Category: Engineer

Engineer

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Engineer engineering

Notes from UKNOF23 – Cinnamon, Brick Lane & Google Campus

blackboard at Google Campus near Old StreetThe title is somewhat disingenuous because the notes are from the night before UKNOF23. Before UKNOF everyone pops out for a curry sponsored by one of the fine networking companies that support the organisation. In last night’s case it was IX Reach and we all went to Cinnamon on Brick Lane.

Fair play to Cinnamon the food was great and included dishes called Naga containing the world’s hottest chilli pepper. Not for the faint of heart and certainly not for me though Adrian kennard of AAISP seemed not to break into sweat as he tucked in to his. More of a man than I’ll ever be.

Fair play also to IX Reach who took the decision to cover all the cost of the booze as well as the food which meant I could indulge in that second half of lager. I was in bed by ten though as I have a speaking slot today, albeit after lunch.

The photos are a random selection from the Cinnamon curry house, Brick Lane, the Google Campus where the meeting is being held and of Bonhill Street where the Google Campus is located. I took the picture of the urns because it is unusual to see two urns for hot water and only one for coffee. Clearly engineers drink more tea than coffee.

Photos below.

That’s all folks…

Continue reading “Notes from UKNOF23 – Cinnamon, Brick Lane & Google Campus”
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competitions Engineer

winner of the most home networked devices is @NeilMcrae

Neil came in clearly ahead of everyone in the competition for who has the most home networked devices. He gets the mug. There were some great entries and it was all a bit of fun so I’m going to give everyone a fabulous Timico pen for entering. What’s more if you really want a mug you can have one of those too:)

Can everyone wishing to take possession of their prize (s) please email me their address and I’ll try and sort it out on Wednesday when I am next in the office.

PS don’t forget to sign up for the Trefor.net xmas bash. It’s gonna be a goodun.

The competition is now closed…

Categories
Cloud Engineer storage backup & dr

Human Face of Big Data launch today #hfobd

screenshot from android version of #hfobd#hfobd "trust"Attended the EMC sponsored launch of The Human Face of Big Data this morning and picked up some data:

Any kid born in 2012 will generate more data than all the information that mankind has ever generated. In his or her first year he will have generated more info than is currently held in Smithsonian Institute and 10% of all photos ever taken were taken in 2011.

At that point I stopped writing. People spout so many facts about data these days that it starts to lose its impact. Some numbers are so big they almost become pointless.

There are plenty of good and bad uses of big data and we as a society need to think how we go about minimising the risk of the latter.

Coincidentally a taxi driver yesterday told me that he had had four laptops left in his cab in seven years. There are apparently over 19,000 registered black cabs in London. If he was representative that suggests that on average 10,857.141  laptops are left in taxis every year.

I wonder how much sensitive data was on those laptops and how many of them were unsecured?

I’ve not really told you anything about the project – check it out here The Human Face of Big Data. I downloaded the app and entered my data. You can look at and filter the (anonymized) global data set and compare results for different demographics.

Apparently the Apple app isn’t ready yet but don’t worry – Apple usually manages to catch up eventually.

As a footnote, I am interested in exploring Big Data over the next few millennia (think big). If anyone wants to discuss projects drop me a line.

1 No arguing, I have total editorial control:)

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Engineer gadgets

Home networked devices

I took a look at my router yesterday, as you do, and counted 14 devices connected over WiFi and 4 over Ethernet.

WiFi included 4PCs/laptops, printer, 4 android phones, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Ethernet included my laptop, a VoIP phone and a couple of homeplug devices that hook up the XBox.

That’s not SoHo. That’s a small business. We certainly have the overheads:)

Categories
Engineer fun stuff

communications protocols for swimming pools

I was having a swim before work this morning, as you do – healthy body, healthy mind etc. I had a whole lane to myself which those of you who indulge in a bit of a splash before work will know is a real luxury.

There are two types of communications scenarios used in the swimming pool, one for serious lane swimming and one for the general melee and out and out chaos when you take the kids.

For the latter you employ more CSMA/CD1  style protocols of the old Ethernet hub world. Lane swimming is different. Lane swimming employs multilevel quality of service. The faster the swimmer the further towards the far side of the pool he or she goes. Slow ones like me go to the lanes nearest the changing rooms.

This basic protocol typically keeps everyone happy though even within lanes there are different “packet speeds”. Although I am a slow swimmer if I encounter an even slower swimmer I either overtake in a bit of “open water” or turn around when I catch the person up and swim back in the other direction. If I am the slower I usually pause at one end to let the faster person overtake.

It all works well. Everyone knows the protocol, the etiquette. We are a happy bunch, us early morning swimmers.

This morning was slightly different. I was ploughing away on my own, “in the zone” when a shadowy figure appeared at the shallow end of the pool. I say shadowy figure because without my specs life is a bit of a blur. I thought to myself, “hope that person isn’t coming in my private lane”. It turned out she was.

Now normally the protocol for newbies to the water is that they wait for the person swimming to go past then get in. I was just coming to the wall when this shadowy figure jumped in and set off directly in front of me momentarily throwing me off my stride/stroke. Huh I thought to myself, just a teeny bit disgruntled.

