Engineer
This is simply a public record of a bet between
two guys. Wayne, pictured right has bet Stuart (bearded guy obv) fifty quid that he won’t get his CCIE before he is 40 in two and a half years time.
My money is on Stuart but Wayne has plenty of time to start saving.
It’s good to have a culture of self improvement and also to be able to make some money out of it as well 🙂
Couple of videos here for your delectation and delight. We had a Dell film crew come and visit a few weeks ago. They were very professional, all three of them, and had flown over from gay Paree the night before. Their one mistake was flying into Manchester where they stayed the night and then took a 2 1/2 hour taxi ride to Newark the next day. Next time they come they said they will try East Midlands airport – less than an hour away. Very sensible I’d say.
Anyway here are the vids:
http://www.dellinnovation.com/en/timico-trefor-davies-2/
http://www.dellinnovation.com/en/timico-trefor-davies-3/
There were three of them. I don’t know what happened to the first. I must have said something.
Just sat in one of our ongoing planning sessions to calculate our bandwidth 
needs during the London 2012 Olympics. It’s a complicated call and we will be telling all nearer the time.
One of the data sources we are using is the BBC’s own estimates of iPlayer traffic growth. The inset photo shows when the BBC is expecting heavy iPlayer traffic loads and is based on the sport/competitor mix for any given session.
The colour coding scheme doesn’t tell us how much traffic is expected for each event but the Beeb is planning for a peak of 1Terabit per second.
The capacity planning and quality management for the Olympics is not totally straightforward because there are factors involved outside the control of any individual ISP. Load on the iPlayer servers is one and the traffic at individual exchanges is another. As an industry we are going to have to be nimble to make sure that our customers’ experience is a good one.
More as I get it…
The UK telecommunications community, including all major Timico network partners, has put in a huge amount of preparation in readiness for the London 2012 Olympics.
This includes additional capacity, network security and the ability to cope with and recover from major network incidents.
Capacity
As a lead sponsor BT is responsible for all the communications services provided during the Olympics. BT has been active with its customer groups, including Communications Providers such as Timico, to understand capacity demands for core communications services during the games.
These include
Did you know1 that LTE was launched in the USA in December 2010 where a most aggressive competition between operators has been taking place, led by Verizon? In the USA LTE has high penetration across all devices, comes at no premium over 3G data services and LTE users typically use around 50% more data than 3G users.
LTE was also launched in Germany in December 2010 but has had a slow adoption rate with the initial focus being on fixed/mobile substitution. This I understand is in part due to regulations ensuring that owners of LTE bandwidth have to service “the final third” as part of their licensing arrangements. There isn’t much of a choice of devices on LTE in Germany.
South Korea was relatively late to the game here. They launched in July 2011 but had nationwide coverage by mid 2012 and has the highest penetration rate, focussed mainly on selling to consumers. LTE has brought innovative new services to the South Koreans eg richer high quality interactive maps.
Norralorrapeople know this. Brings the scheduling of 4G in the UK into perspective doesn’t it?
1 source Ericsson & GSA (Oct 12th 2011)
I have to be careful here because whilst I am a Samsung fan I have no desire to be labelled a fanboi in the manner of Apple afficionados. Samsung has announced a media event at Earls Court on Thursday 3rd May and the speculation is that this will be the Galaxy S3 launch. This might be exciting.
I use a Galaxy S2 which is as far as I am concerned still a great phone. There has to be a lot of new functionality for me to want to upgrade – certainly more than appears to have been the case with the various flavours of iPhone churned out over the last 12 months.
What might these improvements be?
Holidays are greatly helped by nice weather. 
This has been a typical week in April in the British Isles. Sunshine and showers. Bathed in sunshine Peel is a lovely place to stroll around. I have been up at around 6am every day to go down to my favourite spot on Fenella Beach. It’s rare to see anyone else around at that time of day, except maybe the odd fisherman.
Although I have a rule to stay away from the likes of Twitter the holiday has not been without connectivity. There is wifi at mam and dads. 11.8Megs down despite the exchange being
just around the corner. 0.47Megs up.
