Categories
Engineer media

Snowflakes, snowdrops and YouTube streaming formats – signs of spring in deepest winter

Worked from home yesterday. Weather was pants. Didn’t really matter. I lit a nice coal fire and sat in the front room doing stuff.

Here’s a vid of the snow falling in my back garden. It didn’t stick. The noise is water falling off the tree above the conservatory roof.

This morning I went for a swim and then walked down to the office. I vary my route and today’s took me past the old graveyard in Park Street. It was bitterly cold though that didn’t matter moving along at a briskish pace.

The graveyard was covered in snowdrops. Most of the gravestones have lain flat for years and are covered in moss or lichen. The prominent exception is the one in the  photo which is more of a tomb-like structure.

snowdrops in graveyard

Very poignant I thought. A symbol of death in the depths of winter surrounded by new growth and optimism.

That is all.

PS Good word, briskish.

PPS YouTube was playing up a bit this morning – had to load the video twice. Also the video was taken using an Android phone (SGS4) but YouTube told me processing would be quicker if the file format used (mp4) was compatible with their recommended streaming codecs (mp4!).

I know someone is going to come along now and tell me it was a specific flavour of mp4 with green spots and chilli spice topping.

YouTube message re streaming format

Categories
Engineer social networking Weekend

Immediacy

I’ve done most of my jobs. Stuff taken to tip, wood piled up “neatly” at bottom of garden, Kid 4’s bag emptied after skiing holiday (that one was worth a few brownie points I’ll tell you), roast beef prep done with veg peeled etc, broken light bulbs replaced. I’m sure there was more. It felt like it (cue violins – I’m not proud). I only have the bit of wood to glue back on the towel hooks in the bathroom to do (again – different bit this time) which will wait for me to finish the cup of tea I am about to consume as a reward for getting most of the jobs done.

When I came in from the garden the news about Jenny Jones’ bronze medal was on the radio. Thing is that happened hours ago. I’ve even written a blog post about it. Very topical, me.

I suppose there must still be people who don’t pick things up as they happen,

Categories
datacentre dns Engineer internet servers

Diagnosing very slow website loading problem

downtime_graph_smallBeen having intermittent problems with trefor.net since moving the site to a new virtual platform at Christmas. It’s all sorted now. Thanks to the lads at the Timico Datacentre.

I asked Ian Christian to describe the issue and how it was resolved:

Well… explaining it is a little hard…. The key to figuring it out was this:

At the bottom of every page it shows when the page was generated, and how long it took. I suspect in wordpress somewhere it might have told you this too – but I’m not sure.

What we were seeing was

Categories
Engineer obsolescence

Now gather round people wherever you roam

trefor_150This morning as I walked to work I passed the Lincoln City Council offices. My thoughts were “Lots of people work in those offices. I bet many of them could be replaced by software.”

It’s an interesting point. In one sense a City Council is very much a social business. Historically someone who was getting too old to work to work in private industry, a builder’s labourer for example, might have got a job on a council road gang once his fitness levels and usefulness on a building site waned. I’m sure there must be many other examples of this.

Also what would someone who has spent most of their life working for the council in the rigid structure of public service do if they weren’t doing that job? Is that my problem? I’d be quite happy if

Categories
Engineer storage backup & dr

Got any holiday snaps, wink wink #ReadyNAS

trefor_250Shortly after I’d arrived back from Lisbon and hooked up to WiFi not only had a hundred and seventy photos and vids already been uploaded to Google+ but also to my own ReadyNAS box at home. V reassuring.

Everyone should have one. My sisters, with who (m?) I went away for the weekend, don’t. One has been carrying photos around on her camera since last summer, meaning to “download” them. She has a huge SD Card which can store seemingly an infinite number of pics but that is bye the bye.

The other sister has no strategy whatsoever. The pics remain on her iPhone and she occasionally sticks one on Facebook. There must be millions of people out there in this situation. The second sister has a Virgin email address and her own domain wot I got her. The notion of using a third account, eg Gmail/Google+ that would provide her with at least the basic backup she needs just hurt her brain, and she is a highly intelligent (natch) individual.

I suspect her kids have it sorted. Half the problem is that she, as a busy mother/taxi/etc doesn’t have the time to look at the issue.

Anyway, as I said, my pics are now backed up. Good oh.

Read more – photo backups to NAS box sorted

Galaxy S4 to NAS Backup.

Categories
Engineer servers

Is this a symptom of the recession or has the Moore’s Effect plateaued?

Moore’s Law predicts that advances in device fabrication double the number of transistors possible on any given piece of silicon approximately every two years.

This has lead to a constant performance increase in computing over the last 40 years. That is, a near-linear improvement in CPU speed and storage capacity.

It has also lead to another notable effect – a rapid depreciation in the cost of new hardware over the first couple of years after a device first goes on sale.

