Category: Engineer

Engineer

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Engineer fun stuff ofcom

And the hot news is…

Normally I’m fending off ideas for blog posts. This last couple of weeks I’ve been wading through a soup of Awards Entries which take yonks to write, especially when they limit you to writing your life story in 250 words. Bit of an  exaggeration but those of you who have to do that sort of thing will know what I mean.

So I’ve looked up, drawn breath and thought what do I want to write about. There’s the massive DDoS attack against CloudFlare that was in all the news earlier in the week. “Internet grinds to a halt” – that kind of thing. It didn’t affect us.

Then there was the cable cutting by Egyptian insurgents, demonstrators, rebels, whatever they were. Didn’t affect us though I know one or two people with operations in the Middle East and lots of traffic to Pakistan that were affected. Not us though like I said.

I note today the Register talking about how capital expenditure by network operators is very rarely recovered. I guess that doesn’t apply in our case as we are not just a bits shifter. We are into added value services that generate good gross margin. We are in this game to make money.

If you’re not in the trade you might not have noticed the Ofcom consultation on Narrowband Markets which closed on Tuesday. Amongst it’s various nuggets the Ofcom proposals contain suggestions like “if you get your line rental from BT then they would also be able to compel you to get your minutes from them as well”.  Not good really and I’m to sure that is what Ofcom wanted to say but that is how it came out on paper. Timico responded through ITSPA, that fine Trade Association that looks after everyone’s interests in the Internet Telephony space – that’s yours and mine if you but knew it. I thought about a specific blog post on the subject but no, too tedious! Yawn…

Yesterday’s news was the 40th anniversary of the mobile phone. In those days it was the size of a phone box but, hey, you could stick it in your boot (trunk) and drive it around. That was yesterday’s news. This blog ain’t a retrospective. It’s progressive and funky. Move on.

Today all the broadsheet tech pages, at least the currently free to access ones such as the Grauniad and Torygraph, are talking about the leaks of info about the forthcoming Facebook phone – poetic license intended – more here. It might interest some people but not me. I don’t trust Facebook though I do use it to keep in touch with the kids and have to admit to having two Facebook Pages of my own (here and here). One assumes btw that with modern spellcheckers they never get the Guardian spelling wrong these days, unless they use an American dictionary maybe. Whilst claiming immunity to nostalgia there are still some things worth gazing back wistfully over your shoulders. The Grauniad spelling is one.

I’m a bit of a mixed up kid when it comes to these social media platforms and online privacy. On the one hand I complain about it and say I don’t trust any of them. On the other hand I still carry on using them all in one form or another. It’s unavoidable unless I just take an allotment and spend all my time growing carrots (or peas, beans and spuds – that kind of stuff anyway. Not sprouts as I’m not very fond of them and as for broccoli!!!). #isnotgonnahappen!

Anyway I can’t think of anything to write about today so I’m going to give it a miss. Feel free to post some ideas as comments. If nobody does I’ll take it as an endorsement of my own inactivity and assume that you are either still in Tenerife catching some rays, or skiing in Bognor Regis, WL.

Catch ya later 🙂

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Engineer nuisance calls and messages ofcom voip

Nuisance calls

At last week’s ITSPA Council meeting we discussed nuisance calls. This post on on the subject was written by Pete Farmer, writing in a personal capacity. Pete is the Commercial and Regulatory Manager for Gamma  a wholesale supplier of telecoms services. Pete is a colleague on the ITSPA Council  and chairs their Regulatory Committee. His contact details can be found via his LinkedIn profile.

Nuisance Calls

No-one doubts for a second that silent or abandoned calls – the current focus of Ofcom’s attentions whereby predictive diallers make more calls than they have agents for- are a pain. It is even worse for a vulnerable person to receive a prank call at 3am let alone one where the content is potentially violent or sexual. These are often criminal acts that require decisive action from law enforcement.

What people don’t talk about so much though, is the effect such calls have on businesses. The economic harm as well as the effect on the staff can be commensurate with that suffered in a residential setting.

A business can of course be pseudo-domestic; by which I mean that a plumber, electrician or window cleaner procures their telephony services much as they would at home

Continue reading “Nuisance calls”
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Cloud datacentre Engineer

Cool stuff – Timico datacentre vids

Some pretty cool vids showing off our datacentre. Also pretty cool landing page. Come and visit. Nuff said.

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broadband Engineer

And then there was light

fibre broadband light

News today is they are electing a new Pope and I have a working broadband line. It was fixed this lunchtime by BT’s Lincoln area ops manager who turned up at our house with two new VDSL modems – just in case one of them didn’t work, fair play. It took ten seconds to unplug the old one and plug in the new and hey presto, it lit up.  Where there was darkness now there is light. It is better to light one small candle than to sit alone in the darkness etc etc etc1.

The Davies household has now breathed a collective sigh of relief. It’s a bit like the feeling you have when your petrol tank goes from nearly empty to full. You feel you can go places.

I’m not going to dwell too much in this incident but I do feel it is worth a little post mortem on how it was fixed.

Yesterday our NOC asked for the ticket to be escalated – basically raised up the priority list to ensure that someone did turn up at the next appointment. Today the escalation was rejected – it would appear that three engineering no-shows was not sufficient reason for escalation.

Also yesterday I dropped BT’s regional director an informational note linking to the blog post and highlighting the fact that it had been covered by The Register, ISPReview and quite possibly elsewhere. I also said that the next appointment was set for Friday – the first day I would be able to work from home and thus be around to let an engineer in. It was a belt and braces approach to making sure that someone turned up on Friday. It wasn’t in anyone’s interests for there to be another no show.

The issue was processed at director level and this morning the BT ops manager rang my wife to ask if he could pop around this afternoon which as you know he did to smiles all round.

Apparently over the last twelve days or so the volume of tickets requiring engineering visits has shot up. My solution is not scalable. I can’t drop BT senior management a note for every customer fault and not everyone venting their frustrations in a blog post is going to have that blog post covered in the mainstream media.

Lets hope there will be a lesson or two learn’t from the incident, though I fear not. BT has a huge organisation to run and change is not easy. I did ask whether the 1,000 engineers being taken on by Openreach would help but I’m told that they are specifically targeted at supporting BTVision which is unlikely to influence resource levels on FTTC.

Fibre broadband modem light at the end of the FTTC tunnel. Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting blog post from trefor.net.

That’s all…

1 I realise that one is not totally relevant but I thought I’d stick it in anyway 🙂

Categories
broadband Engineer

Openreach – it’s all noise

Openreach broadband engineers working at an FTTC cabinet

openreach engineer up a poleOpenreach broadband engineer finds corroded pair up pole

It’s a complicated old game, broadband. Ethernet is far simpler. You connect a length of fibre to  router at one end and one way or another it gets back to a bigger router at the ISP’s core network somewhere and hooks you up to the internet/intranet/wherever you want to hook up to. I realise that’s a simplistic way of putting it but basically that is it. it doesn’t matter if it rains or blows a gale. Fibre doesn’t normally mind.

