Categories
broadband Business

21CN in Lincoln

BT’s rollout of 21CN exchanges continues and Lincoln is now up and running – hooray.

I can report that with my previous ADSLMaxPremium connection I was getting roughly 5Mbps.  I am now getting 10Mbps. At a guess I am 1km from the exchange.

In my book this is a worthwhile improvement.  If you live in Lincoln and want faster internet let me know.

Categories
Business internet UC

Project Chainsaw web.alive and Lenovo

In my systematic tour of the UC09 Exhibition yesterday I sat through my first real life Telepresence demo on the Cisco/BT stand. Very impressive technology. It really was just like being in the same room, such was the quality of the video.

I then sauntered along to the Nortel stand. Nortel have similar technology but seem to have made significant strides in moving the whole online meeting and web collaboration experience forwards.

Project Chainsaw has been in the Nortel pipeline for some time and I was pleasantly surprised in seeing that it was now a production item. It has now surfaced with the marketing moniker “web.alive”, a  reasonably descriptive name though  I think Project Chainsaw is more impressive 🙂 . 

The technology allows you to mimic more of a real world environment. For example it could be embedded into an online “world” populated with shops. You can walk up to a virtual shop and begin communicating with a virtual shop assistant to help you with your purchases, The virtual shop assistant might well of course have a real person doing the talking behind the avatar.

Web.alive integrates with existing enterprise network and security and with existing software tools (so they say). You can check out more on the Nortel Website here and take a look at the Lenovo demo example here at the Project Chainsaw microsite.

I’ve unashamedly nicked a picture of web.alive in action from the Nortel website:

webalive_meeting_800x493

Categories
Business internet security

Office of Security and Counter Terrorism

Met with the Home Office, Office of Security and Counter Terrorism (OSCT)  today.  Not unsurprisingly the OSCT has grown from zero to over 200 staff in 18 months although only three of them are internet oriented.

The department’s mantra is the 4Ps:

Pursue – police & security forces
Protect – making UK a harder target
Prepare – for the eventuality there will be another attack
Prevent – stop people becoming violent extremists in the first place

One of the subjects under discussion was part of the report produced by The International Centre for the Study for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) – blogged about the other day.  Specifically how to go about promoting more positive use of the internet.

They talked about “flooding the internet” with positive messages about Muslim groups quitely practising their religion and not indulging in fanaticism that leads to violence.  I though the idea of  flooding the internet was somewhat ambitious. 

What they really mean is that one of the proposals is to educate groups on how to make the best use of the internet to get their positive messages across. Search Engine Optimisation etc.  I could imagine the Government secretly paying Google to raise the rankings of websites promoting  peaceful activities 🙂 ! 

It is worth taking a look at at the Alliance Of Youth Movements Summit that took place in New York (New York)  in December 08. This get together was part of a drive to promote the positive use of the internet.

Categories
Business internet

Digital Britain Report by not so digital civil servants

The Digital Britain Report is a key part of Government strategy to make the UK a leader where internet issues are concerned. I’m not sure whether I am wrily amused or plain horrified by a comment made to me by someone who had recently met the team compiling the report.

None of the civil servants at the meeting had been on Facebook, or any other social networking websites. In fact none of them seemed to have heard of Twitter. Apparently this engendered laughter all round.

You have to say that this does not bode well for the success of the Digital Britain initiative.

The Digital Britain interim report included a proposal to establish a Rights Agency to supervise the fight against illegal P2P music downloading. More detailed proposals are apparently due out this week and I am told that industry will only have 10 days to respond with comments.

This is a very short consultation period and suggests to me that Lord Stephen Carter has an agenda to muscle through this measure. Whilst I don’t disagree with him – the list of stakeholders is too long to get any meaningful consensus – the notional speed at which he seems to be trying to make things happen here lends itself to mistakes being made.

I can see a mopping up excercise following any legislation to make corrections to laws created in a rush.

Categories
End User internet security

Pirate Duck Update – Gordon Brown Petition started

Notwithstanding anyone’s particular feelings about the suitability of the Pirate Duck as a technology blog post it is worth looking at what has happened since it first hit the ether yesterday afternoon.

The Facebook group Save The Pirate Duck hit 50 members the same evening. Now, 24 hours after the group was started, it has 120 members (up by 7 since I started writing this post). The group has 10 wall posts and one video link.

