Category: Net

connectivity and networking posts – both fixed and mobile, fast and slow

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.

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End User media

@BBCRadioLincs tech predictions for 2013 – @mrwilliam talks with Trefor Davies

Trefor DaviesFor the those of you who didn’t surface until after lunchtime on New Year’s day here are some links to my chat with William Wright on BBC Radio Lincolnshire yesterday.

In the first we talk about NGA/superfast broadband and 4G.

The second is about the snoopers charter and what’s happening in mobiles in 2013.

They are both around 15 minutes long but I’m told well worth listening to the whole lot 🙂

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End User media

Predictions for 2013 & BBC Radio Lincolnshire appearance on New Year’s Day

Trefor DaviesI stopped doing predictions for the new year some time ago. Wet your finger and hold it up in the air. That said I always predict that Wales will win the rugby 6 Nations. Why would I bet on any other outcome?

This year though I am going to be live on BBC Radio Lincolnshire on New Year’s Day talking about technology that is going to impact us in 2013. Some of it is going to be Lincolnshire specific – where, for example, is the superfast broadband rollout in the county? when will we be getting 4G?

Most of it is going to be a general chat about techy stuff – Apple, Android, et al.

Tune if you fancy. They have asked me to arrive at 11am so I guess I’ll be on at around 11.15 ish. Link is here.

Categories
Business media virtualisation

The last post!? Hell no:)

Trefor DaviesIt’s Friday, the last day of term. Maybe the last day ever as we await our fate and for the Mayan prediction of apocalypse to kick in. I sit here contemplating this fate, reflecting on a life that has passed by at blurred speeds governed by a constant of Einsteinian proportions.

I have a cup of tea on my desk, a comfort as I gaze at the horizon wondering whether the clouds I see are the innocent tip of a stormier gathering. My twitter stream is filled with observations, concerns and contemptuous noises of disaster.

But hey, it is indeed as I said, the last day of term and Christmas holidays have finally arrived yay. I turn my thoughts to more joyous considerations. Another year gone, and although it has been a tough one, another year of growth.

There has been plenty to talk about business-wise. At the start of the year we opened a new data centre to much fanfare together with a wonderful new Network Operations Centre facility. We spent a lot of money on a core network upgrade and now have a spanking new Juniper core that is going to allow us to provide a multitude of new services in the future.

Virtualisation has played a big part in our year. 75% of our infrastructure is now virtualised using VMWare and we now have our first Private Cloud customers. We also introduced our eVault hosted/centralised server backup solution and have been very busy both training existing staff and adding new experts to the team – I’m talking more VCP5 CCNP and MCITP for those that understand acronyms. On the network front we also extended our carrier relationships with links into Talk Talk and O2 Wholesale.

Awards and prizes have come our way. Winners of Best Unified Comms Solutions at the ITSPA Awards and Winner of Excellence in Innovation at the Nottinghamshire Best Business Awards. We also made it as  finalists in loads of awards including Business of the Year at the Nottinghamshire Best Business Awards.

On a customer industry front we hosted the COMIT (Construction Opportunities In Mobile IT) meeting in September. We have a lot of customers in the construction industry – it’s an area of the business that is building nicely:).

In February we acquired Redwood Telecommunications Limited who have not only added some great people to the team but a fantastic capability and knowledge in the burgeoning Unified Comms market.

Timico has been in the news a lot in 2013 being covered in at least ten articles in the mainstream press including the Telegraph, Guardian and the BBC. On a personal note I have also appeared a number of times on BBC Radio including The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4, on 5 Live Breakfast with Nicky Campbell and numerous local BBC radio stations. I also gave evidence to the Joint Select Committee for the Draft Communications Data Bill. The nature of this Bill is now being reconsidered following inputs from many stakeholders opposed to its original form.

Readership of trefor.net has also risen this year. In the January world record attempt it received 9,449 visitors leaving 5,455 comments in 24 hours. The blog has nearly 50,000 visitors that have returned more than once during the year and around 20,000 unique regular readers.

All in all it’s been a good year and I’m sure that everyone is now looking forward to a well earned break. Have a great Christmas and I look forward to engaging with you in 2013:)

Tref

PS I was thinking of signing off with “Goodbye and thanks for all the fish”  but there is still no sign of the apocalypse. Must have made a mistake in their calcs somewhere!

C ya…

Categories
End User media

BBC Radio Lincolnshire New Year’s Day – tech trends for 2013

Trefor DaviesHi folks. Thought you might like to know I’m appearing on BBC Radio Lincolnshire just after 11am on New Year’s Day1. Chatting with William Wright about what to look out for technology wise in 2013 (bigger faster better ?!!).

Worth getting up for I’d say, ahem. Will be on air for 30 minutes or so. whaddaya think I should be talking about?

Assuming you have surfaced by then and eagerly want to tune in the link will be here.

1 for the avoidance of doubt that’s the first of January. For our American friends that’s 1/1/2013 as opposed to 1/1/2013 – note day/month reversal.

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.

Categories
broadband Business media

I could have leant upon that coppice gate – Thomas Hardy and homeworking

broadband for working from home avoids long commute

early morning sun in December in LincolnshireBroadband for working from home avoids long commute.

