Exciting to announce that LONAP has Linkedin as another new member. This follows on from the recent announcement of Apple hooking up with the IXP.
AS 14414 LinkedIn joins an exciting roll call of members in what is a rapidly growing marketplace.
Not all readers will be familiar with the internet peering model whereby content providers and eyeball networks meet at an Internet Exchange Point (IXP). This is a means of getting content from providers servers (eg Amazon/Apple/LinkedIn) content to your broadband ISP and thence to your laptop/tablet/phone. Connecting via an IXP normally makes for lower cost connectivity and almost more importantly better performing, lower latency (read faster page loads) connectivity.
Membership of an IXP is therefore essential for organisations where quality of their customer experience is very important. VoIP service providers for example. Commercial website owners are also able to express faster page loading in terms of improved profitability – the faster the page load the more likely you are to make a sale.
The LinkedIn LONAP membership is yet another great piece of news for the IXP. The internet industry is just an exciting place to be at the moment. Long may it continue. A full list of LONAP members can be seen here. LONAP is a member owned not for profit organisation.
I should declare an interest as I am on the board of directors of LONAP. It’s a true pleasure to work with Will Hargrave, Andy Davidson and Richard Irving who are time-served veterans of the peering industry.
London, together with Amsterdam and Frankfurt is one of the major meeting points for the worldwide internet community which is very much run on a basis of mutual benefit.
Most recent LONAP post (on growth) here. Loads of other peering related posts can be found here.
Siemens IT graduate – my career experiences so far…
On October 1st 2014 I embarked on the first step into my career in IT. After completing four years at the University of Lincoln and gaining a Masters degree I was lucky enough to be offered a place on Siemens IT Graduate Scheme. Congleton is the only Siemens site in the UK not to have an Atos controlled service desk. IT support is done internally by the IT team. Therefore, I am the only specific IT Graduate in the whole of Siemens UK. Little did I know the exposure to various IT systems that I would get within a month of starting!
The feeling of knowing that you have a position waiting for you does spur you on through the last few months of study. It also dawned on me then that I would be officially moving out of the family home and relocating to South Manchester. A few weeks of flat hunting and acquiring furniture wasn’t so bad.
The contracts finally came around mid June. It was becoming so much more real! I’d secured my flat and bought a bed so in my mind this was what ‘growing up’ was all about.
Then the day arrived that I was due to start work. It has to go down as one of the most nerve-racking days of my life. I remember walking into reception and the feeling of relief and drive came over me. The lady on reception already knew who I was – which I did find quite odd, and my ID badge was there waiting for me.
The first month went by so quickly. IT had had an office refit with posh new electronic desks and I’d begun to get to know people across the whole site and manufacturing areas.
My first main task was to do a massive data collection exercise to gather every item of software that was used across the Congleton site. The plan was to create a Service Catalogue of all the systems on site which IT didn’t currently have. Support, usage and a criticality level were all collected during this project. This ranged from Web Apps, Server Apps and Installed items. I also learnt a great deal more about the factory floor systems. All these systems have been developed internally over the years. Some are approaching 18 years old!
Not only did this project give me exposure to the site and its systems, it also allowed me to meet people. I visited every department and spoke to a few from each to collect the information that was needed.
As a part of the Graduate Programme, there are modules of work to be completed. We had an Orientation event at the end of October and then these modules kicked off in January. Each Graduate had to select dates for each of the 5 core modules – Project Management, Business Influencing, Customer Communications, Team Building and Career Planning.
These involved training courses which were set over a few days at other Siemens sites across the country. These modules are intended for us to understand the company and develop ourselves as young professionals. It was suggested that we kept a log book of these activities as well as reviewing each module with our line manager. I found the reviews really helpful as it enabled me to outline areas that I should work on in my day-to-day working.
It is now approaching 9 months since I started as a Siemens IT graduate in Congleton. I have completed one 6 month placement in Demand Management relating to applications and I am now working on the software roll-out of a specific data analytics software package with the Business Intelligence team. I have completed several items of work along the way: from becoming proficient in SharePoint development, using my previous knowledge of Agile to set up Sprint boards in the department and rolling out several items of software across site to improve communications.
I have almost completed a site wide cost saving exercise in fixed line telephony which has saved the site as a whole over £42,000 per year and I am due to start more cost saving initiatives in the coming months.
Even though I am very young in terms of career, I have achieved a lot since I have been here. I have also learnt that if you strive to develop yourself and search for opportunities that you will be looked after.
I’m part of the Strategy team promoting and ensuring our sustainability. I’m engaged in numerous school based activities promoting STEM subjects to Primary and soon in Secondary Schools. I’ve attended careers fairs across the country and even been back to my old University as a Siemens representative. It’s definitely been a great start to my Siemens journey.
So what’s next for me? I finish the first year of the graduate scheme in August, so I then have one year left. I am due to spend 4 months in Germany at a sister site early next year as well as participate and lead in a few new software projects in the various IT teams. 2016 is set to be an interesting year for me that’s for sure!
Zoe Redfern is an IT Graduate at the Siemens Digital Factory, Congleton, Cheshire.
A farmer’s wife speaks – rural broadband solutions
why I care – what’s wrong – what’s to be done
I am a hairdresser and a farmer’s wife, and I don’t want to run the country, but I do want to set a few facts straight.
I got involved with tech in the late 80s, when my children started using computers, I didn’t want to ‘not know’ what they were doing. I did some training, and worked as a digital graphic artist for a designer from home, whilst doing caring duty. This meant posting large files on disks, but then we got digital in earnest to keep up with competitors. I started with dial up and tried satellites, without much success, so I ended up as part of a group building a wifi mesh with the help of the university, and this then led to laying the very first rural community fibre to the home in 2009. I am now a small cog in a fibre network called B4RN, built by the community, for the community, and costing £30 a month for gigabit symmetrical, unlimited, unthrottled awesomeness.
During the last 15 years I have seen what a mess we are making of ‘Digital Britain’. I have seen funding wasted. I have seen politicians looking foolish. I have worked as a volunteer for the Digital Assembly as an observer and reported to Neelie Kroes, who, like me wants every citizen to have the chance to be digital. I want to help. Thanks to my community and B4RN JFDI, I now have one of the best connections in the world, here on my farm. My speed test, just for interest, what’s yours like?
Why I care. (about the rest of the country) (inc You)
Millions of us are left on connections that are not, and never will be fit for purpose. Government have been brainwashed into believing in infinity.
In order to save billions of pounds in eHealth, eEducation and eGov we need every single citizen to be able to go online, easily, affordably. At the moment they can’t, so the analogue ways have to continue which is very expensive for the government and taxpayer. We should NEVER ask ‘what will it cost?’. We should ask ‘what will it cost if we don’t grasp the nettle and do it once, and do it right?’ Patching up the old phone lines is not a solution, and it is a scandal and a disgrace that this government, and the previous two have got it so wrong.
We are up against a monopoly incumbent, determined to protect its assets, with a massive marketing budget and snake oil salesmen. We are the lobbyists of the future. We need to be heard. Thank you to Tref for the platform! May I also say at this point that our phone line network was one the best in the world, it fed the industrial revolution, and that is down to the fantastic engineers who built and maintained it. Sadly, since privatisation the finances for upgrades simply haven’t happened. Yet money can be found to buy football coverage to try to stamp out Sky…
What’s wrong. (with the rest of the country) (inc you)
The current state of ‘Digital Britain’.
What really bugs me is the fact that most of the politicians, civil servants and funders who are in charge of building a Digital Britain in order to keep up with the digital revolution know very little about the subject. This has been proved time and time again. The emperor has no clothes, yet all the minions assure him he’s gorgeous. (looking at you Edward). As we lose our manufacturing industries we have to replace them with other exports, and digital exports are the way to do it.
All the funding for the final third (rural areas and those on long lines) who couldn’t get broadband has been manipulated into Openreach coffers and wasted. ‘Wasted’ you say? ‘they have brought fibre broadband, superfast to millions of homes’ you say? Not so. If you study the statistics its ‘homes passed’. What has really happened is that the monopoly has effectively prevented anyone else getting support by grabbing the funding and by doing so has throttled innovative solutions from altnets. They have enabled some cabinets, and every single home on those cabs are classed as having ‘fibre broadband, even if they are still on dial up.
The quango in charge of regulating telecoms is staffed with ex BT employees and tickboxers doing reports. They base their reports on information from BT and consultancies who are often paid by BT to write more reports. The ASA (advertising standards authority) has no grasp of physics and is worse than useless. They think we are getting fibre broadband through phone lines. They let millions of pounds of marketing budgets bombard you with advertising until you believe in infinity. This is total rubbish. I will tell you why…
Fibre broadband does not come down phone lines. Also, their statistics are ‘homes passed’, and many in those statistics aren’t really connectable, (too few cabinets deployed and not enough fibre). If an exchange is enabled it moves into the superfarce statistics, even if users’ lines are still too far away to get a fit for purpose connection. Business area cabinets are not upgraded to protect openreach revenue from leased lines. Poor areas are often not enabled. Rural areas don’t have any cabinets to upgrade to ‘fibre’. It is all a superfarce.
The ‘fibre’ cabinets are a choke point (see p141, Peter Cochrane evidence to HOL) and a dead end and are not futureproof. All the funding wasted on these would have been better spent getting real fibre nodes into the final third, not squandering it on the urban fringe where there was easy picking. All it has done is enable a few near the cabinets to go a bit faster.
It hasn’t helped any on long lines. Many cabinets haven’t been enabled, only the easy ‘economic’ ones that BT could have done themselves, and should have done if they had wanted to.