Mam and dad don’t really care – as long as the Guardian loads up in a timely manner. I have principally been using it to catch up on the local weather forecast. Also gmail – I’m speaking at a meeting at the LSE next Thursday so kept in touch with the organisation of that. Olympic news emails are also welcome – we have tickets for the kayaking. Work email has been left alone. My phone has been left mostly in the car. I don’t like to use it due to the cost of data roaming.
We had to reboot the router one day. Pretty much all the Davies complained to my Dad that they couldn’t pick up the wifi/internet. His laptop still worked fine so he didn’t care 🙂 Neither did I. Internet! Who needs it 🙂
The main story of the week in respect of connectivity is my discovery in the ships chandlery at Peel of a laminated map showing the line of the undersea telecommunications cable between the UK and Ireland – near Blackpool to near Dublin.
It was free so I took a copy – you never know when these things are going to come in handy.
The chandlery is down on the quayside near the museum if you happen to be in Peel and need some spares for your seagoing vessel. You don’t have to be a sailor to appreciate it. I was sorely tempted to buy some block and tackle gear. Only problem is I don’t have a use for it other than it is really cool gear to have. I doubt that Mrs Davies would entertain having it on the wall above the fireplace.
You will otherwise be pleased to know that we ate well and slept well and fully recharged the batteries in the fresh Manx sea air. Hooray for holidays. The short amateur video below is of Fenella Beach – one of my favourite places.
This chart is a few months old now but I haven’t had it all that long and is still interesting to take a look at (click either pic to enlarge).
It shows the growth in O2 3G data traffic between 2008 and 2011. See the spike when the iPad was introduced combined with the football world cup traffic (dunno why anyone bothers!).
I don’t have an up to date one which would probably be even more interesting but I suspect that is too close for commercial comfort.
Over the next few weeks I’m going to be covering two main themes. These are the Olympics Games and 4G. They are different though to some extent the technical aspects are very similar. Both subjects are going to be in our consciousness quite considerably from here on.
I’m not going to be blogging or tweeting over the Easter Holidays so see you all back on the 16th April, thoroughly refreshed and ready for the sensory onslaught that will be the run-in to London2012.
PS Thanks to O2 for the chart – keep the info coming guys – everyone is interested 🙂
It might interest you to see my monthly ADSL usage over the last four years or so, reported in GigaBytes per month. There is a very clear upward trend – over 500% growth from the low point in April 09 to Jan 12.
There would have been a technology upgrade from ADSLMax to ADSL2+ – quite possibly around mid 09 which would explain the jump but I can’t remember exactly.
The average household usage is around 17GB a month so us Davies’ are clearly heavy users. Our oldest, Tom went to University in October 2010 but this doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect. In fact there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason why one month his heavier than another. it’s just the general trend that tells us that I should expect to be using 150GB a month by sometime in 2015.
My broadband connection by 2015 is likely to be at least 100Mbps so I will have bandwidth available that would sustain large amount of data transfer. I suspect that reality will be higher than this. We as a family will begin to use even more services so I am going to predict 200GigaBytes a month. I’d also like to bet that my mobile data usage will be in the tens of GigaBytes compared with the very low single digit GigaBytes at the moment.
Any insights happily discussed.
4G is like lightning, it’s an eye opener and seriously enhances the mobile data experience. This post talks about the truly exciting O2 4G trials in London and thinks about how the technology is going to change the mobile game.
Mobile data is already an important feature in the business communication landscape. As an ISP we see demand for it in the area of machine to machine, rapid site deployment, backup solutions for Disaster Recovery scenarios and of course straightforward internet browsing and email access from mobile devices.
The strategic importance of mobile data has even led Timico to invest in an Ethernet connection direct into the O2 network. We can now offer mobile MPLS solutions that sit within the same environment as existing fixed line MPLS networks – ideal for businesses that need security in both fixed and mobile networks.