Broadband is different. Broadband is made up of copper cables, aluminium1  if you are unlucky. Even fibre broadband, as the BT marketing hypers like to call it, is not usually fibre. Fibre broadband is, unless you happen to be one of the few with Fibre To The Premises, carried over copper in the last critical few hundred yards to your house.

So fibre broadband, or Fibre To The Cabinet, has some copper. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. Well actually I have been complaining. My home broadband performance had dropped right off from the 53Megs down and 11Megs up to at times a pathetic 6Megs in either direction.

Fortunately I have “a man who does” named Adam Rutter who leads one of our tech support teams. The BT System had rate adapted a line that could theoretically hit 80Mbps (I never expected it to do that – I am a few hundred yards from the cabinet). It normally does this if it finds errors on the line – the speed is adjusted to a point where the errors disappear. In my case the line was synching at 15Megs. Nogoode.

Adam knew there was something wrong and called out the cavalry in the guise of BT Openreach. The engineer arrived at the appointed time (good) and I hung around whilst he ran through some tests.

Now one thing you should know about a copper broadband line is that it was originally designed to carry your voice via analogue electrical signals. The specification for the copper telephone cable is therefore based largely on the parameters needed for your Aunty Mabel to hear your dulcet tones without having to put a bigger speaker in her hearing aid. Broadband hadn’t been invented in Aunty Mabel’s day (may she rest in peace).

When the boffs at the Post Office BT came along and said “Eureka we have read this article about something called ADSL and we think it is a good idea” they were stuck with a copper line that had a pre-Mabel date on it. That line spec, SIN349 for the purists amongst you, was designed to keep Mabel the inveterate talker happy on her Plain Old Telephone line and not Mabel the Skyper who loves to video conference with her nephews and nieces who in turn indulge their auntie because she shells out at Christmas and birthdays.

Now I’ve had Openreach out before to check my line and it has always passed their tests. This time I explained in no uncertain terms that there was something wrong – the evidence being in the speeds I was getting. I know it wasn’t congestion on our network and I also know how BT manages the capacity at the exchange so it wasn’t going to be down to congestion there.

Tim Drake, the Openreach engineer realised that there was no point in performing the normal line test – it would have passed. He got on the blower to their operations team and asked for the limits on my line to be lifted (the limits imposed to prevent line CRC errors).

My internet access speeds shot up, as expected.  However it didn’t take long for the errors to return. Tim spent the next hour or so testing the line looking for the source of the errors. He eventually found it at the top of the telegraph pole down the road from my house.

“Eureka” says I. Tim finished his stuff up the pole and brought down a piece of cable that showed corrosion on both strands of one pair. These wires, rubbing together in the wind and rain would have resulted in noise that was the cause of my errors and the speed downgrade. Mabel and her yakking on the Plain Old Telephone would not have been troubled by the problem. Mabel on Skype would.

My FTTC line is now back a lot nearer to where it needs to be and I am a happy bloke. I am next week having dinner with a senior team from BT and I intend to specifically commend Tim Drake for his efforts. Openreach broadband engineers have a budget of one hour to fix each problem.  Mine took two hours and Tim could have walked away early on in the process with the throwaway observation that the line was in spec and there was nothing he could do.

This he did not do and he now has a happy customer. He is a good man. He cares.

The only real answer to all this would be for a total network rollout of Fibre To The Premises. Whilst I am not saying that fibre is totally immune from the environmental problems that affect copper it is far less so. Ubiquitous FTTP ain’t going to happen any time soon, we all know that, but perhaps this blog will be used one day as an illustration of the issues that dogged that historical piece of communications antiquity, the copper telephone line.

Thanks Tim. The photo is of Tim up the pole.

Ciao.

1 That’s alue-min-eeum and not aloominum, y’awl

Categories
Engineer Net security

The Fortigate100D firewall & MPLS networks

Fortigate100DI find it profitable to sit around the development teams. Someone always says “hey Tref come and see this”. On this occasion it was a couple of Fortigate100D firewalls.

Now the cynics amongst you will say so what? A firewall? What’s so interesting about that? I realise that there can be few readers of this blog of that disposition and those that are have probably only stumbled upon it by accident, never to return.

I also realise that it’s not quite the same as saying “hey Tref come and see this Cisco CRS-3 322 Tbps router”. Well we don’t have such a beast at Timico, yet (although it is is surely just a question of time before we need routers of that capacity, Cisco or otherwise). It’s unlikely that the Cisco CRS-3 would have been lying around the lab anyway as it takes up three racks and no doubt a DC hall full of power.

In fact the FortiGate100D is not a particularly high spec firewall at least compared with what you can get. It is however more than adequate for the job it is lined up for which is a network refresh of one of our customer’s MPLS implementations.

It is in the lab being set up and tested prior to roll-out sometime over the next few weeks.  These things don’t want rushing, they want careful planning. That’s probably the single biggest difference between us as an ISP now and when we first started off with just a few hundred ADSL customer and a few Ethernet connections. Planning and project management is a far bigger proportion of the network engineering job now that the straight setting up of the noughts and ones. It’s a discipline that leads to fewer tears later on and I’m all for cutting down on the time spent weeping by engineers.

These particular firewalls are destined for separate London locations on our core network. Once in they won’t see the light of day for a few more years. TTFN.

PS thanks to that fine person Gareth Bryan for this snippet.

Categories
Apps Engineer mobile apps mobile connectivity

AA wots goin on ere then? On Board Diagnostics – OBD

AA vanIOBD system used by the AA had occasion to call the AA this morning. I was out at the crack of before dawn to take in my usual swim on the way to work when knock me down with a thirty pound sledgehammer the car wouldn’t start. Never had a problem before but hey, stuff happens…

I called the AA at 7.40 am and was promised a van in my front drive at 8.40. Ok cool. I had my usual Weetabix with banana and before I knew it an sms came in on my Samsung Galaxy S3 telling me the AA man would arrive at 08.10. Very good. Impressivo.

OBD connectionFollowing breakfast I moved into the front room to keep an eye out for the van and at just before 08.40 it drove past. I must get the house number on the gatepost fixed. Walking out to the drive I saw the van drive past the other way – I definitely must get that number fixed !:)

At the third pass I flagged the van down and it pulled into the drive. Yay.

Fortunately the car didn’t start as soon as the AA man tried it. I had this irrational worry that once he got there there wouldn’t be anythingOBD crypton AA wrong with it. Out came his diagnostic kit and he set to work. Now this is really the point of this post. The AA man plugged a connector into a socket just below the steering column that I didn’t know was there, got his ruggedized tablet out and ran some tests.