Many millions are therefore still on the wrong side of the digital divide, still tied to copper phone lines. We are no nearer NGA than we were in 2003. In those days 2Mbps would have been luxury, in 2005 someone invented youtube, and iPlayer and now needs are climbing and 100Mbps doesn’t seem that fast any more with many homes streaming on TV and PCs. Cabinets cannot deliver what many need now, let alone in the future. Many families have multiple devices and a single feed won’t be enough. Also they have to pay copper land line rental for phones they don’t use just to get the broadband.
Why did it go wrong?
In 80s the then government led by Margaret Thatcher started a programme to bring fibre to every part of the UK. They didn’t want a monopoly (BT) to do this, so they opened it up to competition. BT were well advanced in the manufacture of fibre and in pole position to deploy it in those days, but the Americans came in and it looked like they would get masses in before BT did.
So BT started with dial up, and followed with ADSL, and the bottom dropped out of the market, and the cable companies pulled out. BT have since ruled the roost with the second class solution – internet access through phone lines. Cheap as chips, should actually have been free. Virgin bought some of the bankrupt fibre lines and started their own network in urban areas. This competition in towns and cities has led to what is FTTC, fibre to the cabinet, or ‘infinity’, a faster service for those who are close to the cabinets. It doesn’t help those who aren’t within a few hundred metres much – if at all. Where Virgin go, BT upgrade, but Virgin cable is a lot better service so customers stay with them. Virgin on adsl isn’t good, they then become just another reseller of Openreach via wholesale. (I know, it’s complicated but stick with it).
In the late 90s in project Colossus, most of the exchanges were fibred up. That meant your dial up was fibre based. Smaller exchanges were government funded (all the project access funding went there) and only odd tiny ones were left out. Then Openreach sat back and collected the golden eggs, not investing, not feeding the goose, just paying fat cat wages, and shareholders.
They even gave their boss over £9 million a year, two years running!
The only time they have done anything to update the infrastructure is when and where there was a sniff of competition. The rural areas languish on dial up and sub meg ‘broadband’ and nothing has been done at all to help. Along came the digital switchover fund, and BDUK. They gave the money to the councils. The councils gave BT the funding, and they have used it to cherry pick the urban fringes. Essential maintenance has not been done, as any customer will testify, but now Sky (another ISP) is calling for a review. Openreach are now holding out their paws for yet more funding, (Phase 2) having not delivered the first set of promises. This funding will end up going into satellites with their partner Avanti. It is all a stitch up.
British telecom is split into a few groups. Openreach control all the infrastructure. Wholesale sell the access. BT internet buy from wholesale and are an Internet Service Provider. All the other ISPs buy from wholesale too. Wholesale buy off Openreach. This is why we are deemed to have ‘a competitive market’ but in reality we are held to ransom by a monopoly, with the exception of a few altnets who are independent. Virgin also has an alternative network, mainly fed from their own cables. But in the main, it’s all down to Openreach, and they are failing the ISPs.
In 2002 we attempted to get our telephone exchange ‘enabled’ for broadband. We already had fibre in it, as did most of the others. We marketed for BT openreach in other words. They weren’t interested in us, as with many of the rural exchanges, there was not enough profit in us. In 2003 there was masses of funding made available, ie Project Access in our area, and we tried to get funding to build our own wifi mesh, using a feed from the publicly funded CLEO project. (CLEO Cumbria Lancashire Education Online) We couldn’t get any, and all the other funds – Big Lottery, Plunkett, Nominet, Nesta etc etc replied to say that ‘BT promise to get broadband to every home in the country, so we can’t fund you’.
Eventually project access, having wasted all their funds enabling a few exchanges for BT in Cumbria, and millions in ‘promoting the benefits’ were a bit embarrassed to have nothing to show for it, so they gave us £25k for 6 case studies to shut us up. We did the case studies from the wireless mesh we built with their money. They spent a fortune making a film about it. It was showcased at the launch of project access at Rheged 27/10/2005. As soon as we started building the mesh, BT enabled our exchange. Coincidence? It didn’t matter, as our network couldn’t get broadband through the copper anyway, and still can’t. Our mesh thrived and prospered and now all the customers are on our own community fibre. And have sacked off their phone lines.
For the next few years, our hopeless regulator assured government that everyone had access to broadband. The OFCOM website still has the information on it (page 5, but they have now added a proviso about long lines after pressure from grassroots lobby groups). The ordinary people who I met every day still hadn’t got it, and where I live the lines are so long even dial up didn’t work, despite being ‘fibre based’. In some areas there is no terrestrial tv nor mobile signals. Some places don’t have mains water and electric, but you can generate that. Not so with internet. If there are south facing hills, even satellites don’t work, but we tried those too. Very expensive to run, dodgy upload, high latency and not reliable. One even broke the quoins out of the side of a house, because round here it is windy too.
Anyway, we made a fuss. We had a conference in Cumbria, we launched the Final Third First campaign. Government needed to realise that to enable everyone to have NGA you have to start at the outside and work inwards. Openreach jumped onto this very quickly, and with their snake oil salesmen they convinced the councils that only they could deliver to this final third. They assured government that their commercial footprint would be upgraded at their own expense, if government would fund the harder to reach places. They visited every one of the councils and convinced them they could do it. They have put a lot of time and effort into making their vital vision work. Their vision is to keep the country on copper, but they call it fibre. FTTC is no more fibre broadband than dial up is.
We made it quite clear at the start that they couldn’t do it with copper. We tried to get the civil servants and the EU commission to see through the hype. But they wouldn’t listen. (nobody got fired for buying IBM).
The upshot of all this, is that any altnet (alternative network) was not able to access any funding. Despite the PAC and NAO investigating and castigating BDUK and BT Openreach, and demanding that they release the postcode data to descope areas they don’t intend helping, nothing has been done, and regulation isn’t working. In the last few months, 6 years after the launch of Digital Britain, we have seen a couple of altnets get support, having spent 3 years and a lot of community and private money fighting for funding. There is hope. But it’s a farce to have to play a stupid game when it should be made easy for people to help themselves.
We are being held to ransom by a greedy monopoly who is killing the golden goose. It has consumed all the golden eggs, so there is no next generation waiting in the wings. We are stuck on an obsolete phone network for our internet access, and we are fast becoming a laughing stock as BT leech the last remaining assets from what was a world leading telecoms company.
Nations without good phone networks have leapfrogged straight into fibre, which has also enabled powerful mobile networks too, even in remote regions. All this talk of 4G and 5G, it won’t work without the fibre backbone, and unless we want millions of masts it still won’t work in the majority of the land mass without small local fibre mobile cells in homes and businesses. Even 2G still isn’t available in a lot of rural areas. As long as government believes the telco hype, there is no hope for us though. That is what compelled me to write this blogpost.
You cannot get fibre broadband down a phone line. You cannot connect the whole country using obsolete cabinet technology. gFast is the next stupid thing they will try to push on to us, this only works down 19 metres of copper in lab conditions, not through miles of twisted pairs flapping in the sky or knotted up in trees and ploughed up in fields, or up and down city streets in jammed up conduits. We have to wake up and talk to the taxi drivers and those who cut our hair, and stop listening to snake oil salesmen.
In our area we are now ok. We all have real fibre, dug in by the community, owned by the community, and funded by the community until it was sustainable. Our local heroes.
photo by Murdo McCleod in June issue of Saga magazine
Now it is making a profit. We have proved it works. This project can be replicated to go the extra mile, where telcos fear to tread. We are ok, so should I just stop ranting and ignore what is going on in the rest of the UK? I think not.
Who are We ?
It’s the whole population of the UK really, isn’t it? If not us, then who? The population employs a government supported by public servants to ‘serve the public’. We can all see “our employees” have been seriously led astray by commercial interests who have lost the plot and are stifling innovation in the UK. The Vital Vision brainwashing ran for many years before it was removed, but the damage had been done and many public servants had been on it. They became the ‘visionaries’ for the infinite superfarce. BT have erased all traces of it from their site, but the pdf lives on, thanks to the cloud.
The incumbent is determined to protect its investment in copper. It will not invest in fibre until it is forced to. It is wasting its profit on patch ups, fat cats and football, instead of futureproof upgrades. It has brainwashed our vital ‘visionary’ employees in Westminster.
What’s to be done?
If not now, then when? It’s almost impossible to deal with the “yes ministers” public servants but MPs are duty bound to investigate difficulties and instigate remedies. We need to insist that a group of MPs are educated with the basic rules of physics and successful solutions, such as B4RN the rural community solution, Gigaclear the commercial operators who have deployed rural fibre in several places and Hyperoptic in urban areas. These must be visited and studied as templates. These altnets have not had government support, but they are still delivering a vastly superior and more cost effective solution than the incumbent. After the explanations of what’s wrong, and when they understand, the MPs could follow instructions for including a much clearer and more precise set of definitions:
It is not ‘fibre broadband‘ if it comes down a phone line.
‘Homes passed’ should not be included in statistics.
”Upto‘ speeds are not acceptable.
It so happens that an “All Party Parliamentary Group” (this group could easily be brainwashed into becoming yet another delaying tactic?) has been set up specifically to investigate Rural Broadband. Ian Liddell-Grainger MP will chair the Rural Broadband APPG with Richard Bacon MP and Nigel Evans MP as vice Chairs. They, for a start, must visit B4RN in Rural Lancashire, Hyperoptic in London and Gigaclear in Oxfordshire and find out the truth, free from snake oil salesman hype. The telco lobby has brainwashed most of our nation. Rural areas are the lifeblood of our nation, and need fibre, and it has been proven to be economical by altnets. Once the rural areas have fibre, the rest will swiftly follow, as food and water flow into the cities, so will superb internet access for all. <end rant>
Please do your bit. Think about it, talk about it, to the taxi driver and your barber/hairdresser, friends, family and co-workers, and help stop this superfarce, bit by bit. The same way you eat an elephant. One bite/byte at a time. Do it for the next generation. Help build a real Digital Britain.
