Category: Engineer

Engineer

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Engineer internet

iOS7 release causes internet traffic to double

traffic growth on lonap network due to ios7 upgradeiOS7 caused a stir in more than one way last week. Twitter abounded with all sorts of comments regarding how slow the Apple servers were responding to download requests from excited fanbois eager to checkout the latest slightly iterative functionality of their new iOS. When the dust settled it seemed that the majority of people had been sorted.

Taking a look at the effect of iOS7 on networks comes up with some interesting results. The graph in the header pic above shows the traffic over the Lonap core before, during and after the flurry wave (ocean?) of downloading. Steady state is around 30Gbps or maybe slightly more. Once iOS started to hit the fan this doubled to around 60Gbps.

It’s good that networks such as Lonap can take the capacity hit.

The growth in traffic comes as no surprise when you consider the size of the download. This seems to have ranged from around 700MB to nearly a Gig depending on the device with 3GB of space needed on your phone for the install. I guess you wouldn’t want to be eating into your mobile data bundle with that.

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4g Engineer mobile connectivity olympics

4G speed test results in London – comparison of O2, EE and Vodafone

4G4G test results in London – comparison of O2, EE and Vodafone on a road trip.

Competition in 4G has been a long time coming. It’s almost a year since EE launched their service and we now have the Vodafone and O2 4G networks running, at least in London. When I took part in the O2 4G trials in 2013 the results were spectacular (43Mbps in the Devonshire Arms pub off Oxford Street) if confined to a few places – O2 used 25 cell sites for these trials. The results were great partly because I doubt that there were that many people using the network given that we all had dongles and not phones. You had to have your laptop out which aside from my coverage experiment conducted from the top deck of a moving number 25 bus meant that you had to be in a static location.

Now I have three networks to play with: EE, Vodafone and O2. It would be natural to expect that having had longer to roll out their network the EE coverage would be better. However with more subscribers using the EE service would their speeds be as good as the relatively empty networks of the new kids on the block?

The 4G test tools to hand were a Samsung GalaxyS4 running O2, a Nokia Lumia 920 on Vodafone and a Huawei 4G Mobile WiFi E5776 (MiFi) loaned to be my EE. The tests were conducted over two separate trips and on each occasion I had a Twitter pal along for the ride: @flosoft and @UKTamo. We also used @UKTamo’s SGS3 LTE running on EE.

In one sense because I was using four different devices the test conditions were not going to survive academic scrutiny. However having to go to the effort of swapping SIMs every time I wanted to run a test just so that I could do like for like testing wasn’t going to be practical. What you get here therefore is a mix of experiences with some real results mixed with subjectivity. It should provide a feel for the 4G experience in London.

4G speed testing at McDonalds KingsX We started off in McDonalds in Kings Cross. Day one was not an unbridled success as for much of the day the only network I had working was EE.  Having only just provisioned them, the new 4G SIMs on the other two took a while to kick in. Before realising this I thought that maybe the S4 and Lumia 920 needed a firmware upgrade. @flosoft averaged around 5Mbps using the McDonalds WiFi to download the software for the Samsung whereas I was getting double that using the EE 4G MiFi for the Nokia. Nokia took well over half an hour to perform the actual upgrade after downloading the software but it had still finished the job before the WiFi based software download for the Samsung had ended, let alone start the installation.

This became a theme. During lunch at the Nag’s Head in Covent Garden hanging off the EE4G Huawei MiFi was a better experience than using the pub’s WiFi. This is despite the fact that my Galaxy S4 is set to backup media to Google+ when connected via WiFi. Because of this any speed testing and usage on the MiFi will have been degraded because of the background uploading yet the experience was still good. It suggests to me that as 4G becomes more ubiquitous, cost of data aside, public venues will need to upgrade their broadband service if they want people to continue their WiFi rather than a cellular service.

As an aside during the 2012 Olympics I spent a lot of time testing mobile connectivity in London and found that when walking around the cellular networks were far more useful than the hundreds of thousands of WiFi hotspots in town.

Will 4G render public WiFi networks obsolete I wonder?

Roaming around central London saw very variable results with all three networks working on 4G. Handsets would switch between 3G and 4G by just turning a corner and 4G performance when in a low signal strength area felt not to be as good as 3G in the same circumstance. In theory 4G should be no different to 3G in this respect – maybe it just needs a bit more playing with.

4G speed testing on a number 73 busSat on the Number 73 bus between Kings Cross and Oxford Circus the EE network had more consistent 4G coverage than Vodafone – see the video. EE averaged 18Mbps on this route with only a couple of results dropping below 10Mbps to 5Mbps and 8Mbps.

Following on from the Nags Head lunch experience indoor coverage seemed better than I had been expecting. When my Vodafone 4G kicked in I managed to get 65.85Mbps at the back vodafone 4G speed test resultsof the Pop Up Brittain shop on Piccadilly. We saw 48.62Mbps down and 43.31Mbps upload with EE in a 2nd Floor Office in Castle Lane near Victoria which was the best combined performance. I was getting around 10Mbps down with both O2 and Vodafone at this location.EE 4G speed test results 48Mbps castle lane London

Vodafone and O2 are sharing cell sites so where you got 4G with one you would naturally expect the other to be present. This was by and large the case though sometimes one network would have better performance than the other at these locations which might be explained by traffic volumes.

We used speedtest.net for the testing and when comparing different networks it was important to be using the same server. For EE performance at one location rose dramatically when we switched away from the Yoda in Covent GardenVodafone London speedtest server – no dirty work on the go here I’m sure:). It was also funny that when I stood next to Yoda between Covent Garden Station and the Piazza I got a very poor Vodafone signal – the force was obviously elsewhere unless he wasn’t the real Yoda (Vodafone uses Yoda from the Star Wars movies for advertising purposes).

The fastest download seen was 73Mbps on O2 at South Kensington tube station. Sat at the Champagne Bar in Paddington I was regularly getting 58Mbps on Vodafone – indoors again (video here). The EE MiFi in this environment didn’t perform so well. Indoors in Paddington Station might be a poor EE coverage area but my guess is that there were too many WiFi enabled devices in the area and the MiFi struggled with the noise.

Overall I didn’t see quite the same peak speeds on EE compared with O2 and Vodafone. The fact that there are far more people on the EE network would explain this. As you might expect EE did seem to have better overall coverage, though this coverage was far from ubiquitous. There seemed to be pretty good 4G from all three networks in the main tourist and commuter hotspots – Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus (video here) and major train stations for example.

One additional data point is that I had to plug both the Nokia and Samsung phones in to charge by around 2pm after a day’s testing. I was carrying two Powergen Mobile Juice Pack 6000s especially for this purpose. Whether that tells you anything about battery life when using 4G I’m not sure considering I was hammering the phones. It probably does.

Overall it’s exciting to see three networks up and running now albeit only in London. It won’t be long before competition sees coverage improve everywhere – although it isn’t advertised I could get 4G from all three networks on the platform at Slough Railway Station.

Even the slower 4G speeds were pretty fast compared to 3G. I have to believe that with 4G the mobile networks have finally moved into the 21st century.