Trying the engine again the car started straight away! Blimey!!

The AA man (I should have asked his name – it may be on the docket which is in the car but I can’t be bothered to go out and get it) showed me that there were no error codes and thatOBD toughbook basically there was nothing wrong with the car/engine. He suspects it was a low fuel pressure or at least a temperamental fuel pressure sensor. If the on board computer doesn’t think there is enough fuel pressure it won’t let the car start. The car deciding to start was nothing to do with the plugging in of the OBD kit. It is now ok again.

The worry of course is that this might happen again. I didn’t want to keep thrashing the battery to start the car in case it ran it flat (fwiw) and itwon’t really be any different another time though there is a scenario where if the car isn’t going to start it doesn’t matter what the state of the battery is..

The information obtainable via the OBD interface was impressive. I could in real time see the changes to the fuel pressure as I pressed my foot on the accelerator. I’m sure there must be a market for an application that streams data from the engine management system to a cloud based data base that would allow me to observe the trends related to what is happening with my car engine. It might help me to spot problems before they happen and mean I’m less likely to miss my swim in the morning.

This is a machine to machine big data job with a mobile data SIM connected to the engine management system. It would be very simple to add a tracking function to this as well.

This may be available but I’ve not seen it. Car tracking systems seem to be more about recovering stolen vehicles and spying on your truck drivers to make sure they aren’t slacking than anything related to anticipating problems with the car. In itself this is fine but more could be done.

You could use the same SIM for in car internet browsing whilst on the go. Not for the driver but maybe for the kids use with an iPad to keep them entertained on a journey.

Anyway that’s my threppence halfpennyworth. The car is fine now Praise Be!

Categories
datacentre Engineer virtualisation

242GHz processor with 767GB RAM? oh ok


john milner - top timico applications engineerHere at Timico’s Newark datacentre we have just expanded our main VMware cluster with a couple more Cisco UCS B200 blade servers (see earlier post ). The cluster is now running at a whooping 242Ghz of Compute power with 767.51GB of RAM! Impressive ou quoi?

It’s a bit mind blowing if your experience with buying computers is based on time spent in PC World staring at specifications trying to decide whether to pay the extra few quid for 2GB more RAM and a slightly faster processor.

This is just one of the many virtualisation clusters needed to run an ISP and another step forward in Timico’s P2V campaign – onwards and upwards. In fact it’s onwards and downwards when it comes to things like data storage space colocation rackspace, power and of course cost. On the back of this work we have just been able to cancel two cages in Docklands datacentres which will save us £100k a year. That’s significant. That’s half a million quid over five years – that’s very significant.

Virtualisation is allowing us to better manage and control our systems so we can always provide the best possible performance to the services we offer. If you’re a Timico customer you may have noticed the improved performance on services such as hosted web and email.  This is because these services have been virtualised with the accompanying improvement in performance.

Gimme a shout if you want to chat more about this or to come and see it in action for yourself. Info courtesy of that fine engineer John Milner again :)) (sorry if this is embarrassing John but you are a good guy 🙂 ). Check out the Enterprise Private cloud page at Timico.

Categories
Apps Cloud Engineer virtualisation

EMC datadomain compresses 103TB of VM backups to 6.8TB using deduplication

john milner - top timico applications engineerJohn Milner is one of our top systems engineers specialising in Virtualisation. Over the last year he has been running an experiment to see the potential of using an EMC datadomain as the primary repository for VM backups. He has approximately 200 VMs (150 Linux and 50 MS Windows) backing up nightly to this appliance. What is amazing is that this appliance has managed to reduce nearly 103TB of production VM backups to 6.8TB using de-duplication and compression!

The below chart shows the actual data (blue) growing rapidly compared with the disk used to store this information (purple).

This allows us to retain data for much longer periods of time than usually possible. John’s next experiment will be to try the same using Veeam Backup and Replication as a comparison.  It’ll obviously take a while to get the results but I’ll let you know when we have some numbers to show.

deduplication in actionCheck out the Timico Data Vault page here.

Categories
Engineer engineering internet

Fearghas nods off

Many of you will know Fearghas McKay as a solid hard working lad who is thoroughly dependable and very knowledgeable about his subject. Such is his commitment to his job that he often works through the night at home and then turns up for a full day in the office the next day.

All this hard work does eventually take its toll.  I mischievously filmed the lad sleeping like a baby at UKNOF24 held at Timico yesterday.  Poor old Fearghas completely missed Jesse Sowell of MIT’s retrospective on the WCIT meeting. Ah well. Lucky for him he wasn’t snoring when I was filming.

I gave out some wonderful Timico Megamugs at UKNOF but I do have a few left and seeing as it’s Friday afternoon I’m going to have a caption competition. Lets have some suggestions for captions to accompany this video.

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Engineer online safety security

How to achieve a PCI Compliant network

Trefor DaviesA lot of effort goes into achieving PCI compliance for a network. Without going into huge detail I thought some of you would like to know the type of work we had to do to get the badge.

Implementation of secure LDAP cluster

This consists of a master server and three read-only slaves, the master server is locked down heavily and the read-only slaves are used for applications to authenticate against. All communication is authenticated and encrypted. All of our new systems have been moved over to authenticate against this LDAP cluster.

TACACS+ / RADIUS (2-Factor) authentication front ends

TACACS+ is an authentication protocol used by all our network equipment and passes authentication through to the LDAP cluster. This system was rebuilt to use encrypted communication, a well structured user/group system, and various security features.

RADIUS (2-Factor) was implemented to pass one factor of the authentication back to the LDAP cluster and the second factor back to a Yubi Key server so that Yubi Keys can be used.

Secure VPN, was implemented using

Continue reading “How to achieve a PCI Compliant network”
Categories
Engineer internet Net

PCI compliant networks

Trefor DaviesPleased to tell you that as of today, Timico, NewNet and PowerNet have been listed on Visa Europe’s website as having a PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant network.

Check it out here.

Our PCI compliance project began in mid-July and all paperwork and network scan was sent to Visa Europe on 14 November.  The team met pretty much every other week since July, sometimes for all day workshops, to tackle this project.  It’s a great credit to everyone that the project was completed in such a short space of time.  I’m sure they will all agree, it wasn’t easy.

The cross disciplinary team was lead by Leslie Young and comprised Nick Luckcuck, Ian Christian, Will Curtis, Faye Hemingway, Dean Bruce, Tom Grace, Jared Moore and Calum Malcolm.

Anyone out there needing a PCI compliant network should check us out. Press release with more spiel here.

I’ll do another post to cover the type of work we had to do to achieve compliance.