4As – the Activists enthuse the Adopters, the Adopters can enthuse the Apathetic, (activists scare apathetics) otherwise the Anti brigade get their way, and all we’ll end up with is FTTC and a superfast train set for a few commuters. If you can’t be an Activist, be an Adopter. Help us build a Digital Britain to be proud of. Why not be the best?
We have made a start, here in Lancashire. We have built our own fibre network from scratch, and it just works. The people have done it all. We have many retired people working in the trenches, grannies and granddads with spades and pickaxes. We have found it builds community cohesion and everyone has a feel good factor. It can be done. If we can do it, others can too. If government would support it, it could be done a lot faster and a lot easier. Your future is in your hands. To which group do you belong? Activist or Anti?Adopter or Apathetic? You don’t have to be techie. It isn’t rocket science.
For those who are interested in a truly factual account and history of the Superfarce that is Digitalbritain, they need look no further than this blog, it is written by the very brave whistleblower, Mike Kiely, and you will have no doubt after reading it that what I said is true. He has the proof. http://thebitcommons.com/cgi-bin/ebb/blog2/index.php?action=viewcomments&pid=19
When I was asked if I would like to contribute a blog item on Women in Tech I seriously wondered if I was the right person to do it. You see I have never thought of myself as a Woman in Tech. I am simply a person doing a job I love in what I see as one of the most exciting industries around.
Before I got involved in IT and Telecoms the most technical position I had held was designing and selling photovoltaic system for electrical power at remote locations. I never really thought of it as a technological role at the time. Maybe that is one of the reasons for my success. Technology has never seems unobtainable to me, it has just seemed a challenge of the job and I have always loved challenges.
My sister was involved in technology and my father and both my brothers are engineers. I suppose you could say technology was in our blood but I think rather that fear of technology was never taught to us. Maybe my parents were ahead of their time in never trying to teach us to conform to traditional roles.
Being educated in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Greece certainly did not give me a lot of strong female local role models. The wonderful thing about technology and engineering subjects in general is that they are for the most part logical and factual, and therefore in my humble opinion so much easier to deal with than the many shades of grey and public opinion that effects so many professions.
The IT and Telecoms industry is demanding and fast moving and to succeed you need to be logical, organised and dedicated. Above all you need to stay up to date which involves constant ongoing reading and discussions through networking groups. You can’t bluff it, if you are going to succeed you need to understand the industry and the technology.
I am aware that at the ripe age of 30 I achieved the distinction of becoming a Director and that over the following years I have continued to be one of the few women at board level, but I have always felt I could do the job, and I have certainly never felt that I achieved a position on anything but merit.
I do recall one position from which I resigned in disgust when I discovered that my male colleague was earning substantially more that I was for essentially the same work. I would have done the same if it had been a female colleague and I have never felt either discriminated against or held back by my sex. OK I recognise I have different personality characteristics from my, mostly male, counterparts but this has never seemed like an advantage or otherwise. It is just who we are.
30 years ago I did often find myself the only woman in the room. This was at first in meetings, then attending seminars or conferences and finally as my experience increased as the only women speaker at many industry events. But the people I met at these events whether as a delegate or as a speaker where not interested in me as a woman. They were interested in what I knew or had to contribute and so everyone at the event started on an equal footing.
Over the years the number of women in the industry has steadily increased and I am delighted to have met some lovely women that I now count amongst my friends.
Technology is great, it is exciting, it is fun. It is rarely boring and often challenging and in my experience you are respected for what you know and can do and for who you are. The IT and Telecoms industries are a wonderful place to work and I would, and have, encouraged any young person to get involved in a field that can be so rewarding.
Valeria Rossi, general manager of MIX is passionate about not for profit IX model
I am in front of the typical “blank page” …
I read “Women in tech – a blog written by women, not a blog about women”, and I wonder if a woman would write about technology differently from a man. But this does not matter, this is not the subject.
In reality I have never much felt gender differences in my job, nor have I suffered from it. At the beginning of my career, I had the chance to work in the IP networks field within the academic world. There, despite “networks design” being predominantly a male activity, gender has never been an issue. I realise that it is not always the case, but either I was lucky or I have always behaved neutrally with respect to gender, avoiding to making it an issue.
I must admit, nevertheless, that things changed 15 years ago, when I started to manage MIX, initially as the technical director and later as its general manager. There I had to make double the effort to persuade a board, composed then and ever since entirely by men, that one specific strategy could be winning rather than an other, or that a particular chance had priority over others.
Nobody has ever challenged my technical choices, but often I had to make an extra effort to assert my credibility in business management and general overview. Do I believe that this has been due, at least partially, to the fact that I am a woman? Yes, I believe so, but now, even in this respect, fortunately or thanks to my skills or perhaps only to my strong determination, this belongs in the past.
I think of how many times I had to act with, and sometimes against the governing board, in order to develop MIX, company that started very quietly and kept with a low profile for several years. This as in a highly vertical Italian market where peering seemed both the keystone and a service competing with the transport and transit services of those offering the peering.
It took years before achieving the IX (Internet Exchange) model which is now recognised everywhere in Europe, open and without barriers, where anyone in possession of an AS is welcome … But effort is part of the game.
In this effort I was supported by my colleagues – who along the years have become friends – and co-founders of Euro-IX. Euro-IX is a successful example of open forum where we debate and coordinate efforts for the benefit of the whole Internet community.
This experience shared together, at the very beginning just with a few people taking the first steps towards the achievement of the IX model, later with a larger community representing every European country and many others in the world, has been for me and consequently for MIX itself a source improvement and growth. Doing it with my friends, was also a life gym.
Actually, those have been important years of learning, both for the people and for the market itself.
Perhaps MIX reached some goals more slowly than others.
Why such an effort?
Well, because in such a rapidly evolving world we have faithfully adhered to the successful European models that espouse openness of the market – firstly in Italy but strongly linked to that of our foreign friends.
Amongst all this only one thing is really written in the stone:
never act in direct competition with our members’ business,
operate neutrally and
never considering a peering service as a money source in itself.
Every internal battle, every ‘lost’ opportunity, everything has been justified by the strong belief that we had to maintain the super-parties role of IXes and in particular of MIX, without discrediting it by giving in to market dynamics which we do not believe is compatible with the role of an Internet Exchange.
IXs are born within the ecosystem of Internet as neutral substrate, functional to its development. IXs can optimise Internet paths, while enabling the freedom and autonomy of traffic routing, favouring openness against closure, protecting the market from monopolies, and balancing the market logic of transports.
Therefore I do believe that an IX has a big responsibility and must be an example of neutrality. The stability and growth of an IX must guarantee this type of ecosystem.
Rethinking to the Euro-IX experience, I’m now certain that in the domain of IXs, the concept of ensemble is the keystone to success:
On the one side every IX is born to operate primarily inside its country of origin – where it knows the actors, the market dynamics, the political-economical implications, where it knows where it can ‘touch’ the ecosystem to improve it
On the other hand, the ensemble of IXs can act at a global level, intervening on the dynamics of the overall Internet, which by construction is a whole and only entity.
Unfortunately though, the millstone of the business-oriented is slowly but more and more clearly encroaching on our micro-world, where nowadays the strategy of the ‘IP routes trawling’ seems to prevail over a more global stability and growth.
I do not believe this is the right way ahead, I believe that attempts to predominating can only bring confusion in favour of old market logics.
But when things are changing and moving, there’s more fervour, passion, need to exchange new ideas and possibly to battle too. New efforts? Yes, but this is the amusing part of my job.
A long time ago, in Operations the world was very fragmented – web admins, sysadmins, database administrators. Now most people at good companies are generalists. Tools allow you to administrate all of the different programs in the same way. Specialists still exist, but for most day to day operations, specialists are unnecessary.
On the other side, traditional network engineers are in a world all on their own. Networking companies try to push this mindset, through interfaces and designs that de-emphasize interoperability and certification tracks which emphasize knowledge in single-vendor environments. Once someone has spent years and thousands of dollars on studying for their CCIE, there is a huge barrier to changing technologies and mindsets. The emphasis on certifications is just another way to reinforce the idea that network engineers are special and need to be held to a different standard.
We must learn from the Operations DevOps world. DevOps encourages the use of tools, quick turnover cycles, and intercommunication between teams in order to lower errors while deploying and encourage deployment. Tools allow developers and other technical colleagues to self-service their needs.
This new mindset is required to scale systems up to their current large state. Even medium sized companies may need to administer huge numbers of systems due to VMs and containerizing services in for security and helping to up the scale. Network engineers cannot be a single chokepoint in this environment. As well, network engineers should not have to spend the majority of their day assigning ports and vlans manually.
In the past few years, automation tools and network operating systems have finally become interoperable. Puppet Labs has led the charge with pushing custom agents for traditional network OS’es (like IOS and Junos), as well as partnering with newer operating systems that can run native agents (like EOS or Cumulus Linux).
Without tools, network changes are usually made manually at the command line. Even cut and pasting a known good configuration can incur errors… so many times in my life I’ve pasted a large configuration, only to have the buffers fill up and part of my configuration left out. Using network automation tools to commit changes to a central repository can ensure that manual errors are a thing of the past. Code reviews allow a second layer of protection and automated tests can prevent minor typos from bringing down your network. Automated configuration pushes ensure that no switch will be forgotten when pushing the latest firewall rule.