Took me an hour and ten minutes to get in to work this morning. That’s twice as long as usual – broken down tanker on the A46. Walking in to the office I felt a bit like the Reggie Perrin of old – “20 minutes late, frozen points at Clapham Junction”.

I went on a very long diversion through the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire countryside. The stark winter beauty reminded me of the Thomas Hardy poem “The Darkling Thush” :

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.

It’s one of my all time favourites.  Anyway driving in on this extended albeit pleasant detour made me think about the whole subject of commuting and broadband for working from home. The number of times I have the radio on driving home on a Friday night to hear the UK wide traffic reports – quite often its gridlock on all the major routes around the country.

Makes you wonder how much time and money we really waste travelling to work. Granted there are some jobs where the person absolutely needs to be in the office but equally there are many where a little bit of mix and match (home versus office) would be perfectly acceptable. Phone system vendors often try to model the financial benefits of homeworking as part of their pitch to customers. I don’t think you really need to work out the payback in terms of pounds shillings and pence. It’s bloomin’ obvious.

Quite a number of our customers see this. We have a portal that some of them use to manage estates of hundreds, if not thousands of home worker broadband connections. The portal is integrated with the customer’s HR system and when an employee moves house and change their address the portal automatically informs us to migrate their broadband to another location. For some large organisations this can save a considerable workload on the IT department – managing what is really a tedious and time consuming process that really benefits from automation. Bung in a VoIP account and hey presto, you have a home office just like in the office.

To conclude, my other favourite Thomas Hardy work is “Under The Greenwood Tree”. I don’t get on with most of his novels, they are depressing, but this one  is a nice novel and signals the end of an era in a similar way to the Darkling Thrush. It is also very seasonal and I am now most definitely feeling Christmassy.

That’s all folks…

Categories
Engineer media

The art of producing music soundtracks for online games

I have a friend called Ervin Nagy who is a Hungarian concert pianist. I also have 3 sons who all like playing online games. Ervin has branched out into composing music for online games. It’s interesting how trades that have been around for centuries are now being applied in the era or the world wide web.

Ervin comes from Budapest and has a story to tell about how he got into the business. This is a longer than usual blog post but I thought the story worth telling. You can scroll down quickly if you just want to hear the music development mp3s.

Continue reading “The art of producing music soundtracks for online games”
Categories
broadband Business

#FTTC video outtakes #broadband #fibre

superfast broadband video case study camera

Broadband video case study – the outtakes

Just browsing through some bits of video left on the cutting room floor after we finished the FTTC case study. Thought a couple or three might be of interest.

The first one was taken with a GoPro camera positioned inside the cabinet filming the door opening and the Openreach engineer coming in to do some work. In this one you can see one of the cameramen filming the cab from the outside.

Bit like the David Attenborough nature stuff where at the end of the programme they show you how they did the filming. Nothing particularly dramatic such as a close encounter with a shark or a yeti. We were however filming outside a school and a very concerned headmaster did come out so see what was going on. He went away though I sensed that he would have been happier if he had shooed us away.

The second film is a short one taken from the outside with the open cabinet so that you can see the workings. No GoPro camera inside this time – obv we had to do multiple takes to get all the different angles in.

The third is one I took of the BT crowd in my conservatory. Of course you only see me in the case study but in actual fact there was a huge support team including the outside catering van, make up artists, continuity, clapperboy, director, producer, personal masseuse etc – you get the drift. I couldn’t fit them all in the conservatory so you get four.

Some of them will be at my Xmas bash so if you are coming to that you will be able to chat with them in person. Not often you get the chance to meet the people behind the movie eh?

Some of you have asked for a video showing the process of the installation. I didn’t get any of that off the production team but I will ask. Bear with…

Categories
Engineer Net olympics peering

A funny thing happened on my way to #LINX79

Today is the quarterly LINX meeting. LINX79. It’s been going for a few years now – you can work out how long yourselves.

These are great meetings. You can learn more in two days here than in the rest of the quarter in between. LINX continues to grow. It in part reflects the growth of the internet but also the fact that LINX some time ago hit a critical mass and is a great place to peer if you provide connectivity to the internet.

LINX has 443 members. Last year the membership grew by 49. So far in 2012 they have had 86 new applications – that’s double the run rate of 2011! Since LINX78 only 3 months ago the peak traffic has grown from 1.431Tbps to 1.538Tbps and connected capacity has grown from 5.958Tb to 6.14Tb. What that is saying that the traffic is continuing to grow over and above the huge peaks we were seeing during the Olympics which themselves drove a significant rise.

For the sake of comparison if your broadband connection gives you 10Mbps (as I recall the UK average is now around 12Mbps) then the 6.14Tb capacity at LINX is about six hundred thousand times faster.

Colin McFarlane speaks his lines to Trefor Davies on the train to LondonNow to the “funny” bit. I bumped into a neighbour of mine on the platform at Newark Northgate station. Colin McFarlane is an actOr1.  He lives round the corner from me. Colin is working on a very interesting project that should hit the streets next year. It has a technical slant that I will talk about sometime in 2013.