Categories
Engineer engineering

Travel guidance for attendees of #UKNOF24 on Thursday 17th Jan #LAMMA

UKNOF24UKNOF24 is being held at Timico in Newark on Thursday 17th January. People trying to book accommodation will already have found out that there is an agricultural equipment show called LAMMA on at the Newark Showground. Great if you like tractors (which I do) but a nuisance if you are coming to UKNOF24.

If you are coming by car you need some local advice re how to avoid the traffic which will be heavy with farmers heading to the showground.

Coming from Lincoln Heading for Newark turn off the A46 at the Brough turning around 2 or three miles before Newark. You can find your way the back way through Stapleford Wood and Coddington to our offices that way.

Coming up or down the A1 turn off at the Coddington exit and turn right towards Newark. Lamma traffic will be turning left. This is one exit after the main Newark turning (the one with the railway station signposted) heading South – so the one before it heading North (obv).

Coming from Nottingham turn off at the first roundabout at the end of the new dualled bit of the A46 and head in on the B6166 to Newark (this is the old Roman Fosse Way fwiw). Avoiding the A46 bypass will save you a lot of time.

Cars should come and park at the actual data centre which is secure and where there will be more space. The address is

Timico Data Centre

Brunel Business Park

Jessop Close

Newark NG24 2AG

It has a different access road to the HQ building though you can access both buildings on foot from each other. The gate is a secure one but someone should be keeping an eye open to let you in.

For those catching the train the data centre is about a 10 min walk South from Newark Northgate – there is a footpath along the side of the track. The walk from Newark Castle is a bit longer. If I were you I’d call a taxi.

Newark Taxi 01636 705200 – book in advance when you know what time your train gets in.

Any questions just ask. See you for the curry.

UPDATE WEDNESDAY16TH

I’d plan to get in early if I were you as some of our staff members got caught up in horrendous traffic on hte way in this morning.

Tref

Categories
Engineer engineering internet

#UKNOF24 is at Timico in Newark next week

UKNOF24It’s a day for writing posts about being excited. This time I’m excited to tell you that next Thursday Timico is playing host to UKNOF24. Many of you will know what I’m taking about but more will not.

The UK Network Operators Forum acts as an open forum for operational, technical and engineering information exchange related to networking technologies and practices. On Thursday we will have 120 or so of the UK’s top network engineers in our Newark Conference Centre.

Its a very packed agenda including a curry the night before sponsored by LINX and beers afterwards. UKNOF is open to anyone involved in the networking game. It isn’t just ISPs and commercial network operators. You could be running the network of your own business.  Next week we will hear about subjects as diverse as 100Gbps optical networks and the market for VoIP/SIP.

If you want to come you can register here.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

Trefor Davies elected to board of LONAP

@tref on a VoIP conference callYesterday I attended the Annual General Meeting and 15th birthday bash of LONAP – the London Access Point. LONAP is a not for profit Internet eXchange and is used by Timico along with LINX (London Internet Exchange) for peering with other networks.

In a world where uptime and resiliency of networks are important LONAP and LINX are complementary and together provide Timico and its customers with fast access to a large number of networks and content.

I am particularly pleased proud honoured to announce that at yesterday’s AGM I was voted onto the board. It’s an exciting time to be around. The type of service provided by LONAP, for those of you unfamiliar with the IX genre, is fundamental to how the internet operates. You may also have noticed that the use of the internet is growing rapidly. To be on the board at this time is to be in an environment where lots of change is happening all the time.  In a world that is moving so quickly it is important to stay at the leading edge and working with LONAP will help Timico to stay at the front of the pack.

The photo was taken by outgoing Chairman Seb Lahtinen – I’m at the LONAP social after the AGM and actually on a VoIP conference call. The restaurant, Belgo, had excellent O2 WiFi coverage and I spent an hour on the mobile VoIP client with a flawless “signal”. I’m not going to tell you what I was doing with the cuddly toy though seeing as it is Friday there is a Timico megamug for anyone who can tell me who gave it to me.

Categories
Engineer UC voip

S3 SBC, rhymes with VoIP, Securitee – Session Border Controller @Genband @Timico

Trefor DaviesYesterday I wrote about our new mobile VoIP App for the iPhone. This included a link to a press release issued by Genband, our VoIP infrastructure partner.

That release covered more than just the mobile VoIP iPhone App. It is a bit of an overall solution release but an important bit covers our acquisition of the Genband S3 Session Border Controller.

The SBC has been a bit of a controversial beast in the world of purist VoIP engineering. It’s purpose is to manage VoIP sessions across different networks. In its earliest incarnation it was used to convert VoIP signalling from the old H323 video conferencing protocol (also used for just voice in older VoIP services) to the more modern and up and coming SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) or perhaps to a variant of MGCP (Media Gateway Control Protocol). As a “border controller” it also grew in functionality as a device used to manage the security of a network.

The conceptual problem of the SBC amongst the early VoIP pioneers was that it operated as a “back to back user agent”. In other words it effectively terminated a signalling stream on input  and started it up again on output. This meant that in the “open internet” it would not necessarily be possible to trace a VoIP signalling packet from end to end as you might be able to do with other non-voice packets using tools such as tracert, the outcome being that it would be harder to debug problematic services.

This was at a time when the theory stated that all VoIP calls would be free heralding the end of the telco and paid phone calls as we know it. This Utopian scenario was underwritten by companies such as Skype who appeared to offer free phone calls to all. Of course to be confirmed and adopted by the general scientific base, theories need proving in practice and even the virulently successful Skype ended up demonstrating that it has to pay for its infrastructure somehow by starting to charge for some of its services.

The growth of the VoIP market1 has also stimulated the growth of a VoIP security sector. There was initially an element of playing on the fears of people entering uncharted technical territories. The fact that VoIP is designed to operate on the DNS based internet2 and functions in a similar way to email and web browsing opens up opportunities for fraudulent activity in the same way that we have become accustomed to such happenings in our general web use. Email SPAM is replaced with VoIP SPIT (computer generated SPAM for Internet Telephony bombarding the world with automated sales messages).  The use of a crawler ploughing through blocks of IP addresses looking for open networks to penetrate is replaced with a search for exposed network based iPBXs that can be exploited for financial gain.

There are many precautions that can be taken to remove vulnerabilities from a VoIP network but if you are serious at security you will want to use a Session Border controller.

A VoIP network, at least if it is to be usable by business, needs managing to maintain its quality and reliability and the SBC plays an integral role in this. The SBC today, far from being the object of criticism of the VoIP network engineer, is the demesne of the grown up Internet Telephony Service Provider. Think of it as a super security tool that secures your network and cements the quality of the service it supports.