Pressure group, Pirate Duck People’s Coalition, has also set up an online petition urging Prime Minister Gordon Brown to help save the duck. So far there are 5 signatures and I’m sure this number will increase further – it is only a matter of time.

I have also had a request by a prominent radio station to field a spokesman for an upcoming investigative special this weekend. More details on this once it is firmed up.

Clearly democracy is flexing its muscles here and the power of the internet is being used to promote the will of the people. Anyone wishing to contribute their time, money or simply expressions of support should joing the Facebook group and sign the petition.

Also constructive ideas on how to track down the perpetrators of the crime are welcome as hitherto the team’s investigative efforts have drawn a blank and the duck remains firmly ducknapped.

Categories
Business internet media

ICSR-YouTube-PRS

A bit of an ambiguous post title but considering this is meant to be a technology blog I get more and more opportunities to comment on political and business issues. Following on from yesterday’s post on the Coroners and Justice Bill today brings a report on how to combat Online Radicalisation and also more on the debate between the music industry and ISPs as YouTube pull the plug on music downloads in the UK.

The International Centre for the Study for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) has produced a report recommending how “the world” should combat this problem. It starts off saying that any efforts to date have been either “crude, expensive or counterproductive” and concludes that we need to spend more time deterring the producers of extremist materials, empowering users to self-regulate their online communities, reducing the appeal of extremist messages through education and promoting positive messages.

Call me a cynic but I doubt that this will get anywhere though I suppose at least they are having a go.

The second bit of news relates to a public spat between YouTube and the Performing Rights Society (PRS) who can’t agree licensing model (ie costs) that will allow YouTube to stream music. Unfortunately this seems to be a theme of any discussion between the music industry and those organisations providing internet services. During my time spent in meetings between the ISP and music industries it seems to me that the latter needs to start exploring new ways of making money, and believe you me I do not in anyway support the illegal downloading of another person’s intellectual property.  Link to the Guardian report here though it has been widely reported elsewhere in the UK.

What all this amouts to is a huge change in the way we live our lives. Last night a friend rang me for advice.  His broadband connection was down all day and his family was up in arms. Other than suggesting he moves to Timico all I could do was make sympathetic noises and say at least his family would talk to each other that evening – united in the face of a common problem instead of locked away surfing in their own rooms.

Categories
Business internet

Unified Communications Web2.0 Style

Unified Communications ’09 is on next week at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. I anticipate there will be 70 or so businesses there pitching their wares, including Timico subsidiary KeConnect which has a joint stand with Cisco.

UC09 is a business to business show. It is worth reflecting on the fact that in the consumer world UC  is racing ahead of what is typically available to business. Lets look at my son’s radio programme as an example.

Tom, as regular readers of this blog will know, has his own weekend breakfast show on Siren FM, a local community radio station  in my home town of Lincoln (England).  He has a website and a Facebook home page.  The Wake Up To The Weekend homepage has 318 fans as I write and each show gets around 100  listener contacts/interactions.

Tom’s listeners are by and large teenagers in the Lincoln area. They listen to his show on their laptops whilst lying in bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings. When they want to conatct the show to request a song or enter a competition they send an IM via Facebook, or leave a message on the show’s wall.

Listeners also communicate via SMS and email. I doubt that many make phone calls but if Facebook had an embedded voip client then this would overcome a teenager’s cost objections to talking. The radio presenter could then escalate an IM request to a voice call – to talk to the winner of a competition for example. The show can also post photos, videos and recordings of bands they have had in the studio on the Facebook page.

So where is this leading to?  For radio show read business.  Companies are more and more going to have to move into this space.  Corporate websites are going  to change to reflect Facebook and Twitter-type functionality and begin to interact with their customers in real time in new ways.

Integration of a corporate communications strategy with Twitter has already been shown to be highly effective. Initially the domain of large corporates, smaller companies should easily embrace it.  Customer care and marketing teams will sit “on the internet”.  I anticipate doing this at Timico sooner rather than later.

As a footnote Tom’s biggest fan, me aside, is a person in Lincoln named Les. Les enters every one of Tom’s competitions and has frequent interactions with the show. Looking at his picture on the Facebook site it can be seen that Les is in fact probably in his sixties.  This then is not just the domain of the teenager!

PS if anyone is at UC 09 and wants to meet up drop me a line.