For example I built a server in 2005. Within 2 years the price I paid for the motherboard, CPU and RAM had collapsed to less than half what I paid initially. In fact it allowed me to upgrade the CPU, RAM and hard disks to give a vast performance increase for less than I paid for the original components.

Fast forward 5 more years to early summer 2012 when I built my last server. 18 months later the CPU and motherboard are still on sale. But the i7 3820 CPU is today exactly the same price I paid for it and the X79 chipset motherboard has actually increased in value, from just under £200 to over £260.

Even the Ripjaws 16GB quad-channel memory kit I bought has gone up 20 quid, something quite unusual after years of tumbling memory prices.

In fact the only notable depreciation is in the cost of enterprise-class hard disk storage, due to a couple of high performance 4TB disks entering the market in the intervening period.  So I might just be able to afford to upgrade from 2TB to 4TB RAID-1.

Of course this could just be a temporary blip due to a combination of the severe economic down turn we’re [hopefully] heading out of and the rapid decline of the desktop computer reducing the demand for traditional motherboards and leading to a temporary glut in the market in 2012.

However it could be an economic indicator that the Moore’s Effect is plateauing, meaning computer hardware will hold its value for longer and I’m denied the cheap performance boost I’d grown used to 2 years after I build a server.

Categories
Engineer security servers

Lloyds Bank – 2 out of 7 servers “down”

Problems with Lloyds Bank & TSB cashpounts attributed to failiure of 2 out of 7 servers by BBC.

Interesting article on BBC Radio 4 Today Prog this morning. Apparently last night some Lloyds & TSB customers were unable to use their debit cards for a couple of hours or so. Not me. I was at home.

The point is that apparently two servers were down. It’s a bit of an eyebrow raiser that this could happen with just two servers going down. Doesn’t sound like good capacity planning. I’d have thought they’d be load balanced with plenty of headroom on each server that would allow for such an eventuality.

Can’t be right unless there’s something specific re security for such systems that doesn’t allow them to do that.

One wonders what would have caused two servers to go down at the same time. Rack outage maybe? No generator bup? Suspect we won’t find out and I’m only mildly interested.

The other observation relates to that comment by the reporter re people at petrol stations whose cards were rejected.  Unless they had alternative means of payment they had to wait at the petrol station until someone came along and paid for them.

Petrol stations in my experience can fail over to a manual card swipe using old fashioned slips of paper. Maybe not all of them. Or maybe because the card processing system was not “down” generally the specific Lloyds customers weren’t trusted.

That’s all.

PS no such thing as 100% uptime – see this post on Vodafone outage

Categories
Engineer peering

LONAP AGM & my first Banksy

banksyGot together with the LONAP board yesterday to go through arrangements for next week’s AGM. It’s been another year of growth. Better not tell you any more at this stage or I’ll be spoiling it for Tuesday.

As a not for profit we try to keep overheads down and yesterday we borrowed a meeting room off Vision IPTV in the shadow of the BT tower.  On the end wall of the building was a Banksy. My first one! I was thrilled.

Apparently when the council leased the building to it’s current occupiers they wanted to charge them extra because of the Banksy. That angle didn’t work. Then some time later someone else in the council decided the mural was getting a bit worn and wanted to paint over the whole lot!

That’s when Vision IPTV decided to place a clear protective screen over it.

coldwar corridorThere’s not much else to report other than the meeting was held upstairs in what appeared to be a building right out of a 60s cold war movie. I could imagine Michael Caine striding up to me, leather shoes echoing along the corridor, saying “My name is Harry Palmer”.

We all sat in the meeting room jointly editing the slide decks for the AGM in the LONAP Google Apps Drive space. Internet connectivity was provided my my EE 4G  MiFi dongle. I was getting 16Mbps – perfectly adequate for 4 laptops hanging off it.

London is a bleak place in January. We finished our work and retired to a warm pub, an old favourite, The Lamb (Conference Room L) in Lambs Conduit Street, for a cheery pint and a chat about life, the universe and internet connectivity.

All work and no play makes Tref a dull boy. As you know:)

Categories
Engineer mobile apps

Use of memory on phone by Applications #connectedlife

available_ramactive_apps_smallavailable_ram2_smallWas flicking through the apps on my droid this morning in bed, as you do, and I noticed that I was running low on available RAM, again as you do. I was down to something like 16%. Blimey I thought. Wonder what’s using all that memory up?

So I looked and saw that I had 11 Applications running even though I wasn’t using most of them. Now I didn’t notice that this slowed my phone down but taking it to the extreme it could have done.

I took some screenshots to illustrate how using Apps uses memory. The Apps screenshot is an approximate simulation as I already killed the ones when I originally looked.

Stopping the Apps releases a load of memory. You can see the available memory grow from 16% to 43%.

All obvious stuff but interesting to see in action nevertheless.

Just for interest I uploaded these screenshots from my droid to Google Drive when I was at home.