Looking at it parochially I’ve been wanting an SBC “to play with” for years, ever since we started our hosted VoIP service. We put a lot of effort into the management of security of our VoIP users but the Genband S3 SBC, covered in the press release, allows us to take this to new heights.

The Genband S3 effectively acts as a VoIP firewall. It manages network access using real-time and aggregated admission control policies. It can, for example, spot and prevent the SPIT attacks referred to earlier.  It will also help Timico as a service provider to control the quality of the VoIP service with capabilities such as the automatic monitoring of network bandwidth rates and capacity.

From Timico’s perspective as a voice carrier the Genband S3 will allow us to hook up with many more interconnect partners because as a border controller it allows us to manage interoperability with different carrier’s kit. The SBC will also provide us with the flexibility to fine tune routes based on both cost effectiveness and quality. For example if a specific route begins to suffer from poor call completion rates the S3 will detect this and intelligently reroute traffic to that destination via a different interconnect partner. The S3 is also hugely compatible with our Genband A2 VoIP platform and will scale to 25,000 concurrent calls that effectively supports a subscriber base of over 250,000 users.

The S3 is relatively new to Genband. It came with the acquisition of NexTone, one of the market’s original and leading SBC vendors. This has brought with it a maturity and pedigree of user base that is not only reflected in its functionality but will quickly help Timico cement our position as one of the leading VoIP providers to the business market. Bit of marketing blurb there but it is actually based on solid engineering principles.

If anyone wants to chat more about our new S3 SBC drop me a line, call or hook up with me via @tref on Twitter.

Ciao.

1 note there will come a time when we don’t talk about it as a VoIP market. It won’t be long before we have to simply describe the world as a communications market which contains a subset known as the old fashioned telecommunications network as championed by the ITU (another story in itself).

2 It still doesn’t fully merge with the domain name system as this would rely on every ISP supporting VoIP on its DNS servers. The principle of domain based routing is still the same for VoIP as for regular web traffic.

Categories
Engineer mobile connectivity voip voip hardware

Timico mobile VoIP app now available on Apple App Store

I started to look at mobile VoIP clients a good 8 or 9 years ago. At the time the handsets were near enough useless – battery life was rubbish and the processors lacked the oomph to properly run a SIP user agent.

The advent of the modern day smart phone has changed all this, together with years of development effort put in to improve the soft clients themselves.

Now, most of us have a VoIP client on our phone – almost certainly Skype, maybe 3CX, Bria or Eyebeam. I stopped counting the number of low cost VoIP calling services that you might use as the target for the mobile VoIP client.

Many desktop VoIP clients are not supported on mobile. So if you use MSN or Facebook or Google+ or Lync even their mobile clients almost certainly do not support voice but are just used for presence and Instant Messaging.

The dwindling list of vendors of Unified Comms equipment offer their own mobile VoIP clients, which necessarily have better functionality than those I’ve just mentioned from the major platforms. Ask Avaya or Mitel about it and they will proudly show off their solution. These vendor specific solutions usually use a third party soft client tailored to their specific need. Bria from Counterpath is one and MobileMax is another.

I am very proud to announce that Timico has introduced its own mobile VoIP client . There are some clear differentiators from the generic soft phones mentioned earlier and used with hosted solutions.

First of all the user’s account is tied to the employer’s VoIP subscription, so the desktop extension and DDI is the same as the mobile. The user interface is also similar to that of the soft client running on the desktop and is controlled using the same familiar portal. Mobile users can not only speak and do video calls with other users of the network, but are able the see the availability of others

There is more to the technology that goes in to making a successful mobile VoIP client than is at first apparent. A little technology primer might serve a useful purpose here. When you speak into a telephone you are using an analogue broadcast service, i.e. your voice. In order to get to the telephone at the far end this analogue signal is converted into data packets (i.e. digitised) and then transmitted using computer networking technology, in our case Internet Protocol and the layers of networking technologies that come under its umbrella.

The sent packets have to traverse a number of hurdles in the guise of different networks and routers before arriving at their intended destination (next door, Australia – anywhere connected to the internet). Voice is very time sensitive. You really notice the difference if there is a delay between the person at the other end speaking and you hearing it, and vice versa. Slow or poor quality hops in the network can affect the quality of the user experience.

Use of mobile networks for VoIP transmission comes with its own specific issues. 3G is a notoriously latency ridden data service and a number of mobile operators actually block VoIP services (although they are far from transparent in their approach to this). It is too early to assess the practical usability of 4G because there is only one service provider in the market and that network will be only lightly used. The issue of cost of bandwidth over a mobile carrier network has also historically made VoIP impracticable in many cases.

WiFi is the sensible alternative. Although even WiFi comes with its own issues with Ethernet style best efforts transmission. Packets that collide with other packets don’t arrive at their destination. The busier the local WiFi network, the more likely you are to suffer from poor quality voice.

In practical terms this is likely to mean if you are sitting in an office with many hot desks where WiFi is the principal means of connecting to corporate resources, then that network is likely to become congested. This congestion may not be particularly noticeable to laptop users just doing emails or general web use.

A congested WiFi network that is ok for most uses might not be good for VoIP. In an office environment this can be engineered around, by creating more cells/hotspots each with fewer users. At home there is far less likely to be a problem although VoIP packets in this scenario are more likely to be using the open internet for transmission.

A VoIP phone is actually a computer that looks like a phone. Fortunately the lost packet compensation and packet processing techniques used in modern mobile VoIP clients (smart phones/computers) are able to overcome many “noisy” environmental scenarios, or at least go a long way towards mitigating their effects.

Timico’s announcement today comes after some time working with partners (Genband) to develop the soft-client. The app is available on the Apple App Store  to existing (and new!) Timico VoIP customers and is a piece of cake to install – use of our Mobile Endpoint Provisioning (MEP) portal means all the user has to do is enter a username and password and they are up and running.

The MEP is worth further mention. With the MEP comes the ability to change mobile client settings on-the-fly which provides the Timico operations team with a critical tool for managing your mobile VoIP solution in near real time. There are over 200+ settings that the MEP controls, including default codec selection, NAT traversal settings and the keep-alive timer value.

There are often deployments where we might initially need to make adjustments to these settings to suit the environment in which you use the service. We can do this transparently and without requiring interaction with the end-users.

Another feature to our service that is designed to provide the optimum user experience is our Client QOS notification. The mobile client analyses the RTCP statistics in real time. Should these stats fall below predefined thresholds then the user will receive a notification informing them of ‘network quality issues’.

I’ve been around polling some of the early users and got the following comments:

  • “I’ve ditched my deskphone and now just use the iPhone app”
  • “Connects very quickly”
  •  “I was sat in Starbucks in Canada and used it to call the office”

I’m sure that I will have previously mentioned that last year we won the ITSPA Award for the best Enterprise Unified Comms service. This mobile client adds nicely to that existing feature-rich service set. It’s going to be a terrific tool for people who need to make calls out of the office but don’t want to pay extortionate roaming charges or use their own phones.