4G is definitely going to drive usage. I used almost 2GBytes in two days of testing with O2 – I’m on an 8GB package. I suspect the real issue is how quickly the networks will want to drive usage/fill their capacity. They will be able to control this with pricing. However although the mobile operators are desperate to move away from selling on price I can’t see them being able to do so long term. The market will have its way…

More speed test screenshots here from O2, Vodafone and EE. Thanks to @flosoft and to @UKTamo for their able assistance especially for the photos and screenshots of the test results. Thanks to EE for the loan of the Huawei MiFi – it’s a great piece of kit. I was hoping to be able to publish a comprehensive database of the tests but unfortunately the speedtest.net app only kept a certain number of results and the Windows 8 Phone version didn’t even seem to allow you to export the data. Ah well.

Other 4G posts:

4G as a fixed broadband replacement service here.

EE 4G mobile broadband roadmap here.

Google Hangouts over 4G here.

Categories
Engineer phones

Comparison of Samsung firmware load versus the base Android version

Bumped into Florian Jensen (@flosoft) whilst out and about in London doing some 4G speed testing. He has a Samsung Galaxy S3 which he had rooted with CarbonRom based on Android 4.3. He wanted to increase the phone’s performance and improve battery life.

I was surprised to see that there is a very noticeable improvement in speed. The SGS3 running CarbonRom was faster than the SGS4 which has a more powerful processor (s) running Samsung’s firmware. We did some videos yesterday that illustrate this. You can read Flo’s post on what he did here. Unless you are a serious geek (which I realise that quite a few of you are 🙂 )I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing it yourself.

Categories
Apps Engineer mobile connectivity olympics

Funky Cisco stadium WiFi technology at The Barclay Centre

Cisco engineer & pal Stuart Clark sent me this link to a really cool stadium WiFi network deployment at The Barclay Centre. You will all of course know that the Barclay Centre is home to the Brooklyn Nets basketball team (c’mon now – don’t tell me you’ve never heard of ’em).

The Cisco Connected Stadium WiFi Solution (for once they have a product name that tells it like it is) enables stadia to allow “visitors to keep up with box scores and player stats in real time. And for patrons who hate those long lines at half time, concessions can be ordered with the swipe of a finger from any seat in the house.” as the blurb puts it. All this from your phone.

I like this. Stadium technology is not straight forward as you will recall from the stuff  I wrote about preparations for the Olympics, ahem sorry London 2012 Olympics. The Cisco spiel uses lots of good phrases such as

  • 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks to the core or distribution switches
  • Access switches that have 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE) as minimum or 802.3at PoE+ ports
    (recommended) for powering access points
  • radio resource management
  • self healing, self optimising wireless networks

I can’t find any data that tells me how to go about designing a network for, say Wembley or Twickenham which would have a lot more punters sat in their seats than a basketball arena. I presume it is doable.

What I really like is the fact that the accompanying app allows you to order hot dogs etc from your seat. I can see huge benefits should they ever implement this at Sincil Bank, the home of my local side Lincoln City (up the Imps). The queue for burgers and pies at half time is massive-ish and it often takes the whole of the half time break for you to get served.

I can see problems though. At Sincil Bank you can sit anywhere in the stand your ticket is valid for, unless that specific seat is reserved by a season ticket holder (so most of them are free). The person delivering the hot dog/pie/burger/chips would have to wander around the stand looking for you, probably shouting your name and trying to make him or herself heard over the din of the tannoy announcing the winner of the raffle. The hot dog/pie/burger/chips could well have gone cold in the meantime.

I’m sure there must be a solution for this – it’s probably in a Cisco Application Note somewhere.

As I write I can think of lots of useful addons to the app, assuming they aren’t already featured. Sports such as snooker and tennis will have their own plugins – after all you can’t expect your order of champagne, strawberries and cream to be delivered to Centre court at Wimbledon whilst the game is in play. The same applies for snooker – you’d have to wait for the bit in between frames or when the players nip out for a toilet break which happens on an ad-hoc basis so the delivery scheduling would have to be able to accommodate this – easy small deliveries in between frames, larger more complicated ones during comfort breaks.

Anyway you get the drift. I can even envisage social media hookups so that fans can comment on the game in real time from within the app. I’d better stop. Got stuff to do. Ciao…

Categories
Engineer internet peering

#LINX82 – visible signs of growth of the internet

Sat in the LINX82 meeting. If you’ve never been, these LINX meetings are where the people who run the internet in the UK get together to chat – about the nuts and bolts of the internet.

Today we are discussing the Open IX developmental standard, getting an update on the US exchange, following the Manchester IX update yesterday. Traditionally an ISP’s connectivity to the rest of the internet is a mix of peering, where one network connects directly to another through a mutual not for profit internet peering exchange such as LINX or LONAP (both of which Timico is a member of) or  using a commercial provider of international connectivity called transit.

Peering is cheaper and over time represents a growing proportion of internet traffic.

LINX, which is the London Internet EXchange is expanding – to Manchester and the USA. I have been in two minds about this. Each of these regional exchanges are mutually independent – connecting in Manchester or the USA doesn’t mean you can peer with someone connecting at LINX in London.  So in one sense I had initially to ask myself why an organisation that set its stall out as a London exchange would want to also be elsewhere.

The LINX argument for its own regional expansion is that if it is to continue its growth in London it needs to be seen to be more of a Global player and the first choice for new members looking for a first connection in Europe. LINX competes with the likes of  AMS-IX (Amsterdam) and DEC-IX (Frankfurt) in this respect, both of who have been establishing bases overseas outside their original locations.

The long term trend is forecast to be towards more and more regional peering.  If you are in one city and want to connect to someone else in the same place why haul the traffic back to a hub such as in London that might be hundreds of miles away? You do need a critical mass of traffic for regional peering to be economic but the growth in the use of the internet is such that  the business case is beginning to become valid for more locations.

On balance, personally knowing the board of Directors at LINX and although I was originally sceptical, I have gone with the flow regarding this expansion. The numbers coming out of LINX certainly show real growth continuing to happen.

In the last three months LINX membership has grown from 469 to 477 companies and its connected capacity from 6.792 Tbps to 6.999 Tbps. This is a huge capability. Peak traffic remains at 1.618 Tbps. LINX is undoubtedly a major global presence on the internet to the point that the exchange has already connected its first 100Gbps port.

The internet industry. It’s an exciting place to be.

Categories
Engineer internet ofcom

Ofcom slow news – 98% of tablet owners use them to connect to the internet

August is normally a deadly quiet month. Almost to the extent that it would be very easy to say I might as well take the whole month off. This year seems to be different. We are rushed off our feet. It’s all good stuff. I’m not complaining. Just saying that we are very busy.

August is also normally a very quiet news month. The media resorts to headlines such as “Boy’s ice cream melts before he could finish it” and other riveting slow news day reports. The one bit of news that you could set your watch by every year in August is the Ofcom Communications Market Report. This year it came out when I was on holiday in North Wales and observing radio silence so I’ve only just noticed it. On that basis whatever I might say on the subject has possibly already been said.