She was a slightly faster swimmer than me so she soon moved away. Then a couple of laps later she caught up with me just as I was getting to the shallow end and blow me down if she didn’t shove in front and disrupt me again.

Being extremely short sighted (-5) I will never know who she was and she will never know that she breached the unwritten law, the etiquette of the lane swimmer. There was no point in complaining. I finished my 30 minutes (ish) and got out of the water.

Protocols – why we need them and the consequences of a breakdown in order…

1 look it up – this blog is not here to teach the basics. It’s here for my own gratification 🙂

Categories
Apps Engineer virtualisation

Meet John Milner VCP5-DV, MCTS, MCSA+M/S, MCSE+S, MCITP: EMA/SA, A+, S+, eater of cake

John Milner and the VMware monster cake - click for a closer picJohn Milner started with us earlier this year to help with our virtualisation programme. He has a string of great qualifications and has now just passed his VMware Certified Professional – Datacenter Virtualization examination.

We are proud of him and glad that he has come to work at Timico. He has made an instant impact. He’s one of those guys you can chuck a job at knowing it will get done in a totally professional manner. We seem to be very lucky with the quality of our engineering staff all round.

In keeping with the cake making tradition we have here at Timico John has brought one in for everyone to help him celebrate his success. It says much about the character of the man that he admitted that the cake was actually baked by his sister. After all you can’t be good at everything:)

I of course am on a health kick and will not be partaking. It has been made easier by the fact that I’m sat at home waiting for a film crew to turn up but more on that later…

Well done John & keep up the great work :))

Just for the record & any SEO (smiley face) I repeat his qualifications here for your perusal: VCP5-DV, MCTS, MCSA+M/S, MCSE+S, MCITP: EMA/SA, A+, S+, eater of cake

PS John – sorry if this is a somewhat personally embarrassing post having nice things said about you but credit where credit is due 🙂

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Engineer voip webrtc

That Alexander Graham Bell moment and WebRTC @IPCortex

I gave a talk at IPCortex’s 10th birthday party bash yesterday. Was really impressed with Rob Pickering’s WebRTC demo. He made a call from a Yealink VoIP phone hanging off the IPCortex PBX to a browser based client, also registered with the PBX.

Then I called the browser client’s DDI from my mobile – surely one of the first PSTN to WebRTC calls (ok ok I know someone else will have probably already done this but it did feel like an “Alexander Graham Bell moment”).

WebRTC is an open source (ie free) project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. It is supported by Google who have been buying companies with key patents so that they can be made available free of charge to the community.

It is the future of communications. IPCortex are at the front edge of this work and the video below is part of Rob’s demo. We are all having a bit of fun and it was only a very rough and ready implementation but it shows what can be done. Although it is still in the early  stages of evolution expect lots of applications to use the  WebRTC API in time.

Other WebRTC posts you might want to read:

Uber cool WebRTC video conferencing service appear.in

ITSPA WebRTC Workshop at Google Campus

Categories
datacentre Engineer Net ofcom social networking

Power to the portaloo – bog standard networking in a (ElectroMagnetic) Field @emfnoc @emfcamp

EMFCamp network planning diagLast year I dreamt of holding a tweetup over a weekend in a field. I booked a large scout camp but the project didn’t get anywhere because it needed connectivity to make it a success and I couldn’t for one reason and another make it happen.

A couple of weeks ago you may have noticed something called EMF Camp appearing in your Twitter stream. People I knew were going and blow me down if it doesn’t turn out to be the type of event I had been thinking of.  I couldn’t go myself but Nat Morris, who ran the networking for the event, has sent me some notes of the tech setup.

Nat’s notes are a great read and I have left them by and large unadulterated. I have to thank him for sending me a wonderful cornucopia of facts and links – every link is worth clicking on. You especially need to make sure you read the camp_network pdf – it has drawing in it showing how they planned the network even down to the distances between portaloos for the Ethernet cable runs. Some knowledge of data networking would help you understand some of the technical terms here but the first link to Zoe Kleinman’s BBC report gives a great overview.

Nat writes:

Here are some details about the internet setup for EMFCamp which took place last weekend at Pineham Park in Milton Keynes. The BBC turned up on Saturday afternoon and recorded a nice piece about the event, you can see my stomach about halfway through when they film in the NOC tent…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19441861

Some slides from Will and my presentation at the end of the event about the power and internet are here…. (50MB warning)… www.natmorris.co.uk/camp_network.pdf

We were lucky that the site is only 2.8 miles away from the Pulsant DataCentre in Milton Keynes –  what was formerly BlueSquare MK. Brian Ross and Nick Ryce got the wheels in motion inside Pulsant and arranged with Matt Lovell the CTO for them to sponsor us. I cheekily asked for a couple of U of rackspace in MK and some in their Telehouse East rack plus a 1Gb/s layer 2 circuit between the two, I was expecting them to say no, but they were fine with the idea!

So back in June we started our network building placing a Cisco 7200 with NPE G2 in Telehouse and another in MK, we borrowed a /19 of v4 + /48 of v6 and AS number from Chaos Computer Club in Germany, meaning we didn’t have to NAT any campers.