Because the VoIP service is tied to their company’s business account then all calls just appear on the standard monthly bill. Calls to other internal VoIP users are of course free.

So there we have it. The mobile VoIP client has finally come into the world of reliable, serious business strength communications. If you want to try the service check it out here .  Press release yurr1.

1 note South Walian accent

Categories
Engineer fun stuff internet

TalkTalk break records for downloads with 557GB per sec on New Year’s Day

Trefor DaviesTalkTalk is a highly successful provider of communications services – broadband, phone lines etc. I noted an entry in the Twitter stream this morning that showed they had seen record traffic levels on New Year’s Day – people upgrading firmware on new gadgets, using the gadgets etc.

We know this because TalkTalk CTO Clive Dorsman blogged about their network peaking at 557GB per second of traffic – that’s around 4.45Terabits per second which is impressively massive and three times to peak usage seen on the LINX network. I can only dream of having that amount of capacity at Timico.

Clive goes on to sell TalkTalk broadband services in his post. That’s OK. I occasionally chuck in a reference to a Timico service (great value & service etc – check it out here). “TalkTalk Superfast Fibre Broadband … costs £10 per month for up to 38MB or £15 for up to 76MB, allowing downloads up to eight times faster than the UK average.”

The only tiny element of doubt I have about all this is that I don’t believe that FTTC speeds of 76 Megabytes are available. In fact the TalkTalk product pages correctly quote speeds of 76 Megabits per second.

I suspect that Clive’s post was written by a PR person new to the tech game. I guess these things happen. I’m sure we are all guilty of the occasional cock up.

Btw this is only a bit of fun but I attach a screenshot of the post here for reference in anticipation of the corrections to the TalkTalk blog and the pursuant challenge for me to provide evidence. Also if the real number is 4.45Terabits per second – as I said that is massively impressive.

Categories
Engineer phones

kiss goodbye to the set top box – Android Stick

Trefor DaviesI think I’ve been burying my head in the sand as I have only just noticed Android thumb drives. Following on from my earlier post on low cost Android tablets 2013 could well be the year you kiss goodbye to your set top box, if you had one in the first place. Mini thumb drives loaded with Android and with a HDMI interface for plugging into your TV are the way ahead. They are sourced from China for around £32 including delivery!

Running with Android allows you to download apps from the Google Play Store which means you can, in theory use the drive to run BBC iPlayer, Netflix or any other media service service. You can also insert a micro SD card with some of your favourite1 movies or music for locally sourced content. These drives support WiFi for internet access and you can either plug in a USB keyboard or use wireless access to control it.

It’s everything you can do using the RaspBerryPi but without having to learn to programme or sysadmin. If you use an external powered  USB hub you can plug in some extras and, for example, use a webcam for video chats.

I’m going to get one and check it out. The only problem I can forsee is that we only have one telly at home. This is already called upon by two boys competing for XBox time and my wife who wants to watch every cookery programme on the planet. Also I don’t really watch that much TV but hey… It’s got to be done I think. It’s a cheap way of hooking your TV up to the internet.

The next problem is which one to buy – Amazon has 840 results for “Android Stick”. Any suggestions duly noted.

Ciao.

1 I think I’m starting to sound like a cheesy TV advert here!

Categories
Engineer internet

Why adjacency matters

Check out this post of the Timico website as to why adjacency matters. If you don’t know what I’m taking about you will learn something:)

Categories
Engineer media

The art of producing music soundtracks for online games

I have a friend called Ervin Nagy who is a Hungarian concert pianist. I also have 3 sons who all like playing online games. Ervin has branched out into composing music for online games. It’s interesting how trades that have been around for centuries are now being applied in the era or the world wide web.

Ervin comes from Budapest and has a story to tell about how he got into the business. This is a longer than usual blog post but I thought the story worth telling. You can scroll down quickly if you just want to hear the music development mp3s.

Continue reading “The art of producing music soundtracks for online games”
Categories
Engineer Net olympics peering

A funny thing happened on my way to #LINX79

Today is the quarterly LINX meeting. LINX79. It’s been going for a few years now – you can work out how long yourselves.

These are great meetings. You can learn more in two days here than in the rest of the quarter in between. LINX continues to grow. It in part reflects the growth of the internet but also the fact that LINX some time ago hit a critical mass and is a great place to peer if you provide connectivity to the internet.

LINX has 443 members. Last year the membership grew by 49. So far in 2012 they have had 86 new applications – that’s double the run rate of 2011! Since LINX78 only 3 months ago the peak traffic has grown from 1.431Tbps to 1.538Tbps and connected capacity has grown from 5.958Tb to 6.14Tb. What that is saying that the traffic is continuing to grow over and above the huge peaks we were seeing during the Olympics which themselves drove a significant rise.

For the sake of comparison if your broadband connection gives you 10Mbps (as I recall the UK average is now around 12Mbps) then the 6.14Tb capacity at LINX is about six hundred thousand times faster.

Colin McFarlane speaks his lines to Trefor Davies on the train to LondonNow to the “funny” bit. I bumped into a neighbour of mine on the platform at Newark Northgate station. Colin McFarlane is an actOr1.  He lives round the corner from me. Colin is working on a very interesting project that should hit the streets next year. It has a technical slant that I will talk about sometime in 2013.

You might know Colin as the Police Commissioner in one of the Batman movies or working with Rowan Atkinson in The Thin Blue Line. I’m sure he’s been in other things but not being much of a TV watcher I don’t know them.

Colin was on his way to Paris to record a cartoon voiceover and on his way was stopping off in London to audition for a stage show. He had a wodge of scripts in his hand and asked if I would help him to remember his lines.

Bear in mind we were in the quiet coach. So there I was reading a classic black American script in an American accent whilst Colin performed in the seat in front of me. I could almost hear the audience, breathless in anticipation of what was to come. Being in the quiet coach we could hear a pin drop. Very dramatic!

We finished the script, the rest of the coach applauded (very quietly) 2, the train pulled into Kings Cross and we went our separate ways – he to his audition and me to the TUC centre for LINX79. Colin did tell me the name of the play but I won’t share it in case he decides not to take the part. He is bound to be offered it, natch.

1 I left the capital O there to make sure you got the pronunciation right 🙂

2 Only joking there, they didn’t – I’m sure it was my fault not Colin’s, or maybe we were being suitably quiet

 

Categories
Engineer mobile connectivity

Train WiFi – the unexpurgated truth (as far as I can see it)

test data for WiFi versus O2 cellular on Eastcoast trains - click for full size imageThe only sensible way to travel to central London is by train. Whilst it isn’t cheap it is fast and has the benefit of allowing you to usefully use the time doing work and of course tweeting and writing blog posts.