I’ve been working within the networking industry since 2007. This isn’t the longest time compared to some of you die-hard industry types, but with my first UKNOF in 2009 I was thrust straight into the fabulous world of ISPs, networking and geeks.
It was an odd industry to join as a young 20-something with a background in midwifery. I had jumped from a world of mums, babies, late-night shifts and a female-dominated workplace to a world of switches, routers, late-night maintenance and more males than I’d previously realised existed.
The strange thing is how similar these two worlds actually turned out to be. It’s true that being surrounded by geeky men (and I mean this in the most complimentary sense possible) has introduced me to characters I’d never have encountered in any other walk of life. In six years, I’ve met some truly strange and fabulous people, and there are even those I’ve met for the first time on multiple occasions (more on this later). It’s also true that I found being the only woman present at a several-hundred-strong conference can be intimidating. But the story I want to tell isn’t one of sexism: it’s of a community of geeks that includes both genders and is becoming more welcoming all the time.
When I first made the shift to the geek-world, there were times when my gender made things harder. Some of my male colleagues couldn’t seem to speak to me or even look me in the eye; some thought I must be a sales person; and others assumed I knew nothing about the industry. Initially, of course, those few were right, but not because of my gender. I lacked experience, and the vast majority of the people I met were very kind about that. They helped me to learn. And in some cases, I suspect that being female made it easier for me. I was such a rare commodity that they easily tolerated my presence and my questions: even the silly ones. And the more enlightened amongst them realised that the silliest questions are sometimes exactly the right ones because they come from a place without assumptions based on specific experience.
Over time my knowledge grew and my face became familiar. For me, the names around me got faces or sometimes the faces got names and a lot of the companies became suppliers or customers (occasionally both). More recently, turning up to events is about greeting old friends but that didn’t happen overnight. It was a gradual process that happened through the industry’s many events.
Many of you will be familiar with the set-up at UKNOF, LINX, LONAP and various smaller geek meets, but those who have never attended might appreciate a brief description. These are not standard sales events or even networking events where your whole purpose is to meet people who might get you the next step up the corporate ladder. Instead, these events are about the free exchange of ideas; a place to meet up with the real brains behind the internet in the UK. You are uniquely able to hear technical talks about the new ideas that companies are implementing, hear predictions about where things could be heading and encourage strong relationships between companies working together to push the industry forward.
The real work, however, gets started when the day finishes and everyone heads off to the pub. It’s a chance to chat to presenters about their chosen subject and offer a two-way dialogue. The first step, of course, is to congratulate them on a great talk with the gift of beer, and from that beginning some of the most inspirational ideas can be generated. Increasingly, for me, it’s a chance to catch up with friends from conferences past that I had not seen for months or years, and to find out all the great (or sometimes not-so-great) things they have been working on.
Of course, there are also always going to be those awkward meet-ups where I am re-introduced to someone who has no memory of me whatsoever. I can think of at least two guys that I have met and talked to on two or three occasions before they had any clue who I was. Some of them I suspect remembered little because eye-contact was actually beyond them, and it’s quite hard to put a face to a face when you’ve never seen it. Others perhaps have so much going on inside their heads that the memory had been pushed out to make room for some router config that was way more important. Either way, it can be disheartening when someone doesn’t just forget your name: they forget that a meeting has happened at all.
But the message to take away from this is that it isn’t just about gender or lack of respect. Geeks of all kinds can be prone to finding social situations challenging, and by perseverance, I became a known and respected member of these circles.
As my involvement in the industry developed, so did my love for new pursuits. I think the key driver for being part of this field is a thirst for knowledge and a keen interesting in trying something new. I’m fascinated by new technology but have you ever noticed how an interest in the new and old go hand in hand? My interests started to broaden and I soon realised that there was fun to be had with these geeks. I’m not ashamed to say that I love steam, old buildings, grand Victorian engineering and board games (yes, even the really geeky board games). The more pumping-stations and heritage railways I visited, the more I realised how fascinating these places were. Working in a highly technical field meant that I appreciated the engineering more and more.
Then in 2013 I had been invited out to London for a Friday night gathering and found myself at a loose end on the Saturday. So I did what any single young female would do when she was on her own in London: I went to my favourite steam museum. I was lucky enough to have a suitably geeky friend willing to accompany me and to run around after me as I excitedly gave him a tour. At that point there was no doubt about it: I was a true geek. I had tried to hide it for the whole of my life but my colours were out.
Now I’m proud to admit that I’m a geek who has probably been to more heritage railways than most train enthusiasts. This Valentine’s Day, I took my boyfriend to the same museum. Although I sold it as a treat for him, I can assure you that there was no difference in the enjoyment we got out of it.
Six years into my career-change, I’ve found that respect often comes from being like-minded. People like those people who are similar to them, and I have embraced those geek tendencies. On top of that, I don’t mind getting my hands dirty and that can often go a long way in helping a project move forwards. I’ve slept on data-centre floors, bruised my arms shifting equipment, racked servers and even accidentally knocked out the occasional very important cable (which I’ve come to realise is a rite of passage). I can remember, clearly, a ‘quick trip to the DC’ at the end of a big project where I realised that the vital fibre link between the racks hadn’t been run by our contractors. Without hesitation I spent 12hrs in the DC single-handedly running bundles of fibre. I often wonder how many times I climbed up and down the ladder, but it was too many times to count. Somehow I managed to get the project finished about thirty minutes before the customer arrived on site, and it was worth a gruelling stint to achieve that.
So this post was ostensibly about sexism in the industry. I can tell you a great story about everyday sexism in B&Q if you like, something so shocking that I really didn’t know what to say to the guy. If you are interested in knowing more just comment below and I will tell the story. But beyond those initial awkward encounters and the occasional assumption that I was just in sales, I couldn’t tell you a single industry-related tale. You might want to read about how I battle with male chauvinism every day as part of my job but I can’t tell you that. I work in a male-dominated industry every day and I enjoy every minute of it. I’ve been in charge of multi-million pound network roll outs and I’ve presented every week to a boardroom full of men. I’ve been in charge of teams of network engineers, software developers, cabling engineers, support desk engineers and systems engineers, but not once felt belittled or patronised.
How this has happened I can’t say for sure. I would love to put it down to the way I work. I’m honest when I don’t know something, I’m firm if disagree with a decision, I value peoples’ opinions and I’m willing to learn. I join in with office banter, enjoy the same pursuits as the guys, work hard and avoid at all costs using my gender to influence others.
But I think that in truth it’s about the industry itself being ready to accept women as much as anything else. Over the years I’ve seen big changes. I’m no longer the only female at conferences. There are a whole bunch of us now and as far as I can tell the others are just as passionate and dedicated as I am. It’s great to have some female company to even things up a bit but we need to do more to encourage women to get passionate about networking.
Over the last six years I have realised just how rewarding working in our industry as a women can be. There are some great female role-models so take every opportunity to talk to them, learn from them and emulate them in your own way. They have worked hard to get where they are today.
In short, I love the ISP industry. Wherever life takes me and whenever I wander off I always come back with a passion even deeper for my love of the people, the tech and the vibrancy of an industry that is constantly going from strength to strength. It is driven by a great bunch of people who should be proud of all they have achieved.
I was always a closet geek and I just needed some help to realise it.
Liz Fletcher is a trained Midwife; cable monkey; Project Manager; prolific prosecco drinker; part-time steam train driver; and occasional singer. As of 3/8/2015 she is looking for a new challenge.
Female blog posts to the fore with women in tech week on trefor.net
To be honest we shouldn’t have a “women in tech” week on this blog. We shouldn’t have to. However it is still very much the case that blokes hugely outnumber women in the tech industry and a bit of positive discrimination doesn’t do any harm, innit.
All my career I’ve worked “in tech” and there have been very few women on the scene. The only really different environment was at Timico which as a service provider employs lots of girls in customer service roles.This was of course very nice but did lead to problems. The guys and the gals in the office could never agree on what was the right temperature level for the air-conditioning.
Notwithstanding this I am having a week of tech posts by women. The contributors come from a wide variety of roles and backgrounds, ranging from newly qualified graduates to CEOs. I have as is usual in “themed weeks on this blog” shied away from specifying any of the content. This generally results in a wide variety of subjects being discussed and makes for more interesting reading.
Some of the posts do refer to the gender issue and that is fine. Some are pure commentaries on what the author is working on at the moment.
The guest posts will appear every afternoon this week with the first one going live at 1pm each day. Tune in this week for great content on trefor.net.
At first glance this map of London broadband speeds coverage is a bit of a shocker. It’s been published by Mayor Boris Johnson (or by his minions) based on inputs from Ofcom.
You can see that the residential areas outside the centre are by and large well served albeit with a fair few “not so superfast spots”. However central london is a nightmare.
One presumes that the same logic applies to central London as to business parks where FTTC is frequently not provided. The rationale is notionally absence of an adequate business case. Cynics have been known to suggest that the real reason is that operators (naming no names) prefer to push businesses towards higher value Ethernet connections knowing that superfast isn’t available and the bandwidth they must have (as Yoda might have put it).
We make no call here. Simply report he facts. I would be a bit dischuffed if I was in an area that could only get “fast” broadband if all around me were on the blistering stuff.