We had a BGP transit feed from Pulsant in MK, plus Goscomb in Telehouse, along with a temporary connection to the LONAP peering network for v4+v6 plus multicast. http://stats.emfcamp.org

The costs for providing internet access to campers came in at around 5.8k, apart from 10 boxes of cat5 all of this was for the last mile between the MK DC and the campsite, everything was provided free or in kind from sponsors. RapidWireless from Liverpool (Richard Porter) loaned us a pair of DragonWave Horizon Compact units – we got a temporary OFCOM license for the 18ghz link which ran at 385mbit/s full duplex. As a backup we bought a pair of Ubiquiti Nanobridge M5’s, these were installed but we never pushed any traffic over them, they were just there in case something happened to the primary link.

Onsite we borrow a tent / marquee from scout group, the tent was made in 1953, made a 25quid to borrow it! Some pics…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nottinghack/7929611918/

Our onsite rack / data centre, housing dual core routers, wireless controllers, along with various servers:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nottinghack/7929611592/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andy_d/7902260210/

Around the site we deployed a resilient OSPF ring, switches were stored in portaloos, along with power distro units – we used the German term Datenklo for these, meaning ‘data toilet’:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ne0hack3r/7924490940/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/je4d/7924689482/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andy_d/7902347402/

Someone even colocated a Raspberry Pi along with a 3tb USB hard disc in one! http://www.flickr.com/photos/andy_d/7902345240/

Campers left their cables outside and then either tweeted or text us and a NOC monkey would come out and connect them up. Wifi AP’s were deployed all over the site http://t.co/rBsQUAn9

We limited tent connections to 100Mbit, so a single user couldn’t saturate our upstream.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/b3cft/7909251802/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/loggedhours/7925212568/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/russss/7909193016/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nottinghack/7929909834/

Had some nice feedback!

https://twitter.com/Ash_Force/status/242067006537474048
https://twitter.com/markphelan/status/241896897290309633
https://twitter.com/je4d/status/242386884276396032
https://twitter.com/markphelan/status/242133609908142080

Our infra team twitter account is @emfnoc, the general camp one is @emfcamp

End of Nat’s stuff

A huge thanks to Nat for sharing this with me. The whole event was clearly a massive joint effot by lots of people and looks to have been a great success  I look forward to attending the next one in person.

Categories
broadband Engineer internet

Penis Envy, Broadband Style: 1Gbps FTTP at Appleton & Eaton

Gigaclear gigabit broadband broadband week image - Gigaclear speedtest showing 1Gbps broadband speeds in Appleton & Eaton

Gigaclear speedtest showing 1Gbps broadband speeds in Appleton & EatonGigaclear gigabit broadband is blazing fast.

This is the nearest thing you can get to penis envy in the broadband world. It’s a speedtest, performed on the new Gigaclear gigabit broadband network in the fortunate communities of Appleton and Eaton.

I was recently gushing over the 20Mbps and 40Mbs speeds I have encountered at WiFi hotspots in London. Well, it won’t be long before properties in Appleton and Eaton get to London prices, as this amazing new network is sure to have a beneficial effect on valuations.

Gigaclear quote one of their customers as saying, “I run my business from home, and with only 1-2Mbps available before Gigaclear I had to plan well in advance when to upload and download”. Pricing starts at £37.

Gigaclear is digging fibre into a number of communities (check them out here).

Categories
Engineer olympics

Olympic bandwidth usage growth

chart showing http (web browsing) traffic before and during the OlympicsThought this would interest you. It’s a chart showing the http traffic on our broadband network in the run up to and during the London 2012 Olympics.

The change is quite amazing. This growth isn’t representative of all the internet traffic during that time – that showed an overall increase of 30% or so.

As a business ISP our peak traffic time is during the day with a smaller local maximum (ok mini peak) in the evening when homeworkers and road warriors get back and use their work-provided broadband.

We still saw the evening  mini peaks but they are dwarfed by the daytime ones.

That’s all folks…

Categories
Engineer media olympics

Technological Olympic conversations and what’s so special about Finsbury Park?

We all had a great time watching the Olympics, be it physically going to the games, on the telly or online (or all three). I’m sure we all agree that the BBC did a great job. There were comments regarding the quality of the NBC coverage in the USA but a) I live in the UK so don’t care and b) NBC apparently had 9.9 million users visiting their website so they just may have been getting their dose of Olympics from that source.

In the long run up to the games I wrote a great deal about the technology and capacity being put in place for the Olympics. The BBC in particular had geared its iPlayer servers up to expect 1Terabit per second of streaming. In the end the service peaked at around 700Gbps. The BBCs answer to hitting its capacity ceiling would have been to reduce the bandwidth available per stream rather than stop new users accessing the service or suffering service degradation so this worked out well.

Interestingly the Beeb says that it’s Olympic peak number of viewers expressed as the number of streams was during the Tennis singles finals at 820,000 requests.  Bradley Wiggins’ time trial  was similar to that of the Jubilee weekend at 729,000 streams. The peak daily volume was 2.8PetaBytes! 33% of all streams were to mobile devices.

Virgin Media, who had provisioned a huge 240Gbps of additional internet access bandwidth only ended up using a third of it. Good news from the customer experience perspective and the additional bandwidth now in place will soon be used up so it wasn’t wasted effort. Virgin’s peak was during Usain Bolt’s 100m final win.