I was tweeting away during one such trip and one of my pals, @HmmmUK, suggested I write a post on the connectivity on board the train. This is that post (said in a dramatic booming sort of voice).

Finding out all about the service was easy. Icomera, the company that provides it, proudly boasts about it on their website. I had thought it was satellite based but surprisingly it is based on a combination of satellite and 3G.

The connectivity is based on the good old “Moovbox M800” which you may not have known “provides a central network connection moovbox m800 - it's a cool name - thanks to Icomera for the picfor all the real-time communication needs of urban and suburban rail systems…

…combining up to eight cellular WAN radios with an aggregated downlink speed up to 28Mbps (in our dreams). The Moovbox will automatically change between network types including HSPA, 3G UMTS, EDGE and GPRS to deliver the best connection possible depending on network availability. The M800 can also be configured with a DVB-S satellite module for connectivity in areas where terrestrial networks and unavailable. Each cellular radio supports two SIMs allowing it to switch between different cellular providers and thus the best available network. Where a track-side or depot Wi-Fi network is present the Moovbox will use this as a preferred backhaul alternative at speeds up to 54Mbps.”

Icomera is a Swedish company which explains why I’ve occasionally had Swedish language adverts pushed to me when using the service. The ground station is in Sweden with a Swedish IP address.

To make this post a little more interesting I decided to test the on board WiFi against the O2 sim in my phone. I did this on a 2 hour 20 minute journey between Lincoln and London Kings Cross (the train was late – it shouldn’t take more than 2 hours 5 mins 🙂 ). After Newark I did continuous testing using speedtest.net on both laptop WiFi and phone sim.

Although I tried to start each test at the same time in reality one normally took longer than the other so the finishing times do not coincide. I managed 88 cellular tests but only 55 using the WiFi which suggests that the WiFi tests took longer to perform.

This is borne out from the average results which were better for O2 than for the WiFi.

Average Download Speed bps Average Upload Speed bps Average Latencys ms
O2 mobile data 2002 872 203
On train WiFi 985 618 231

The recording process was not perfect. We have to remember that I was hurtling through the English autumnal countryside at 125mph for much of the time (must have been less than that seeing the train was late) and there were times when the speed test stalled due to no connectivity and continued when it picked up a signal once again.

It felt like it did this more often for the O2 sim which you could understand losing connectivity in parts of the countryside whereas the satellite should have had a continuous connection. That said the fact that I was able to perform more speed tests with the former is telling. Of course it may have been down to more people on the train using the WiFi than their cellular connection but I can only report my own experiences. The numbers speak for themselves.

Cellular WiFi
Fastest Download (bps) 6176 3930
Fastest Upload (bps) 3233 1580

Although I do use the on train WiFi I have on occasion resorted to the cellular connection in my laptop (O2 in phone, Vodafone in laptop) and whilst this test used O2 not Voda I suspect what it is telling me is that it makes more sense not to bother with the onboard WiFi and just stick to the mobile networks.

It also makes me wonder what sort of cellular connectivity they have on the Moovbox M800. I guess must have a lot of people hooked to it on that train!?  They must use some sims because the latency seems low for a satellite only connection. In fact thinking about it I wonder if they used a satellite at all on my trip?

Icomera looks like it has established a nice little niche in transport based connectivity but I suspect that passenger expectations in the UK have overtaken what Eastcoast is providing.

That’s all for now – click on the header image for a full size graphical representation of the test results. You will see that there are many more “good” results for the cellular connection than the WiFi. Also it’s no surprise that the best cellular readings come when the train is in or near a station.

Categories
Engineer voip

What’s in a bowl of fruit – IPCortex RaspberryPi

bowl of fruit - click to see IPCortex RaspberryPiIt never ceases to amaze me what we can do with technology. The most generous Rob Pickering of IPCortex sent me a RaspberryPi microcomputer loaded with a cut down version of his PBX.

It was the work of minutes to set up a couple of Lincoln area code (01522) SIP trunks and then define some client devices with which to make phone calls. I then downloaded the 3CX SIP client for Android, free from the Google Play Store, stuck in some simple credentials (user name tref etc) and I was away.

The IPCortex bearing RaspberryPi is ipcortex on raspberrypi screenshot currently plugged in to an Ethernet port in our kitchen. Click on the photo to zoom in. I don’t think my wife has noticed yet but no doubt she will. At that point I will move it to the switch in the attic and leave it there for a general play.

The IPCortex lets me configure any SIPipcortex on raspberrypi - click to enlarge client for the RaspberryPi. In this case a softphone was used and we needed to generate some dummy mac addresses – shown in the photo as 0000001 etc. Ordinarily you would input the MAC address of your deskphone.

In one of the images you can see that there are three users set up – Tref, Joe and John. You might need to click on each image to enlarge for a better view.  I took these screenshots lying in bed this morning. It’s just great what you can do from your phone. You can see the internal IP address of the IPCortex/server plus a glimpse at some of the features.

The 3CX is great for a play but I haven’t3CX SIP softclient running on Samsung Galxy S3 and hanging off the IPCortex on RaspberryPi figured out its ideal set up yet. It currently assumes it is the main phone you want to use when dialing out but I have a number of clients I play with on my handset and I don’t want it to be the main one. I have to switch the 3CX off for normal operation of other phones. It might just be a question of me needing to play with the Galaxy S3 more.

The call quality was great. I made WiFi to PSTN, PSTN to WiFi and WiFi to 3G.

I can see possibilities for home workers and consumers with this technology. You could envisage giving the kids an extension hanging off a local number – press 1 to talk to John etc or they could have their own DDI.

The time is not far off where people manage their own call routing – for example forwarding to their own mobile when not at home. If their package includes free calls to mobiles, or just to family mobiles then this would be a no brainer. This functionality could easily be embedded in a set top box along with a media server, which coincidentally (not) is what me next RaspberryPi project is going to be.

That’s all for now. I’ll report back as I get more to say on this subject.

Ciao…

PS no comments about the untidy cable. I couldn’t find a shorter one and my wife will have enough to say anyway when I get home.

PPS Thanks to Rik Wheeler for helping with the setup and being at the other end for the 3G demo calls.

Categories
Engineer internet

miscellany submarine cables and submarines – dive dive dive

submarine cable map courtesy of http://www.submarinecablemap.com/Visiting my old alma mater today, Bangor University. It’s nice to get invited. We are opening a new Laboratory and then the Annual Engineering Lecture. This year it is entitled “Submarine Engineering across the years”  and is to be given by Rear Admiral (retd) Paul Thomas CB, FREng, FCGI, FIMechE, Hon FNucI, Hon FSaRS. That’s more badges than most of us could possibly dream of!