For your convenience, and because the embedded pics are just screen grabs of the original interactive maps we provide the legend:
Superfast – Next generation broadband (> 30Mbit download speed) is available at 1 to 100% premises within postcode
Fast – Maximum download speeds from 10 up to 30Mbit
Slow – Maximum download speeds from 2 up to 10Mbit
No Data – No data available for this postcode
Interesting to consider that 2 – 10Mbps is labelled as slow by the GLA folk. Can’t disagree with them. It’s also the uplink I’d be wanting to make sure of. The old ADSL uplink speeds don’t cut the mustard anymore.
I’ve done you a zoomed out version of the featured image – shows a lot more superfast broadband availability.
On a slightly different but similar subject I was browsing the Twittersphere for broadband related tweets and came across thissun:
It was this response that struck a chord – the forgotten people of the internet world. London or Aberdeenshire. Notspots know no geographic boundaries, only population densities.
@sarabudge_DSSB @BTScotlandNews @Aberdeenshire like learn about this too, but apparently I may not get the chance till 2018 or not at all😡
B4RN as all of you should know is a rural broadband network providing a 1Gps symmetrical service to parts of the countryside near Lancaster.
B4RN has produced a video that has been entered into a competition. It features @cyberdoyle plus many volunteers seen out digging trenches high up on the hills in in deepest mid winter. They are helping themselves to provide themselves with decent broadband connectivity, an essential for life nowadays.
It’s a world ignored by mainstream providers of broadband service because there is no business case. As a result the B4RN footprint is growing. The featured image isn’t good quality because the vid isn’t available in hi res until after the competition judging is over. It does however give you a feel for the B4RN geographic footprint.
It takes 2 hours to drive from one end of the B4RN area to the other just because the terrain is so difficult and the roads consequently windy. According to @cyberdoyle you can drive for 2Km without a customer in sight.
It isn’t really just the network operators that find it uneconomical to service these rural areas. The government, which through its BDUK initiative, has hitherto considered it too expensive to facilitate broadband into these areas. The notional spec offered to prospective customers in these areas is 2Mbps. Totally inadequate.
I have just upgraded my 81 year old father in the Isle of Man from ADSL Max to 80Mbps FTTC. The cost difference was very small and in fact he said he was perfectly happy with his existing service. Now that he has the new connection even he, at 81 and with very simple internet access requirements (email, guardian online etc), says he can notice the difference.
Maybe 4G might be the answer but B4RN provides 1Gig at £30 a month with unlimited bandwidth. No way you’ll get that from a mobile service. In fact you won’t get an unlimited bandwidth bundle. It’s just too expensive for mobile operators to provide.
Now B4RN is a special case. A not for profit with a community of helpers willing to pitch in because it’s the only way they’ll get broadband. B4RN also has, in Barry Forde, someone that knows what he is talking about when it comes to networks. Most rural areas won’t have a Barry Forde.
So if you are in a B4RN area then you are lucky. If not and you can’t get broadband I don’t know what to say really. You need a @cyberdoyle and a Barry Forde.
Now watch the video:
Loads of B4RN stuff on this site btw. Search results here.
PS expect an extended “director’s cut” version in due course. They were filming for 3 days.
Apple LONAP hook up pushes connected capacity above 1Tbps
Apple Europe (AS714) has hooked up its network to the LONAP Internet Exchange and taken the London based IXP’s connected capacity to over 1Tbps.
Apple has been busy over the last few months hooking up with Internet Exchanges around the world. We in the industry figured that this made sense as you often hear of ISP network traffic noticeably bursting when the likes of Apple issue software releases. Use of Peering exchanges is not only an economic way of delivering data but normally a better performing solution.
Now that Apple Pay availability has been announced in the UK for July it becomes even clearer in my mind. Speed of connection is important for financial transactions and although Apple have not officially commented on this subject, connecting to LONAP will greatly help with the lower latencies experienced with a connection to an IXP (Internet Exchange Point).
Having Apple on board is a milestone for LONAP and the 16 x 10Gbps ports they have ordered takes the IXP to over 1Tbps of connected capacity. Apple is the latest in a series of high profile names connecting to LONAP. Recent new members include Netflix and Microsoft.
Peering via an Internet Exchange has become a no brainer in the internet networking world. This is shown in the growth of the traffic over LONAP. In 2014 the peak traffic at LONAP doubled and this trend is looking like continuing for 2015.
The fact that LONAP is attracting such high profile members to the exchange is an endorsement of the IXP’s strategy to maintain a high quality network that is very good value for money. The first singlemode fibre 10GigE port costs only £375 a month with subsequent ports at £300.
The internet industry is a great place to be at the moment. Long may it continue. A full list of LONAP members can be seen here. LONAP is a member owned not for profit organisation.
The Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, David Anderson QC, yesterday published his report into investigatory powers. The Anderson report on terrorism legislation is almost 400 pages long and includes 124 recommendations so you need some stamina to plough through it.
Following the report’s publication Home Secretary, Theresa May MP, gave a statement (watch it here) to the House of Commons. She set out a timetable and provided some general comments:
A draft bill (Snooper’s Charter revisited) will be published in the Autumn and subject to pre-legislative scrutiny by a Joint Committee. A Bill will then be published early in the New Year with a view to passing a final act before the DRIPA sunset clause come into effects at the end of 2016.
While generally accepting Anderson’s recommendations, May seemed to question the viability of his proposals to require judicial authorisations for warrants, highlighting the need for balancing the responsibilities of the Judiciary and Executive.
In addition to the draft bill, Government will look at a reform of the mutual legal assistance framework (in response to the Sheinwald Report which has not yet been published).
The Anderson Report
Overall approach by David Anderson is as follows:
‘A clear, coherent and accessible scheme, adapted to the world of internet-based communications and encryption, in which:
a. public authorities have limited powers, but are not shut out from places where they need access to keep the public safe;
b. procedures are streamlined, notably in relation to warrants and the authorisation of local authority requests for communications data;
c. safeguards are enhanced, notably by:
i. the authorisation of warrants by senior judges;
ii. additional protections relating to the collection and use of communications by the security and intelligence agencies in bulk;
iii. greater supervision of the collection of communications data, including judicial authorisation where privileged and confidential material is in issue or novel and contentious requests are made;
iv. improved supervision of the use of communications data, including in conjunction with other datasets and open-source intelligence; and
v. a new, powerful, visible and accountable intelligence and surveillance auditor and regulator.’
This forthcoming bill is going to require very careful scrutiny and it will be interesting to see how many of Anderson’s recommendations are implemented. Governments have a habit of listening to these things only when it suits them. Theresa May is already suggesting that she wants the power herself that Anderson is saying should be given to Judges. It’s exactly this situation that we want to avoid.
In principle I don’t think any sane person can object to a government wanting to make it easier for themselves to catch more crooks. However we don’t necessarily need to give them authority to monitor every one of us. Why can’t they stick to just monitoring suspected criminals?
Thanks to the ITSPA secretariat for some of the inputs to this post.
Other Snooper’s Charter posts (lots of them) here.
Superfast broadband connection vouchers – hands up if you’ve had one
Slightly annoys me. I get this email from HMRC winding up my expectations. “Up to £3k towards a superfast broadband connection”. Now I already have an 80/20 line but actually it is rubbish. I’m about 800 metres from the cab. It’s a long way. I only get 30 megs down and 7 megs up. It’s a bit of a disappointment but on the other hand much better than the old ADSL2+ I had. Maybe superfast broadband connection vouchers are for me.
So when HMRC send me an email suggesting that I might avail myself of a three thousand pounds grant I think. Okaay. Goood stuff. Maybe I’ll be able to use it to connect to a nearer cabinet. There is one I know.
I clicked on the find out how link and entered my coordinates. It a message jumped out of the screen, punched me in the face and said no way jose do I get a grant.
If I lived in Brum, Coventry, Derby, Chesterfield, Leicester, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Oxford, Stoke on Trent or Wolverhampton I’d be ok. Maybe.
How totally crap is that? Of course I’m not really bothered, says I putting hands nonchalantly behind my back and looking distractedly into the distance. I am though. It bothers me that there is a finite list of places that can get the grant.
How did they figure that one out? Totally pathetic. What makes Milton Keynes more deserving than where I live?
The other pathetic bit is that HMRC know exactly where I live yet they still spammed me with hope inducing messages. Messages that make them sound great and good and generous whilst knowing that really they were just playing with my emotions. Lifting me up, dangling me there and then letting go.
“Let’s have a bit of a laugh” goes the conversation. Well I don’t find it funny.
Superfast broadband Connection Vouchers. To have and have not.
Exclusive behind the scenes footage of how we utterly destroyed some routers in the interest of science in the making of our broadband movie
Most of you will have seen the broadbandrating shotgun movie by now. Actually to call it a movie is a bit of a stretch. In fact we would have to stretch the footage by an hour an a half or so to do so because the original is only 52 seconds long.
52 seconds of pure gold nevertheless. What people don’t see in these 52 seconds is the immense amount of work that has to go on in preparation and on the day to make such a blockbuster. Take a gander at this introductory video.
Many years ago I worked as an extra on a movie called “Experience preferred but not essential”. It was made in the Isle of Man and I was home from Uni for the summer. One thing I specifically remember was the frequent meal stops. We had breakfast and a full blown 3 course lunch and I got ten quid for the day.
No meals were provided on set during the making of this broadbandrating movie. We were all back in the office before lunchtime and got our own sandwiches from the caff downstairs.
And finally:
Four old routers were destroyed in the making of this video including a BT Homehub, two netgears and a technicolour. The Technicolour proved to be very resilient. However this was, ahem, down to the fact that our marksman missed it three times from very close range before thoroughly despatching it with his fourth shot.