You might know Colin as the Police Commissioner in one of the Batman movies or working with Rowan Atkinson in The Thin Blue Line. I’m sure he’s been in other things but not being much of a TV watcher I don’t know them.

Colin was on his way to Paris to record a cartoon voiceover and on his way was stopping off in London to audition for a stage show. He had a wodge of scripts in his hand and asked if I would help him to remember his lines.

Bear in mind we were in the quiet coach. So there I was reading a classic black American script in an American accent whilst Colin performed in the seat in front of me. I could almost hear the audience, breathless in anticipation of what was to come. Being in the quiet coach we could hear a pin drop. Very dramatic!

We finished the script, the rest of the coach applauded (very quietly) 2, the train pulled into Kings Cross and we went our separate ways – he to his audition and me to the TUC centre for LINX79. Colin did tell me the name of the play but I won’t share it in case he decides not to take the part. He is bound to be offered it, natch.

1 I left the capital O there to make sure you got the pronunciation right 🙂

2 Only joking there, they didn’t – I’m sure it was my fault not Colin’s, or maybe we were being suitably quiet

 

Categories
broadband Business

Superfast broadband video case study by Timico and Openreach

superfast broadband video case study camera

Superfast broadband video case study

“Never before seen footage of the inside of the Davies household now viewable on tinterweb.”

This is it, the video you’ve all been waiting for. Well I have anyway. A few weeks ago we shot some footage around and about Lincoln and chez Davies for a video case study of a Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) aka superfast fibre broadband installation.

Get your popcorn and fizzy drinks ready and settle in to your favourite armchair to watch this much anticipated movie. I don’t have an agent yet but if any major studios are interested in talking then you know how to get hold of me.

That’s all folks 🙂

Link to what BT has on their website http://www.btplc.com/ngb/News/Timico.htm

Categories
Engineer internet

miscellany submarine cables and submarines – dive dive dive

submarine cable map courtesy of http://www.submarinecablemap.com/Visiting my old alma mater today, Bangor University. It’s nice to get invited. We are opening a new Laboratory and then the Annual Engineering Lecture. This year it is entitled “Submarine Engineering across the years”  and is to be given by Rear Admiral (retd) Paul Thomas CB, FREng, FCGI, FIMechE, Hon FNucI, Hon FSaRS. That’s more badges than most of us could possibly dream of!

The subject is quite convenient because some time ago I bookmarked a website http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ thinking it was cool and would come in handy some day. Well now it has and whilst absolutely  nothing to do with today’s lecture it is fascinating to see where all the undersea cables are. The whole internet is underpinned by relatively few connections really.

If you click on an individual cable line it tells you who owns the cable, how long it is, when it was laid and where it lands. This is big business. Some of these cables are very long. SeaMeWe3 for example is 39,000km, stretches from Germany all the way to Australia and South Korea and is owned by a cooperative of 16 organisations.

Keeping it topical, some governments, ours included want to monitor the traffic running though these cables. When you look at the map it makes you realise how absurd this is.

I have visions of Rear Admiral (retd) Paul Thomas in his sub pootling along following the cables to find his way home – a bit like the pilots in their Sopwith Camels during WW1 following the roads and railway lines. Fiendishly clever. Splice the mainbrace, Klingons on the starboard bow, land ho, take her down number one, dive dive dive, etc etc etc.

I’ll let you know how the lecture goes 🙂

Categories
broadband End User mobile connectivity

When did you last phone “home”?

landline use Timico VoIP phone app for iPhone available from Apple App Store

Landline use in decline

Landline use seems to be in decline. When I got into the office this morning I called home. I’d lost a tie and thought I might have dropped it on our drive.

When I want to call someone my usual way is to go to the logs on my phone and click on the relevant number/name. As often as not the person I want to talk to is high up on the list of recent calls – wife, kids, stockbroker, shrink (etc).

I called my wife’s mobile. She didn’t answer. So I called “Home”. I had to scroll a very long way down the list of logs to find Home. In fact I last called Home at 20.08 on the 1st November. 70 calls or text messages down the list. Anne answered the Home phone and you will be happy to know that she found the tie, a very smart blue bow tie, and has it safe in the house.My point is that we are using our landline less and less. Typically for calls to grandparents. I’ve even taken to answering the home phone by saying “Newport Arch Chinese Restaurant” as quite often its a scammer on the other end of the line.

Everyone in our house has a mobile phone. All the adults are on all you can eat plans and it makes no different whether we use the fixed or mobile phone. Nobody rings me on the Home phone. The kids rarely use their phone for voice calls. They either text their friends or they use it to access the internet for Facebook Messaging. The youngest often goes online on the XBox if he needs to chat to a friend!

I’d like to bet that for a large proportion of the population the landline number is hardly used at all and is effectively only there because you need a landline to get Broadband.

There have occasionally been calls for BT (Openreach) to provide data only lines, known as “naked DSL” without the costs and overhead of the voice service. BT has always pushed back on this, saying there is no demand and that the costs would not be greatly reduced.