Over the last year or two in the UK the focus in fixed line broadband has been on Fibre To The Cabinet, or in marketing jargon Fibre Broadband. With downlink speeds of “up to”40Mbps (to be upgraded to 80Mbps this coming April) the technology is revolutionising how people use their broadband connection. Add in the growth in high quality streaming video and gaming services and it is easy to see how the additional available bandwidth will be consumed.
Until very recently the mobile world, in the UK at least, has remained firmly in the domain of 3G – a technology that now seems relatively stone aged compared with Fibre Broadband. HSDPA makes the experience more bearable but it is still many Mega-bits apart from its fixed line counterpart.
The mobile companies are poised to change all this with LTE (Long Term Evolution) otherwise known as 4G. Trials are being conducted in a small number of locations in the UK. Timico is the first O2 Service Provider partner to be invited onto their London trials I am pleased to be able to report on my experiences.
This service is like lightning. It’s fast, speedy, call it what you like it’s a life changer. It’s been one of those projects that has been a pleasure to be involved in.
With only 25 masts around central London coverage is nowhere near what you would describe as ubiquitous but this is only a trial. When in a coverage area the speeds are great.
I started off in McDonalds at Kings Cross with a dongle fresh out of the box. After installation of the software, which was easy, the dongle performed an automatic firmware upgrade, also easy, using its own 4G connection.
At McDonalds I was getting over 13Mbps down 
and 540Kbps up which in my mind was a bit disappointing though I’m not sure it should have been. I have experimented with O2s 4G at their offices in Slough and seen much faster speeds both up and down than this. In fact this speed at McDonalds is faster than I get from my home ADSL2+ connection so I couldn’t grumble.
I knew I could do better than this. Roaming around town on the top deck of a number 25 bus I got 15.5Megs down
and amazingly 25Megs up – near Wardour Street. The ping times for all these measurements were impressive.
In torrential rain I moved around on foot dipping into various places to check out the speeds and moving generally towards known good hotspots.
In the end I took shelter in a pub called the Devonshire Arms on Duke Street, just off Oxford Street. Sat in the window and sipping a cup of tea I hit the jackpot with
40Megs down and 23 Megs up. I did various tests including varying the browser – Chrome was much better than IE. I also did video calls with both Timico’s own VoIP service and Skype.
The screenshot on the right is of four iPlayer daytime TV streams. The things you have to do to get a blog post written!
The highest I have seen recorded is 97Megs in the O2 Arena
itself. The 2,600 MHz LTE itself will go to 150Megs but the dongle tech doesn’t currently support this. We do have to remember this is very much a test rather than a production rollout so it isn’t going to be perfect but even considering this the experience has been great.
There were a few observations to be made out of this trial. The
raw speed I saw with O2s 4G was terrific when in good coverage areas. The amount of data you can download in a very small amount of time is going to change the game. In upgrading the dongle firmware for example I used 50MB in around a minute. If you consider that until recently a typical “fair use” policy for an “unlimited” data package was 500MB then you can see that the model is going to have to change. The backhaul capacity that mobile operators are going to have to build in to their networks is going to have to see growth measured in orders of magnitude.
Spectrum allocation for 4G rollout is going to be very important. At 2,600MHz the bandwidth you can get is much higher than at 800MHz, say. However the in-building penetration at the higher speed is not as good so the overall network design represents an interesting (though not insurmountable I’m sure) challenge for engineers. This makes the forthcoming Ofcom spectrum auction important – there is a mix of spectra that is going to be optimum for commercial success.
As a side note it is going to be interesting to see how much the operators are prepared to pay for spectrum – they all think they overpaid for 3G but the demand has not been there for most of the time that 3G has been around. It is different this time and people are starting to get used to paying for the bandwidth they use.
From an end user perspective the ability to have genuinely fast internet access on your laptop, tablet or mobile phone is going to change their experience. Whilst WiFi is becoming more common, at least in pubs, coffee shops and other public places the need to authenticate is still a nuisance. Also not having to wait whilst a screen loads up on your mobile phone needs to become a human right!
It is certainly going to drive more business into the mobile environment. Timico, for example, gives all its salesforce an iPad so that they can demonstrate Timico applications and our customer portal on the fly at a customer’s premises. An iPad with 40Megs of bandwidth all of a sudden becomes a low cost endpoint for a telepresence HD conferencing system.