We have to thank marksman Clinton Slingsby for turning up to do pyrotechnics shooting, Farmer Bill for the loan of his location and local Lincolnshire weather forecasters for keeping the rain away until we had the last reel of film in the can, so to speak. Also in the various media in this post you will see me and Sasha, able member of the trefor.net staff. Finally thanks to Tom at Eyup Media for putting the film together so professionally.
I do have some stills but seem to be having problems uploading them right now – I’ll do a separate post later.
Ciao amigos
No potatoes were destroyed during the making of this broadband movie.
I know we got thousands of you thinking when we put out a post last week asking what had happened to the router. Well it was all a taster for our social media broadband marketing – video style.
Last Thursday we had a corporate day out shooting. This was shooting in both senses of the word. We shot routers both with shotguns and with a camera. In fact we shot the shotgun with a camera as well.
It was all done in the name of social media publicity for broadbandrating.com. Here’s the video that came out of it all:
Look out for more from the filming over the coming days.
Many thanks to our video production manager Tom Davies for his outstanding media production skills.
If you are looking for help with a corporate video then do get in touch. This is all part of our trefor.net Technology Marketing capability. Look out also for an announcement this week regarding a series of events we are putting together around the theme of Technology Marketing.
Just goes to show how vital broadband is seen to be everywhere. You can imagine every government looking at league tables for broadband speed and % coverage and thinking “we have to get our country up the table if we want to be competitive”.
I’ve lost track of where the UK is in it’s progress towards ubiquity in broadband services. As I recall the target was 95% of the population by (the end of) 2017. I did follow it for some years but my enthusiasm became bogged down in the mire of government obfuscation (quite like that phrase 🙂 ) and the general lack of transparency associated with the whole project. You get my drift.
I guess if you live in an idyllic rural hamlet surrounded by meadows, tinkling streams and birdsong but don’t yet have decent internet access you will have been following progress of the fibre broadband roll-out very closely. All I can say is that one of the reasons I might eventually move to said paradise is to get away from it all, but I know I’m not helping here.
The last census (2011) showed the UK having a population of 63.2 million people living in 26.4 million households. The OECD report of 2014 suggested the UK had 36.2 broadband lines per 100 people (23.2 million lines). That gives 87.88 penetration of broadband to households in the UK in 2014. The data, which was supplied by HM Govt will have been old at the time and will also now be out of date in any case.
I imagine we are still on for the 95% in 2017. Don’t know how this compares with Tunisia’s 100% by 2020 but I doubt the UK will be at that level. I’m not suggesting that Tunisia is a major competitor of the UK in global markets but they will almost certainly have worse problems in connecting to rural communities than us in the UK. From the tweet it’s also not possible to tell what the Tunisian government minister means when it says “high speed”. In fact it’s difficult to find out much about broadband in Tunisia using Google.
The point is that Tunisia is demonstrating the right kind of ambition.
Should anyone have any more info then feel free to share. In the meantime I’ll just be looking at brochures for country cottagessurfing Tunisian holiday websites cracking on in the office here with my high speed ja.net connection.
Picked up this article in Total Telecom. China plans to spend $327Bn on rolling out ubiquitous broadband by 2020. The slowest performance will be 20Mps with urban connurbations (or however you spel it:) ) of more than 200k people getting 100Megs.
I don’t know how that compares with the per head spending in the UK but I guess the two things that stick in the mind are the 100Megs in cities and 20Megs on the farm. It’s very difficult to come up with a business model that justifies the investment but of course in China that doesn’t matter.
The UK government should take heed though. In some respect, at least in the cities, competition will ensure that we get the speeds we need. Poor old Farmer Giles however is never going to be looked after. Unless he looks after himself and even then they will probably be exporting milk from China to rural Britain because Farmer 賈爾斯 (look it up) is going to have an edge on him.
Actually there are some things you just can’t leave to a competitive marketplace. I was at RIPE70 in Amsterdam last week (now a distant memory). Someone from the GSMA stood up and towed some bland corporate line on how market competition meant that net neutrality was not an issue in the mobile space. We all know that this is total rubbish. At least in the UK.
I was able to inform the assembly that the only reason net neutrality had been accepted by some mobile operators in the UK was down to 3 years of intensive lobbying (including by ITSPA) and the tacit threat of government legislation if operators didn’t toe the line.
So sometimes governments do need to get involved, even if as in the case of net neutrality they were just a threatening presence in the room. I think that our government should really start thinking about how a competitive UK plc should have a competitive broadband infrastructure, and by this I don’t mean the cheapest services although that does help.
We have always struggled with finding MPs that understand technology enough to be able to make informed decisions. I even recall an anecdote a few years ago whereby the civil servants who worked on the Digital Britain report had all been joking about the fact that none of them had ever been on Facebook. I guess that having ex Facebook Director Joanna Shields in the government could help here. We now also have former Telegraph Technology Editor Matt Warman as an MP.
Only time will tell whether these new kids on the Parliamentary block will make any difference. We shall see. In the meantime if you live in China broadband is coming your way.
RIPE70 was held in the Okura hotel in Amsterdam. Very nice hotel. Nice pool, sauna, bars etc etc. Amsterdam was very nice too. Great restaurants, picturesque streets and canals. Only downsides were the lethal nature of the roads and the beer. Re the roads you have to look out for cars, cyclists and trams. All on different roadways. I made it back alive. As far as beer goes all I can say is Heiniken. Nuff said.
So far so good. The purpose of this post though is not to tell you what a great time I had. 5* hotel, beer, cocktails, great food etc. It is to reinforce the value of attending such meetings.
Even if you don’t go to the talks, and I did go to a few, the real value is in the corridor chats. At RIPE, just as at most internet conferences, as long as you don’t spout rubbish, you can expect to be sitting down for a coffee with some real heavy hitters in the networking game. Or a beer. Or food.
This industry must be amongst the most egalitarian going. The opportunity to make useful contacts is very real in attending these conferences. You do have to understand how to play the game though.
I remember at the last LINX meeting there were a couple of sales guys stood wearing suits talking to themselves. That’s because they didn’t get it. If the sales people had turned up in jeans, or shorts and t-shirts it would have been a different story.
LONAP attends these meetings because a big proportion of our membership sends engineers to them. It’s a great place for sorting out ongoing issues (planning bandwidth upgrades for example) and meeting new prospects.
It isn’t unusual to have over 50 conversations during a RIPE meeting. Conversations that might normally be categorised as sales or customer support touch-points. You try having that many useful conversations during a normal business week
They don’t have to be sales conversations. Could be pure engineering idea swapping.
Anyway if you’ve never been you need to sell it to the boss. See ya.
The chart in the featured image is the yearly 1 day average internet traffic growth at Lonap.
What you see is effectively a reflection of how the internet is growing. The Lonap traffic includes organic growth plus the addition of new members but the details needn’t concern us really – it’s all up and to the right. It’s pretty much the same story in every IXP (except IXP Cardiff but more on that anon). Also peak traffic on the exchange is quite a bit higher than the numbers shown.
In 19 months the traffic has almost quadrupled. It’s also interesting to note the drop off at holiday times – notably Christmas and the school summer holidays .
Lonap, in case you didn’t know is an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) and is one of the two main players in London. London in turn is one of the key points of presence on the internet, Amsterdam and Frankfurt being the others in Europe.
It makes sense for networks to employ peering via an internet exchange for both cost and performance reasons. It also makes sense to use multiple IXPs. Only yesterday the Amsterdam based exchange AMS-IX had an outage. It was apparently human error on the part of a member connecting to the exchange.
This type of issue could happen to anyone, despite lots of efforts to minimise the likelihood of a problem. The point is that when an unplanned outage like this happens networks need a back up solution. Whilst IP transit does the job it would be far better to have a suitable IXP alternative.
These alternatives aren’t always available at a given location but where they are then you should consider using one.
In the meantime internet traffic growth is making this industry an exciting place to be. Check out our other internet peering posts here.
In his week as guest curator Rob Pickering of ipcortex now has a post by Amandine Le Pape who discusses WebRTC federation.
I’ve held a view for a long time that the world would be a better place if there were a widely used standard for messaging federation, so that I could for example have one universal public chat address on my business card just like I have a phone number and e-mail address. I know quite a few folks disagree with this, and think that it is a “feature” rather than a bug that they have to use a myriad of apps each with their own private chat space and no interoperability, but I think this is a big usability headache.
Like most things, there is an Internet standard for messaging interop: XMPP, but it doesn’t have the wide adoption of other standards like SMTP for e-mail, or HTTP for the web. In fact it suffered a bit of a body blow when Google dropped support for messaging interop via XMPP from its front line messaging products a couple of years ago – I wrote about this at the time. Whilst XMPP is a well documented protocol, it is over complex with many extensions to do fairly basic operations. A new initiative has emerged from the folks at Matrix which aims to produce a de-facto standard protocol for messaging interoperability – I wish them well and suspect that this is probably our last chance to sort this out. Here is what Amandine Le Pape from Matrix has to say…
Take a look at your smartphone. Chances are, among the various icons on the screen, there are quite a few messaging apps and apps with a messaging capability. Whether text, chat, calling or via video, every week brings a new app to download. We use all these different applications daily – LinkedIn for colleagues, Facebook for family, WhatsApp for the sports club, Viber for some international contacts, Skype for video and that is without even touching messages sent from within other apps.