In the railway station waiting room I used my Chromebook to access pixlr.com via my EE 4G MiFi to size them and convert to jpg for use in the blog. They were still in Drive at this time.

As the train moved out of the station and with diminishing cellular signal I moved the pics from Drive to the media folder on trefor.net.

This process wasn’t heavy on cellular bandwidth as I was moving stuff from one cloud to another (more on the “other” cloud in due course).

It was all a bit of a race against time knowing that the precious resource of connectivity was going to dwindle and vanish.

Now as I head through the wilderness of Lincolnshire towards Nottinghamshire, London and notional civilisation I am forced to continue editing this post locally.

I’ll only need a tiny bit of bandwidth to finally publish it, in theory, because the heavy shifting has been done.

The only other thing to note is that I’m stretching this post out a bit because the photos are fairly tall and therefore use a fair bit of real estate.

I could have shrunk them a bit but then I find it difficult to read the text don’t you? 🙂

That’s all folks. Stay safe but make your life an exciting one.

#connectedlife 🙂

Categories
4g Engineer engineering mobile connectivity

EE 4G mobile broadband roadmap in UK #LTE-A #mobilebroadband

EE4G4G speeds continue to grow in the UK as EE trial LTE-A 300Mbps.

Sat in an interesting talk at UKNOF27 given by Bob Sleigh of EE. You will know that EE were the first of the mobile operators to sell 4G services in the UK. Bob told us that by the end of 2013 EE 4G services have reached 66% of the UK population with 98% potentially covered by the end of 2014. This represents the fastest rollout of 4G services in any country anywhere and EE now claim that the UK has moved from a mobile backwater to one of the world’s leading implementers.

This claim of world leadership is likely to be on the back of EE’s Techcity LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) trials (November 2013) which saw maximum 4G speeds of 296Mbps. EE expect to roll out LTE-A services in 2014.

Categories
broadband Engineer internet Net

BT achieves world record for fibre transmission rates – fair play @neilmcrae

BT world record broadband speed

Had an excited Neil Mcrae come up to me this morning  asking if I’d read the press release 🙂 Neil is Chief Technical Architect of BT Group. The conversation began over beer and a curry last night where Neil alluded to an important announcement the next day but declined to elaborate. Normally beer will loosen a person’s tongue but Neil doesn’t drink enough beer for this approach to work.

Next morning I had naturally forgotten all about it until prompted by the lad.

The press release, which you can read in full here, tells us that BT, in conjunction with vendor Alcatel Lucent, achieved “trial speeds of up to 1.4Tb/s with a record spectral efficiency of 5.7 bits per second per Hertz (b/s/Hz)on an existing core fiber connection. This is believed to be the fastest speed ever achieved in commercial grade hardware in a real-world environment and is equivalent to transmitting 44 uncompressed HD films in a single second.

This press release has been picked up by online media all over the world. After all 1.4Tbps is a pretty advanced performance for a fibre connection. In fact the connection made use of multiple fibre strands running off BT’s Alcatel Lucent 400Gbps capable kit. Multiple ports were used to get the speeds.

Not many companies have this kind of kit to play with but the development of advanced performance fibre transmission networks is key for large ISPs and content providers to be able to cope with the growth in consumer demand for internet services.

This particular trial majors on the efficiencies of the technology. It uses existing “old” fibre connecting BT’s Adastral Park R&D centre with BT Tower in London. This is important because it will allow bandwidth to grow using existing fibre in the ground.

BT are quoted as saying that a 1.4Tbps is the equivalent to transmitting 44 uncompressed HD films in a single second. Now I happen to know that Neil Mcrae is a big fan of the latest and greatest TVs – he is the only person I know to own a 4K TV (in fact he has a Sony 4K Ultra HD job). It’s all becoming clear.

There must be a 3rd node on the BT network with the Alcatel Lucent kit in Neil Mcrae’s back bedroom. He is going to have a Sony 4K TV in every room.  Seems obvious. 1.4Tbps is still a little overkill even with all these TVs but there is such a thing as future proofing you know. As 8K becomes available Neil will be able to upgrade his TVs without having to go to the hassle of changing his home router.

Respect:)

Meanwhile I think we can be proud that this kind of pioneering work is happening in the UK and I think Neil is right to have a smile on his face this morning. Onwards and upwards.

Categories
Engineer peering

Internet connectivity powered by beer and curry #ixmanchester

Did you know that the internet is powered by beer and curry?

Am at the IX Manchester meeting today. IX Manchester is an Internet Peering Exchange that allows networks local to the area to connect to each other so that internet traffic destined for each other’s networks travels by the fastest path rather than having to be backhauled to London then boomeranged back up to Manchester.

Consider the scenario of you, sat in your front room. You want to check out the opening times of your local sports centre so you

Categories
broken gear Engineer gadgets

External USB sound card to replace broken laptop card

usb_sound_cardPicked up this cracking little USB sound card off eBay for less than two quid, including postage and packaging. It’s for my old Dell laptop. I knocked it off the arm of the settee a year or so back. It fell on the floor and rammed the headphone socket right inside the machine. Ah well.