It would be interesting to see how many households don’t use their landline at all. My bet is that millions of us would put our hands up and voluntarily relinquish possession of our old fashioned phone. It might be worth having the debate…

Categories
End User engineering

Introducing the Nook Simple Touch Glow Light – billstickers will be prosecuted

This post isn’t really about the Nook Simple Touch Glow Light, worthy subject though it may be. This is a very simple post about a man putting up a poster on Platform 4 of Lincoln Central railway station. That is it!

Sometimes you have to keep things simple:)

The video is 3’44” long. It’s longer than I’d normally post, knowing the attention span of the modern internet user. On that basis it is almost a book in blog post terms, or a full length feature film in YouTube parlance.

I have taken this ambitious step because this video is a work of art. It takes a second or two for the Galaxy S3 to properly focus so you need to bear with me there. It’s a bit shaky too, partly because it was windy (that’s my excuse anyway) and I didn’t wait until the job in hand was totally finished because my arm was getting tired and it was taking too long.  About two thirds of the way through I zoom in so you do eventually get a closer look.

Just like the ride on the Number 205 bus you could call this video an historic representation of a moment in time, on this occasion in Lincoln. It is also a study in poster technology and the craftsmanship by which the said advertising medium is skilfully erected. I say erected for this is no mere “slap on a bit of glue and shove it up” job.

There is very little dialogue in this video and whilst the main actor has his back to us most of the time1we do get a glimpse of his character when he smiles briefly at the camera just after the three minute mark.

Let me delay no further. I present to you “how to put up a poster” Act one, Scene one:

Stick no bills, billstickers will be prosecuted etc etc etc.

Oh and finally if anyone wants to send me a Nook ereader I will happily do a review. Up the revolution!

1 the cognoscenti will understand that this is unavoidable in the poster erecting trade

Categories
Apps broadband End User social networking

Home broadband data usage growth

home broadband data usage trends for Trefor Davies

Broadband data usage growth driven by photo uploads

I’m installing a RaspberryPi computer at home carrying an IPCortex PBX with SIP trunks. I just needed to find a free IP address and found myself checking out available addresses so that I could provide a static one to the IPCortex.

I just happened to find myself looking at my home broadband data usage and came up with some interesting stats.

The first chart plots the growth in my overallgrowth in upload data usage for home broadband - Trefor Davies usage for the last four years. It actually shows almost an order of magnitude (20GB to 160GB) growth from the lowest point in 2008 to the highest point this year.

I realise this is not scientific but you can easily see the trend. The rise in upload usage in the May/June time frame (2nd chart) this year coincides with my taking proud possession of the Samsung Galaxy S3 and the fact that all photos now get backed up to Google+. Trefor Davies photo storage requirements ytd 2012

The final chart shows the growth in photo storage needs this year and you can see a very good correlation between photo storage and the growth in bandwidth upload usage.

The numbers don’t exactly match because we use the home broadband connection for other applications and I, being both gregarious and fertile, do not live alone.

I haven’t drilled into specifics but a reasonable chunk of the photo storage space is now used for video. I do both a daily (ish) video diary for the kids and take lots of “generally interesting” videos. Check this one out from the weekend visit to the Beamish Open Air Museum in county Durham.

 

Categories
broadband Engineer

When Things Go Wrong…

broadband Network Operations Centre

Broadband Network Operations Centre spots when a line goes down

I was in the broadband Network Operations Centre  the other day talking to the guys. We were looking at our instance of the Solar Winds network monitoring tool. Then I remembered I was on the way to see a customer later that day so I asked to see their network status.broadband

Blow me down if one of their sites wasn’t showing up as red – connectivity problem. I sauntered over to first line and to my delight one of the team was already looking at it. It was an ADSL connection. As we were watching the status reverted to green. ADSLs sometimes lose and reestablish connections on their own – that’s the vagaries of copper for you.

It’s nice when systems work like this. With ADSL we have a suite of tests we can run to see where the problem might lie. Sometimes the customer has unplugged the router for some reason. If we can’t find out the answer we spring into action depending on what we have agreed with the customer. Maybe it’s just a phone call asking him to switch the router back on. Maybe its a site visit.

Anyway I suspect that on this occasion the customer hadn’t even noticed there was a problem, but we did…

c ya

Categories
End User media

@TomAndThat presents – conservation appeal on behalf of the liberal democrats & zane lowe interview

Because I have complete editorial control over this blog I can publish anything I like. I take responsibility for the content. On this occasion I am doing the proud dad thing and offer a couple of vids published by the Davies heir. Enjoy…

Categories
Engineer internet

The history of the Isle of Man Postal service by Kelly from the Isle of Man

Mail of MannJust reading “The Mail of Mann” – the story of postal services in the Isle of Man written by Robert Kelly. A fascinating read  if you like that sort of thing which I presumably do.

On September 3rd 1837 the Post Office in the UK despatched a surveyor to the island to assess what might be done to improve its postal communications. The transmission of data packets (ie letters) was very much adhoc, asynchronous if you like. In particular the service to outlying rural parts of the island was pretty hit and miss.