Notwithstanding that the Ofcom CMR usually has some nuggets worth looking at. The first that stands out is the headline saying:

“Total UK revenues from telecoms, TV, radio, and post fell for the fourth successive year in 2012.  These services generated £59.5bn in revenues during the year, a £0.1bn (0.2%) fall compared to 2011 as a £0.7bn fall in telecoms revenues was offset by increasing TV, radio and post revenues.”

This is interesting because our use of the internet is growing massively. This might lead you to naturally conclude that the revenues for businesses operating in that market are growing. Certainly this is true for Timico.

It is clear though that for the industry as a whole the model is changing. Old fashioned lines of business are changing. ISDN is being replaced by SIP trunks – telephony by VoIP. The cost of minutes has plummeted largely to a fixed monthly fee per subscriber. Broadband prices are also at rock bottom, particularly for consumers. The government is right when it says we have one of the most competitive markets in the world.

This is also true for mobile and whilst people might whinge about mobile prices the mobile operators are struggling with their gross margins. These large telcos are still seen as fat organisations paying fat salaries and there is probably some way to go on the cost cutting side before mobile markets reach the bottom.

Everyone in the game is trying to modernise their business model. The money must still be there. It is just going elsewhere. One clue is in the growth in TV, radio and post revenues. People must be using their internet connection to spend money. In our house we probably watch more TV over the internet that on the actual TV itself. Including the advertising. We also buy a lot more stuff over the internet than we used to, hence the rise in postal revenues. It’s mostly not downloaded. It comes in a van.

As the world moves more “onto the internet” the one thing that is becoming more and more important is the integrity and the quality of the internet connection. This is particularly true for businesses who are increasingly growing to depend on revenues that rely in one way or another on connectivity to make them happen. For example if you own an ecommerce site then every minute of downtime means lost revenues. Similarly in the physical retail world, most payments are processed using broadband connections. Lose the connection and lose the lolly.

However people might be spending their cash this represents a huge opportunity for the telco that can respond to change. They just have to look up and look forward and not dwell on what was.

One final note. Ofcom bless em do have a way of stating the bleedin obvious. They tell us that nearly all (98%) tablet owners say they use their tablets to connect to the internet. One wonders what the other 2% use their tablets for?!

Gotta go. Busy busy busy.

Categories
Engineer security

Is Huawei in your network a national security concern?

I am reminded that yesterday’s post on how would Huawei spy on your network has an additional dimension in the UK in that a significant chunk of BT’s 21CN infrastructure is based on the Chinese vendor’s kit. I hadn’t noticed that this hit the headlines a couple of months ago.

The BT Huawei deal would have been based on very attractive commercials spread over the lifetime of the contract. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on its wisdom from a national security perspective. I don’t have any details to suppose there is a risk other than what I already covered yesterday and then I couldn’t assess the level of risk. That’s somebody’s job.

One wonders whether the powers that be might be might at this very moment be redrawing rules of engagement for secure national networks roll-outs. I can’t imagine that UK defence networks touch any part of 21CN anyway. They will be totally separate. Won’t they?

Access to non defence networks that are strategic could also be a problem. For example how are all our power stations connected? The telecommunications infrastructure itself? Imagine if nobody could make a phone call or send an email for a week? How about the oil refineries? No oil = everywhere grinds to a halt. I’m sure you can come up with other scenarios.

I dunno.

PS takes me a while to catch up with the news, I know.

Categories
Engineer internet online safety security

How would Huawei spy on your network?

Last week the talk was about a story about former head of the CIA and the NSA, Michael Hayden, who thinks Huawei are spying on networks that have installed their kit. Link here to the Register story though it appeared in a lot of places.

One has to think about how Huawei might do this without the network operator knowing?

paul sherrattI had a chat about this with one of our networking gurus Paul Sherratt (pic inset – good looking boy) and this is what he had to say:

“They would write traffic tap/backdoor code into pre-shipped FPGA firmware or on an ASIC, hidden from any local intelligence agency code review body.  If for spying/traffic tap function, there would be some safeguards against activating the code if the router believes it is under test/non-production conditions.  There may also be some kind of ‘Hello, I am here’ call-out, which for example may be done by modifying a large DNS request packet contents and padding to the same length to avoid detection by looking at packet headers.

Whether that is even possible will depend on the hardware design – so that should also go through a full review by an intelligence body to determine if pre-shipped chips are an intelligence risk.  If they are, the only way to 100% prevent it happening would be to fully review the ASIC design and manufacture outside of China, which would probably rule out Huawei as a supplier.

It would be easier to implement in software/FPGA firmware, but easier to tackle from a security standpoint.  All software and FPGA firmware would be compiled after intelligence review and installed on network equipment after shipment.  If I were China, I may find it easier to get software engineer spies working for a more ‘trusted’ vendor not imposed with the same level of hardware and software review.”

It’s a tangled web innit? It feels as if we should be looking over our shoulder all the time.

As a footnote I used to work in the chip business. The company I worked for produced military ASICs amongst other things. it was quite common for chip designers to leave little messages or their names etched into the metal layers in empty spaces a chip. I remember once one of the guys leaving the words  “live fast die young” in the corner of a chip. They had to redo the metal mask and re-manufacture the whole chip. It was destined for a high reliability application where the notion of dying young was not too popular! Good times…

Categories
Cloud datacentre Engineer

It’s too darn hot… not really

I’m sat in the pleasant luxury of my air conditioned office looking down at the melting tarmac in the car park. In the tenements of Newark the residents have all the windows open trying desperately to catch a breath of air. Most people don’t move though occasionally we see groups of street kids running in and out of a fire hydrant that is spraying water into the street. Heatwave!!!

You know the scene. You’ve seen the movie. It applies to Newark Nottinghamshire just as much as Newark New Joisey. Except as I say, I’m all right Jack. My aircon is working perfectly and I take an occasional sip of a cool drink filled with ice to add that perfect foil to the temperature outside.

Letting the imagination flow a bit here. The weather got me thinking about the cooling system in our Newark datacentre. It’s based on free air cooling which means that it uses the ambient outside temperature to cool the inside of the DC when it is lower than the spec for inside. At this time of the year the air conditioning units are kicking in on a regular basis whereas for a big chunk of the year they lie dormant. They kick in when it’s 22 Degrees Centigrade outside.

I was hoping to show you a graph of the power consumption of an ac unit relative to outside temperature but I haven’t got one handily logged. What I do have are graphs showing the liquid temperature in the outside cooling units compared with the controlled inside temperature.

We expect to see wide swings in outside temperature as we go through 24 a hour period but the inside temperature needs to stay nicely within a narrow band. Interesting to see that you can probably identify the cloudy and therefore slightly cooler days in the Newark area from the lower peaks in outside temperature.

Outside temperature:

outside_coolant_temp

Inside temperature (different, narrower scale):

inside_air_temp
I can’t go out with my baby tonight cos it’s too darn hot… except I can 🙂

Categories
Engineer engineering fun stuff

Milner’s Moisture Matic – technology made simple

john milner - top timico applications engineer

Meet John Milner, crazy genius inventor. He is one of a few. A bit like Nat Morris with his Twitter based dog feeder. You’ve met John before on this blog actually should you care to look.