Categories
broadband Business internet ofcom

Cisco CEO John Chambers on Broadband

Hot on the trail of yesterday’s post on the Ofcom decision to waive regulations on the roll out of fibre to homes in the UK Cisco CEO John Chambers has written a guest post on Om Malik’s blog on a similar subject.

I had thought that the Obama stimulus package, which contains a substantial sum of money targeted at broadband roll out, was aimed at standard broadband speeds but it looks as if this is not correct.

It does make you wonder whether the government here in the UK will now look to subsidising the £29Bn it is estimated it will cost to get universal fibre coverage in this country.

Categories
End User internet security

Online identity theft cost USA $48Bn in 2008

I was amazed to read in a press release by Anti Virus firm AVG that online identity theft lead to $48Bn worth of fraud in 2008 in the USA alone. This was part of a press release issued by the company today regarding its new Identity Protection product.

You can read the press release yourself but this is certainly topical for me having only last week attended the ISPA Parliamentary Advisory Forum on ecrime. The scale of the activity clearly makes it worthy of its own specialist blog rather than just getting the occasional post in mine.

I think I will follow up with a top ten security tips for safe use of the internet. Many of these tips will be obvious and just involve a little discipline on the part of individuals. More anon.

Categories
Business internet ofcom

Ofcom gives BT green light for fibre investment

Ofcom effectively gave BT the go ahead today for a £1.5Bn investment in a fibre network to provide up to 100Mbps internet access to homes in certain areas. By removing any regulatory barriers that might constrain BT from charging free market pricing for the fibre services Ofcom has set an environment that makes the BT business case for the investment workable.

BT has been involved in a high profile lobbying excercise to get this decision since around the time of the Caio Report last year.

I welcome this move though many people in smaller metropolitan and rural areas unlikely to get access to the service will view it as another step towards widening the digital divide.

Categories
Business internet

IWF Update

You may remember the fuss surrounding the anti-child porn agency, Internet Watch Foundation back in December 2008. The IWF blocked access to a Wikipedia webpage causing much consternation.

The IWF Council is meeting tomorrow for a post mortem on the issue and is discussing setting up a technical workgroup to find a way around the problems created at the time.

The organisation is having to deal with a highly complex issue and there isn’t the space to cover it all here. What is interesting is the fact that the criminals involved are already combating the efforts of organisations such as the IWF.

Illegal images containing child pornography are often made up of thousands of separate images, a single pixel in size and each pixel containing an URL.  This way a specific URL does not contain illegal content but the combined effect does.

I’m sure I will have some feedback from the IWF meeting and will report back as and when.

Categories
End User internet

Domain name scam

Another domain name scam email came in overnight. I’m told that a number of customers have had similar ones in recent weeks. My advice is to ignore these emails unless you have business aspirations in the Far East in which case you will probably already have your domain registered. I’ve reproduced the email here because it is mildly amusing to those of us who have not yet fully grown up.

Dear Manager,

We received a formal application from a person who is called Jacques Tits is applying to register “timico” as their domain names and Internet brand in Hong Kong and also in Asia on 2009-02-27. During our auditing procedure we find out that the alleged Jacques Tits has no trade mark,brand nor patent even similar to that word.As authorized anti-cybersquatting organization we hereby suspect the alleged Jacques Tits to be a domain or trademark grabber.Hence we need you confirmation for two things.First of all,whether this alleged Jacques Tits is your business partner or distributor in Asia.Secondly,whether you are interested in registering these domains and Internet brand instead of that alleged person.(The alleged Jacques Tits will be entitled to obtain a domain not needed by original trademark owner.)

If you are not in charge of this please forward this email to appropriate dept.

This is a letter for confirmation.If the mentioned third party is your business partner or distributor in Asia,please DO NOT reply.We will automatically confirm application from your business partner after this audit procedure.

Best Regards,

Registration Commissioner
Sponsoring Registrar:Asia Network

Categories
datacentre End User internet

Gmail Down for the Morning Yesterday

Google themselves use Gmail, so someone certainly noticed that the service was down.

Gmail email was down yesterday, you may have noticed.  Certainly you might if you were one of their 113m strong userbase although I imagine that most are consumers and because it happened in business time it may not have had that significant an impact.

The service fell over because one of Google’s European datacentres failed which in turn had a knock on effect on some of their other datacentres. I have recently been visiting datacentres with a view to planning our next phase of expansion. Datacentres are rated in Tiers from 1 to 4, 4 being the most secure reliable and therefore most expensive.