I’ve lived without sound since then but whilst I rarely use the Dell any it has become Mrs Davies’ machine since hers played up and it seems reasonable for her to have sound, especially for the price.

I’ve only tested it on some old vid on YouTube and it did sound tinny but that might well have been down to my choice of content rather than the actual sound quality. For two quid who is going to complain anyway.

That’s all. Two quid!!?? I’m going to plug in a set of speakers for her so that she can listen to her favourite radio programmes.

Tbh she rarely uses a laptop anymore, It’s all iPad. I’d tell you what make the USB thing is but I can’t tell from the packaging. It looks pretty generic. Made in China, fair play.

Categories
chromebook Engineer media video webrtc

Bandwidth use for Google Hangouts #WebRTC

Was on a WebRTC conference call this morning. I was calling from the Chrome browser in my Chromebook. Volume could have been slightly louder but the quality of the call was terrific. All I did was click on a link and hey presto. I’ll tell you more about it in due course.

We chatted for over half an hour. It wasn’t video as the other participants were using standard SIP phones. We were hooked up through a WebRTC gateway in the (good ole) US of A.

One on the subjects that came up was bandwidth use of video streams when making WebRTC calls. Using a gateway minimises the amount of processing that you have to do locally and also cuts down on the internet bandwidth you need.

Google Hangouts apparently use your laptop/local device to do the video mixing and thus you need more i/o bandwidth. Google tells us that for person to person video hangout the min bandwidth required is 256kbps/512kbps (up/down) and ideally for the best experience 1Mbps/2.5Mbps).

For calls with more than 2 persons the ideal scenario changes to 900kbps/2Mbps. This means that many people living with poor quality ADSL connections will not be able to properly experience the power of Google Hangouts.

It also explains why calls at weekends (that’s when we hangout) to my daughter at Durham University are also poor quality. It has been known for four of us kids to be on the hangout – one in Durham and three in separate rooms in the house in Lincoln (me and the two lads still at home).  We have 7Mbps up in our house but in Durham it is an ADSL connection shared between four in a student house.

Shame really. For the want of a few quid more on the broadband line it could be much better. Students however are always skint and conserve the cash and we should recognise that they are representative of many people in the UK.

With time everyone will be on a faster broadband connection but for the moment, and I know I’m quite likely to get noises of agreement (or maybe just the occasional assenting nod) from readers in rural areas, many still have to live with limitations of their internet connection.

Mind you I’m all right Jack:)

That’s all.

Categories
Engineer internet ipv6

Nest Labs – tax benefits and the internet of things? #IPv6

Google has bought Nest Labs for $3.2Bn. Nest Labs is into smart home devices and the internet of things. This we all know because it’s splattered all over the tech pages this morning.

I’d never heard of Nest Labs. I suspect it’s a by product of living in sleepy old Lincoln, somewhere in the deepest sticks of Engerlund and not in Silicon Valley. I live with it every day and I love it.

Ok it is interesting news and it focusses the mind on the growth of the internet, the further pervasion of technology into our every day lives and yes, IPv6 even. Google knows its stuff when it comes to IPv6.

A few things particularly spring to my mind re this acquisition. One is that Nest Labs was founded with over $80m of VC money. If you want to sell your business for $3.2Bn you have to think big and place big bets. Nest Labs will have spent its cash on an expensive team of people able to deliver.

I saw somewhere recently that startup had offered a Google employee $500k to move jobs. Unfortunately that Google developer was already earning $3m! I wonder whether there is the environment in the UK for this kind of activity. It needs both investors and entrepreneurs to be fully embedded in emerging technology cultures.

Secondly if this market is going to be as big as the size of the bet suggests then it has to be the demesne of huge businesses. Global businesses. This is somewhat dispiriting. There must still be room for small entrepreneurial organisation who can make things happen quickly.

Finally one presumes that Google has a huge cash pile. You hear about it occasionally, usually when MPs whinge about the ways large multi-national corporations are able to avoid paying tax in particular countries. All perfectly legal.

A quick “Google” shows that US Corporation Tax is 40% whilst Capital Gains Tax is anything between zero and 15% or 20%. One of the investors in Nest Labs is Google Ventures, fair play. Now I’m not an accountant but might there be huge tax benefits for Google in only paying Capital Gains tax rather than Corporation Tax on the $3.2Bn? Don’t get me wrong. Nothing improper going on I’m sure. Perhaps it all comes out in the wash so to speak.

It would be interesting though if someone out there was able to drill into the taxation specifics of such a transaction. I’m sure it wouldn’t affect the Google business case for the Nest Labs acquisition but an interesting by product nevertheless?

Answers on a postcard or via the comments section.