Unfortunately for those rural dwellers, which in particular included the Lord Bishop whose residence as you probably know is on the far side of the island between Kirk Michael and Ballaugh, the surveyor decided that it would be too expensive to set up a regular service to anywhere other than the main towns which would in any case cover most of the people sending and receiving mail.

The rural areas were left to people to sort out themselves. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Categories
Engineer engineering internet

the leaving of #UKNOF23 TfL bus number 205 to Paddington

Never let it be said that this blog fails to deliver. This time I present for your delectation a journey on the TfL number 205 bus which left Old Street for Paddington yesterday afternoon.

I had been at UKNOF23 at the Google Campus near Old Street and was headed for a rendezvous at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel with Paul Schwartz. Paul is an interesting bloke. He is CEO of Danish router manufacturer Icotera and member of the board of the Fibre to the Home Council (Europe).

Now some of you might wonder what on earth I am doing showing a video of a bus ride. This video is actually of a single hop between two stops: Old Street and Moorfields Eye Hospital on the City Road (of “in and out of the Eagle” fame). It represents a short window on the life of London and will potentially, when considered in conjunction with millions of other snapshots, contribute to the historical record of our great capital city.

The bus enthusiasts among you will also complain that a single stop is not enough. Give me more, more – I hear the clamour. Well there were two factors that prevented me from filming more. Firstly most people will not even watch the 52 seconds of this single hop. Then there was the fact  that my battery was running low and I needed to conserve it in anticipation of the need to call Paul because I had no idea what he looked like.

So there you have it. Those wondering why I left UKNOF23 during the afternoon coffee break now know and those who simply like to ride at the front of the top deck of double decker busses (which could well be the vast majority of the UK population) should also be happy.

And so to the video…

PS these videos are becoming increasingly popular. The one of “How to make steak tartare” has hit 60 views on YouTube! Life is good:)

Categories
Engineer engineering

Notes from UKNOF23 – Cinnamon, Brick Lane & Google Campus

blackboard at Google Campus near Old StreetThe title is somewhat disingenuous because the notes are from the night before UKNOF23. Before UKNOF everyone pops out for a curry sponsored by one of the fine networking companies that support the organisation. In last night’s case it was IX Reach and we all went to Cinnamon on Brick Lane.

Fair play to Cinnamon the food was great and included dishes called Naga containing the world’s hottest chilli pepper. Not for the faint of heart and certainly not for me though Adrian kennard of AAISP seemed not to break into sweat as he tucked in to his. More of a man than I’ll ever be.

Fair play also to IX Reach who took the decision to cover all the cost of the booze as well as the food which meant I could indulge in that second half of lager. I was in bed by ten though as I have a speaking slot today, albeit after lunch.

The photos are a random selection from the Cinnamon curry house, Brick Lane, the Google Campus where the meeting is being held and of Bonhill Street where the Google Campus is located. I took the picture of the urns because it is unusual to see two urns for hot water and only one for coffee. Clearly engineers drink more tea than coffee.

Photos below.

That’s all folks…

Continue reading “Notes from UKNOF23 – Cinnamon, Brick Lane & Google Campus”
Categories
Apps End User gaming internet

Electronic Arts infrastructure fails under weight of demand for FIFA2013

I had to pop into town yesterday to buy FIFA 2013 for my 12 year old. It was the price I had to pay for his cooperation with the BT case study filming when he got back from school. It cost an arm and a leg – somewhere in the region of £85 including 5,000 Microsoft points.

There would have been a lot of people getting around town without arms and legs because there must have been hundreds of the games  piled up behind the counter at Game Station, all on pre-order. In fact if you hadn’t pre-ordered it  you would have been out of luck as they were all spoken for.

My lad got home from school and immediately got down to business with the XBox. That’s when things started to go wrong. He traded 3,200 Microsoft points for 5,200 FIFA points. However the FIFA points did not appear. These are expensive virtual tokens (massive gross margin I’d imagine) and whilst I was sure that we would resolve the issue – @EA support has been great in the past – on this occasion the support was totally unobtainable.

I began to tweet my dissatisfaction – that’s usually a good way of getting a response (unless you are @eastcoastuk). Every minute I spent on hold I tweeted the fact with increasing levels of annoyance. Looking at the @EA twitter account I could see they had over 1 million followers. I gave up after 20 minutes.

Later the lad found out online that EA had had to switch off their points system because it had been overwhelmed. This was another Olympic ticketing/Ticketmaster moment. The next morning the system is still down for maintenance.

It surprises me that in this day and age of scalable online computing resources that businesses let themselves down like this. I often hear complaints in our house that the FIFA servers are down or too busy.

As I write the @EA twitter follower count is down to 999,901 – clearly a few disgruntled folks out there.

Categories
Business internet Regs

ISPA conference 12th November

If anyone is interested in attending the annual  ISPA conference registration is now open. I’m chairing an interesting debate on the draft Communications Data Bill. This conference is always jam packed with good subject matter and well worth going.

Full agenda is below:

0915  Registration and Coffee

0940  Introduction by Nicholas Lansman – ISPA Secretary General

0945  Keynote Address: tbc         

1005 Q&A Chair: Nicholas Lansman – ISPA Secretary General

1015  Does the Draft Communications Data Bill get the balance right between the needs of law enforcement, the privacy of users and impact on CSPs?

