Category: Net

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

Categories
End User internet video

Japan Earthquake – live as it happens on the internet

Japan earthquake

I watched the news of the Japanese earthquake on iPlayer on my iPad. I watched it in bed, whilst having breakfast and then whilst in the shower (the iPad wasn’t in the actual shower cubicle). Coming out of the shower room I bumped into one of the kids  who said he had been watching it his room on his PC.

On my way in I listened to it on the car radio and then the iPad 3G connection kicked and the video started  in my bag in the boot (actually in the Jeep it is called a “trunk”). This was a bit disconcerting. The newsreader said that people on Japan had been standing in the streets in Tokyo watching the news streaming on their mobile handsets.

Coming into the office by 9am the video bandwidth usage on our network had doubled over the norm and I have iPlayer playing in the corner of the room.  We live in a totally connected world.

Our thoughts must go out to the people affected by the Earthquake. It is unbelievably amazing to be able to watch the destruction happening in real time broadcast live from a camera in a helicopter.

Categories
Engineer internet

Google transparency report on Libya shows traffic drop off from Thursday – Gadaffi slow off the mark

The Google transparency report should be of interest to readers. It shows Google traffic levels to/from a given country. If you click on the link it shows that traffic out of Libya ground to a halt on Thursday evening.

I am somewhat surprised it has taken the Gadaffi regime this long to kill the traffic – assuming that is what has happened.

Categories
Engineer events internet ipv6

Move over IPv4 Bring on IPv6 event sold out but more sponsorship secured – expect more tickets to be available

click to register

The first tranche of tickets has all but sold out for this event. If when you register there are no more spaces don’t worry – just get your name on the waiting list. I’ve been able to secure additional sponsorship and expect to be able to increase the number of partygoers.

The demand for tickets has been amazing and I think reflects the fact that there is a lot of interest in both celebrating the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool (the end of the internet as we know it) and wanting to see what progress is being made re IPv6 implementation.

I am also pleased to say that we have a special star guest signed up for the event. I’m keeping his/her identity a secret for the moment but it will be worth the wait 🙂

I am just waiting for confirmation of one more panelist in the IPv6 debate before publishing the final lineup.

More anon. Click on the icon in the right hand column of this blog to go to the event website.

Categories
Engineer events internet ipv6

Moveover IPv4 Bring on #IPv6 Party

click to register

We are marking the end of the internet as we know it with a celebratory event on the evening of 22nd March at the Highly Prestigious London Transport Museum in Covent Garden.

This gig isn’t just to bury IPv4 though. It is also a serious look at where the world is at with the roll out of IPv6.

If you are a techie in the internet community, a tech journalist or just as importantly an IT manager/CTO/CIO who might want to understand the relevance of IPv4 exhaustion to your business then you need to be here.

We have a nice little retrospective look at the history of the Internet in the UK by early Pioneer and colleague of Vint Cerf, Prof Peter Kirstein.

Also on stage will be speakers discussing the actual state of IPv6 rollout, the practicalities of implementation and the problems yet to be overcome.

Then we will be peering into a crystal ball and taking a look at the future of the internet and the www!

Finally there will be a ceremonial bit of fun whereby IANA will do a re-run of the handover of the last block of IPv4 addresses to RIPE.

Bring your camera. You will want to remember this one

What: Move Over IPv4 (Bring on IPv6)
Where: The London Transport Museum, Covent Garden
When: 18.30 – 21.30 Tuesday March 22nd (ceremonials commence 19.00hrs)
Agenda:
  • A brief history of the internet and the www by internet pioneer Prof Peter Kirstein.
  • What next? Is the world ready for IPv6? What are the problems?
  • The future of the internet!
  • Ceremonial repeat of formal handing over of the last IPv4 blocks by IANA representative to RIPE representative.
  • Party Time!
Cost: This is a free event but entry is by invitation only.

Registration (click here to go to the event site) for “bringonipv6” requires a password as attendance at the event is invitation only. The password is freely available from industry sources or will have already been mailed to you. If we have missed you out you can contact Trefor Davies at [email protected] with your details.

Many thanks need to go to the sponsors that have made this event possible. These are Nominet, LINX, Timico, ThinkBroadband, NewNet, AAISP, Brocade and 6UK.