Virgin also had a great story to tell with its WiFi on the London Underground. With hotspots in 62 stations Virgin had started the Olympics fortnight with 277,000 users registering 275,000 email addresses so some people must use multiple devices (presumably unless I’ve got it wrong). By the end of the games the number of users had grown 166,000 to 443,000. The number of sessions peaked at 20.7M on August 13th, the day after the closing ceremony with Finsbury Park being the busiest station!! What’s so special about Finsbury Park? Virgin’s Underground WiFi traffic grew by 34% over the Olympics period.

Evidence suggests that network traffic generally peaked the day after the closing ceremony which we can only ascribe to people catching up on all the Eastenders episodes they missed whilst watching the Olympics (losers!).

BT reported similar peaks at similar times to Virgin though its most popular times were for different events which just might reflect a different customer demographic. Also on the BT network the Andy Murray doubles finals game had more traffic than his singles which is different to what the Beeb was saying. Both could be true as BTs customers weren’t necessarily watching the live stream online. They might have been watching the games on TV and using the internet to fill in with other content.

BT also said that the saw a specific increase during Mr Bean’s stint at the Opening ceremony – folks sharing their excitement online or watching the video a second time – it was fantastic, fair play.

The London Internet Exchange traffic peaked at just over 1.2Tbps. Compared with its pre-games level of 1.1Tbps this might not sound like a big rise but we should remember that traffic normally drops in August because I go on holiday1 and taking this into account the actual growth is probably more like 170Gbps. Note LINX traffic in August 2011 was 800Gbps. This is not a like for like comparison as LINX now has more members using its network.

Btw if anyone can explain why Finsbury Park I’m sure all readers of this blog would be grateful.

1 only joking but you know what I mean – I tend not to use the internet when on holiday but I hammered it this time.

Categories
Engineer olympics peering

If you see a network engineer pat him on the back and buy him a beer – Olympics good job #LINX78

I’m at LINX78 the latest quarterly meeting of the London Internet Exchange. This meeting is particularly interesting because it comes immediately after the Olympics and its attendees represent the vast majority of UK internet access networks. In other words the people responsible for making your web browsing experience a good one during the Olympics were all here.

This community of engineers should stand up and take a bow as part of the team that made the event a total success. Whilst there will be the odd exception and glitch the network of UK plc performed incredibly well. From a personal perspective although I was on holiday I kept in touch with the office from time to time.  The level of support calls in to the Timico NOC was as we would normally expect and we got the additional network capacity planning just right which is hugely satisfying.

CEO John Souter described the “Olympic  effect” seen at LINX in the run up to the games. Since LINX77 in May the exchange has seen a 20% increase in traffic capacity growing from around 5Tbps to 6Tbps. In a single month over 60 10GigE ports were installed as part of a capacity growth that month of 800Gig (including the first 100Gig port connected by BT).

The rush was prompted by a June 19th cut-off date for new capacity needed before the 14th July Olympic change freeze at LINX.

If you need some perspective consider that the average UK broadband speed is less than 10Mbps. The 6Tbps capacity is the equivalent of over 600,000 broadband connections running flat out. It’s not really a good way of looking at it as there are many other factors that need to be considered – networks have alternative routes to the internet , broadband connections not running at capacity to name but two. However it is a testament to the efforts made by the UK network operator community to ensure that their contribution to the Olympics was a success.

Note I’m told that the Dept of Business Innovation and Skills (Vince’s lot) asked for a daily report on how the LINX network was performing – such is the critical nature of this infrastructure. LINX is going from strength to strength. The exchange currently has 431 members with 64 having joined this year (that’s up on the 49 new members for the whole of last year).

If you see a network engineer pat him on the back and buy him a beer (several beers knowing the engineers I know).

Categories
Engineer olympics

A stroll around the Olympic Park

Park Live - where you could go and watch proceedings on a big screen at the Olympic ParkJust a couple of general interest Olympic posts to go. I’m saving some work related ones for when I get back from holiday next week. The first video shows the view of the crowds streaming out of the Park after one of the sessions was over. You only got a relatively short stint at a sport for your money although you could stay in the Park to take in the atmosphere. There wasn’t much seating so I don’t think they particularly encouraged you to hang around.

The view was from the Cisco House balcony.BBC studio at Olympic Park Next up are the BBC studios – looked flash on TV but actually built up on a load of containers so not so flash when viewed from the outside. when lit up at night the actual studios looked great though.

It was quite nice to be able to see where most of the interviewing action had happened on TV. It was also possible to determine which presenter was on at any given time.

There were games makers a plenty to help volunteer gamesmaker at the Olympicsout if you needed it – usually just asking the way somewhere.

The last pic is of the BP House – a very reflective wall. The basketball arena is to the left and the athletes village to the right.

The video at the bottom is of some handball action with Hungary scoring. BP house at the Olympic Park

Categories
Engineer olympics

Which #Olympic events are going to attract most online interest? #London2012 #Locog

Usain Bolt - billions of fans want to see him win at the London 2012 OlympicsI’ve got tons to do but I’m on holiday after this week (yay) and the Olymic coverage is building up to near frenzy already (gawd knows what it will be like when it really gets going) so I’m doing Olympic posts.  For the avoidance of doubt that’s the London2012 summer Olympic games if any of the Locog police are reading.

