, Alliance Against IP Theft, UK Music (Feargal), BPI, BT, Mobile Broadband Group, Sky, Premier League, Orange, HSBC, Post Office, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, T Mobile, Communications Consumer Panel, Open Rights Group, Nintendo.

The scope of the meeting was to discuss the Appeals Process for subscribers accused of unlawful copyright

Continue reading “Digital Economy Act appeals meeting at Ofcom – notes #DEAct #debill”
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Business hosting internet piracy Regs

RLSLOG.net Suspended Following Universal Music Removal Request

Doing the rounds today is news of the removal of the RSLOG.net site. The italicised text is from their temporary holding page.

“RLSLOG.net was suspended by its German hosting company after removal request from law firm representing Universal Music, although we never hosted any files or copyrighted data on our server. Our site is strictly informative.

We found a new host and moved our site, but it wasn’t powerful enough to handle the site.

We should be back tomorrow on more powerful server.

Check our forums in the meantime: rlstalk.net.”

Now I’ve never been on RSLOG.net. A quick “Google” tells me this about it:

Links. RSS | IRC | Contact · New releases | posts · AuTo.RLSLOG.net · NewTorrents.info · NTi forums · Leecher’s Lair · PornLeecher · Rapidshare King …

It doesn’t look like my kind of site. I then did another quick Google on “NewTorrents.info” and it came up with about 1,950,000 results. That’s a lot of sites promoting free availability of copyrighted material (presumably).

The Government was naive in the extreme to think that filtering websites would go anyway towards solving the problem of unlawful copyring infringement. It is a complete waste of time, effort and money that also establishes a very dangerous precedent.

If this ludicrous law somehow sticks I’d like to see the Government take on Google, Bing (Microsoft) et al and trefor.net.  We are all accessories to unlawful activity here.

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Business internet piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

BT support call highlights extent of Digital Economy Act problem #deact #debill

A friend of mine works in Tech Support for BT.  He gets a lot of consumer support calls for broadband. This brief transcript is of one of his calls recently:

Customer: I can’t get my wireless to work
Tech Support: Is your wireless light on the hub holding colour or not?
Customer:I don’t know it’s next door
Tech Support: Oh right could you go back home and check?
Customer: Oh no sorry its my neighbours hub and they are at work
Tech Support: Oh so do they know you use their internet connection?
Customer: No he told me his password once when he was drunk
Tech Support: Do you know that is illegal (long pause). Phone goes dead.

Lets hope that the “customer” hasn’t been using his neighbour’s broadband for unlawfully downloading copyrighted material. Who needs enemies eh?…

DEAct DEBill

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Business internet Regs security surveillance & privacy

cleanternet – you know it makes sense #debill #deact

This video is doing the rounds. It helps you understand why the web filtering aspect of the Digital Economy Act is a very bad thing.

http://www.cleanternet.org/

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Engineer engineering internet ipv6

IPv6 to IPv4 tracert showing NAT

tracert showing IPv6 to IPv4 NAT with bbc.co.uk end destination - click to enlarge
tracert showing IPv6 to IPv4 NAT – click to enlarge

 

Adrian Kennard of AAISP gave a talk on their implementation of IPv6  at yesterday’s UK Network Operators Forum (UKNOF).  Whilst it may not be of huge interest to most readers it is worth taking a look at how the old IPv4 and new IPv6 networked worlds will talk to each other.

The picture below represents a tracert to the bbc.co.uk website.  The BBC sits on an IPv4 network.  AK is moving  AAISP exclusively to IPv6. His customers still need to be able to reach everywhere on the internet and this is done by Network Address Translation (NAT), something that most people will associate with private internal IP addresses.

The tracert clearly shows the long originating IPv6 address 2001:8b0:0:31::51bb:1ffa and the point in the network at which NAT is used to convert to IPv4, in this instance when connecting to the LONAP peering exchange. The shorter 212.58.238.129 address is the more familiar IPv4 format.

Thanks for Adrian for permission to use this.  His presentation can be found here.

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Business internet social networking

Online instant poll results for #leadersdebate Guardian Times and Telegraph

Interesting to flit round the various online poll results for some of the newspapers, taken 15 minutes after the end of the debate:

                                        Guardian         Telegraph           Times

Gordon Brown                28.5%           16%                        15%

Nick Clegg                        62.1%            38%                     59.9%

David Cameron                 9.4%           47%                       25.1%

I think I will wait for an independent poll –  the above are somewhat partisan.

Interesting to watch technology in action though.  I followed the debate on line with SkyNews and with Twitter.

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Business internet ofcom piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Digital Economy Bill–Act–Farce continues beyond Parliamentary grave #DEAct #DEBill

In a continuation of the farcial speed that the Digital Economy Bill was rushed through into Law I’m told that Ofcom has already conducted two meetings with the 5 largest ISPs to discuss the implementation of the Code of Practice with a third planned for next Wednesday.

I’m also told that Ofcom has also met with 9 Music Industry Rights Holders and 5 from the movie making industry. Perhaps Ofcom could elaborate on this? If this is the case it seems hugely disproportionate in terms of representation. Hugely unfair in fact and feels very familiar with the way the Law was rushed through in the first place.

Despite what seems on the face of it to be a substantial consultation with Rights Holders no attempt appears to have been made to involve any small ISPs, the ISP Association, ISPA, or the London Internet Exchange, LINX. In fact the majority of the organisations that stand to lose out under the Digital Economy Act.

A threshold is likely to be applied in respect of which ISPs must comply with the DEA. This however has not been set yet and without it seems reasonable that all ISPs likely to be affected by it get a chance to participate in the discussion.

Being a reasonable minded person I am able to look at it from Ofcom’s perspective and observe that they have very little time to put together a Code of Practice around a hugely complex and controversial subject.  You might say Ofcom has been stitched up just as the ISPs have been. However in this case it just isn’t good enough. I think everyone concerned here should complain to Ofcom in the morning.

The Ofcom Switchboard number is 0300 123 3000 or 020 7981 3000. Ask for Ed Richards, Chief Executive.

Follow on note – check out these posts from Andrew Cormack, Chief Regulatory Adviser, JANET . He was at one of the meetings.