See ya, buddy…

PS Internet of things. IPv6. Very exciting.

Categories
Engineer engineering

Growth in UKNOF attendee registration suggests healthy industry

With a couple of weeks to go the regular UK Network Operators Forum (UKNOF) meeting is seeing very healthy growth in registrations.
uknofattendees2_545

Take a look at the chart. Waaay back in the actually not too distant past UKNOF1 in May 2005 had 47 folk in attendance.

If you are in the game you will recognise quite a few names there.

Today, at the time of writing and with a couple of weeks to go, there are 232 people signed up.

A fair bit of this growth has come in the last 12 months which must sure be an emulation of other economic indicators. Although not all companies are doing well the well run ones are. I’d expect the final numbers for UNKNOF27 to exceed 250.

UKNOF meetings are not for the layman but if you are in the business the agenda reads very well – indicators of what’s going on in the internet plumbing world.

This meeting includes talks on:

  • progress with the new generic top level domains by Leo Vegoda ICANN – remember the industry is expanding from the relatively short list of domain suffixes (.com, .net etc) to include hundreds more (/plumbing, .sexy, .photography etc)
  • 100GigE rollout at Janet by Rob Evans (ref yesterday’s post on Janet)
  • DDOS equals pain by Richard Bible

These are all subjects that, if you but knew it, affect everyone on the planet one way or another. We may all want a website that uses the new gtld (.plumbing might become cool:) ).  Faster home broadband means that networks need faster and faster connections to carry the traffic back and forth from the internet (etc). 100GigE which has been in development for years was first mentioned on this blog back in 2010 but still only has 2 organisations using it in the UK (BT & Janet).

You may not notice a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack but every now and again if you have problems accessing particular websites there is a fair chance that this is because of DDOS. Even an individual broadband connection occasionally gets attacked – usually if the person at the end of that broadband has upset someone else. The internet is certainly still in the wild wild west web stage.

The fact that sponsors line up to support these events is a testament to the quality of the meetings and of the attendees.

That’s it for now. I’m going to UKNOF27 and will perhaps update on final numbers on the day.

PS took me ages to get the chart exported from google spreadsheet. There is a known bug that has been at least 2 years in the fixing (not). In the end I had to take a screenshot!

Categories
broadband Engineer

Well Done, Rob Evans @rhe #Janet

janet_office_speedDay two in the big brother house new office (spoken with  Geordie accent) and I’ve just done a broadband speed test. For the moment my network connection is a WiFi hotspot on a 4 year old iMac which is in turn connected to an Ethernet socket in the wall. Tomorrow we will be bringing in a router.

With this setup I’ve just done a speed test and as you can see got 66Mbps down with an equally good 40Mbps up. Impressivo. Remember this is through the iMac.

speed_fast_smallThe iMac itself connected directly to the Ethernet port gets even better speeds. On this occasion 141Mbps down and a whopping (the Sun says) 208Mbps up.

This must be a GigE LAN. Will have to investigate. I’m told that in the wee small hours when most of the whole wide world is fast asleep it gets even faster. It’s likely constrained by the speed of the Ethernet card in the Mac. Clearly it’s must be locally shared bandwidth.

This is all because the network is run by the University of Lincoln who of course will be attached to Janet.

At this point I’d like to thank Rob Evans (@rhe), who runs the Janet network, for his efforts here. Rob doesn’t mess about down at 1Gbps speed I know. He is more into 100GigE but nevertheless thanks Rob 🙂

I had intended to do some trade study work into various broadband services as part of being able to recommend providers. In the case of the office this would be futile so I will at some point do it on my home connection. I currently use Timico and see no real reason to change seeing as I know the network.

However I sense that I will want to move to FTTP on demand and also as a consumer might want to avail myself of TV and or sport bundles which as a B2b pureplay Timico doesn’t offer so watch this space for news on that score.

Categories
Engineer phones

I dreamt last night I was upgrading to Android 4.3

android 4.3 upgradeThis is another musical post to be sung to the tune of Sit Down You’re Rocking The Boat from Guys and Dolls. If you don’t know it look it up.

Whilst I was in bed I dreamt last night I was upgrading my Android, a great big download that took me quite a while. 730MB. Blimey. That’s more memory than they had on the Apollo space mission to the moon (etc). It took what seemed ages though I didn’t time it because I didn’t know when it started.

I quite like it when I see my phone upgrading itself. Makes me think I’m being looked after by the great Android god in the cloud. These upgrades aren’t without an element of fear though. The fear of the unknown. You hear stories about “how my phone has never been the same since”. Perhaps stupidly I trust the major global corporations that provide me with these services. I trust that at least they won’t get the upgrade wrong. They only need to step out of line once for them to lose that trust but so far so good. Not everyone’s experience.