Categories
Engineer internet ipv6

Significant IPv4 announcement to be made in Miami tomorrow #IPv6

Those of you who have been following the countdown to exhaustion of the IPv4 address space will want to tune in to a webcast coming out of Miami tomorrow at 9.30 EST (GMT+5hrs). It is an open secret that this will be the IANA handover of the last 5   /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses.

We in the UK will be marking this important milestone in the history of the internet at a date in March. Look out for an announcement very soon. In the meantime you will be able to watch the ICANN ceremonials and press conference here.

Categories
Engineer internet ipv6

Last 2 IPv4 blocks allocated – STOP PRESS

The last two available /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses have been allocated by IANA to APNIC.  This takes the remaining total down to 5 which means the IPv4 address pool is effectively exhausted. The last 5 are spoken for. There are no more. That’s it :).

I’m holding off crying “history, history” until the remaining 5 are allocated.  This was, I’m told, originally planned for a ceremonial handover at the ICANN meeting in San Fransisco in March but will now happen much sooner than that. Keep reading this blog for updates.

I’ve written plenty about this so if you need to understand more do a search for IPv6. It is worth noting that this isn’t the total exhaustion of all IPv4 addresses. That will happen in dribs and drabs as people use up those held by Regional Internet Registries (RIRs – expected to be streched out in ever decreasing block sizes) and then use up their own.

You need an IPv6 strategy. For a quick overview on how it might affect you read this.

Categories
broadband Business

BT Openreach Broadband Provisioning Lead Times Stretch Out

Broadband provisioning lead times with BT Openreach are currently far outside what we have come to expect over recent years. Typically we have quoted analogue and ISDN2 new installs at 7-10 working days and ISDN30 new installs at 20 working days but in many cases we are now seeing this double and people looking to install new circuits need to be aware of this.

Below is an extract from the weekly service update Provided by BT Openreach which explains the current position.  Note this is working days so 30 days is effectively 6 weeks:

Provision Lead Times

Provision lead times across the country remain high with significant regional variance.

Continue reading “BT Openreach Broadband Provisioning Lead Times Stretch Out”

Categories
broadband Business

Akamai Reports UK 17th for Average Internet Connection Speed Despite Being 6th Highest User #deappg

Akamai is the world’s largest Content Delivery Network employing 73,000 servers around the globe to deliver its customers’ content. Timico hosts an Akamai box in London.

The trends in traffic patterns flowing through the Akamai network are therefore very much representative of what is happening elsewhere on the internet. It was Akamai that showed us that 23% of the world’s internet usage was coming from the UK during England’s afternoon match in last year’s football world cup.

The Akamai State of The Internet Report states that in Q3 2010 over 533 million unique IP addresses connected to the Akamai network, a 20% growth over the same quarter a year ago. Of these 21.6 million were in the UK. For reference Germany has 31.5 and France just under 23m. Looking at the UK’s global competitors the USA led the pack with 141m, China 63m and Japan 37.5m. By this token the UK creeps in as sixth largest user of the internet.

Looking at the average connection speed the story is different. South Korea leads with 14Mbps, followed by Hong Kong (9.2) and then Japan (8.5). In fact there are 16 countries whose average broadband speed, according to Akamai are faster than the UK including 11 of them in Europe.

The message here is obvious. Whilst the UK seems to occupy a significant place in the rankings for internet usage (which is good) its lowly position in respect of average connection speed is somewhat of an embarrassment.

PC link to the report is included above – you need to register but it is a good 31 page read if you are into this sort of thing.

Categories
ipv6

IPv4 exhaustion likely to happen this week

Word on the street is that APNIC will ask IANA for two /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses this week.  The IPv4 exhaustion counter (embedded here) suggests that there are 8 days to go – we are pretty much at the end.

This will effectively bring the IPv4 saga to a close – once these two blocks are taken then that’s it. All that will remain to do is the release to the 5 Regional Internet Registries of the last 5 blocks – likely to happen during the ICANN meeting in San Francisco in March. There are no other blocks available.

We in the UK are planning our own event in March, post ICANN, to celebrate what really is a historic milestone in the history of the internet. I’ll post more as details firm up.