You will remember the post I wrote ages ago about the BBC’s own forecasts for iPlayer traffic based on the which sport is happening at the time. Now of course that time is upon us. Today the ladies of  Team GB football are taking on the mighty All Blacks at the Millenium stadium. Actually I don’t know if they are mighty or whether they are even called the “All Blacks”. I mean New Zealand ladies.

I’ve never watched a ladies football match, at least not in its entirety. I did watch “Bend it like Beckham” which I thought was a very enjoyable movie but  I digress. The Beeb reckons that this first ladies match will be more popular than the men’s game tomorrow. Do they know something?

BBC estimates of iPlayer busy periods during London 2012 Olympics - click to enlargeThe Beeb has in fact identified six sessions it has labelled as having the highest iPlayer demand. These are the opening and closing ceremonies, the mens 100m and 200m finals (good old Usain – don’t let us down), Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton on the afternoon of Tuesday 7th August (yay cmon guys) and the afternoon of Saturday 11th which has the finals of the men’s footy, hockey and basketball (yawn).

As I write I’m scanning through the BBC’s schedule showing its demand forecast and I’ve just found something that casts the whole process into doubt. On a scale of 1 – 4 where 4 is the highest demand the women’s beach volleyball finals are only rated a 2. How credible is that?

That’s it for now. I normally adopt radio silence when I’m on holiday but this time I will be posting live from Olympic events using my trusty Samsung Galaxy S3 and WordPress for Android. I must get a speed tester app on the phone. Also I’ve not gone yet 🙂

Click the inset box to see which events the BBC thinks will be busy.

Categories
Engineer Net olympics

Olympic planning & infrastructure put in place by BT for the “Olympic Family”

Usain Bolt - billions of fans want to see him win at the London 2012 OlympicsDespite being the CTO of an ISP I’m not a geek. The project to install an Olympics communications infrastructure, although being highly technical, has nuances and beauties that you don’t have to be a geek to get your brain around. Read on for more information.

Continue reading “Olympic planning & infrastructure put in place by BT for the “Olympic Family””
Categories
Engineer internet

Vint Cerf, Tar Babies and the Dalai Lama

the very civilized scene at Jamie's 50th bash on Saturday night - spot the special guest to win a fabulous Timico mugWent to my mate Jamie’s 50th birthday  “geeks and bimbos”great band The Tar Babies - you should book them party in Sussex on Saturday night. Though I don’t class myself as a true geek compared with some of the guys in the office I was able to go just wearing my normal clothes. I wore my LINX 15th anniversary black T shirt with shorts and a pair of sandals with Jeep socks.

Great thing was there was a guy called Jon there carrying a TCP/IP manual and I of course was able to tell him I met Vint Cerf himself recently. We were the only two there who had ever heard of TCP/IP or Vint!

Some of you may know that I too have reached the notionally respectable half century milestone. Although the body can’t quite take it like it used to I did look around the room and wonder what this age thing is all about.

The party was a great evening. Not got many usable photos – they are mostly blurred. We danced hard to the 60s and 70s music of the Tar Babies, all sang along when instructed to do so – everybody knew all of the words. The concept of “acting your age” is dead.  Prize for the first to spot the  special guest at the party – it’s totally amazing how she does it at that age. Click on the header photo for a larger image.

In the Fareham office of NewNet on Friday and one of theprosciutto - where am I? guys mentioned that I seemed to enjoy my job and was always having a good time. I refer you to the lecture given by the Dalai Lama last week at the London School of Economics. In a nutshell he said “enjoy life and do stuff”. Recognising this there is another prize for the first to guess the restaurant where this last photo was taken.

Categories
dns Engineer

Did you get your gTLD application in? Lots of duplicates and some aggression

The list of new generic Top Level domains applied for has been published. 1930 of them all together including Chinese, Arabic etc. It makes for interesting reading. There are quite a few duplicate submissions including 13 applications for .APP and 11 .ARTs. I didn’t get past the “A”s before giving up on listing them.

Having said that there are even 9 applications for .BLOG. Huh! Not sure if I like the idea of trefor.blog though I suppose it could be trefors.blog. I did also note that there seem to be duplicates amongst the Chinese names.

Amazon has applied for 76 gTLDs. Wow. Google seems to have applied for 101 (via Charleston Road Registry Inc. which seems to have Google written all over it)!! These include all the obvious ones such as .YOUTUBE, GOOGLE, GMAIL. HANGOUT but also .MOV which will raise an eyebrow or two. .mov is an extension used by QuickTime the media player developed by Apple Inc. As far as I can see Apple seems to have only applied  for .APPLE. Are the digital wars about to move into gTLDs?

There are some interesting names in the list Bentley, Buggatti, Ferrari, Jeep (it’s in there – I’m not saying its in the same league as the first three but it’s my car :)). The BBC is also in there as is only right and proper.

This does make me wonder whether companies are going to continue registering their business domain with all the different extensions. It’s going to get expensive and out of control.

You need to read the list yourselves to fully digest it. There is presumably a mechanism for deciding who gets the name where more than one organisation has applied for it. This is going to be an interesting one to watch.