In a Tier 4 datacentre you will find the ultimate in security mechanisms, biometric security, weighing machines etc. You also find the highest levels of resilience to power and connectivity failure. I was interested to learn recently though that there is a sensible limit to how much it is worth spending on a data centre as even Tier 4’s have been shown by modelling that they are vulnerable to catastrophic chain reaction failures .

I don’t know what Tier datacentres are operated by Google but they do employ someone specifically to manage reliability of their site. It just goes to show that when software and computers are concerned there is no such things as a 100% reliability.

In this case if you are totally reliant on a single email system it seems that there will always be a potential reliability issue. What you can do is have a totally separate mail system coming from a separate platform. I use both timico.co.uk from an Exchange server and trefor.net from our ISP platform.

Although I don’t ever recall the ISP mail platform letting me down certainly the Microsoft product has occasionally given me cause to resort to the backup. With a backup you can always call someone and ask them to resend to the other mail address and also use it yourself to send.

Most people have a personal email address but you might not want to give that out to a business acquaintance and in any event this type of email typically has file size storage and download restrictions. I’m sure others will have views on this subject but that’s my five pence worth.

Categories
Engineer internet olympics

Surreal Sewer Story

The things I have to do for the business. Today it was almost like being in a James Bond movie. I turned up at 10am prompt at the Thames Water Utilities Depot in Bow in East London – just around the corner from the site of the Olympic stadium which incidentally seems to be shooting up. I was met by Calypso Harland, bubbly marketing manager of Geo, the Alchemy owned business that sprang out of 186k’s UK fibre optic network.

I had been invited to inspect Geo’s London fibre ring which, yes you’ve guessed it, runs through the sewers. Donning layers of protective clothing I disappeared into a subterranean world for a once in a lifetime experience. Believe you me I doubt that anyone wants to do it twice.

The 140 year old Victorian sewers under London are I suppose of cursory interest. The message actually was that Geo can provide very cost effective and very secure fibre backbone connectivity because they use the sewers and don’t therefore have to dig up the roads.

What is interesting is the huge capacity there is down there. Geo run 4 ducts, three of which are currently empty. A duct can hold two fibre cables each with 288 strands of fibre. Each fibre can, using current DWDM technology, run 160 10Gbps channels (x 4 if you use phase modulation per wavelength).

So by my sums the Geo London ring should be able to operate at nearly 15 Petabits per second or roughly a billion times faster than the latest and greatest 21CN ADSL2+ connection. That’s a heck of a lot of capacity.

And for anyone that wants to know no, my thigh length wellies did not leak and no there were no floaters in sight – something to do with a high fibre diet apparently! 🙂

These sewers run on the surface (covered up obviously) right through the Olympic site. Come 2012 they will likely be crawling with security guards!

Check out the Geo video here.  Photos below:

Categories
Business internet

Interview with Jeff Pulver for "Hardcopy", newsletter of ISPA

Jeff Pulver
Jeff Pulver

The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.

New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.

TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?

 JP:  Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.

Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.

I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.

TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?

JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.

I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.

TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?

JP:  The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)

TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?

JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.

TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world

JP:  It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.

TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?

JP:  Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.

TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.

Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .

Categories
Business internet

Interview with Jeff Pulver for “Hardcopy”, newsletter of ISPA

Jeff Pulver
Jeff Pulver

The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.

New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.

TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?

 JP:  Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.

Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.

I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.

TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?

JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.

I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.

TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?

JP:  The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)

TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?

JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.

TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world

JP:  It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.

TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?

JP:  Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.

TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.

Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .

Categories
broadband Engineer internet

Broadband Growth Results in Network Capacity Increases

Been a busy week again. Where do they all go? This week was a milestone for Trefor Davies in that I got my first 622Mbps BT central pipe. It’s not mine really of course, it is Timico’s but it feels like mine – toys for the boys 🙂 .

Not everyone will understand the significance. When an Internet Service Provider starts life they begin with a small connection to the BT (Wholesale) ADSL network. They use this connection, known as a “central pipe”,  to carry broadband web traffic from their ADSL customers to the internet, email server, co-located equipment etc.

The ISP itself usually provides the applications (ie email) and contracts with a variety of network providers to offer resilient access to the internet.