Now I will say that a few thoughts have entered the bonce since capturing the screenshot of the upgrade. First of all I thought Oooh. I can use Samsung Galaxy Gear. Aside from the fact that I didn’t know I couldn’t use it already with my SGS4 my next thought is hmm, I haven’t heard good things about it. I did see some in PC World last weekend and they looked plasticky. Also I’m not going to pay two hundred odd quid to try it out and find I don’t like it, especially as I don’t wear a watch. And that is even though I happen to believe that the smart watch is the way forward. I bought my Samsung Chromebook for roughly the same price as the Gear.

The next thought I thunk was that I was looking forward to the improved graphics performance. Unfortunately this is not particularly noticeable. It seems as slow as ever though I ascribe that to Samsung software and not Android. What was instantly noticeable is the flickering screen when displaying multiple browser tabs. I’ve just checked and it is still there. A backward step. Definitely.

You can see from the screenshot all the other features that have been improved in this version of Android. I obviously welcome the security update. Who wouldn’t eh?

That’s all. I might pop down to PC World and see if they will let me have a play with a Gear.

Ciao bebe.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

#LINX83 – traffic growth and regional expansion

I’m at LINX83. The eighty third quarterly meeting of the London Internet Exchange. The statistics associated with LINX continue to astound.

LINX has 492 members, 1191 connected ports 683 of which are 10GigE and 1 100GigE port with 2 orders in process. The LINX network carries 1.791 Tbps of peak traffic with 7.324 Tbs capacity (plenty of headroom there) to 60 member countries.

This is an enormous amount of traffic and capacity upon which I’m not going to dwell much more (unless as I’m sure it will, something interesting comes up during the LINX83 sessions).

I do however want to talk about regional peering efforts.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

Sensible freebies for network engineers at #LINX83 #IPPerformance

usb bottle openerWhen engineers get together at conferences and trade shows a flock of vendors naturally flutters down and starts pecking around looking to impress (totally random collective noun btw). This is indeed the case at LINX83. One of the tools of the trade in the conference impress the engineer game is to hand out freebies. LINX83 is no different. There are pens to be had and there are USB memory sticks.

USB memory sticks are a standard freebie but one that vendors need to take great care over. The bar is set by LONAP who handed out 32GB USB sticks at their AGM at the beginning of this year. Every USB freebie is measured against this mark.

AT LINX83 USB sticks are available but not at 32GB. They are only 4GB! Ordinarily this would engender contempt but not on this occasion for as you can see from the inset photo, these USB sticks are also beer bottle openers. IP Performance, the fine organisation handing out these freebies has struck at the very heart of what makes an engineer tick. Beer.

Someone, I think it was me, suggested that a 32GB or even a 64GB version could be produced attached to a Screwpull corkscrew. This kicked off a debate about the sense of having electronic circuits near to a source of liquids. This would apply to beer as well as wine..

I say that an engineer wouldn’t spill his or her beer or wine regardless of how difficult the bottle cap or cork was to extract. I realise also that many fine wines come in screw top bottles but the very best, as consumed in great quantities by LINX members, will be cork and the Screwpull corkscrew is a suitable tool for extracting such stoppers.

I already have a Screwpull at home but if anyone has a stock that needs giving away please let me know – with or without 64GB memory stick.

You heard it first on trefor.net…

Categories
broadband Engineer

Evidence that video is driving home internet use

Home broadband usage driven by TV streaming

Evidence is emerging of what applications are driving home broadband usage at the Davies house.

broadband usage wife at workThe two graphs presented herein for your entertainment and delight are of the broadband traffic over our Timico 80/20 FTTC line at home over the last two days – Tuesday and Wednesday.

The first graph shows very little happening during the day. As it happens my wife Anne was at work – she is a supply teacher. There isn’t that much going on in the evening either really although were were hitting 10Mbps at 10.30 pm.

DSL usage wife homeThe second graph shows the traffic when Anne was at home during the day. What a difference!

Most of the bursts are running at around 1.2Mbps and lasting between 30 minutes and two hours.

Now I happen to know that Anne, who always keeps herself busy, often has cookery programmes on during the day in the kitchen. There is so much to catch up on – Master Chef, Great British Bakeoff etc etc. She plays them on her iPad.

The bursts of traffic look very much as if they represent this kind of TV programme watching. Also interesting is the bandwidth required. It isn’t very much although I’m not sure what codecs were being used by iPlayer.

The other usage must basically represent everything else though the spike at 10.30 looks like a download – I know not what. All this just goes to show what this tinterweb thing is being used for. This is in no way an accusation that Anne sit around all day doing nothing – if you knew her you would know she is a very active person. I would however say that she was very representative of the average consumer even if I am not.

You can check out our home broadband data usage trend here.

Ciao bebe…

Categories
Engineer online safety

More on Team Cymru

team cymruSeeing as  I mentioned Team Cymru (Teem Come-ree) yesterday I just noticed that I’ve had their quarterly newsletter (Cymru Quarterly) on my desk since June. This is a personalized high quality newsletter that I specifically signed up for. I remember when doing so they asked me a second time whether I really wanted the newsletter in hard copy. I rarely read hard copy but in their case I did so I’ve been getting it through the post.