The only point where these apps and the profiles on them converge, is on your phone. We then have to juggle what app connects me to what person, or holds the information you need. Matrix.org is a new open source and non-profit project aiming to fix the problem of fragmented IP-communications between devices, people and services with a very pragmatic and novel approach. Matrix defines a persistent data layer for the Web, with open federation, strong cryptographic guarantees, eventual consistency and push semantics. Like the Web, Matrix can be used for many purposes, from Instant Messaging to IoT, via VoIP and WebRTC. With it the “missing link” of interoperable calling between WebRTC silos becomes interoperable and as simple as a single HTTP PUT to invite the callee, and a single HTTP PUT for them to answer. Meanwhile, OTT messaging apps can finally federate by synchronizing their conversations into Matrix; letting users own their history and select their preferred app and service.
As an open source project, any developer can use Matrix (it’s all on Github) to easily create and host their own feature-rich real-time communication apps that openly interoperate with one another, or add such features to an existing service whilst building on the Matrix community of users. Existing communication services can also easily join in and integrate with the Matrix ecosystem, extending their reach while participating in this collaborative effort to break down the walls between communication silos.
Matrix is an open project and will stay so because for Matrix to achieve its mission of making all communications services interoperable we believe it needs to be truly open; giving people access to take all the code we produce to use and build on top of it. We need the trust and support of those who want to use Matrix in their own applications and startups and want to see an end to all walled garden applications and closed silos.
We firmly believe in doing what is right for the consumer and the internet user. As people begin to use interoperable communications tools, service providers will have to compete on the quality of their service, security and features rather than relying on locking people into their walled garden. Can you imagine using a phone network that only allowed you to call people on the same network? We genuinely hope that one day, Facebook, Whatsapp, BBM etc will all integrate with Matrix voluntarily.
Once consumers realise they can choose to use their favourite app, from their trusted app provider, and still be able to communicate with friends using competing apps and services, they will likely demand integration and interoperability.
Matrix is here to help foster innovation throughout the Internet. We are making communications safer, more ubiquitous and innovative. Generic messaging and data synchronization across the web will never be quite the same again. The project may well provide the disruption needed to change how real-time data is shared on the Internet, and usher in a new age of services which by default collaborate rather than compete. There is no doubt that a revolution of sorts has begun and Matrix intends to fan the flames.
As a company or an individual, whether you believe that today’s communications are fragmenting and need to change or not, check out the Matrix.org website or follow us on Twitter @Matrixdotorg. We also recently launched our ‘Matrix Console’ app which is free to download from the Google Play or Apple App Store.
Amandine Le Pape is the Co-founder and Business lead for Matrix.org
Welcome to Manchester and UKNOF31. This is the thrice yearly gathering of the networking industry in the UK. Each meeting seems to be bigger and better than the last and today as people converge on the Manchester Central conference centre I have to tell you it’s shorts weather. No incriminating photos though.
You can check out the agenda here and the live blog starts below. The featured pic btw is the kitchen at Akbars where we had the pre UKNOF curry.
OK kids it’s day 2 at Euro-IX and the conference is in full swing with a packed room at the Pullman Palm Beach in Marseille. Last night was the usual humdinger with dinner at La Nautique in the Old Harbour followed by a bit of community singing on the bus and then dancing to Abba back at the bar in the hotel. We know how to live in the IXP game.
Morning all. Trust we are bright and breezy on this fine Mediterranean morning. I am in Marseille for Euro-IX 26. These Euro-IX fora (not forums) happen every 6 months and are a great way for keeping up with what’s going on in the world of Internet Exchange Points (IXP). Keep this page open for updates as they happen at the conference together, of course with insightful comments.
Transit costs plummeting but not as fast as peering
Last time I looked at transit costs I was paying something like 60pence/Mbps, admittedly only for a 1Meg commit. My habit of sharing blog posts on Facebook seems to be attracting an eclectic bunch of ads and this morning I was pushed one from Hurricane Electric for transit pricing!
This pricing, which is being touted as a special offer at $3,700 a month for 10Gbps. That’s 37 cents a Meg or about 25 pence according to Google. Much cheaper than I was paying a couple or three years ago.
However nota benne the LONAP 10Gig port price which is currently £375 a month for the first with subsequent ports a rock bottom £300 a month. That’s less than four pence a Meg. Even cheaper if you have more than one port.
Now it makes sense to have a blend of transit and peering, particularly as you can’t access all routes via peering but you can see how it makes real sense from a cost perspective to bias your network towards the latter. And it’s not just pricing. Using a peering exchange such as LONAP also makes technical sense as you get better adjacency – fewer router hops on average between you and your destination. Lower latency connections.
The pricing in this post is relevant now but one thing is certain and that it has further to go down. We continue to be in boom times in the internet networking game and there is no sign of it letting up. 10Gig ports on the exchange have long since replaced 1Gig as the bread and butter and the world is only waiting for 100Gig to become cost effective before moving en masse.
Currently the main cost benefit in moving to 100Gig is that you need fewer wavelengths. ie fewer fibre strands which makes it more manageable physically. Otherwise 100Gig kit costs 10 x 10Gig kit. Second generation equipment should bring down both costs and footprints.
Note not all peering providers will have pricing as low as LONAP but they will almost certainly all be cheaper than transit. Also I only quote what HE pushed me. Experience tells that you can always get a better price by haggling – the internet market. Alright darlin’? Do you a fantastic price on 10Gig?!
Internet traffic dip during eclipse – unusual behaviour for a big news event
We saw an unusual internet traffic dip in traffic across the LONAP network this morning as presumably people downed their devices and went outside to watch the solar eclipse.
I only found out the eclipse was happening yesterday as the papers started to publish guides on how to watch it without looking directly into the sun.
The chart thumbnail on the left shows the traffic building normally for the day. Then as the scheduled time for the event draws nearer you can see the upward curve stops abruptly and then drops down again.
These solar eclipses are, we are told very rare events. The internet traffic pattern that resulted is also rare:)
I was having a late breakfast in London at the time of the eclipse. Between mouthfulls I kept popping outside to see if there was any sign of it. Not a single ray! In fact the sun was nowhere to be seen in London. V disappointing.
LONAP is a London based Internet Exchange Point and I have to say that I am privileged to be on their board. You can check out other peering posts here. As far as I can recall there are no other eclipse related posts:)
internet traffic dip during eclipse – exciting though the eclipse was a disappointment.
Average broadband prices roughly equal 5 pints of beer a month ( 3 pints if you live in London).
We have introduced an average broadband price element to broadbandrating.com. This allows punters to see what the average monthly cost of a broadband line is over the period of a contract.
The average pricing takes into consideration any up front incentives and also any set up costs (router delivery charges etc). Where a reduced cost line rental is available the lower price is assumed. This is normally for an annual upfront payment.
The “normal” broadband (ie ADSL) average price works out at £14.35 a month. This is slightly skewed by TalkTalk who don’t bundle any telephone calls into their deal whilst the others chuck in at least weekend calls. Seeing as a lot of people only use their mobile phones these days we don’t see that as a huge issue.
Monthly charges will increase once the initial incentives are out of contract but in theory there isn’t anything to stop consumer switching supplier every time this happens.
The average “fibre” pricing is £24.42, also taking into consideration offers and incentives (the TalkTalk telephony observation remains)
For periods of time when ISPs aren’t offering cashback or rewards their average prices are significantly higher and presumably means lower new customer signup/higher churn. You have to believe that ISPs are also assuming low churn after the initial contract period as I can’t see much margin in their deals otherwise.
The cost difference between normal broadband and fibre is around £10 which presumably represents the difference in bandwidth usage costs. Broadband is certainly very cheap now. The average price of a pint of beer in the UK is £2.90. That means that regular broadband is the equivalent of around 5 pints a month. Fibre is more like 8 1/2 pints. That’s very affordable.
Londoners get an even better deal which will bemuse our rural friends as beer is usually a lot more expensive in the capital. Their tourist rip off prices are nearer a fiver a pint so we are talking less than three pints for a broadband line. Amazingly affordable I’d say:)
Online rights framework will help safeguard privacy
The internet is increasingly key to our daily lives and a crucial part of public policy making with ramifications across all areas. However, too often what we get from politicians is poorly thought through kneejerkery. I’ve seen this myself, on far too many occasions.
Just to pick up a few examples, when we were re-writing the Defamation Bill, there was a proposal being pushed that ISPs should be required to filter out any defamatory content on their network – quite a tall order.
David Cameron has been particularly bad – you may remember his suggestion at the time of the riots that he should be able to turn off social media to avoid panic. It took a lot of work to stop that and make it something that was ‘not even considered’. More recently, he’s been insisting that we should ban any messaging system that cannot be decrypted by GCHQ, completely failing to understand the essential link between encryption and cyber-security.
But this problem strikes the opposition too. There have been some really alarming comments about filtering out legal material online that completely miss the point of what is technically possible or desirable. And of course there are people in each party who do actually get it, although not all of us get to have the necessary influence over our front benches to achieve sensible outcomes.
My party has taken these issues seriously, and there are several things we hope to achieve in this area. One of these is stable sensible regulation – something that almost shouldn’t need to be said. Brilliant new ideas can easily be killed off if regulation is tweaked unexpectedly and long term investment will drop off if there is a risk of irrational rule changes. We as politicians should set a framework of principles, which should then be relatively stable. We should call on technical experts for help and have discussions with the community and businesses. We can then setting the detailed online rights rules in a rational way. That has to be the best way forward.
I’ve been particularly working to develop a Digital Bill of Rights, setting a basic framework for what people should expect online when it comes to issues like privacy, net neutrality and more. This has become especially important since the Snowden revelations. All of us want security, and all of us want privacy. How do we try to achieve both of those goals? When should the police or security services be allowed to collect information on us, and for what purposes?