As the number of broadband customers grows more BT central capacity needs to be added and this is normally done in affordable “chunks” rather than going straight for a big connection that would almost certainly be uneconomic for low levels of ADSL customers.

Unfortunately for the small ISP the bigger the connection the better the level of service experience  that can be offered. This is particularly the case if an ISP has many small (34Mbps) pipes.

So this week Timico moved into the bigger league with a 622Mbps pipe and cancelled 7 smaller pipes. What is more our second 622Mbps pipe is due for delivery in April giving us a huge headroom in capacity/expansion capability. This is in additional to the resilient 1Gbps links we have for 21CN.

Ironically although supposed to provide 622Mbps these pipes in reality provide more bandwidth than advertised. This compares with a 155Mbps pipe which typically only provided 120Mbps capacity in two separate 60Mbps halves and a 34Mbps pipe which only provided 25Mbps capacity.

Exciting eh? ! 🙂

Categories
End User internet security

Conficker Virus (also known as downadup)

I picked up the Conficker worm whilst at LINX64 yesterday.  I’m pretty sure I was one of the few Microsoft users in the audience of out and out geeks so I know not whence it came.

My virus checker caught it, or at least told me it was there. This morning I gave my machine a complete set of security updates and it is now clean.

This is not an easy worm to remove. You can use a free tool provided by Symantec at this location. The Microsoft update that patches the vulnerability is at this location.

Categories
Business internet peering

London Internet Exchange market data – from LINX64

66% of the global routing table is carried by LINX. This means an Internet Service Provider can connect their customers  to 66% of the webservers  (is websites) in the world just by hooking up to LINX  at their Docklands locations. Using Peering Exchanges like LINX allows us to cut down on expensive internet connections.

LINX has 57 of the world’s top 100 network operators as members, including 16 of the top 20. This confirms the not-for profit organisation as one of the world’s leading peering points.

In 2008 they had 13 membership cancellations of which 8 were consolidations. There are a further 6 consolidations in the pipeline. An indication of the ongoing rationalisation of the industry.

Finally I have put a pie chart together illustrating the distribution of ports at LINX in terms of 100Meg, Gig and 10Gig Ethernet. Not shown are stats that the 10Gig ports are on the rise and the 100Meg, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the rise in internet usage, in decline.

linx

Categories
End User media

Tom Davies is the man for me – White on White

This post has nothing to do with IP. I reserve the right as a proud parent to promote the interests of my family. The media file below was recorded on Saturday by “White on White”, a guest band on my son Tom’s radio show Wake Up To The Weekend” on www.sirenonline.co.uk Saturday and Sunday mornings.

tom-davies-is-the-man-for-me

Categories
Business datacentre internet

Building Datacentres: The Costs are Rising

Datacentres are quite a hot topic in the Internet Service Provider world, and their costs are rising, largely due to the increasing costs of power and cooling.

In the UK the major datacentres have typically been located in London’s Docklands. This is because Docklands is where most of the world’s major network providers connect. The cost of connectivity has traditionally been far too high to locate critical network infrastructure outside the capital.

I am sat in the LINX meeting in London writing this post listening to Bob Harris, Technical Services Director of Telehouse, one of the major datacentre players in Europe. Timico is already located in Telehouse North and East. Well the news is that they are building a Telehouse West (not particularly new news).

What is interesting are the financials associated with this project.

  1. £165m over 5 years (£80m over 1st 2 years for the first two floors)
  2. 5 floors with 985 sq metres per floor
  3. 425 racks per floor providing 4KW per rack = total 2125 racks
  4. Business plan to fill the facility over 3 – 5 years

That works out roughly at £78,000 per rack or just under £20,000 per KW. In terms of contribution to the operating costs the capital depreciation is £258 over 25 years, which is incidentally a long time in this game – 10 years might be considered more normal and the period has been arbitrarily chosen by me for illustration. Remember this is before anyone starts charging for operating costs.

I think the costs of this project point towards a trend to start building datacentres outside of London. Communications costs have plummeted and service providers and businesses are going to start hosting all but their most critical, perhaps latency sensitive, infrastructure outside the M25.

You can follow the progress of the Telehouse West building on their webcam here. I’ve pasted a picture of a typical backup generator that is used by datacentres to give you a feel for where the costs are incurred.

generator

PS I don’t think there is room for a Telehouse South, in case anyone was wondering.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

LINX64

Timico is a member of LINX, or the London Internet Exchange. Linx is a not for profit  meeting point in London where ISPs and network operators meet to peer their traffic, ie to share their connectivity with one another.