·   What has changed and how will businesses be effected?
·   Is retaining third party data proportionate and technically possible?
·   Is this an extension of existing powers? Are there enough safeguards in place to protect privacy?

Chair: Trefor Davies – Timico CTO and ISPA Council

Panellists: Conor Ward – Partner, Hogan Lovells; Dr Julian Huppert MP – Joint Committee; Nick Pickles – Director, Big Brother Watch; Professor Anthony Glees – Director, Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies (BUCSIS) at the University of Buckingham; more speakers tbc

1115  Coffee and Networking                                 

1130  How can Britain’s broadband strategy best help SMEs and businesses?

·   Is the current focus too much on speeds and not enough on reach of service?
·   What are the next steps for the broadband strategy?
·  How best can we ensure that investment in broadband reaches businesses and consumers in all parts of the UK?

Chair:  Mark Gracey – Cable&Wireless and ISPA Council

Panellists: Earl of Selborne – Lords Committee; Barry Forde – CEO, Broadband for the Rural North (B4RN); more speakers tbc

1230  NETWORKING LUNCH

1400  Speech & Q&A: tbc

1410  Whose responsibility is it to ensure cyber security?

  • How can ISPs, law enforcement and government work better together to ensure a safer internet experience?
  • What can we learn from the experiences of other countries?
  • What is the responsibility of the user to protect themselves?

Chair: James Blessing – Limelight Networks and ISPA Council member

Panellists: Tony Neate – Chief Executive, Get Safe Online; Alexandra Birtles – PR and Public Affairs Manager, TalkTalk; more speakers tbc

1510  Coffee and Networking                     

1525  Review of the Communications Act

·   Update on what is happening with the White Paper
·   Is there a need for a wholesale review of the communications framework?
·   How is Government going to create a framework to make the UK a digital hub?

Chair: & panellists tbc.

1625  Drinks reception with selected members of the media

1800  Close

 

Categories
broadband End User media

Why We Will All Need 1Gbps FTTP – 20/20 Vision – Conversations with Nat Morris

gigabit broadband conversation with Nat Morris

Nat Morris in conversation with Trefor Davies (pic taken by Umar Bajwa)

Gigabit broadband is the way forward.

Met with Nat Morris (Google him) last week. We discussed life, networks and Ultra High Definition TV. Ultra High Definition TV will dispel any doubts you ever had about why broadband networks need to get faster and faster. Gigabit broadband is the future.

Developed by Japanese national broadcaster NHK in conjunction with the BBC, Super Hi Vision has sixteen times as many pixels as HDTV. Frames have 7680 pixels across by 4320 pixels down – roughly the equivalent of a 32Mpixel photo.

It’s going to be a while before this becomes mainstream. There are only three cameras in the world capable of filming in this format (known as 8k) and the footage has to be shown on a 145-inch (3.7 metre) prototype display co-developed with Panasonic.

TV makers are currently focusing efforts on launching 4K enabled devices offering a quarter of the resolution. This is the format currently used by most digital cinema cameras. LG recently unveiled the biggest 4K television set to date  – an 84 inch screen costing more than $22,000 (I won’t be buying one). Manufacturers are likely to want to offer 8K screens by 2020 when NHK aims to begin its first experimental broadcasts in the standard.

Now this is all very well and good but what will it mean for us men in the street? Well the amount of digital bandwidth needed to stream 8k video is around 350Mbps. If we assume that households will want to have multiple streams so that people can watch Big Brother, Coronation Street, Eastenders and the footy simultaneously in different rooms whilst sharing the experience with their friends via Telepresence it isn’t difficult to imagine a world where several Gigabits per second is required to the home.

Much more info together with pics can be found at the links below. V interesting stuff that is not only going to drive broadband speeds but also memory sizes and processor power.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2012/08/the-olympics-in-super-hi-visio.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/07/super_hi_vision_ultra_hd.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19370582

Follow Nat at @natmorris .

Categories
datacentre Engineer Net ofcom social networking

Power to the portaloo – bog standard networking in a (ElectroMagnetic) Field @emfnoc @emfcamp

EMFCamp network planning diagLast year I dreamt of holding a tweetup over a weekend in a field. I booked a large scout camp but the project didn’t get anywhere because it needed connectivity to make it a success and I couldn’t for one reason and another make it happen.

A couple of weeks ago you may have noticed something called EMF Camp appearing in your Twitter stream. People I knew were going and blow me down if it doesn’t turn out to be the type of event I had been thinking of.  I couldn’t go myself but Nat Morris, who ran the networking for the event, has sent me some notes of the tech setup.

Nat’s notes are a great read and I have left them by and large unadulterated. I have to thank him for sending me a wonderful cornucopia of facts and links – every link is worth clicking on. You especially need to make sure you read the camp_network pdf – it has drawing in it showing how they planned the network even down to the distances between portaloos for the Ethernet cable runs. Some knowledge of data networking would help you understand some of the technical terms here but the first link to Zoe Kleinman’s BBC report gives a great overview.