The gaming experience is going to be great1. Who knows what mobility combined with high speed internet will do for that industry, freed from the shackles of the lounge or the bedroom. City wide action games? Orienteering for the 21st century?
The use of mobile technology for backup purposes will also extend into many more areas of businesses. Typically 3G is used where only low bandwidth is required or where any bandwidth is better than no bandwidth. 4G becomes a viable solution for offices – even company HQs.
Of course with many more people on a production 4G network the average speeds available may well come down but LTE really is a game changer.
Footnote
It’s nice to to be in a position of being able to play with these new toys but there is a very serious business side to this. As those of you who have met me recently will probably know I’ve been testing the technology for a few weeks now – Timico is the first O2 service Provider partner to be given access to their 4G network. It forms part of the long term mobile data strategy of our business and follows nicely on from the direct connection into the O2 network I referred to at the start of the post.
I should finish off with a big thank you to O2 for including me in the trials. It’s good to be able to work with such a progressive partner.
1 I’m not a gamer but one of my kids would spend his entire live tethered to the Xbox. I have heard the tinny VoIP it emits.
The FTTC broadband 80Meg trials are now more or less over with production launch of the faster service currently due on 12th april. FTTC80 was the version of the 40Meg FTTC but using a different baseband frequency that results in a doubling of its overall speed performance.
You can see from the small pic inset that this user saw an impressive 75Megs down though he didn’t see much change in the uplink. The ping time at 14milliseconds is also pretty good. it’s just the way ahead. Waiting for an onscreen response when using the internet is just not acceptable. It needs to be instantaneous.
It doesn’t matter that no application has an use for this kind of speed. Now that we have built it the applications will come.
Just had a communication through from BT re planning for the Olympics. This year the good citizens of the United Kingdom are divided into two camps – those that are looking forward to the Olympics, think it is a great thing and are really excited, and those who think it is a huge waste of money that would be better spent on hospitals and schools and have been whinging about it ever since it was announced.
I am excited. What’s more I have tickets for me and the kids to see the kayaking slalom finals aaaand we have some great friends in Windsor who have kindly agreed to put up the whole noisy lot of us (and before anyone chips in we aren’t kipping at Windsor castle – they already had too many people staying). That for those of you who know the Davies’ (6 of us) is a big ask.
I’ve already posted about the expected growth in traffic on ISP networks during the Olympics. Interesting research just in is a look at the lessons learnt from the Vancouver Olympics.
One in four organisations suffered broadband network capacity issues
Mobile data has been a bit of a theme recently on the blog. It must be trendy1. This is quite gratifying because when Timico was set up 8 years ago this Easter the mobile play was part of the vision of an overall convergence story that also included IP data networks and VoIP. At the time the sales pitch was the convenience of being able to source all your communications requirements from one supplier and on one bill. The approach back then was pretty revolutionary and stood us in good stead.
What we couldn’t foresee at the time was how the use of mobile data would grow and the effects of the more powerful mobile handset on our patterns of behaviour. That early decision to include mobile in the portfolio is now starting to payback and today we are announcing a case study with customer Murco Petroleum.
Last Autumn we got our first Ethernet connection into the O2 3G data network. The plan was to offer customers a cost effective multi-tentant version of the secure APN (Access Point Name – don’t ask) used by large corporations as private mobile Wide Area Networks. The resulting Mobile Access Management service is what is being used by Murco today as a mobile backup to their Timico broadband based MPLS WAN – the key infrastructure over which they carry secure payment transactions.
This MAM service has some significant benefits
Apparently during WW2 in the USA diners became hubs for social networking. Somewhere for lone workers finishing a late shift perhaps to go and chat to someone. At UC Expo in Olympia this week this was replicated and brought up to date by giving the diner actors iPads and laptops to play with. As an artistic creation it was great. However I can’t for the life of me remember whose stand it was so unless it was a charitable act in support of “social networking” they might want to change who they use to design their exhibition stands to make themselves more memorable!