I’ve just noticed that on the cover of this edition they ask me whether I want to continue receiving the newsletter. In order to do so I have to click on a link and fill out a survey.

This is pretty cool and efficient. I get a fair bit of junk mail/magazines that I never look at and which are a total waste of space (and money). I’m not going to carry on with the hard copy. I follow them on twitter @teamcymru and am happy that I get my news in that way and save them some cash.

I wonder if they will be supporting Wales v South Africa at the Millenium Stadium on Saturday 🙂 They are based in Florida mind you. I expect they are so busy they will have forgotten the match is on…

Categories
Engineer peering security

Team Cymru – the correct pronounciation

On a completely different note whilst I was at the Euro-IX conference last week someone gave a talk that included something about Team Cymru. Team Cymru are a top bunch of guys in the cyber security space.

However there is something that urgently needs addressing about the organisation and that is how you pronounce their name. I’ve been hearing Team Kim-roo which is understandable but totally incorrect. I’m sure that the good folk at Team Cymru will not mind me saying that the correct way to pronounce the name is Come-ree. It is the way that the Welsh would say it.

There. I’ve got that one off my chest. Cymru am byth!

Categories
Engineer media

29% of USA ISP traffic is Netflix

Interesting talk from Nina Bargisen of Netflix. What surprised me was the chart she showed of the main traffic drivers on ISP networks in the USA. Netflix comes out top, representing 29% of all traffic carried by ISPs in the US. YouTube is only 15% of traffic with http coming third at 11%.

The thing to consider here is that as people move to higher quality video -3D,  Super HD, Ultra HD (4k) and ultimately 8k format the percentage of traffic that is video is clearly going to grow. Also clear is that this move to higher bandwidth video is going to seriously drive bandwidth requirements – both in operator networks and at the home broadband level.

Netflix recommend that you need 12Mbps bandwidth to carry 3D and between 5 and 7 (optimally) for Super HD. In the UK you would therefore be able to stream one 3D video or two Super HD, assuming an average download bandwidth of 14Mbps. 4k video will need 15Mbps per stream.

If for the sake of argument we assume that Netflix and YouTube represent all the video traffic in the USA then as 4k comes on stream and the bandwidth required to support it therefore doubles then video could well end up at almost 90% of all internet traffic. I realise that other applications will also grow their bandwidth needs but I don’t think I’m a million miles off the mark.

It’s coming folks. Better get your broadband speeded up. Pic below is of the chart shown by Nina at the conference.

PS no idea why people watch TV – the only good stuff on is Time Team and Storage Hunters and I’ve already seen Mary Poppins quite a few times.

USA ISP traffic statschart courtesy of Netflix and Sandvine

 

Categories
Engineer internet

20th Anniversary of FICIX at Euro-IX 23 Helsinki

euroixI’m at Euro-IX 23, the 23rd six monthly get together of the people that run Europe’s internet peering exchanges. Without these mutual not for profit exchanges your internet connection would cost a fair bit more.

Euro-IX 23 is in Helsinki because 2013 is the 20th anniversary of the founding of FICIX, the Finnish internet exchange.

It’s very much worth looking at the connectivity provided by FICIX over the last 20 years.

1993 10Meg Ethernet hub soon upgraded to a switch
1996 155Mbps ATM
1999 622Mbps ATM
2002 1GigE
2004 10GigE
2013 100GigE ready with first ports expected to be provisioned in 2014

This roadmap is interesting because it is an illustration of how the internet has grown over the last 20 years. It also shows the flow of technology during that time including the demise of ATM.

Time was all your home broadband surfing would have been made over an ATM backhaul connection (the link between the telephone exchange and the internet. Now it is almost certainly done over 10GigE.

Unless you are in the business the chances are you won’t understand any of these terms in which case just note the flow – 10>155>622>1,000>10,000>100,000 millions of bits per second. Remembering that the average broadband speed of something like 14Mbps is faster than the total aggregated connectivity of the whole of Finland in 1993.

Cop this Euro-IX video to understand how the internet works and what peering is all about – you don’t need to be a techie to watch.

Video and header image/logo courtesy of Euro-IX.

Categories
Engineer engineering H/W

New toys for the boys Cisco ASR1002

Cisco ASR1002

To keep engineers happy you have to give them toys to play with. In our game it is fairly straightforward because the network is always evolving. It’s all about continuous upgrade.

The “problem” at Timico is driven by two factors:

  1. the need to keep moving with the times
  2. the need to add extra capacity

In a world where the broadband market has been fairly stagnant or at best slow moving for a number of years, certainly in terms of total numbers of subscribers, our broadband customer base seems to be growing in step functions. A strong driver for this is that we deal with businesses that often have many sites that need connecting – sometimes thousands. We aren’t therefore driven by the need to continuously bomb the price and and more into the bundle such as TV.