More I’m sure in due course…

Categories
Engineer internet

Submarine Networks and targeted marketing

Submarine Networks World 2012, Marina Bay Sands, SingaporeThere is a big pile of junk mail in my pigeonhole – downstairs behind reception. This morning I took the unusual step of looking at it. I have to do this once in a while because every now and again something turns up that is not junk. Very infrequently.

Today it was, as usual, junk. One flyer did catch my eye though. An invitation to “Submarine Networks World 2012“. I noticed it because I thought it was a wonderfully badly targeted piece marketing – a good subject for a blog post. Maybe they saw my piece on the Virgin undersea cable near the Isle of Man and figured I would be a good guy to have along.

The flyer arrived airmail from Singapore. Hmm, Singapore eh? I quite like Singapore. Before Timico I did quite a bit of globetrotting in my job and Singapore was a paradise in the Far East that one could rest at between visiting countries where the signs were totally illegible to the Western eye. I used to stay at the Hyatt Grand Regency on Orchard. Beautiful hotel, great bar, fantastic service etc etc.

So now I’ve changed my mind and I’d like to go to the conference. I don’t want it to cost anything mind you. Certainly not the S$4,190 it costs to attend or the business class airfare (it’s a long flight and I need to be in the right frame of mind when I get there). I don’t even want to pay the S$319 room rate at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel though I’m sure that’s good value for the quality of the accommodation.

In fact I’ve convinced myself that this is the one conference I absolutely need to attend in September 2012. If someone will stump up the cash – £7k will probably cover it – I’ll go. In return I promise to write a blog post condensing  my learnings into three concise, highly readable and absolutely on the money paragraphs  that will save you the effort of having to go (there could be a business idea here 🙂 ). The post will undoubtedly include pictures of palm trees and the Indian Ocean (Pacific?).

All that aside this is still not very well targeted advertising. This is surely a business model that needs to change.

Categories
4g Engineer

4G site surveys and the Self Organising Network Nirvana – LTE small cells

Ever wondered how they go about deciding where to put a new cellular base station?  It’s a fairly complicated process. It’s also very much site specific, awkward locations, landlords, etc. but as an average the following table is a fair reflection of the effort (source Accelera Mobile Broadband with some O2 validation).

Activity

Effort

(Man Days)
New site verification

1

On site visit: site details verification

0.5

On site visit: RF survey

0.5

New site RF plan

2

Neighbours, frequency, preamble/scrambling code plan

0.5

Interference analyses on surrounding sites

0.5

Capacity analyses

0.5

Handover analyses

0.5

Implementation on new node(s)

0.5

Field measurements and verification

2

Optimization

2

Total activities

7.5 man days

Now just imagine the urban 4G/LTE scenario  we have been discussing, where there are ten times as many small cells as in the existing macrocell model. Research org ABI has forecast that there will be 5 million small cells by 2015.

That’s a lot of site surveys using the traditional model. A lot of man days. The only sensible answer is to deploy Self Organising Network. SONs seem to have some way to go before they are mature enough for full scale deployment but there is time, in the UK at least.

A SON has, in theory all the features you might expect from the name. Cells should self-configure,  regularly self-optimize parameters and algorithmic behaviour in response to observed changes in network performance and atmospheric conditions.  Self-healing mechanisms can be triggered to temporarily compensate for a detected equipment outage whilst waiting for a permanent fix. Nirvana really – plug and play. As we have already found out in the lamp post story plug and play is probably some time away but it will come.

Categories
dns Engineer internet

Still time to apply for your generic Top-Level Domain – dot llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch

Many of us own a domain name. I have a few – trefor.net, philosopherontap.com plus all the kids own name domains. Not many of us own a generic Top-Level domain though. In fact gTLDs (.com, .org, .uk etc) are typically managed by not for profit national infrastructure players such as Nominet although there are some in private hands.

In June 2011 ICANN announced that they would be looking to stimulate innovation on the internet by making it easier for you to own your own gTLD. You could have non latin script versions – for example Cyrillic, Chinese or Arabic. There was a rush of applicants, $185k payment in hand. Unfortunately the ICANN registration system had a bug in it and they were unable to complete the registration process on the originally planned date of 12th April. The system was therefore frozen whilst the engineers looked for their magic wands.

Looks like they fixed the bug on Monday and the system started working again. You have until midnight on 30th May (presumably Californ-eye-a time) to get registered. When the system went down they had 1,268 registrations. That’s a lot of new gTLDs. They won’t all end up as production entities but we are clearly going to see many new domains hit our screens.

We can’t see the actual domains applied for yet – they won’t release that info until the end of the registration process.  Most major cities will have one – London, Berlin, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch et al and I understand that Nominet has applied to have .cymru and .wales. I quite like the idea of having [email protected] but I expect there will be a few other Davies’ interested as well:)

I’ll write a post in Welsh when the .cymru domain comes out –  those of you not fortunate to have been brought up in God’s country can read it using Google translate.

More on the new gTLDs here.

PS don’t think it stops at $185k. You will need a few million to do it properly.