Today John brings you Milner’s Moisture Matic. Arduino powered with a recycled power brick the Milner Moisture Matic puts a 5V field between two bolts buried in the soil of a plant pot. The resistance is measured between the two bolts. The more moist the soil the lower the resistance. When resistance hits a threshold, ie when the current hits a certain low point,  it tells the system that more water is required.

moisture maticA 10bit sensor is converted to 8bit for the processor to read. A 3 way LED tells us the state of the soil – green is good, amber is ok and red says it needs water at which point a pump kicks in for 7 seconds.

Separate sensors tell us the level of water in the reservoir (reused milk jug) and whether there is water in the outside pot. The pump will only work if the moisture sensor and the pot water sensor indicate dryness.

sensorThe Arduino processor comes with pre built twitter elements so we could extend the functionality to log reports on twitter – frequency of watering, whether the reservoir needs topping up etc.

Check out the images clicking either gets you a larger image or a different view.

milners moisture detector

Categories
Engineer media

Atmospheric problems with radio this am – DAB & FM noise

I woke up this morning, my radio sounded bad, oh yea! It’s true. Radio4 DAB sounded very crackly. I switched to FM and it was OK. I tweeted about it.

By return of tweet I found out that others had the same problem. I’ve just slotted in the tweets below. They aren’t necessarily in the correct chronological order because different people were responding to different tweets at different times but it certainly shows that there would appear to be a problem. Radio4 FM was also noisy in the car on the way in to work.

We periodically have problems with DAB which on reflection I would never swap in preference to  FM. It’s only benefit is that you can get more channels. If anyone can explain what is going on in the airwaves then please feel free to comment.

Rural Broadband @RuralBroadband_

Large amount of radio disruption in West Norfolk this morning. Woke to a German radio station rather than the local one! #Funkstörungen

tref @tref

@RuralBroadband_ DAB rubbish here in lincoln. Wonder what’s occurin

Adrian Wooster @awooster

@tref @RuralBroadband_ Oxfordshire also – Radio 4 & 5 impossible to listen to in the car

Rural Broadband @RuralBroadband_

@awooster @tref Time to get radio apply and listen on 3G and mobile phone.

@RuralBroadband_ @tref Except I’m now on a train with no wifi and very limited 3g but the FM in my phone still works

Categories
Engineer peering Regs voip

A Day In The Life #ITSPA #Lonap

Trefor DaviesI read the news today oh boy. Andy Murray through to semi-finals. I saw the last hour or so on the TV when I got home from work last night. Goo’on Andy!

Today I’m off to the big smoke on the 07.20 for a full day of industrialising.

This morning I have and ITSPA council meeting. After lunch it’s the ITSPA AGM followed by the Summer Forum we have, every summer, natch. These ITSPA workshops are always most informative. We have an update of how the market is going by Matt Townend of Illume. The market for VoIP services is on the up.

Then Pete Farmer of Gamma is going to discuss what’s going on in the industry from a regulatory perspective. There’s lots to consider: Draft Communications Data Bill, Narrowband Market Review, Non Geographic Calls Services and more.

Then after the break yours truly is going to chair a panel discussion entitled “Federated Communications and Call Terminations – Is free the way forward?” Should be an interesting debate. Bear in mind when considering the “free” bit that we will all still want to get paid.

After a short reception I then shoot off to a dinner being thrown by Lonap where I will be chairing a debate on the merits of connecting to overseas POPs. This dinner is restricted to CTOs and Chief Technical Architects of network operators and should be a most useful and informative evening.

Then tomorrow morning I have a breakfast meeting, but tomorrow is another day…

I read the news today oh boy. Four thousand POPs in Blackburn Lancashire. You probably need to be of an age to understand that one!!!

Categories
Engineer internet ipv6

Disturbing news re internet traffic growth forecast – prefix exhaustion

I’m doing some prep for a talk next week and just discovered a disturbing fact. I’m sure all of you will have read Cisco’s annual network traffic forecast. I covered it here.

What you need to know about is that Cisco reckons that by 2017, global IP traffic will reach an annual run rate of 1.4 zettabytes, up from 523 exabytes in 2012.

Somebody asked me what a zettabyte was and it made me wonder what comes after it in the big number naming or prefix stakes. I looked it up on Wikipedia and the answer is (of course !!) yottabyte.

The real problem comes when internet traffic outgrows yottabytes, which, dear reader, I assure you it will. I couldn’t find the name for the next one up. Wikipedia stops at yotta (1024 )! The world is facing prefix-exhaustion.

This is a problem akin to IPv4 exhaustion although the fix is far simpler. We have enough warning. We simply have to run a naming competition on this blog. It just won’t be acceptable to have more and more yottabytes. I could have a special mug produced as a prize.

I’m not going to bother with it yet (unless you really want to) but as we get nearer name exhaustion date we will have to give it some thought. It will also be a good excuse for another party like the end of the IPv4 bash I held a couple of years ago.

I would think it will happen sometime in the next decade – ie the 2020’s.

You heard it first on trefor.net…

PS I’d have put an image of the Cisco traffic forecast up but their flash code didn’t work and neither did the link to generate a jpg! We won’t get to yottabytes if we have errors like that now will we Cisco, eh? Probably just a glitch.

Categories
Cloud Engineer storage backup & dr

Data storage strategy #cloud

I’m back from my hols. The news is my hard drive has 4.5GB more data on it than it did before I went on holiday. All videos and photos. In June I added 17.5GB worth of media. That’s 54GB ytd and if I extrapolate that to the year end that means I will have added 108GB to my laptop in 2013.

I’m sure I’ve recently had this conversation on the blog but I now have less than 20GB of space left on my laptop, after cleaning it up. I can’t realistically expect to get a new laptop. Mine is relatively new and I can’t expect the business to provide more storage for my personal photos. They will have to go.

So I have to come up with a strategy here. I still want easy access to the photos but it isn’t worth forking out the small fortune that the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive will charge for that level of storage.

The charts below show my own usage growth. By the end of this year at the current rate of growth my photos will take up around 330GB of space. The annual growth rate since 2004 has been around 50% a year – roughly in line with Moores law and also in line with an EMC study of storage capacity trends from 2011. Extrapolating the number forward to 2020 I can expect to be consuming almost 2TB a year of storage with a total accumulated requirement of 5.5TB.

added-storage

accumulated storage

Remember data beyond mid 2013 is extrapolated/forecast.

Does this make sense I ask myself? Well the video formats in use by 2020 are quite likely to be approaching 8k which at 350Mbps streaming data rates will produce a storage need of 44MBps or 2.6GB a minute. That’s only 13 hours of video storage. All these are approximate calculations and do assume that I am onto 8k by 2020 but the 5.5TB by 2020 sounds very plausible to me.

It’s interesting to note that whilst I am discussing my own personal data usage here the rate of growth very much reflects what we are seeing as a business. We have all heard the term Big Data bandied around. Businesses are gathering far more data than they used to. Information is power. The decisions I am facing are therefore similar decisions to those seen by businesses of all sizes. What do I do with my data?