Categories
broadband Business

FTTC Broadband Cabinets in Cornwall – First to Go Live

BT has not yet started marketing FTTC broadband to consumers in the Cornwall area, though that doesn’t mean that “mere” consumers can’t have the service.

BT has advised me that the first FTTC broadband cabinets in Cornwall went live on Monday 17th January. From that date, BT Wholesale are accepting orders for provision of lines on those cabinets in the Threewaters exchange area.

BT has also started marketing to businesses in the area, but not yet to consumers (though that doesn’t mean that if you are a “mere” consumer you can’t have the service).

I would expect it to be a straightforward sale to a business. If one day you can’t have broadband and the next you are offered 40Megs, you would have to be daft to say no (this might be a slight dramatisation of the situation on the ground).

Cornwall is an interesting situation, having been the subject of large grants to “broadband enable” the county, and is regarded by some (not everyone) as a prototype for other areas with broadly rural populations.

I have some specific FTTC broadband cabinet/postcode details if you want to drop me a line.

Categories
Business Cloud media

Flashback to Christmas Eve 2010, Skype outage and Talk Talk traffic surge forecast on Xmas Day

BBC Radio 5 Live interview on Christmas Eve 2010 talking about the expected surge of internet usage on Christmas Day when people started using their new gadgets.  Also discussed the Skype outage.

Categories
internet

OMG the internet is about to run out of addresses what should I do?

IT manager worried about IPv4 to IPv6 migration

Media interest in IPv6 last week prompted a few questions, notably on twitter, regarding whether people should worry about the IPv4 address pool exhaustion. It would be easy to make noise and attract attention by saying “OMG yes – you should worry”. After all it is a fairly momentous event –> “The End of The Internet As We Know It”. ARMAGEDDON!!!

This blog does not indulge in such tabloid-like scaremongering 🙂  So what is the deal?

Well firstly it is very true that the IANA IPv4 address pool is about to run out. There are only seven /8 address block remaining and Asian  Regional Internet Registries (RIRs ) APNIC is about to ask for two of these. The growth of internet usage in Asia has been outpacing the rest of the world.

Word has it that APNIC has been holding back on this request to a) stretch the exhaustion date and b) give IANA a chance to organise the PR surrounding the release of the final blocks. Once APNIC has received its two blocks (each /8 contains approx 16 million IPv4 addresses) we will be down to the last five. This is expected to happen in January – or mid February at the latest.

The rule is that this is the point at which IPv4 exhaustion is declared and the remaining five blocks are distributed to the five RIRs. The last five should be released in March. (all dates subject to change in this rapidly changing world)

Of course whilst this means that IANA will no longer have any addresses each RIR will. It should, however, be remembered that /8 blocks are being used up at the rate of one every 6 weeks or so. It won’t be long before RIRs will run out of stock. It will then be down to individual ISPs to nurture their own stocks so that they last as long as possible. I have already heard (anecdotal) stories of companies being bought for their IPv4 addresses, at least in part.

ISPs can make their stocks last longer by getting better at recycling IPv4 addresses from customers who have left for pastures new. These ISPs will need to move to IPv6 or, in the medium term, depart the market because they will not be able to service new customers– enter tabloid press – ISPS HIT WALL AND GO OUT OF BUSINESS PANIC/STAMPEDE/WILL MINE BE ONE OF THEM? !!!

The industry has known this has been coming for a long time – more than 10 years so what’s the state of play?

The global network penetration of IPv6 is still quite low – only a few % – it does vary from country to country. This means that relatively few networks can talk to each other using IPv6. This rate of adoption is increasing as D-Day gets closer (Depletion Day?).

The migration strategy for IPv6 implementation is to run dual stack networks ie to run both IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel. Existing ISP customers will be able to continue to use their existing “IPv4 only” routers. IPv4 is not going away in a hurry. However you should know that once IPv4 has been “used up” new websites and services will start to appear that only use IPv6. If your ISP cannot provide IPv6 then it is quite probable that you will not be able to access services that only use IPv6. With time this will be a growing problem.

Consumers
As long as your ISP does support IPv6 then your routers don’t need to – the ISP can do a Network Address Translation on your behalf. After all end users don’t typically see their IP address. End users use the friendlier DNS system for sending emails and web browsing eg trefor.net sits at IP address 62.121.11.173 but you don’t need to know the underlying number – the system takes care of it for you.

Their problem will be if their ISP does not support IPv6 then they will not be able to help when trefor.net (or any other DNS based service) moves to IPv6.

Now consumers don’t need to rush out and buy a new router. For one if their ISP does not yet support IPv6 it would be a waste of money, but they do need to be sure in the medium term that the ISP has an IPv6 story. The other point to note is that routers don’t last for ever and do periodically get replaced as technology develops. For example in moving from 8Mbps to 24Mbps broadband many people will have had to have a new router.

One of the things holding back the release of IPv6 to consumers is the lack of support for the protocol amongst consumer broadband router vendors. The market leader for IPv6 equipment support is Cisco, whose kit is typically used in business environments. Cisco routers are too expensive for home users who expect to get the equipment bundled with their broadband connection for free or at least a very low price.

There are very few alternatives with fully working solutions – these vendors are only now just sampling their first devices to their ISP channel.

There is no real reason for this, other than a perceived lack of market demand, because ADSL routers typically all use the same open source (ie free) Linux kernel. Linux is the pet project of a global engineering community and provides good IPv6 support. We should therefore expect to see many IPv6 enabled broadband routers appearing in the market during the course of 2011 which will likely trigger more ISP IPv6 announcements.

Business
A business should give more thought to a plan to migrate its network from IPv4 to IPv6, or to provide support for a dual stack. This is because it might be a bit of a nuisance for consumers to have only partial access to the internet but this could be mission critical for a business, especially if it is that business’ own website and services, or those of its trading partners that become inaccessible.

Up until now this is something that has been completely ignored by the IT manager community but it is something that they should be aware of in 2011.

Support from Cisco and Linux is good news generally as many businesses are heavy users of both Note a business may not know it uses Linux but for example Timico installs IPv6-ready Fortigate firewalls – it is the firewall’s underlying Linux stack that facilitates this.

There is a lot of uncertainty here and I will be arranging some educational workshops to cover this in the near future – watch this space. In the meantime if you want to know more by all means drop me a line at tref at trefor.net.

If you want to learn more about what an ISP does to prepare for IPv6 read about our work at Timico in this previous post. Note since writing that post in December 2010 the number of IPv6 routes supported by Timico has grown from 3,500 to 4,500 which shows how quickly the space is moving.

Geoff Huston also has a good discussion on this subject here.

PS I will update the percentage penetration of IPv6 numbers as I come across them.

Categories
internet ipv6

The end of #IPv4 and the coming of #IPv6 – exclusive interview with The Young Journalist Academy

Over the past few days I have had a flurry of media interviews on the subject of the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool and the advent of IPv6. This is increasingly going to be a talking point during 2011. The biggest problem in linking to these interviews is that they are usually on the BBC and typically only accessible via iPlayer, and then only for a week after the event.

It would be nice to be able to link to something that should stay up for a more usable period of time. On this occasion I was pleased to spend some of Saturday morning (pre golf 🙂 ) talking to some budding young journalists in my hometown of Lincoln. They (Jonathan and Robert from Year 8, Carre’s Grammar School, Sleaford) have written a story and posted it on “The Young Journalist Academy” website.

The podcast is here.

Categories
broadband Business

@edvaizey @jeremy_hunt please read this #deappg #digitalbritain #fttc #fttp

Last week I wrote an analysis on the superfast broadband strategy published by Jeremy Hunt. It attracted more comments than any other post I have written in the last three years. I concluded that whilst the published strategy might enable the government to meet its near term objectives it was not necessarily the best thing for UK plc.

Now Barry Forde, the brains behind CLEO, has written a post on broadbandcumbria.com that goes into fantastic analytical detail as to why promoting a FTTC based plan is not the right thing to do. Indeed Barry shows that in the medium term it would be the more expensive approach and would lead to continued requests for government handouts.

I can’t better this piece of analysis and suggest you read it here.

Categories
broadband Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can envisage a four tier society

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

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

My message to the people of Lincoln?