Our customers are of course interested in price but they also want a management wrap.  Network uptime is more important to them than price because downtime means loss of cash.

So the ASR1002 in the pic is one of a number that will be integrated into the network as LNSs (Layer 2 Network Servers). Each can cope with 64k users. We won’t be pushing them hard. We are after reliability and don’t want to cram as many users as possible onto each one.

That’s all. Funny what you pick up when walking around the office innit?

Categories
Engineer ipv6 ofcom

IPv6 usage in UK lagging behind our major global competitors

ipv6_usage_headerThis graph of  percentage IPv6 adoption by country as of today, 14th October 2013, was extracted from potaroo.net. It shows the percentage of internet users in each country using IPv6. You can get the exact numbers from potaroo. The UK’s 34th place suggests we are seriously lagging behind. OK we can look at it in terms of actual numbers of users – see the next chart below.  We are 13th one this one but take a look at the top 5 – all major competitors in the global commercial stakes.

v6users

 

These charts don’t show us how IPv6 adoption is moving with time for each country but I don’t get the feeling it is proceeding with any pace here in the UK.

Whilst we are on the subject of UK competiveness it is also worth noting that the annual Cisco Visual Networking Index is forecasting an average global broadband speed of 39Mbps by 2017. Ofcom reports that in May 2013 the UK average broadband speed was 14.7Mbps. This does fit with the Cisco forecast but to keep up with the game there is a lot of work to do to hit the 2017 number.

The base technology roadmap is there in the UK – you can now get FTTP on demand at 330Mbps. It’s going to take ultra high def TV delivery over broadband to drive the market. I think we are still relatively early days in this space. Fibre To The Premises with a performance of 1Gbps and up is still the end game.

Categories
4g Engineer mobile connectivity

Mobile data usage growth when using 4G networks

EE4GMet with EE last week. Discovered that in the early days of their 4G network rollout a significant chunk of the bandwidth usage was people doing speed tests. Bit like me. I’ve racked up around 6GB between O2 and Vodafone and more when taking into consideration the Huaweii MiFi with the EE SIM.

A pal of mine told me that last week he had already used up his 8GB bundle for September and had to buy more. He hadn’t been doing 4G testing but had been watching movies. It’s the shape of things to come. I’ll see if I can find some bandwidth usage trend stats for 4G and maybe we can extrapolate to see how much data we are going to be using in say 2 years time. Problem is there isn’t enough data specifically on 4G yet.

One interesting aspect of the meeting with EE was that they have no plans to introduce unlimited packages on 4G. Like it or not this is the only sensible approach in the near term when network capacity is still fairly expensive.

It’s too early to tell which of the operators is going to have the best 4G network.

Categories
Engineer internet ipv6

IPv6 traffic hits 2% of traffic at Google

IPv6 came up in conversation over lunch this week. Google reports that up to 2% of traffic to its servers are IPv6. It took about 4 1/2 years for IPv6 to hit 1% which it did around February of this year and I guess another 7 months or so to then double (timeframes are imprecise because I’m interpreting a graph rather than looking at the numbers behind it).

Traffic to Google isn’t necessarily representative of what is going on generally on the internet and I’m not sure there is one single source of data on this subject. However you can look at specific internet exchanges to see the trend on their own networks.

DE-CIX in Germany is the world’s largest internet exchange (IX) and a peek at the statistics on their website show a growth trend. As of today, 29/9/12 the 2 day average IPv6 traffic at DE-CIX is at 6.7Gbps which compared with the overall traffic level of 1,430Gbps is still a relatively small proportion.

Anecdotally different ISPs are at different stages of the game with IPv6 with some having to look at Carrier Grade NAT as an interim solution. Equipment aside the main issue is often the fact that automated provisioning and back office systems need redesigning to make IPv6 a scalable proposition. Whilst IANA stocks of IPv6 ahem IPv4 addresses are exhausted this is not necessarily the case within individual ISPs which is perhaps why we aren’t hearing more scare stories in the media.

Check out this paper on IPv6 readiness written back in 2010.

Chart below is the Google IPv6 traffic growth – links to Google’s own page.

Google IPv6 traffic stats

Categories
Engineer fun stuff

What does an engineer wear underneath his kilt?

engineers and kiltsOch aye the noo. Whassup? Worrayulukinat? Actually no.

The four gentlemen in kilts here are far better spoken than Rab C Nesbitt. They aren’t all Scottish but engineers like a bit of a laugh and that’s what we had at the Lonap ISPA Party Party at the Phoenix Artist Club in London last night.

The boys concerned here are Thomas Weible,  Marcus Arnold, Fearghas McKay and James Blessing.

The question is what does an engineer wear under his kilt?

be oro at the phoenix artist club