Let’s look at my personal choices first. Currently I back up my laptop to two separate external drives. Frankly this isn’t going to be good enough for our family going forward. If I’m taking media off my laptop I want it to always be available at a click of a button. It has to be Networked Attached Storage or NAS. Because I am going to be using it more and more for lots of different family storage needs the NAS also has to be resilient so it either needs to have two mirrored hard drives or be a multiple RAIDED box such as the Drobo box shown in the pictures inset. (Box shown has 3 out of 5 slots populated with 1TB drives giving 2TB usable capacity).

Drobo box with front cover on

We use Drobo boxes (1st pic with front cover – 2nd without) to send to some of our cloud customers to seed their online storage. A small business will not have a fast enough internet connection to upload a couple of Terabytes say in a timely manner. If they were lucky enough to get 10Mbps upload then it would take them well over 400 hours to upload the data. Even though Timico provides that customer with free bandwidth to perform the upload that isn’t a practical proposition.

The Drobo box is going to cost me knocking on a grand even if I just put in three drives and though by my current calculations as an infrastructure it would do me for the rest of this decade, taking into account the fact that I could easily upgrade the hard drive capacities, Mrs Davies wouldn’t want me to spend that kind of money. We need a new freezer and the dishwasher is about to pack up.

Drobo box with front cover removed

So I’m going to go for a cheaper option such as a dual ReadyNAS which with a couple of mirrored 2TB hard drives will probably cost around £300. I will still want to have a separate backup for this but will in the short term stick with the 2TB SSD I currently use. With that setup I reckon I will be good until mid 2018 and could probably also upgrade the hard drives at that time. Rather than have the hard drives switched on all the time I will also probably go for a power switch that I can control over the LAN. In effect it will still be instant access.

It still makes sense to have a cloud option and I should be able to go for a cheaper solution such as Amazon Glacier which costs 1cent a month per GB. This would cost me $3 a month for 300GB, just over two quid say or about £25 a year (mixing formats :)). Amazon Glacier is much cheaper than the $20 a month that Google Drive would charge me but isn’t a comparable service. Being a “deep storage” service the recovery time from Amazon is very slow versus “immediate” from Google depending on your internet download capacity. $240 a year isn’t a practical proposition for home use. I don’t need the recovery to be fast. I just need it to work as it will be the line of last defence.

The observation that springs to mind here is that the costs discussed here are insurance policies that I have not hitherto had to pay. Our use of technology is driving the change. According to my calculations by 2020 I would be paying Amazon $55 a month for the storage based on current prices. It is reasonable to expect prices to plummet but this is obviously a nice growth market to be in.

The needs of a business are similar but different. Firstly a business will typically have a lot more people generating the data. The amount of data being generated per person however is not wildly adrift of the numbers I’ve been discussing for my own usage. There’s a good chart over at NetworkWorld that tells us the average storage need per employee ranges from 160GB for small businesses up to 190GB for mid-sized companies. You can do your own calculations for forecast storage needs based on the size of your own particular business and assuming 50% a year growth.

The other issues affecting businesses relate to skillsets (overhead), security (life and death of the business) and recovery time (revenue and opportunity cost). It all revolves around money.

The numbers I have looked at for my own home use therefore don’t copy across to business. Businesses are willing to spend more for additional security, ease of use and speed of recovery. A business may also think it important to know where their data is stored – for UK regulatory requirements for example – and want to have someone to call if something goes wrong. Personal support is not something that the big cloud providers are known for.

Check out example services here and corporate services here.

Categories
Engineer travel

Anyone want to go to an event in Perth?

Just been invited to an industry event in Perth (Scotland – not Australia) on the 9th July. I won’t bother telling you about the event but it was from a reputable source. The invitation was to “Dear Colleague” so it was almost certainly a blanket mailing to an entire list.

I checked. It is 325 miles from my house and 5 hours 22 mins driving in current traffic conditions. I replied to the email asking them whether they were planning an event in Lincoln which is 0 miles from my house and I could walk there.

Not heard back yet but I only just sent it so it’s only fair to give them a bit of time.

The point is that this was not a particularly well targeted email and is a waste of everyone’s time who doesn’t live within striking distance of Perth. Mind you I’ve never been to Perth. Is it nice?

That’s all

Categories
broadband Engineer UC voip

VoIP Conversation Snippet from the Corridor

Just chatting with one of our telephone sales guys. He told me about a customer who had been thinking about buying a FTTC broadband connection with a couple of VoIP seats but had been worried about the cost. Their previous method of communication had been through two analogue lines into an office of fourteen staff!

The package that customer ended up with costs them around £300 a month – far more than a FTTC and two VoIP seats. The beauty is that now that all fourteen people have their own VoIP phone line they are spending a lot more time talking to customers and the new business they are taking dwarfs the cost of the comms.

It makes you feel good. Simples 🙂

Categories
Engineer UC voip

Integration

Redwood acquired by TimicoLast week we integrated the Redwood brand into Timico. Redwood was a specialist Unified Communications business we acquired last year.

There are two different ways of integrating another business. You can do it well or you can do it badly. There are also two different speeds. I recall that Cisco, a company that has made many acquisitions in its time, has a defined process with dedicated teams to do the job. On day one they change the acquired brand to Cisco and then there are well rehearsed steps over a period of three months or so until all aspects of the old brand are erased. No doubt a few people get erased at the same time although companies like Cisco are known to buy small technology businesses just to acquire the talent.

It’s no different in our game really. We bought Redwood for a combination of channel to market and the talent of their people. However the nature of our business is different to a product manufacturer such as Cisco. Our customers largely buy services from us and they buy them on a recurring basis. Every month. The other thing to note is that the services they buy from us are by and large mission critical to their business.

We love all our customers. They pay our wages. We do our best to keep them happy so that they want to keep on paying our wages. The last thing we want to do is upset them. Now in the networking game the time of greatest risk is when something changes. A small config change here can have big ramifications there. A kind of butterfly effect for business. So we want to be very careful when we make changes.

The same applies when you change a brand. When integrating company not only are you changing the look of a business but you are potentially changing the way it feels to do business with you. People don’t like change so you have to do it carefully.

When integrating Redwood we want Redwood’s customers to feel as if things are working just as well as they were in the good old days when they were dealing with Redwood as opposed to this new company called Timico that they might never have heard of. We might in our ever so optimistic dreams dare to hope that Redwood customers will think things are even better than they were before though we would settle for them thinking things were just same. “Name change? Oh ok that’s fine” is the reaction we want.

What we don’t want is “What’s gone wrong with my bill. Why have you charged me twice? Where has Fred gone? Fred always used to sort out my problem. It was never like this when it was Redwood”.

That’s why we like to take time over the integration of an acquisition. We want to make sure it goes well. The telecommunications industry abounds with stories of market consolidation and company acquisitions that have gone wrong. We love it actually because it generates churn in a company’s customer base and someone else’s churn is our sales opportunity. I even heard of one highly acquisitive business whose business plan assumed a 30% churn in customers post acquisition. That’s not how we like to work.

If my memory serves me right we have bought seven companies in nearly ten years of doing business. We have learnt a few lessons along the way but our general principle is that we want to build a business of real value to all our stakeholders. That means real value to shareholders, staff and of course customers. We want to keep every single customer.  That’s a difficult objective in a highly competitive market where competitors sometimes not only drop their pants to win a deal but run naked down a customer’s drive shouting “I won’t put my clothes back on until you give me the business”.