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

Get voting!

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

Categories
Business Cloud internet piracy Regs security

The Futility of Blocking Websites #deappg #wikileaks #censor

Mirrors, and the sheer hopelessness today of blocking websites.

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Business Cloud internet net neutrality Regs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Cloud Engineer internet ipv6

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

Apocalypse IPv4

A paper by Trefor Davies and Chris Nicholls

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “The Road to IPv6 (or How to Avoid the IPv4 Apocalypse)”
Categories
broadband Business ofcom Regs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
broadband Business UC voip

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

snowy view from our back window

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

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

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

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

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

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

timico carpark in the snow

snow covereed jeep at Newark Northgate railway station last night
snow covered jeep at Newark Northgate railway station last night
Categories
Engineer ipv6

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

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

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

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

Categories
Business dns Regs scams security

Nominet and the pseudo-judicial roles of ISPs

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

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

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

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

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Categories
dns Engineer internet

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

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

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

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

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

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Categories
Cloud datacentre Engineer peering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Cloud Engineer peering Weekend

New #LINX added value service – chutney peering at LINX71

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

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

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

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Categories
dns Engineer

Nominet 25th birthday party

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

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

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

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

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

The birthday cake, by the way was delicious:)

Categories
broadband datacentre Engineer

Next Generation Broadband: The Digital Village Pump

Google satellite image of Ashby de la Launde in Lincolnshire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Categories
broadband Business

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

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

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

Check this 30 second video out.

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

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Categories
broadband Business internet ofcom

Yes Minister 2010, Broadband Growth, and Digital Britain

Over the last year or two it has been interesting to watch updated episodes of the BBC TV series Yes Minister playing out in front of my very eyes.

First of all it was the 2Meg Universal Service Obligation. You can picture civil servants in BIS (Dept of Business Innovation and Skills) running around in panic wondering at how they were going to make the “obligatory” bit happen. That one soon evolved to Universal Service Commitment which apparently in politicospeak means “we say 2Megs but actually it could be anything and between me and you is a worthless statement”. Got out of that then!

The came the Digital Economy Act hot potato that was thrown over the fence to Ofcom one evening with instructions to get it sorted out by the morning.

Now, with new masters settling in to the Whitehall roost, it’s a privilege to be one of the page turners and to read out to you the next hilarious chapter.

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Categories
broadband Cloud End User

Non Internet Use –> Neo-Monasticism –> The World as it Was

There are still plenty of people today who have never been or don’t go online. Life without Broadband. There will come a time when either they will have seen the light or that generation moves on to greener pastures. Then the only non-internet users will be monks. The old real world will become a spiritual world and the internet will become the new real world outside.

People will sign up for retreats for days, weeks or even for life amongst the true believers. Monastic orders will be established touting the “truly spiritual” way of life as being the road to salvation. Contact will be via a single analogue landline in a phone box at the bottom of the road and they will have self imposed rotas for when the monks will be allowed out to call friends and relatives.

The hardcore will only write letters. This in itself will spawn a new cottage industry filled with those that can actually write in the old fashioned way using pen and paper. Many people will not be able to decipher this handwriting and will need help to translate it when they receive a letter. Handwriting to text application software will be built in to every operating system

Taking this to the extreme these people will probably have to grow their own food because you will only be able to buy such items via an online portal. Tesco will be turned into a virtual arcade. You will be able to physically go there but everything on the shelves will just be a touch screen that you add to your cart. This doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to get instant access to goods but that will carry a premium.

The monks will of course lead long and obliviously happy lives. They will not be governed by the 3rd law of t’internet that states that time goes a lot more quickly when using the internet. This life will not be totally filled wine and roses (there is nothing to say that wine is forbidden btw) and there are some pitfalls to watch out for. Every day will become a Sunday afternoon but without even a black and white movie on TV. There will in fact be no TV because terrestrial services will long since have moved onto Terabit per second fibre to the premises.

And if you are not one of the spiritual few? Who knows what your fate might be…

PS  I realise that the concept of watching a black and white move on TV on a Sunday afternoon will be beyond the ken of someone under the age of 40 but it made it into the final editor’s cut on this post anyway 🙂