PPS They would have a lot of fun with .llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch – think of all the spelling mistakes/repeat attempts to get it right 🙂

Categories
Engineer peering

How much would you pay for a haircut? #LINX77

Glamorous city centre hotel £47.50 a night if you book far enough in advanceIt’s a glamorous game, the internet. You get to go to all sorts of exotic locations. On this occasion it is the Travelodge in Covent Garden – a bargain at £47.50 a night (note bar set for other Timico staff 🙂 ).

On this occasion it is very handy for the LINX77 meeting at the TUC Congress Centre. We always have a social evening after the first day. Being a lightweight I left at 9.30 to hit the hay but was able to snap some interesting views on the way back to my room. Some were just plain artistic with their neon lights on display (as editor I make the call) and some were downright illuminating.

I first give you the artistic shots. It is worth reading the illuminating bits at the bottom, especially if you are used to paying £8 for a gents trim at the barbers as I am.Matilda the Musical - v colourful I thought Matilda stood out for me – very colourful and I’m sure I would have enjoyed the show. The theatre was at 7 Dials, You probably know it. It’s on the way to Covent Garden from Kings Cross Station. There are lots of nice looking bars and restaurants around that area.

bar cafe gallery

7dials by nightOldest Punjabi restaurant in London apparentlythe diner You need to scroll down to after the picture of me and the lads at Laredo mexican restaurant to see the haircut bit.They are tough at LINX - one beer in each hand - same as the old days on the frontier The first thing to observe is that the hairdresser is named Sassoon – presumably after the WW1 poet, Siegfried. I’ve read his stuff.sassoon salon - I wonder if the coffees are free?You have to click to enlarge the pricelists – I photo’d them through the shop salon window. If you look carefully you can see that a cut can be as much as £145 if you want it doing by international creative director Mark Masefield. If you want to leave the salon with dry hairsassoon - a cut above the rest? that can put you back another £50 – plus £10 if you want them to use an iron !!! It takes years of practice to get that iron bit right – they have to try it out on students first. Then if you want a bit of colour in your hair that’ll be another £230 – for asassoon - colourful prices full head mind you – it’s cheaper if you only want half of it doing. I can’t imagine anyone asking for the half – unless they just do the front so it looks as if you have had it all done when someone is looking straight at you. Add tips into the mix and I reckon you can kiss goodbye to a monkey (all London hairdressers tawk loik vat yanow).neal street - the sign

At least when the hairdressers at Sassoon talk about where they are going on their holidays it will be somewhere nice. You of course will not be able to go anywhere other than Butlins because they will have all your money.

I normally get mine cut at Antonio’s on Wragby Road in Lincoln – as I said £8 for a quick number 2 back and sides – in and out in 5 minutes. Check him out in this promotional video which some of you will remember from my pigeon racing days.

I’m in the wrong game and it is now 11pm – I wanted to be in bed by 10 – night all.

Categories
Engineer peering video

The joys of travel – #LINX77

another bout of delays on the East Coast line

Today I’m headed for LINX77 in Laandan. if you’ve never been you need to go, assuming you are in the networks game. It’s a great opportunity to meet people – network actually.

To get to Laandan I have to catch a train. Driving into Central Laandan isn’t practical. This morning I worked from home first thing and caught the 11.35 from Lincoln Central, due to connect with the 12.16 from Newark.

I had plenty of time when I got to Newark. A train pulled in. Apparently it was the 9.06, running a smidgeon late. Uhoh! I don’t know whether I’ve ever told you but me dear old mam is from Mohil, County Leitrim and one thing she has passed on to me, apart from a love of (warm) Guinness is a bit of the “luck o’ the Irish”.

Click on the header to reveal more. A train pulled in (very late)

Continue reading “The joys of travel – #LINX77”
Categories
4g Engineer mobile connectivity

Location, location, location – first mover advantage and the strategic nature of lamppost ownership – LTE

In the wifi hotspot game first mover advantage is becoming critically important. Experience shows that landlords everywhere are initially happy to allow a network provider into their mall/stadium/building. Once in however they decide they don’t want the hassle of doing it again or don’t really like the infrastructure they are now stuck with but have to keep.

As a result there is a market for the first movers in reselling capacity or subletting space on their infrastructure. We are therefore seeing a land grab in places around the world where operators are snapping up as many sites as they can.

In London The Cloud is looking at 1 hotspot per 200 persons. Time Warner is putting 15,000 wifi access points in Los Angeles and PCCW have 10,000 hotspots in Hongkong where peak time traffic has 50% going over wifi instead of mobile networks. For PCCW in Hong Kong their resold wholesale wifi capacity is their single biggest revenue stream1.

O2 is rolling out massive coverage in

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Categories
4g Engineer mobile connectivity

4G Spectrum snippets – why LTE spectrum is important

Spectrum is the key resource in the mobile network game. It is what the operators paid billions of pounds (arguably too much too soon) each for during the 3G auctions. Users for the services weren’t there and nor were the handsets that would encourage bandwidth consumption.

It is a different game today. Don’t be surprised to see even greater sums of money paid for 4G spectrum. It would be commercial suicide for a mobile operator to not have any.

Spectrum when allocated is then divided into 20MHz bandwidth slots. 20MHz of spectrum allows for an 80Mbps data throughput using LTE. If you double this to a 40MHz slot you double the throughput. The higher the spectrum frequency you have therefore the more capacity your network can handle.