Nat writes:

Here are some details about the internet setup for EMFCamp which took place last weekend at Pineham Park in Milton Keynes. The BBC turned up on Saturday afternoon and recorded a nice piece about the event, you can see my stomach about halfway through when they film in the NOC tent…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19441861

Some slides from Will and my presentation at the end of the event about the power and internet are here…. (50MB warning)… www.natmorris.co.uk/camp_network.pdf

We were lucky that the site is only 2.8 miles away from the Pulsant DataCentre in Milton Keynes –  what was formerly BlueSquare MK. Brian Ross and Nick Ryce got the wheels in motion inside Pulsant and arranged with Matt Lovell the CTO for them to sponsor us. I cheekily asked for a couple of U of rackspace in MK and some in their Telehouse East rack plus a 1Gb/s layer 2 circuit between the two, I was expecting them to say no, but they were fine with the idea!

So back in June we started our network building placing a Cisco 7200 with NPE G2 in Telehouse and another in MK, we borrowed a /19 of v4 + /48 of v6 and AS number from Chaos Computer Club in Germany, meaning we didn’t have to NAT any campers.

We had a BGP transit feed from Pulsant in MK, plus Goscomb in Telehouse, along with a temporary connection to the LONAP peering network for v4+v6 plus multicast. http://stats.emfcamp.org

The costs for providing internet access to campers came in at around 5.8k, apart from 10 boxes of cat5 all of this was for the last mile between the MK DC and the campsite, everything was provided free or in kind from sponsors. RapidWireless from Liverpool (Richard Porter) loaned us a pair of DragonWave Horizon Compact units – we got a temporary OFCOM license for the 18ghz link which ran at 385mbit/s full duplex. As a backup we bought a pair of Ubiquiti Nanobridge M5’s, these were installed but we never pushed any traffic over them, they were just there in case something happened to the primary link.

Onsite we borrow a tent / marquee from scout group, the tent was made in 1953, made a 25quid to borrow it! Some pics…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nottinghack/7929611918/

Our onsite rack / data centre, housing dual core routers, wireless controllers, along with various servers:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nottinghack/7929611592/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andy_d/7902260210/

Around the site we deployed a resilient OSPF ring, switches were stored in portaloos, along with power distro units – we used the German term Datenklo for these, meaning ‘data toilet’:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ne0hack3r/7924490940/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/je4d/7924689482/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andy_d/7902347402/

Someone even colocated a Raspberry Pi along with a 3tb USB hard disc in one! http://www.flickr.com/photos/andy_d/7902345240/

Campers left their cables outside and then either tweeted or text us and a NOC monkey would come out and connect them up. Wifi AP’s were deployed all over the site http://t.co/rBsQUAn9

We limited tent connections to 100Mbit, so a single user couldn’t saturate our upstream.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/b3cft/7909251802/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/loggedhours/7925212568/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/russss/7909193016/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nottinghack/7929909834/

Had some nice feedback!

https://twitter.com/Ash_Force/status/242067006537474048
https://twitter.com/markphelan/status/241896897290309633
https://twitter.com/je4d/status/242386884276396032
https://twitter.com/markphelan/status/242133609908142080

Our infra team twitter account is @emfnoc, the general camp one is @emfcamp

End of Nat’s stuff

A huge thanks to Nat for sharing this with me. The whole event was clearly a massive joint effot by lots of people and looks to have been a great success  I look forward to attending the next one in person.

Categories
broadband Engineer internet

Penis Envy, Broadband Style: 1Gbps FTTP at Appleton & Eaton

Gigaclear gigabit broadband broadband week image - Gigaclear speedtest showing 1Gbps broadband speeds in Appleton & Eaton

Gigaclear speedtest showing 1Gbps broadband speeds in Appleton & EatonGigaclear gigabit broadband is blazing fast.

This is the nearest thing you can get to penis envy in the broadband world. It’s a speedtest, performed on the new Gigaclear gigabit broadband network in the fortunate communities of Appleton and Eaton.

I was recently gushing over the 20Mbps and 40Mbs speeds I have encountered at WiFi hotspots in London. Well, it won’t be long before properties in Appleton and Eaton get to London prices, as this amazing new network is sure to have a beneficial effect on valuations.

Gigaclear quote one of their customers as saying, “I run my business from home, and with only 1-2Mbps available before Gigaclear I had to plan well in advance when to upload and download”. Pricing starts at £37.

Gigaclear is digging fibre into a number of communities (check them out here).

Categories
Business internet

I love Lincolnshire.org <3 :))

I note there is a new website about where I live. Not about my house exactly. I suspect I’ll never merit a blue plaque. I’m talking about Lincolnshire.org. I’ve always felt that Lincolnshire was not as favoured with visitor information as it could be. I don’t even know why I was looking – I guess I like to find out stuff about my home town.

In fact way back when I first had internet access (dial up) I made a point of looking for Lincoln based websites. As I recall I could only find three at the time including Gino’s Italian Restaurant in the Bail which I remember as being quite good and thinking that it was quite enlightened at the time for a restaurant to have a site. Gino died last year but the restaurant is still going. I don’t remember what the other sites were – I lost the list of favourites in a pc upgrade/move sometime. Must have been a long time ago now (young feller me lad).