It is a sign of the pace of growth in internet related activity that membership of LINX rose  in 2008 to 308, up by around 20% from the previous year. The peak traffic carried over the LINX network is over 400Gbps which is a lot of ADSL connections.

The LINX meetings are not only good networking opportunities but a great place to keep up with developments in internet technology. This week the subject matter includes at IPv6, DNS security and SPAM. LINX64 is sponsored by Telehouse.

I’ll post any useful material as it happens.

Categories
Business internet

Data Retention Act Published Today

The much heralded Data Retention regulations were published today. The Act is due to become law on 6th April and has caused consternation amongst privacy rights activists and initially amongst the Communication Provider Community.

The specifics are

4 —(1) It is the duty of a public communications provider to retain the communications data specified in the following provisions of the Schedule to these Regulations—
(a) Part 1 (fixed network telephony);
(b) Part 2 (mobile telephony);
(c) Part 3 (internet access, internet email or internet telephony).

Part 3 was the bit causing the fuss – the storage of email and web browsing habits.  The CP community has somewhat calmed down since because further down in the spiel it says:

10-(1) These Regulations do not apply to a public communications provider unless the provider is given a notice in writing by the Secretary of State in accordance with this regulation.

The Government had previously said that it would only make the largest CPs comply and here they have essentially put it in writing. 

Moreover:

11. —(1) The Secretary of State may reimburse any expenses incurred by a public communications provider in complying with the provisions of these Regulations.

So all in all, the privacy issues aside, it seems to have been a storm in a teacup for an industry that was worried about all the additional overhead that would be incurred in complying with the Act.

The full text can be seen here.

Categories
Business internet

Broadband in Obama Stimulus Bill

I note that the economic recovery package proposed in the USA includes between $6bn and $9bn to assist with the   implementation of broadband in rural areas (The Register today). In the UK the Government is also talking about making the provision of universal access to broadband compulsory though I’m not sure whether they are going ot subsidise it.

What is worth noting is that the real debate in the UK is around how the country rolls out Next Generation Access which is fibre to the home and an order of magnitude up from broadband in terms of speed.  This has been costed at £29bn.

There is a scenario where the UK could leave the USA behind in the internet infrastructure game. I imagine that the cost of implementing a NGA network in the USA will be an order of magnitude up again on the UK, just because of the sheer size of the country.

Unfortunatley (depending on your perspective) the USA is far better placed for the stimulus of innovation than the UK when it comes the applications to run over this infrastructure.

Categories
End User internet

Twitter in action at SocComm

I already posted about SocComm which is happening in New York today. Well I just caught up with it via Twitter and I’ve been blown away with what I saw.

You can follow it at the SocComm web address http://www.soccomm.com/twitbuzz.html.

When I looked it was during the government and regulation session and the tweets all address this. The main concern I could see from the tweets was associated with what the US government might do in terms of regulating personal privacy issues and whether this might suppress development of Social Networking.

I was going to say Social Networking Technology but I hesitate to use “technology” because it seems to be much more than about the engine/platform that makes it all happen. It is more philosophical than that.

The information is coming in think and fast. It is really a speed read. Jeff Pulver told me he had 25 twitterers lined up in the audience but I can believe, undertanding the nature of the conference, that most of the audience is Twittering. The conference goes on all day New York time and if you miss it I imagine you will be able to catch up at a more leisurely pace .

PS it is too late I’m sure to invent another word for it but twitter is a bit irritating ! 🙂 .

PPS SocComm has just flashed up as the 3rd most active event on Twitter at this time

Categories
Business internet media piracy

ISP and Music industries meet at UK Summit

At the board room of the Performing Rights Society in London today the great and the good of the UK Music industry met with representatives from the mainstream ISP community for an open discussion on how to handle illegal P2P music downloading.

Organisations represented included UK Music,  BAC&S, PPL, PRS, MMF, MPA, MU, MCPS, MPG, Timico, ISPA, O2, Orange, AOL, Yahoo, BT, GlobalMix, LINX, Playlouder and KCom. I’m sure I’ve missed some out and you will have to work out for yourselves what some of the acronyms stand for.