I’m pleased to say the integration of Redwood has gone very well. Customers have had time to get used to the idea and all were contacted well in advance to let them know about the new name. It’s felt like business as usual throughout the whole process.

That isn’t to say there wasn’t a huge amount of work going on in the background. Integration of CRM and billing systems for example. Lots of testing before D Day. We had a few IT glitches along the way but nothing that was customer affecting and the team worked really hard to get it all sorted.

Funnily enough when I asked the one of the Redwood team how it went the answer was “boringly not much to say really.” That’s a great answer. The right answer.

Winning new customers is just about the hardest thing to do in our game. It’s a lot easier to sell to someone with who you already have a trusted relationship. Now Redwood Timico Unified Communications has a whole new existing customer base to sell to. Customers who already trust Timico with their mission critical services. Exciting really. Welcome aboard guys. We appreciate you and value your contribution 🙂

PS sorry if I come across very emulsional there. It happens sometimes 🙂

Categories
Engineer internet ipv6

A few observations on the Cisco Annual VNI Report 2012 – 2017

Trefor Davies thumbnail pictureI live in my own little world. It’s a connected world but relatively contained. I have a modest 2,461 followers on Twitter, 455 friends on Facebook and over 5001 connections of LinkedIn.

All this comes in to perspective when you read Cisco’s annual Visual Networking Index, a body of research that charts the growth of the internet and forecasts traffic patterns over the next five years. The latest issue is just out and comes with a ton of data. I’ve distilled a few points that jumped out of the router at me and shared them below.

Connected people and IPv6

According to the forecast by 2017 3.6 billion people will be connected to the Internet, up from 2.3 billion in 2012. Also by 2017 there will be 19 billion networked devices, up from 12 billion last year.

That’s a lot of people and a lot of devices. The fact that there are around 5 times more devices than people is a reflection of the growth of machine to machine connectivity. Nobody is going to be carrying around five networked devices, although having said that I carry four but don’t use me as an example of Mr Average.

It’s interesting to note that the number of IPv6 connected devices is forecast to grow from 1.6 billion in 2012 to 8 billion in 2017. On the face of it this suggests that most of the growth in connected devices is going to come from IPv6 which shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Metro versus long haul

Cisco reckons that metro traffic will surpass long haul traffic in 2014 and will account for 58% of total IP traffic by 2017 and will grow nearly twice as fast as long-haul traffic from 2012 to 2017. This is not something that your average man in the street will have to think about but it does help us to understand the trend towards regional peering exchanges.

Historically most ISPs connect to the internet at a few major hubs. London is one such hub. However as more and more traffic is local traffic it makes more sense to connect this traffic near to where it originates. For example the traffic between two servers “taking to each other” in Leeds would historically have been tromboned to London and back. It obviously doesn’t make sense to pay to cart data hundreds of miles and back if it can be done more directly. Now ISPs with a reasonable density of customers in Leeds can connect via the IX Leeds Peering exchange. The same applies for Manchester. In time as traffic levels grow the business case for smaller metropolitan areas will work we will see other locations appear on the connected map.

WiFI/mobile

Wi-Fi and mobile-connected devices will generate 68% of Internet traffic by 2017. It wouldn’t surprise me to see this number upsided. The only fixed internet connections in our house are the Xbox and my home office VoIP phone and the XBox is likely to go wireless when the new one comes out later this year. I would guess that most wired internet connectivity is going to be business based.

There’s more info on the Cisco blog here together with links to tools that allow you to play with the numbers. It’s well worth a browse.

Returning to my opening lines and the number of people I connect with, all these statistics do highlight the changing nature of our world. We are going to have to continue to adapt as more and more of our daily lives become electronic and connected.

I think these are exciting times from both a personal and business perspective. Exciting because of the wave of change sweeping across our personal lives that will hopefully enrich and enhance the quality of our lives. Exciting from a business perspective because there is money to be made out of all this growth.

That’s all folks…

1 no idea actually how many because it only tells me 500+ and I couldn’t figure out how many and I wasn’t prepared to spend any time finding out how to do it.

Categories
Apps Engineer video voip

Thunderbirds are Go for Raspberry Pi

Pal Dean Elwood sent me this video. He set up embedded VoIP app developer Voxygen which is going from strength to strength. They developed the call control APIs for Telefonica’s Blue Via platform.

The video shows a mockup Thunderbird video screen just like they had in real life. The app is powered by Voxygen software running on a Raspberry Pi and talks to Blue Via for the call control and conferencing.

State information from Blue Via feeds through to the flashing eyes to say when a call is coming in or has been answered. The RaspberryPi manages another LED to say who is speaking at any given point in time.

When they recorded the Thunderbirds series the technology was of course all purely imaginary. Now it is pure simplicity.

Hardware was simply

  • Raspberry Pi
  • The ‘slice of PI/O’ board, to interface to 10 LEDs and 5 switches
  • 5 push-buttons with integrated LED
  • 5 pairs of White-LED ‘eyes’
  • A small amplifier and speaker for sound effects
  • Power supply and a few ancillary electronic components

Software was

  • Standard Pi Debian wheezy operating system
  • Application code, written in PHP 5
  • Some interfacing code in C that allows switching of LEDs and sensing of switches

Marvellous innit? Now watch the vid. Thunderbirds are go!

Categories
Engineer internet peering

Vodafone GlobalNet C&W integration #LINX81

Just had an interesting talk from Matt Jansen of Vodafone GlobalNet. Matt was originally with AS1273, ie Cable and Wireless which has been acquired by Vodafone. The C&W brand has disappeared.

The interesting aspect of the talk was that Matt described the process of integrating the Vodafone and C&W networks. Voda and C&W have networks all over the world but the steps being taken are largely the same as those taken by Timico during the integration of our own acquisitions, albeit on a much smaller scale.

We are talking about rationalisation of existing pipes and suppliers, removal of duplicate services etc. Of course the savings that may be achieved by Vodafone are on a much bigger scale that Timico’s own efforts but the principle is the same.

Although the internet is driven by complex technology the high level principles are fairly simple and apply no matter the size of the network.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

#LINX81 internet plumbing stats

I’m at LINX81. I go to a couple of LINX meetings a year as it’s a great place to catch up with what’s going on in the world of internet plumbing. Laymen will probably not understand the allusion to plumbing. The internet is made up of lots of “pipes”. A pipe is usually measured as a multiple of Gigs (1x, 10x, 100x) is connected to a port, one at each end of the pipe (obv).

In the internet plumbing world the bigger your pipe the bigger your bragging rights. It’s all about shifting data. Timico I’m pleased to say uses 10Gig ports at its peering exchanges – LINX and LONAP. There is only one 100Gig port at LINX and that belongs to BT. I understand there are more in the pipeline.

The internet as you may know is made up of tens of thousands of autonomous networks. The chances are your favourite website is not hosted by the same network operator that provides you with your connectivity. What your ISP does is it connects its own network to every other network on the internet which it partly does via peering exchanges.