Although the web is a global phenomenon it very much applies to communities both small and local and there will always be plenty of opportunities to find niches where you can make a bit of cash. I’ve no idea how much money is made by Lincolnshire.org. It’s all down to advertising1 page impressions or click-throughs and referral fees for hotel bookings etc.

The key is clearly to make the site attractive and informative so that people will want to visit and more’s to the point link to from other websites. Lincolnshire.org could end up as a nice little business.

This brings us then to the completely new set of skills that a business owner has to acquire in this modern web based world. Not only does he or she have to understand the ins and outs of Search Engine Optimisation but putting together a website ain’t exactly plug and play. You can build very simple websites using tools provided by commercial web hosts (eg Lincoln’s very own WebHostingBuzz) or even use hosted platforms such as provided by wordpress.org but you will probably end up with fairly limited functionality.

So if you are a small business starting up you need to outsource your web design which of course you have to pay for. You can also pay for specialist SEO. It’s all cash out of the business before you even open the doors. Nothing new there then – all you are doing is replacing your shop fitting costs with different technical skills. Then it’s all about content – the modern shelf full of goods.

Kids grow up with this stuff. It’s their world; today. If you aren’t down wiv da kids don’t despair but you will have to work harder at it. Perhaps I’ll make sure one of my kids ends up as a web developer.

In the meantime good luck to Lincolnshire.org. Give it your support. Use it, link to it. Tell your friends and relations about it. It’s a great domain name and it deserves to succeed.

1 I’ve never considered carrying advertising on trefor.net but that is because I have a different agenda. I do link through to Timico wherever appropriate.

PS it was years before I actually visited Ginos and I was pleasantly surprised. Don’t leave it that long before visiting Lincolnshire – you can book through Lincolnshire.org 🙂

PPS It’s not my website btw 🙂

Categories
Engineer media olympics

Technological Olympic conversations and what’s so special about Finsbury Park?

We all had a great time watching the Olympics, be it physically going to the games, on the telly or online (or all three). I’m sure we all agree that the BBC did a great job. There were comments regarding the quality of the NBC coverage in the USA but a) I live in the UK so don’t care and b) NBC apparently had 9.9 million users visiting their website so they just may have been getting their dose of Olympics from that source.

In the long run up to the games I wrote a great deal about the technology and capacity being put in place for the Olympics. The BBC in particular had geared its iPlayer servers up to expect 1Terabit per second of streaming. In the end the service peaked at around 700Gbps. The BBCs answer to hitting its capacity ceiling would have been to reduce the bandwidth available per stream rather than stop new users accessing the service or suffering service degradation so this worked out well.

Interestingly the Beeb says that it’s Olympic peak number of viewers expressed as the number of streams was during the Tennis singles finals at 820,000 requests.  Bradley Wiggins’ time trial  was similar to that of the Jubilee weekend at 729,000 streams. The peak daily volume was 2.8PetaBytes! 33% of all streams were to mobile devices.

Virgin Media, who had provisioned a huge 240Gbps of additional internet access bandwidth only ended up using a third of it. Good news from the customer experience perspective and the additional bandwidth now in place will soon be used up so it wasn’t wasted effort. Virgin’s peak was during Usain Bolt’s 100m final win.

Virgin also had a great story to tell with its WiFi on the London Underground. With hotspots in 62 stations Virgin had started the Olympics fortnight with 277,000 users registering 275,000 email addresses so some people must use multiple devices (presumably unless I’ve got it wrong). By the end of the games the number of users had grown 166,000 to 443,000. The number of sessions peaked at 20.7M on August 13th, the day after the closing ceremony with Finsbury Park being the busiest station!! What’s so special about Finsbury Park? Virgin’s Underground WiFi traffic grew by 34% over the Olympics period.

Evidence suggests that network traffic generally peaked the day after the closing ceremony which we can only ascribe to people catching up on all the Eastenders episodes they missed whilst watching the Olympics (losers!).

BT reported similar peaks at similar times to Virgin though its most popular times were for different events which just might reflect a different customer demographic. Also on the BT network the Andy Murray doubles finals game had more traffic than his singles which is different to what the Beeb was saying. Both could be true as BTs customers weren’t necessarily watching the live stream online. They might have been watching the games on TV and using the internet to fill in with other content.

BT also said that the saw a specific increase during Mr Bean’s stint at the Opening ceremony – folks sharing their excitement online or watching the video a second time – it was fantastic, fair play.

The London Internet Exchange traffic peaked at just over 1.2Tbps. Compared with its pre-games level of 1.1Tbps this might not sound like a big rise but we should remember that traffic normally drops in August because I go on holiday1 and taking this into account the actual growth is probably more like 170Gbps. Note LINX traffic in August 2011 was 800Gbps. This is not a like for like comparison as LINX now has more members using its network.

Btw if anyone can explain why Finsbury Park I’m sure all readers of this blog would be grateful.

1 only joking but you know what I mean – I tend not to use the internet when on holiday but I hammered it this time.