Typically, these issues have been dealt with largely secretively and reluctantly, and with a focus on specific data types. For example, strong controls were introduced on DNA data in the Protection of Freedoms Act, but the Police just sidestepped them when storing biometric information, without even attempting to learn the principles from DNA data.
So those are my two key points – stable and sensible regulation, and a clear principle framework for our online rights. If I’m re-elected I’ll fight for those but it would be great to have more colleagues to help with that.
If you want to help me achieve this vision, please consider helping me out – http://www.backjulian.co.uk has the details.
Julian Huppert is Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge. He has a scientific background and is one of a very small minority of our MPs who can grasp issues relating to internet technology.
Although one or two more might creep in that pretty much concludes the week’s posts on advice to the next government. Other political week posts on trefor.net are linked to below:
James Blessing discusses technology regulatory issues he sees that should be addressed by the next government.
Since we have a potential change of government coming up, it might be useful to see how well the current one has been doing in the telecoms and technology space and where the next one might repeat the same mistakes. These are the random scribblings of an individual, and not a position paper by ISPA or any company that I work for (though the are probably people in those organisations who agree with the sentiment).
There is a fine line that people in business need to tread when trying to get the government involved in something. Whilst there is often a space for government involvement, there is also some risk that they will try to dominate the process and move it from being a good idea to something that actually would have been better for all of us if they’d never been involved.
Let’s start with the biggest heffalump in the room, BDUK. Whilst the idea of government injecting funds into various projects to make sure the country’s infrastructure is the best in the world and no region gets left behind, most of the people in industry recognised that BT would win most (if not all) of the contracts. This isn’t because of the evil machinations of the government or BT (much though people would like to believe that) but rather because the “scheme” was designed by civil servants with a paranoia that Eurocrats would jump on any project that thought outside of the most convenient box.
The “good” news is that the third round of funding seems to be focusing on more creative solutions, but I fear for those communities that are going to be left with solutions that will leave them far behind their dense cousins in the cities. The bad news is that BT’s obsession with copper (which they have a lot of) rather than fibre (which they have a lot of too) seems to be continuing with G.fast. In an ideal world, someone in government would recognise that fibre is the way forward, but it seems that only the smaller altnets are the ones who are delivering it.
Moving on from infrastructure, we have the fun that is monitoring and content. The two largest parties seem to have developed an unhealthy obsession with “out-nannying” each other (and many individuals in other parties have agreed with them on occasion). The last two governments have both tried (and failed for different reasons) to introduce widescale, automated watcher programmes that keep an eye on all internet activity using potential terrorism threat and “think of the children” as their rallying cries. If I were a betting man, then I’d put money that without the more liberal elements in the next government, we’ll see the same legislation in a new format raise its head over the parapet. It’s as if Sir Humphrey’s spirit lives long around the echelons of Whitehall.
Indeed, by using the “think of the children” approach, we also appear to channelling the late Mary Whitehouse in terms of restricting access to “objectionable content”. Whilst I agree that children shouldn’t be exposed to it, the approach being used where end users get no choice in the matter removes “parental” responsibility in terms of their own media, literacy and educational development; as well as teaching an entire generation to bypass security settings to get to the things they want to. For one, I pity the IT admins of the future, who have to deal with a generation who have been conditioned that the only way to source content is to bypass access control.
But what of looking forward? What should we be pushing our government (and politicians) to do from their ivory tower? Personally, I think it comes down to number of (relatively) simple steps that they could promote, and then leave the market/society to work out:
Education – So much promise has been shown with the Raspberry Pi and the maker community when it comes to what can be done when you set the mind free, but schools’ curricula have become so restricted to focusing on “now” and not encouraging “future”, that teachers are prevented from exploiting these developments purely for the ability to create. Not everyone wants to be a web developer, software designer or network engineer but letting kids run wild with technology is the only way new things happen. We need another generation of hackers – in the original sense of the word, meaning people who want to play around with things to find out how they work rather than emo kids who hang around in basements with green characters on a black screen. In fact we should probably just clone Tom – http://www.tomscott.com/
Infrastructure – Many new different technologies are being predicted as being “just around the corner” (the cynic inside says that they’ve been just around the corner since the 80’s but hey…), the Internet of Things, Driverless Cars, 5G, 4K, TLAs, Virtual Reality, Distributed Energy – all of which will need underlying infrastructure to ship control data. Whilst there are frequently voices raised exclaiming that we’re in the top N countries in the world for XYZ, and that we should be proud to be there, surely we should be setting our sight and goals higher? Rather than settling for 25mbps to 90% of the country, we should be looking at delivering 1Gbps in the next 5 years to everyone, and then how we move from 1G to 10G 5 years later. We might decide we can’t quite make it on that time scale and lower the goals a bit, but, at the moment, we’re shooting too low. In 2000, broadband (when it was still called DSL) managed 512k maximum to less than 20% of the country, 10 years later the average was 5Mbps and the coverage was 71%. Our minimum goal should be 50mbps average by 2020, and to hit that, we should be pushing infrastructure capabilities and formats now!
IPv6 – Whilst the previous two are rather grand sweeping topics that need lots of things to happen and a longer period of time before we see the greatest benefits, rolling out IPv6 everywhere is a much more pressing issue. The IoT is going to consume vast amounts of address space, address space that we’ve already run out of. The security services are demanding traceability of end users, and more networks are hiding them as they cope with a lack of space. In both cases, deploying IPv6 now, where ever and when ever possible, will help. It’s painful to watch clever people come up with more and more crazy schemes to share address space when IPv6 would solve the problem. For politicians, this is a great thing to jump on, its easy to measure success and government involvement is pressure on organisations rather than central financial investment – just include it as a requirement in all government tenders (preferably pushed up to an EU level as well) and see how fast suppliers start adapting.
Open data – The other easy win, the data exists, people want the data – make it available. Okay, you’d lose some revenue from the postcode database but everyone’s life will be slightly better as there is no longer a reason not to include postcode lookup in applications (other than laziness, and we can let market forces deal with that). “Publish and be damned” I say, and its great to see http://data.gov.uk/ already taking baby steps, but a change of government is an opportunity to push this issue forward at all levels.
And with that I’ll get my coat, take my soap box away and find another crowd to harangue.
James Blessing is currently CTO of Keycom PLC, a managed services provider. He has over twenty years of experience in internet technologies. Previously he was Strategic Relations Manager, EMEA at Limelight Networks, COO at Entanet, technical support manager and technical development manager at Zen Internet; senior project manager at Eunite; senior producer at Kiss102 and Kiss105; and a technical director at Net Nannies. James is also chairman of the trade body ISPA.
Internet bandwidth trend – usage continues to grow
The title of this post might encourage the odd wise crack. Bear s&*%s in woods etc. Of course internet bandwidth use is growing. The point is though that in the past we have occasionally seen big spikes in bandwidth that have subsequently driven average usage and growth. The Olympic games, football world cup and general elections spring particularly to mind.
What we’re seeing now is different. We now have an almost daily general trend upwards rather than a big spike that breaks new records followed by a bit of up and down on the graph. There doesn’t seem to be any one thing driving it. It’s all general internet use.
LONAP is an internet exchange point (IXP) where networks connect with each other to share traffic (called peering). It’s not just general growth in internet traffic that drives the LONAP graphs up and to the right. There is also a realisation that peering is a far better means of accessing the internet than the alternative of commercial transit. Peering at an IXP is not just cheaper. It’s also better quality. Faster. Fewer hops.
There are a number of highly publicised business cases for use of Peering in IP connectivity in the wider commercial internet:
Amazon quote a 1% increase in revenue for every 100ms improvement in page load time
Yahoo increased traffic by 9% for every 400ms of improvement
Google – “slowing down the search results page by 100 – 400 ms has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6%”
Using Peering helps to lower latency and underwrites these business drivers. Content providers also like the better user experience that fast page loads bring and they are increasingly moving to join internet exchanges such as LONAP.
From what I can see all IXPs are growing. In London we have two: LINX and LONAP. Both are globally significant. In a world where infrastructure resilience is important operators are increasingly adding to the resilience of their own networks by peering at both London exchanges. London is said to have more AS number (individual autonomous networks or Autonomous Systems) POPs than any other city. The presence of two major exchanges may be both a reflection of this and a reason why.
These drivers point to a growth in IXP traffic that exceeds that of the general internet. The chart in the featured image above shows the trend at LONAP over the past 12 months. It shows a pretty dramatic doubling of bandwidth usage over the year. This other chart (inset) shows the growth over the last few days. Ignoring weekends you can see a daily trend.
Looking back five years LONAP has been highly successful in growing its business. 5 year membership has grown from 90 to 145 organisations. Bandwidth usage has rocketed from 10Gbps to 100Gbps (151 ports to 256 connected ports) and the turnover has seen a steady growth from £190k to £409k. It must be remembered that as a not for profit organisation the objective is not to grow sales revenues but to hand as much as the profits back to members. The increase in membership numbers and bandwidth is seen as the real added value.
This year we are seeing significant momentum in both new membership applications and bandwidth growth. My gut feel is that when it comes to the end of 2015 we will be looking back at an even greater level of growth. With the internet bandwidth trend only going one way it’s an exciting time to be around.
Check out other LONAP posts here (I’m on the board of directors so there are a few). General peering posts here and LONAP themselves here.
LinkedIn LONAP membership announcement
If I lived in Brum, Coventry, Derby, Chesterfield, Leicester, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Oxford, Stoke on Trent or Wolverhampton I’d be ok. Maybe.
Internet traffic dip during eclipse – unusual behaviour for a big news event