The subject is quite convenient because some time ago I bookmarked a website http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ thinking it was cool and would come in handy some day. Well now it has and whilst absolutely  nothing to do with today’s lecture it is fascinating to see where all the undersea cables are. The whole internet is underpinned by relatively few connections really.

If you click on an individual cable line it tells you who owns the cable, how long it is, when it was laid and where it lands. This is big business. Some of these cables are very long. SeaMeWe3 for example is 39,000km, stretches from Germany all the way to Australia and South Korea and is owned by a cooperative of 16 organisations.

Keeping it topical, some governments, ours included want to monitor the traffic running though these cables. When you look at the map it makes you realise how absurd this is.

I have visions of Rear Admiral (retd) Paul Thomas in his sub pootling along following the cables to find his way home – a bit like the pilots in their Sopwith Camels during WW1 following the roads and railway lines. Fiendishly clever. Splice the mainbrace, Klingons on the starboard bow, land ho, take her down number one, dive dive dive, etc etc etc.

I’ll let you know how the lecture goes 🙂

Categories
Cloud Engineer virtualisation

Think global act local – vmware survey

vmware surveyI’m not an angry person but some things can certainly irritate the heck out of me. Today it is survey forms. It’s not concept of filling in a survey – I don’t mind doing that sometimes, especially if I have a particularly good or bad experience.

I should explain:

I just downloaded VMware  player for my laptop. I got the usual message “this may take several minutes” and for once it did take several minutes – usually the installation is quite quick regardless of the message. Coincidentally a survey from VMware popped up on the screen as I was wondering whether o believe the message and go off and do something else in the meantime.

I started to fill in the survey, it was a simple one, and fortunately for VMware the installation  finished just as I came to the bit about rating the experience. I didn’t really have anything bad to say. They warned me it might take some time and it did.

What annoyed me though was the fact that when it came to selecting my country of residence the name at the top of the list was the good ole United States of Americay. Now hear this VMware. It doesn’t do anything for me having the USA as the first name on the list. It just it just makes me irritated to think that you, an American company think it is more important for your countrymen to have life made easier for them but not anyone else.

Either they need to have every country in alphabetical order or, more cleverly, their survey system could recognize the country in which the survey was being completed and push that one to the top. It isn’t difficult.

If you want to be a global company you need to change your culture accordingly. Simples.

Categories
broadband Engineer

When Things Go Wrong…

broadband Network Operations Centre

Broadband Network Operations Centre spots when a line goes down

I was in the broadband Network Operations Centre  the other day talking to the guys. We were looking at our instance of the Solar Winds network monitoring tool. Then I remembered I was on the way to see a customer later that day so I asked to see their network status.broadband

Blow me down if one of their sites wasn’t showing up as red – connectivity problem. I sauntered over to first line and to my delight one of the team was already looking at it. It was an ADSL connection. As we were watching the status reverted to green. ADSLs sometimes lose and reestablish connections on their own – that’s the vagaries of copper for you.

It’s nice when systems work like this. With ADSL we have a suite of tests we can run to see where the problem might lie. Sometimes the customer has unplugged the router for some reason. If we can’t find out the answer we spring into action depending on what we have agreed with the customer. Maybe it’s just a phone call asking him to switch the router back on. Maybe its a site visit.

Anyway I suspect that on this occasion the customer hadn’t even noticed there was a problem, but we did…

c ya

Categories
Engineer internet

The history of the Isle of Man Postal service by Kelly from the Isle of Man

Mail of MannJust reading “The Mail of Mann” – the story of postal services in the Isle of Man written by Robert Kelly. A fascinating read  if you like that sort of thing which I presumably do.

On September 3rd 1837 the Post Office in the UK despatched a surveyor to the island to assess what might be done to improve its postal communications. The transmission of data packets (ie letters) was very much adhoc, asynchronous if you like. In particular the service to outlying rural parts of the island was pretty hit and miss.

Unfortunately for those rural dwellers, which in particular included the Lord Bishop whose residence as you probably know is on the far side of the island between Kirk Michael and Ballaugh, the surveyor decided that it would be too expensive to set up a regular service to anywhere other than the main towns which would in any case cover most of the people sending and receiving mail.

The rural areas were left to people to sort out themselves. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Categories
Engineer webrtc

ITSPA Leeds workshop Adelphi Shabab

Shabab LeedsITSPA held its first ever out of London workshop in Leeds last Thursday, chaired as usual by yours truly. We had three interesting talks. The first was by Adam Beaumont from AQL on mobile VoIP and why mobile networks will need regional peering for voice over 4G. Next up was Thomas Mangin of Exa-Networks/IX Leeds who discussed QoS for VoIP and finally Rob Pickering from IPCortex on WebRTC.

We were also given a tour around AQL’s new data centre in Salem chapel opposite the old Tetley Brewery in the city centre. The brewery has been knocked down and turned into a car park – criminal 🙂 IX Leeds is hosted free of charge in the new data centre and is developing as an alternative northern POP for people looking for connectivity in the area.

The workshop was highly successful and is something we will have to repeat sometime next year. Afterwards Adam Beaumont very generously bought the Timothy Taylors at the Adelphi pub and then a traditional Yorkshire curry at the Shabab.

Categories
Engineer engineering internet

the leaving of #UKNOF23 TfL bus number 205 to Paddington

Never let it be said that this blog fails to deliver. This time I present for your delectation a journey on the TfL number 205 bus which left Old Street for Paddington yesterday afternoon.

I had been at UKNOF23 at the Google Campus near Old Street and was headed for a rendezvous at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel with Paul Schwartz. Paul is an interesting bloke. He is CEO of Danish router manufacturer Icotera and member of the board of the Fibre to the Home Council (Europe).

Now some of you might wonder what on earth I am doing showing a video of a bus ride. This video is actually of a single hop between two stops: Old Street and Moorfields Eye Hospital on the City Road (of “in and out of the Eagle” fame). It represents a short window on the life of London and will potentially, when considered in conjunction with millions of other snapshots, contribute to the historical record of our great capital city.

The bus enthusiasts among you will also complain that a single stop is not enough. Give me more, more – I hear the clamour. Well there were two factors that prevented me from filming more. Firstly most people will not even watch the 52 seconds of this single hop. Then there was the fact  that my battery was running low and I needed to conserve it in anticipation of the need to call Paul because I had no idea what he looked like.

So there you have it. Those wondering why I left UKNOF23 during the afternoon coffee break now know and those who simply like to ride at the front of the top deck of double decker busses (which could well be the vast majority of the UK population) should also be happy.

And so to the video…

PS these videos are becoming increasingly popular. The one of “How to make steak tartare” has hit 60 views on YouTube! Life is good:)