The downside is that the higher the spectrum frequency the lower the range and the harder it is to penetrate objects such as buildings. The lower frequencies are preferred for rural deployments – Vodafone in Germany used 800MHz for this. There isn’t a “right mix” of spectrum to own however. Vodafone operates in 30 markets and each market has different spectrum requirements.

That’s all folks…

Categories
4g Engineer mobile connectivity

LTE – the 4G deployment nitty gritty – macrocells and small cells

The mobile networks are built up from thousands of base stations around the country, connected back to the operators’ core networks using a variety of backhauls. Once the media hits the core network the voice/data session is directed as appropriate.

The backhaul technology has developed over time from E1s/ATM to Ethernet (fibre) with wireless connections thrown in where necessary.

Base stations, known in the business as Macrocells, contain the transmission and battery backup equipment to support a variety of call and data handling capacities (typically up to 250 simultaneous users) dependent on location. This equipment has historically taken a lot of space – it would probably fill the average master bedroom at home, requires expert installation and, because there is a mast involved to hold antennae at some height, needs Local Authority planning permission.

Technology developments mean that this kit can now fit into a single wardrobe.

Continue reading “LTE – the 4G deployment nitty gritty – macrocells and small cells”
Categories
4g Engineer mobile connectivity

IWPC LTE Small Cell Deployment Strategies Workshop – the funicular railway in Dresden

If you’re wondering what these seemingly random travel related posts are its because I’m in Dresden this week at the IWPC workshop on LTE small cell deployment strategies. Very interesting. These are long days though so you will probably have to wait until I get home for a report.

The video is of the funicular railway that took us up to the Luisenhof restaurant in Dresden. The view from up there is spectacular, or so I’m told. It was chucking it down when we were there so we couldn’t see much. We probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway – far too engrossed in the subject of LTE small cells.

wilthener xo - fine German brandyThe pic on the right is a sample of what the very excellent restaurant had to offer.

Categories
4g Engineer mobile connectivity

More O2 LTE trial datapoints – very impressive upload times

Continuing with the day’s theme of the O2 LTE (4G) trials I found myself back in the Devonshire Arms with Cliff Saran of Computer Weekly. I’ll leave most of the story to Cliff and his column but I herewith provide you with the video footage of 4 more iPlayer streams – we could have streamed more but screen size becomes an issue.

At the Piazza in Covent Garden I uploaded a 298MB video in eight minutes at 9Mbps uplink speed. O2 LTE 4G upload speeds at the Piazza in Covent Garden
In the Devonshire Arms I videoed the process of setting up the iPlayer streams and then uploaded that video again to YouTube so that we could compare performance with the Covent Garden upload.

This time the file size was 795Megabytes

Continue reading “More O2 LTE trial datapoints – very impressive upload times”
Categories
broadband Engineer

TalkTalk Ethernet Exchanges Added to List

Another quick update just to say I’ve now added the Talk Talk Business Ethernet and EFM exchanges to the lists in the Ethernet section of the blog. Also a statement from Virgin Media on the subject.

Categories
broadband Engineer

Ethernet Exchange Update

I was pleasantly surprised to find that this blog ranks quite highly in Google searches for Ethernet. This made me feel quite guilty that I hadn’t updated the exchange availability list for what seems like forever (since 2009 in fact which is effectively forever in this industry).

That situation has now been remedied and the updated list of BT Ethernet enabled exchanges is now available here.  In keeping with what must clearly be an authoritative page on the subject I will now have a hunt round for the equivalent Talk Talk and Virgin Ethernet lists and those of any other network partner we might use.

Note this is different to FTTC/FTTP,  both highly popular search terms herein.

Categories
Engineer gadgets

Raspberry Pi – the real McCoy

say hi to RaspberryPiI kinda like winding down on a Friday afternoon Raspberry Pi fresh out of the boxalthough this week has been so hectic it feels as if I need a couple of extra days to squeeze it all in.

Fridays are usually when I put up the trefor.net megaprize competition. It isn’t too late to have one this week but first I need to talk about Raspberry Pi, for yes, I have been playing with one.

The amazing thing about Raspberry Pi is that it just works out of the box. They have done a great job. The processor is a bit slower than you are used to with graphics but hey – it’s twenty five quid for petes sake.raspberry pi screenshot

The pics in this post say it all really.

The first is just the PCB. It’s almost like a mobile phone without the screen and battery. Then I have a few screens shots with the obligatory picture of the blog in it to show the browser in action.

Second screenshot zooms in to show the menu options and then I’ve shown the development environment in a window.raspberry pi dev environment You can be up and running straight away although you will need to learn some basic programming languages, which is the whole point of the device.

The last photo shows the desktop setup wit ha Raspberry Pi plugged in to an Ethernet cable. Obviously there is only one video card so only one of the screens are used.

It might almost be conceivable to use two processor cards to have two screens. I can certainly see Raspberry Pi being used in many applications around the home and office.Raspberry Pi desktop setup

Obviously the cables would have to be tidied up a bit for every day use and I expect Health and Safety would insist on a box for the processor card.

The video at the bottom of this post shows a screensaver in action. Thanks to Gareth Bryan for letting me have a play. I didn’t get in particularly early with my registration.