A peering exchange is a point at which networks connect to each other for the sharing of internet traffic. Being a member of LINX brings us lots of benefits. You can get an idea of this from the LINX stats:

468 members (39 new applications in 2013 so it’s growing)
1135 connected member ports
362 member-facing 1GigE ports
631 member-facing 10GigE ports
1 member-facing 100GigE port
over 1.618 Tb/sec of peak traffic (swoon)
6.792 Tb of connected capacity (so notionally plenty of headroom)
58 member countries

Peering at LINX connects us to a large chunk of the internet at relatively low cost. More from LINX81 as it happens.

Categories
Engineer webrtc

ITSPA WebRTC workshop at Google Campus

itspa logoChaired the ITSPA WebRTC workshop at Google Campus yesterday. It had a great turnout so there is obviously an appetite to find out a bit more about WebRTC.

I’ve written about WebRTC several times before including here. The workshop comprised of presentations about the technology from Rob Pickering of IPCortex and Peter Dunkley of Crocodile Rich Communications Systems (they need an acronym methinks 🙂 ) followed by some demos (IPCortex, Crocodile and Drum).

In one sense these  demos are not very interesting. They are just showing video calling – no different to skype or google talk et al. The biggest difference is that with WebRTC the “client” is embedded in the web page that you are visiting. No need to download anything to run on your PC or phone. In theory therefore WebRTC could make for far more ubiquitous online real time communications.

WebRTC should facilitate communities of interest. For example if I have a WebRTC service in this blog then it would be easy to set up conference calls and discussions around specific posts – a big enhancement on the current commenting system. It should even be possible to record such discussions and embed them for others to listen to later.

You always hear about the next big thing that is going to kill off the good (?) old fashioned PSTN and WebRTC was mentioned as a contributor to this yesterday. The PSTN is eventually going to die but not for a long time yet. The WebRTC model, like the original Skype is not about minutes.

In any case, the PSTN is slowly moving away from a minutes based model to a fixed price all you can eat one which makes the death or otherwise of the PSTN a moot point.

WebRTC is potentially very interesting though but there is still a lot of work to be done. The standards are far from complete, even to the point of discussion as to which video codec to use. Half the industry wants to use H264 which is an existing and well bedded in codec. Unfortunately this half is also the half that owns all the patents for H264.

The other half supports Google’s push to use its own VP8 codec which it is making available royalty free.  Of course the H264 camp doesn’t like this and Nokia has apparently said that it owns some codecs that are applicable to VP8 in an attempt to stop it being “free”. You could take the view that Nokia won’t be around for much longer but you can’t base the codec decision on that and in any event someone would probably maintain ownership the patents.

For the moment most of us will have to get on making real money with existing products. SIP trunk anyone?

Categories
Engineer internet ofcom social networking

The speed of obsolescence & the increase in the speed of light

pirate_flag_thumbWe do live in very interesting times. Last night the twitter stream told me that the internet in Syria had stopped working, or at least the traffic in and out of the country had died off which is the same thing. This morning it was included by the Guardian in their Boot Up links. I thought to myself last night that once it had hit twitter the news would be everywhere. I saw a couple more references to it on twitter this morning and thought to myself “they’re a bit behind the game – that was last night’s news”. I figured it was too old and publicly available to write a blog about it & I wouldn’t really have been able to add anything anyway.

Then this morning I saw someone retweet a link to a post by @TheRealRevK about how Ofcom was about to screw the voip market in the UK by, amongst other things (in it’s 500 page consultation). If you know Adrian (the reverend himself) you will know how passionate he is about these things.  I had thought about writing a post about this subject myself – it came up at dinner last week at Convergence Summit North. I didn’t have the time as I was out of the office for much of the week. I’m not going to do one now as I can’t add to Adrian’s post.

The world is changing so quickly. It’s daft that I don’t feel able to write about something that hit the headlines only a few hours ago and it certainly makes you think about what you do write. Google has been giving this a lot of thought with its Google Authorship Ranking (Google it). When I did the pigeon v rural broadband race a couple of years ago it was covered by the BBC and as far as  I could see scraped by approx 32,000 websites around the world. That’s them taking someone else’s news in the hope that it would make their own site interesting.

Google Authorship is designed to give credit to the originator of the news. I’ve added links to my Google+ profile from both trefor.net and philosopherontap.com and linked back from the profile to the sites. In theory over time my Google+ profile will be linked to my many sites as I write guest posts for them (ok maybe it won’t) and this will increase the level of credibility given to me as an author and originator of content.

This doesn’t take away the fact that I will still have to find original stuff to write about which ain’t necessarily easy in this world where the speed of light and information distribution is constantly increasing – you heard it first on trefor.net.

PS the speed of light bit is entirely made up as an attention grabbing bit of sensationalism – had I not made this admission I know many of you would otherwise take it as read from such a creditable source! 🙂

Categories
Cloud datacentre Engineer Net

Connectivity envy

It wasn’t so long ago that  I wrote a post asking who had the biggest home network. The winner was @NeilMcrae  see here for a reminder. So yesterday I was wandering through the corridors of the Timico Development Engineering building trying to find my way out when I came across Paul at his desk doing stuff.

From nowhere a stack of pizza boxes had appeared with enough ports to service a small ISP. “Setting up in business” I asked. Actually we have just decommissioned a couple of cages in Docklands and saved a lot cash in the process and some of the kit has appeared on Paul’s desk temporarily.

When I say a lot of cash I mean £100k a year. The equipment has all been moved to our Datacentre in Newark. Customers are paying less, it is costing us less. Everybody is happy (all clap).

If you want to move some of your kit out of docklands get in touch and perhaps take a look here. You know it makes sense. While we’re at it there is a really cool Timico cloud umbrella, with pictures of clouds inside it when you open it up, for the person who comes up with the photo showing the most switch ports on his or her desk. No cheating now.

connectivity envy

Categories
Cloud datacentre Engineer virtualisation

The Timico Virtual Datacentre #cloud #DCrevolution

I’ve had time to recover from the Timico Virtual Datacentre launch in London on Tuesday night. It was a great evening with a fantastic mix of people there from the IT Director community.

After the talks we had an “unconference” panel session where we discussed the issues of the day in the cloud. One of the things that came out of the discussion was the fact that whilst advantage of the Virtual Datacentre is massive scalability that can quickly be turned on, most standard enterprises don’t need these huge bursts of capacity.

What was interesting is the large increase in servers being used over recent years. One attendee said that he had increased server usage in his business fivefold in as many years. That’s 300 up to 1,500. The beauty of the virtual game is that it is easy and cost effective to do this.

So the question then arose “why not use AWS?”. The simple answer is “throat to choke” and service levels. With Amazon there is nobody to call when it goes wrong and no guarantees. Also AWS does not provide connectivity and the “embedding” of the server infrastructure in the connectivity infrastructure brings real performance benefits.

Another point that came out was the advent of the Platform As A Service. The Virtual Datacentre represents Infrastructure As A Service but starts ups these days don’t want to have to maintain infrastructure. They just want functionality. Office 365 and Google Apps are examples. PAAS is increasingly the domain of both very small and very large organisations whilst the mid-market likes to manage its own services and is the ideal candidate for the IAAS play.