I was essentially there on behalf of the Internet Service Providers’ Association to represent the smaller ISP community who have been left out of the talks up until now. Whilst the “big six” largest ISPs probably represent over 90% of the market the other ISPs, of which there are easily in excess of 300, do represent a “significant other”.

As much as anything the meeting was a “getting to know each others’ perspective” session but a few points in particular stuck in my mind.

  1. We were not allowed to discuss commercial issues and there was a lawyer sat in the corner who interrupted whenever the conversation moved towards this area – the concern being that nobody wanted the meeting to be seen as price fixing. I understand that any initiatives up until now have failed because the Music Industry can’t agree on prices that will allow ISPs to make money out of offering legal music download services. 
  2. It was suggested by yours truly that to make the whole business model work there needed to be a wholesale provider that would make it easier for smaller businesses to participate.  This wholesale provider would have sorted out the rats nest of copyright and licensing issues. Some larger ISPs had 5 corporate lawyers in a department exclusively dedicated to this area. What hope the rest of us!

There is clearly some way to go to get to a working solution although there was general agreement around the table that  everybody wanted to help.

ISPs present were asked whether P2P traffic caused problems for them on their network. I stated that typically B2B ISPs did not throttle P2P traffic  and customers were provided with a high quality experierience for which they paid a premium.

In the consumer space customers seem not prepared to pay for quality and thus in order to try and preserve a reasonable experience for “ordinary” applications such as browsing and email  it is often standard practice for ISPs to throttle P2P traffic. In fact in fairness some ISPs publish these policies on their website. This touched a nerve with one Tier 1 ISP who avoided the word throttling using, instead,  “traffic management” as a less contentious phrase.

Categories
End User internet

Time Online

Completely unscientific but as a rule of thumb there are typically 10% of my Facebook friends online at any given time. Except for early in the morning, anecdotally this stacks up with what others have said as well.

I am online for most of my waking hours though not necessarily always on Facebook. Assuming I am on 16 hours a day, which is a bit of a stretch but not wildly off the mark this suggests that my friends are typically on Facebook for around 1 1/2 hours a day.

I’m not always active when I am online, of course.

Categories
Apps End User internet

Defining Moment In Social Networking

I’ve been conversing on Facebook with Jeff Pulver and am somewhat gutted that lack of time keeps me from attending his SocComm conference in New York this coming Tuesday, 10th February.

Jeff has a lot of experience in running such events and is confident that this one “will represent a defining moment” in Social Networking. His line up of topics is very interesting covering a range of areas such as regulatory, marketing, communications, mobility and investment.

What is also educational is the line up of sponsors, (ZiXi | Vivox | Phone.com | Pathable | Ripple6 ) fairly short this being the first time this show has been staged, but also an example of where people think there might be money to be made in this space.

I’m sure Jeff will be running other SocComm events and I look forward to the time I will be able to attend. In the meantime if anyone who is going wants to give me some feedback that would be great.

You can follow the event on Twitter at #sc09 and #soccomm. Jeff has a team of 25 twitterers lined up in the audience.

Categories
Engineer engineering

How can you make exams exciting?!

I never thought I would get excited by the prospect of an exam. I am at the moment though but I have to confess it is not me taking the exams. When my 16 year old took his GCSEs last summer I think I was more nervous than he was.

This time my nerves are rock steady as 12 Timico engineers are lining up to sit their Cisco Certified Networking Associate (CCNAs) exams. It is exciting because I can see the guys’ knowledge and skillset  improving almost daily as they put in the effort to prepare for the exams.

At the end of it all I’m hoping that we will end up with 12 more members of staff with their foot on the first rung of the professional engineering career ladder. I’m determined to be able to take regular afternoons off to play golf and this is all part of the process of getting  me there. I don’t expect these engineers to have time to play any golf though.

PS congratulations to Mark Chennell of Timico subsidiary KeConnect who passed his CCNA last week. He is a good guy.

PPS good luck to the others.

Categories
Business media

Appearing on BBC Radio Tomorrow Morning

For anyone interested I am appearing as the sofa guest on Rod Whiting’s breakfast show tomorrow morning which should be fun since I enjoy his show. I’ve no idea what we will be talking about – life the universe and Trefor Davies. And probably the weather.

All this assumes the BBC doesn’t devote the whole programme to school closures which is what happened today, much to my children’s delight.

You can catch his show on http://www.bbc.co.uk/lincolnshire/ and I am down to be there from 8.20 am until 9.30.