A few things did stand out at the show. You could not escape the Microsoft effect because they must have taken up a quarter of the floor space. Microsoft was effectively standing on a chair in the middle of a room and shouting “you have to take us seriously”. Microsoft was selling Lync and its ecosystem.
Lync, the Microsoft Unified Comms play – Instant Messaging, voice etc, has moved on significantly since we saw them at UC Expo this time last year. Not, I suspect, the basic functionality, but the number of vendors supporting products that are compatible with Lync – receptionist consoles, call centre applications etc
I didn’t get the impression that it was being used in any great volume – the voice bit at least but Lync desktop clients are shipped free with a Microsoft Enterprise license – throw enough seeds… Coincidentally as I write someone called Barry from Microsoft has just called to see if we would be interested in rolling out Lync. We will certainly kick the tyres. They clearly are spending a lot of marketing dollars on this right now.
In the Microsoft village a couple of gadgets caught my attention. One is the Polycom video conference unit – this looks sufficiently space age to be cool. The other was the Altigen Fusion SmartStation and MaxMobile smartphone app. The smartphone app runs both cellular voice and VoIP and connects to the SmartStation using Bluetooth. The SmartStation then behaves as a normal telephone handset whilst simultaneously charging the mobile device.
This is the way ahead. Altigen also have plastics coming along
to support various Android devices and, if my memory is right, BlackBerry. All it now needs are keyboard, monitor and mouse ports and we are done – the PC is a thing of the past.
Also had a play with a couple of Lumia phones demonstrated by an overly enthusiastic guy who had been trained up especially for this show. I have to say the UI and I didn’t gel though it does take some time to get use to a new operating system.
Finally Powernet were demoing ViBE which in my mind is the
ultimate in bonding and QoS technology for ADSL circuits destined to carry both voice and data. Check it out here.
Powernet, which is a Timico Technology Group company was the only ISP at the show as far as I could see and had a very productive time of it.
That’s all folks.
Just noticed an email from RS Components had come in 23.30 on Saturday night acknowledging my registration to buy a RaspberryPi and that the boards, once they are in stock, will be allocated on a first come first served basis in order of when requests were received.
That puts me well down the list then because all the fuss surrounding the launch was on Wednesday and I registered on Friday sometime. The fact that the acknowledgement email came in over a day later surely suggests a massive backlog? 😉
Strikes me that it will be interesting to plot the progress of the kids’ coding skills once we get one in the house so watch this space.
Most people will not have heard about it before today when it hit the headlines. It is also hitting the shops – two of them. It is the way of the future in the here and now. It is affordable and will one day, in one form or another, inevitably permeate into every household on the planet. It is educational, sensational, it’s the RaspberryPi.
Most of you will know by now that the RaspberryPi is a low cost very low cost computer that has been developed to encourage kids to learn to write computer code. The level of interest in the device has been so great that the two outlets chosen to stock the device, Farnell and RS Components, have this morning seen their websites crash due to high levels of traffic 1. A botnet generated DDOS attack could not have done any better. In internet terms it’s the same as the huge round the block queues that unexplainably form outside Apple stores just before a new product launch.
I leave the minutiae of RaspberryPi to
Just had a pot of tea at the St Pancras Renaissance 5star hotel – as you do. It’s my home from home in St Pancras. When it came to paying their credit card machines weren’t working – internet was down. They had to resort to the old fashioned paper imprint machine. I think retailers pay more commission for manual transactions because they are more prone to fraud. Not ideal but at least they were able to take my payment I guess.
They need a 3G back up service for their credit car processing system. Would save a lot of hassle and probably pay for itself in reduced fees – have you seen the price of a cuppa there?
Last weekend I was turned away from the Shell Garage on Burton Road in Lincoln. They were only doing cash sales as guess what – their credit card system wasn’t working. They didn’t actually turn me away – I took that decision myself. Sometimes these decisions are easy.
Credit card swipe systems these days either use ISDN or broadband connectivity. Had the Shell garage had a 3G backup it would have saved them a lot of cash. I don’t know the sums but if for the sake of argument the average tankful was £80, 10 lanes and 5 minutes per fill-up then that works out at nearly ten grand an hour plus all the Cadbury Creme Egg sales that generate the real gross margin.
Watch this space.
See ya.
PS I like Cadbury Creme Eggs – just sayin’
Filmed at Timico’s Network Operations Centre in Newark. I get a cameo role 🙂
footnote – posted this on youtube but find it has been taken down – the BTiNet uploaded one is there. They must have complained -or Google searches for duplicates! Dunno.
I’ve embedded the iNet version.
Meet Stuart Clark CCNA, CCNA (security), CCNP, CCIP (service provider), JNCIA and Timico 3rd line engineer extraordinaire. Stuart is one of the tough guys that gets going when the going gets tough 🙂 He is clearly camera struck in the photo but don’t let that put you off – not everybody is a media hussy 🙂
Stuart is into continuous self improvement – as you can see from the list of engineering qualifications he has started to amass. The entry level Juniper cert is his latest examination success and just a starter for ten in the Junos world. His Cisco certs will have made it relatively easy – more a question of adjusting to how Juniper does things versus Cisco rather than a whole new world to pick up.
Congrats to Stuart for his latest exam pass and actually for being a general good bloke who shows an interest.
Question for you. Stuart didn’t start life as an engineer. His first career was totally different. A fine bottle of La Grille, Sauvignon Blanc 2010 by Franck Chatelain1 goes to the first person who can guess what that first career was – sorry no Timico staff or family members allowed to enter this one 🙂
1 happened to have one in my desk drawer – as you do.
The attempt at the Guinness World Records® Record for most comments on an online news post in 24 hours is set to start at 6am on Thursday 5th January. This is going to be an interesting experiment which will hopefully raise a lot of cash for the RNLI.
In order to make a success of the record attempt we have moved the blog off its old shared platform onto a new state of the art job hosted at Timico’s new data centre in Newark. This is before the data centre is officially up and running so we have all its resources to ourselves. I am heavily indebted to Timico for this.
We have been quite busy getting the new infrastructure up and running so I am also very indebted to neighbour Steve Nice and his company Forlinux for their help with the platform software.
The basic architecture looks like the diag on the right (click to enlarge). A load balancer fronts a number of wordpress servers that in turn feed off a two database (one replicates to the other as a backup).
Each server is a Cisco UCS B200 blade and connects with 2 x 10TByte EMC Storage Area Network (SAN). The blades are dual 6 core (hyper-threaded) Xeon processors with 96Gigs of RAM each and with the Hard Drives disabled for mtbf optimisation purposes. The components are all connected using a 10GigE backplane.
The data centre initially has 2 x 10Gig connections coming into it so there is plenty of bandwidth available. The site supports IPv6.
We are using WordPress 3.3 on top of CentOS 6/Apache 2.2/PHP5.3 and mysql 5.1 – version numbers are hidden from people querying the web server (Apache).
The blog itself, already relatively light on plug-ins, is based on the Thesis theme and has been pared down to the minimum to maximise performance.
Some plug-ins are worth a mention. Caching is employed using WP Total Cache for performance optimisation. Simple Twitter Connect is used particularly for comment tweets and AddToAny is used in the post for sharing.
We were kindly offered CDN capacity by Limelight Networks but we as we have already been working overtime to get the data centre ready there wasn’t time to incorporate this. The CDN is probably just a “nice little extra” on this occasion anyway as the content isn’t particularly heavy on bandwidth.
If you want to help with this world record please tell your friends – the post is going live at 6am on Thursday at http://www.trefor.net. If you regularly use a forum or have your own blog please leave a post with a link to this site. If you want to donate please use the JustGiving page or click on the big green “DONATE NOW” button in the sidebar.
Tinterweb is a wonderful place full of great things that can change our lives. Of course we all know it is also full of pitfalls, dangers, threats, hazards, risks, problems, exposure, troubles and perils 1.
I have just discovered the McAfee quarterly “Threats Report” . If you haven’t read it you need to rectify the situation. It is an amazing compendium of the threats to which we are exposed when we reach out into the land of the hypertext transfer protocol.
For the convenience of the busy reader I have selected some extracts for your delight.
Look out that your phone doesn’t start texting premium rate numbers or broadcasting your personal data or even, as is the case with Android/NickiSpy.A and Android/GoldenEagle.A, start recording your telephone conversations. Don’t give any banking information over the phone will you. The malware stays on your phone for an extended period of time to make sure it catches the right phone conversation!
I’m not a worrier but I have started to think more about protecting myself and my family when communicating. There are some security solutions on the market and I will give them a go over the next few weeks and report back.
The McAfee report has tons of interesting stuff in it – Botnet growth by region, Social Media threats, new “bad reputation” URLs per day (hits 40,000 some days!!!). There are currently over a quarter of a million Active Malicious URLs. The report even tells you the going rate for Crimeware tools – $1,500 for Linux exploit tool LinuQ (with private exploit) – if you are unfamiliar with this don’t ask – it’s a need to know job and I don’t know.
I encourage you to read the report to which I link again here.
1 My thanks to Roget’s Thesaurus for this contribution
I’m excited to say that the new NOC is now up and running as the header photo shows. The screen content is evolving at the moment but is intended to serve as a useful visual monitor of what is going on in the Timico network.
The photo on the left shows the 
room being built. The photo on the right is the view from the “manage” meeting room which has a glass wall showcasing the facility.
The security levels applied to the NOC itself means access is restricted to NOC staff. No sales people, no customers but there is a great view from the meeting room.
The shift system currently means that some desks are unoccupied at times. However as the business grows the staff will operate a hot desk system with personal possessions kept in a movable tray.
The also use a PCoIP zero client desktop hosted on our VMware platform. When a shift worker logs off and a new person logs on from the same seat the PC instance is completely rebuilt using the new logon credentials.
The official opening of the Timico Newark datacentre and NOC is on Wednesday 18th January.
Over my toast this morning I was flicking through last week’s Hansard, as you do. Yaaawn I hear you say. Come now say I. Buried deep in this mountain of sleep inducing text can be found valuable nuggets of information worthy of dissemination to the wider audience. I am here to serve.
On 5th December the House of Lords held a short debate, introduced by Baroness Greenfield, on the impact of digital technologies on the mind. Beginning with the factoid that a recent survey in the USA found that over half of teenagers aged 13 to 17 spend more than 30 hours a week, outside school, using computers and other web-connected devices the Baroness asked three questions:
Following yesterday’s post I can confirm that hyperfast-openreach, ultrafast-openreach and uberfast-openreach domains are available for sale for all suffixes. There is a domain name checker here if someone from Openreach wants to take a look. I can arrange purchase if they drop me a line. All part of the service. No problem.
They need to get in quick. We all know how difficult it is to bag a good domain name. It’e even worse these days because you also need to get the twitter name. It’s easy for people to hoover up twitter names because they are free. All you need is a load of email aliases.
Not that I’m encouraging you to go signing up new twitter accounts. That would be irresponsible. That’s all for now. I’m off to the trefor.net Christmas Tweetup.
“If I die before u i gonna write your name on the twinkling stars to show the world how much i love u”
I could just leave it at that but I’m sure you want to know more. This was a note found in a Cisco UCS chassis when it was delivered to the new Timico data centre in Newark. Funny huh?!
Well with the same shipment came a UCS B200 blade that was DOA (Dead On Arrival). Not so funny huh? Fortunately BT iNet replaced it with another in short order – well done BT iNet.
I would expect there is an investigation under way at Cisco. It is too much of a coincidence for it to be accidental.
It takes me back to my time in the semiconductor industry where chip designers used to leave little messages etched in metal in spare areas of silicon. One guy I know, who shall remain nameless, etched “live fast die young”. This was only discovered after they made the chip. Unfortunately it was on a high reliability product expected to last a very long time. They had to redo the metal mask. Expensive.
Being intelligent enough to hold down a job as a semiconductor designer he did get his grammar and spelling right unlike whoever wrote this note:)
I do quite like the idea of writing things in the stars though. The concept is doable. You just have to blank out the stars that you don’t want to appear in the writing. I leave it to you to decide how you go about doing that (micro-managing ain’t my thing).
The message would only be viewable from a certain footprint on earth but I’m assuming here that it is intended for a loved one whose location would be known to you. Let us know. When you’re dead you can do anything, or not as the case may be.
If I were you I’d forget about it, live long and enjoy it while you can 🙂
Akismet is a seriously good spam catcher. I just took a look at the comments it has trapped recently. Not clicked on any of the links but there is a wonderful range of products being pushed:
pre-workout supplements, SEO, LA Weightloss (to offset the pre workout supplements presumably), healthy food ideas, free online background checks, pharmaceutical delivery service, wedding photography, kitchen appliances, custom cabinet design!, Scottish mountain biking, a bar in London for stag nights.
Some of the comments appear to be quite carefully crafted responses the the post – as if they really are relevant. Anyway I’ve just deleted 103 of them. Sorry if yours was a genuine comment and is not approved. Keep em coming 🙂
Last weekend we went to the Lincoln Christmas Market.
We go every year 1 – we live just on the edge of where the market is located and can walk there easily. It’s an institution in Lincoln.
You either love the Christmas Market or you hate it. Those that like it love the atmosphere, the gluhwein, the noises and the smells. They love the variety of stalls where they can pick up Christmas presents. The location is top notch – around Lincoln Cathedral and Castle. Take
a break from the walking and stop off for a beer or a coffee or two. It’s great, especially by night when the neon lights add to the effect.
Those that hate it do so for the very simple reason that it is very crowded. The market attracts north of 160,000 visitors in one long weekend. That’s great for local trade but as I said very crowded. This year I noticed something for the first time. I was able to get a mobile phone line every time I tried. No “the network is busy” notifications and frustrated repeat attempts to make contact with lost friends and
relatives.
On my way home I think I spotted the reason – a temporary tower with mobile transponders. The networks, at least O2 who I use, must have boosted their capacity just for the weekend. It was great and whilst I realise that all they probably want is for nobody to notice and for people to just carry on using their phones this does warrant a pat on the back
– for Lincoln City Council too.
If I can I’ll find out what kind of boost there was to mobile capacity. Everyone at the council who has anything to do with the market is busy right now.
And finally a photo of my favourite stall. You hand over a fiver for a small bucket full of red plastic rings and spend a minute or so throwing them in the vain hope that one will land squarely around the neck of one of the bottles and you win a giant stuffed animal. Almost an impossible feat but it is doable as the stuffed gorilla we have languishing in our attic proves. Just the one word of advice. If you do win give the prize away as quickly as you can. It will make a kid happy for at least as long as its take to parents realise they are going to have to squeeze it in the car and then when they get home find somewhere to put it!
I do have a video of the action at this stall. The picture quality ain’t great but the sound effects are spectacular. Sounds just like the cash rolling into the tills of the guy who owns the stall!!!
1 except for last year when it was snowed off.
Just when I thought I had my life in order someone from the far side of the planet has dropped a bombshell with the discovery of Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB). What’s more UFB sits between Superfast and Hyperfast.
You will remember it was only last Friday I confidently announced the broadband progression as being Superfast (24Meg+ 1), Hyperfast (1Gig) and then Uberfast (placeholder for an as yet undiscovered number).
Over the weekend a pigeon arrived from Telecom New Zealand telling me that UFB is defined as a fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) broadband service providing downlink speeds of at least 100 Mbps and uplink speeds of at least 50 Mbps.
When I think of it it is blindingly obvious but
The new kennel. Every datacentre 
should have one.
If you are looking around for colocation or VM hosting you need to ask prospective suppliers whether they have a kennel or not. Period.
I’ve been waiting patiently for this feature to arrive and it has done so with perfect timing to contribute to a Friday afternoon blogging slot.
Mail me at [email protected] if you want to talk about hosting, co-lo or Virtual Machines.