The Virtual Datacentre is another key step for Timico in our onward march in the communications world. It is a sign of continued progress and investment and a recognition of the needs of our growing customer base. If you want to know more check out the Timico landing page here. Press release here. Thanks to Joe Baguley of VMware for his usual terrific talk.

Categories
Engineer webrtc

Web RTC workshop – get yer tickets ere

googlecampusIf you work in the Unified Communications industry you need to know about Web RTC. You can either Google it or come along to ITSPA’s Web RTC workshop at the Google Campus on 14th May to find out more.

This workshop is intended to provide a fairly detailed drill down into the workings of WebRTC and is suitable for the VoIP tech community. It includes an introduction to the technology and presentations and demos from a number of companies involved in the area. We will also be having a few beers afterwards, natch.

These events are seriously worthwhile attending. More details below – the event is open to non ITSPA members so git on down.

Tuesday, 14th May 2013, 14:00-17:30
Google Campus, 3rd Floor
4-5 Bonhill Street, EC2A 4BX London

Part 1: Technical background and introduction
Presentation from John Parr (Crocodile Rich Communications Systems) and Rob Pickering (IPCortex)

Part 2: Demos and real-life implementation: products, services, and more
Speakers TBC – Google, Drum, IPCortex, Crocodile Rich Communications Systems, Voxhub

Part 3: Roundtable discussion/panel and audience Q&A
Discussion moderated by Trefor Davies on the impact of WebRTC:
What are the challenges, opportunities, and threats – to software phones, video market, fixed infrastructure and more?

Reserve tickets here: http://itspawebrtc.eventbrite.co.uk/

Categories
Engineer fun stuff

Electric smart car in Hamburg

Just had to post this photo because it is so cool. It’s an electric smart car charging up on the street in Hamburg. I’ve never seen one before and it was uber impressive (appropriate that uber a German adjective 🙂 ) so I snapped it with my trusty SGS3 so that I could show it to y’all. Quite dinky as well. Wouldn’t have one meself mind you as I’d struggle to get the golf clubs in but it clearly suits someone.

That’s all folks.

electric car

Categories
Cloud datacentre Engineer virtualisation

Join the revolution – the software defined datacentre #DCrevolution

uninterruptable businessThere are two phrases that I thought I’d banned from this blog some time ago: “cloud” and “smart phone”. “Smart phone” is still banned but I’ve had to reluctantly use “cloud” as it is in such common usage and any replacement term is longer than the word cloud itself (phone is the replacement term for smart phone which makes the latter a non starter).

A search for cloud on trefor.net brings up lots of posts that discuss it one way or another. Although it’s been a trendy topic for a while now it’s amazing how many businesses don’t use the cloud. For example Microsoft reckon that 85% of businesses don’t yet virtualise their server infrastructure. Also the market for dedicated servers is still very much all about solid bits of metal and hard drives.

This means that despite the term cloud feeling almost so old it’s about time we got a new one (cf “Unified Communications” replacing “VoIP for Business”1) there is still a huge amount of mileage left in the market. It is still very much  emerging.

With that in mind I’m having a bit of a Timico bash in London next week where we will be talking about cloud services for UK based organisations

–          It’s about a revolution in how IT infrastructure is produced, consumed and maintained

–          It’s about the need for UK data centre sovereignty

–          It’s about the importance of quality connectivity to hosted virtualised infrastructure

To add some pizzaz to the evening I’ve got Joe Baguley, CTO of VMware coming along to do a bit of a talk. Joe is a top banana when it comes to talking about cloud infrastructure. His talk is entitled  “Container Ships, Kittens, Chickens & Coffee Shops”. You know it makes sense. We will also be chatting about what Timico is doing with VMware.

The party is at a super cool venue called the Ice Tank (pun intended) in Covent Garden. Because I’m a good guy I have some tickets reserved for blog readers. The event starts at 6.30 on Tuesday 23rd April – that’s next Tuesday. If you want to come along let me know here. There’s also more info about the gig here.

Please only come along if this is of genuine interest. I don’t want any time wasters, costermongers, itinerant salesmen, rear admirals, unemployed actors or general low life:). Most of the attendees will be IT Directors/CIOs etc. Attendees will also be able to trial Timico Virtual Data Centre services FOC for their businesses.

1 also feels as if it’s about time we found a replacement phrase for UC.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

Submarine cables at #euroix #ixp

Good talk at Euro-IX on submarine cables from Alan Mauldin of TeleGeography.

The world is still very much increasing it submarine cable capacity. Interestingly the drivers for new builds are not capacity exhaustion. It’s more likely to be down to a range of things including Route Diversity – new physical paths being valued, Cost Optimization – use of new technology may lead to long-term unit cost reductions, Competition — still room for new competitors in some markets where high prices persist, Build-vs-Buy Strategy – become an owner, not buyer, of capacity, Peer pressure, ego, national, & corporate pride and First cables (for some island nations).

I quite liked the national/corporate pride bit. It follows on from a chat I was having on the subject of size pipes during the break. In our internet world the capacity of your network connection(s) is a bragging point.

Chat up line of an internet geek: “Fancy coming back to my place to see the size of my pipe?”

Timico customers are taking 10Gbps connections. I’m looking forward to our first 100Gbps connection.undersea cable capacity

I lifted this chart from Alan’s presentation (thanks Al). It shows that we, the world, currently have roughly 70Terabits per second of intercontinental internet capacity. Impressive. We aren’t using it all yet of course but the only way is up.

Interactive submarine cable map here. I think I may have linked to this before but no harm in doing it again.

Another interesting interactive map is of the world’s internet exchanges here. This shows you where the meeting points of the internet are. The places that ISPs connect to/at to carry your internet traffic. When you send an email or click on a web page the data will travel through one or more of these places.

It doesn’t cover private connections but these will largely be done at the same locations. That’s all.

Categories
Engineer fun stuff

Now this is a NOC – Hamburg Model Railway

Hamburg Model Railway NOCMany of you will be familiar with the Timico NOC. It’s a 24x7x365 top class resource for our customers. There aren’t many around as good as ours. On Sunday I saw one that came close. It’s the control centre of the Hamburg Model Railway and pictured in the header here. Click on the pic for a full size panorama.

It’s not 24x7x365. The place shuts at 8pm. It’s hugely impressive though. The whole place is. I first heard about it on a James May TV show and decided I just had to go and see it.  I went on my own without the kids. They wouldn’t have enjoyed it:)

Reality is I’m in Hamburg with LONAP for the Euro-IX meeting. You will no doubt hear more of the meeting in forthcoming blog posts but for the moment I’m happy to dwell on the Model Railway of the Miniatur Wunderland as they call it round here.

Hamburg Model RailwayRecognising that this is a technology related blog I include a photo of the three racks that they use to run the network. Not particularly tidy cabling but nobody is complaining. Also I’m not going to go into any depth on facts about the railway. I didn’t pick up any info like that. When you go to see it you spend all your time gazing at the layouts. If facts are what you want just catch up on the James May show.

Really the point of this post is just to brag about the fact that I’ve been to see the Hamburg Model Railway. If you don’t think it’s something worth bragging about then you are clearly not on my wavelength.

Some vids below for your entertainment: