Tag: data

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broadband Engineer

Evidence that video is driving home internet use

home broadband usage

Home broadband usage driven by TV streaming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ciao bebe…

Categories
End User Regs surveillance & privacy

PRISM and the currently shelved Draft Communications Data Bill

PortcullisThere’s been a lot of noise about the PRISM surveillance program (American spelling because it’s American). There’s a ton of stuff about it on Wikipedia.

A few people asked whether I was going to write a blog post about it. I wasn’t. Lots of people earn their living just looking at this kind of stuff.

There is one thing worth considering though that particularly springs to the forefront of my mind and that relates to the Draft Communications Data Bill that was recently dropped by the Government from the Queen’s Speech.

Without understanding fully what PRISM actually does and what data it accesses I imagine that the capability is pretty similar to what might have been demanded of the ISP industry by the Comms Data Bill.

My biggest objection to that Bill was that it was a serious threat to the personal privacy of every individual in the country because of all the data that would have been gathered. Availability of the data = inevitability that the data would have been leaked. The only way to not have that data leaked would be by not gathering it in the first place.

History shows that the most likely source of such a leak is internal to an organisation, be that within the ISP storing the data or from the negligence (laptop left in taxi etc) of the civil servant or member of the security forces looking after said data.

Well the fuss about PRISM has demonstrated that this is exactly so. Important information was leaked from within the US security establishment by an insider, Edward Snowden. The same can be said of Bradley Manning and Wikileaks.

The only way of not having the data in the public domain is not to keep it in the first place.  I’m not going into a lengthy debate re the rights or wrongs of what the USA is actually doing with PRISM. Just that we should bear that in mind whenever the next attempt to introduce the Draft Communications Data Bill comes along, as it inevitably will.

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broadband Business

Home Broadband Data Usage Growth

home broadband data usage

Every now and again I dip into our network  management portal for a skeet and today came across my home broadband usage data. It makes for quite interesting reading. Christmas showed a whopping 250GB of data usage which was a bit of a local maximum (to coin an old ALevel mathematics phrase). We had a house full of offspring home from University with time on their hands.

The trend is clear. As I recall I had the FTTC line installed in the July August time frame which may account for the data starting to shoot up a bit more round that time.

That’s all. Graph below:

FTTC home data usage Davies house

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Business Regs surveillance & privacy

Draft Comms Data Bill Select Committee appearance for oral evidence #ccdp

portcullisYesterday I gave oral evidence to the Draft Communications Data Bill Joint Select Committee1. It’s the first time I have been asked to give evidence like this and something one has to take very seriously.

I was with three others: Caspar Bowden who is a colleague on the ICO Technology Reference Panel, Dr Gus Hosein of Privacy International and David Walker, a security consultant. The committee has been seeing groups according to their rough views on the draft Bill and readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear2 that this cohort was one that had concerns.

The afternoon’s evidence sessions were reported by the Beeb.

I’m sure that I will already have mentioned that the potential consequences of this Bill becoming Law are so great that it merits the most comprehensive discussion before hand. Today is the last day of evidence sessions with the Home secretary Theresa May being up before the committee.

I don’t have access to the inner thoughts of the committee but I did get a sense of the following:

  1. the fact that many communications use encrypted traffic and that this is likely to cause problems is recognised
  2. the issue of dealing with overseas providers is not likely to be an easy one
  3. the process of oversight of the RIPA system notices needs overhauling, especially if the Bill proceeds
I’m also hoping that the message got  through that nothing can ever be totally secure and that any data gathered under this Bill/Act would eventually make its way into the public domain with disastrous consequences.
I don’t have a handle of the timetable for the rest of this process (enlightenment anyone?) but it wouldn’t surprise me to see the Bill move forward in some reduced form. In the meantime we have to keep up the pressure. More in the fullness of time, a week is a long time in politics etc etc etc.

1 bit of a mouthful/oral evidence/geddit?

2 some previous posts include this one

Categories
Apps broadband End User social networking

Home broadband data usage growth

home broadband data usage trends for Trefor Davies

Broadband data usage growth driven by photo uploads

I’m installing a RaspberryPi computer at home carrying an IPCortex PBX with SIP trunks. I just needed to find a free IP address and found myself checking out available addresses so that I could provide a static one to the IPCortex.

I just happened to find myself looking at my home broadband data usage and came up with some interesting stats.

The first chart plots the growth in my overallgrowth in upload data usage for home broadband - Trefor Davies usage for the last four years. It actually shows almost an order of magnitude (20GB to 160GB) growth from the lowest point in 2008 to the highest point this year.

I realise this is not scientific but you can easily see the trend. The rise in upload usage in the May/June time frame (2nd chart) this year coincides with my taking proud possession of the Samsung Galaxy S3 and the fact that all photos now get backed up to Google+. Trefor Davies photo storage requirements ytd 2012

The final chart shows the growth in photo storage needs this year and you can see a very good correlation between photo storage and the growth in bandwidth upload usage.

The numbers don’t exactly match because we use the home broadband connection for other applications and I, being both gregarious and fertile, do not live alone.

I haven’t drilled into specifics but a reasonable chunk of the photo storage space is now used for video. I do both a daily (ish) video diary for the kids and take lots of “generally interesting” videos. Check this one out from the weekend visit to the Beamish Open Air Museum in county Durham.

 

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Business online safety Regs

More Draft Comms Data Bill analysis & Gary McKinnon

blogspot broken link landing pageGary McKinnon has been in the news this week. Unless you have just surfaced for internet air you will remember that he is the guy with Aspergers who hacked into the Pentagon computer and who the marshalls Feds in US of A wanted to extradite so that they could extract revenge.

This post is not about Gary McKinnon or the rights and wrongs of his case. It is about the fact that he was able to hack into what must surely be one of the most secure computer systems in the world (wide web).

Next up is the breach of Google’s webmail service in December 2009.

Continue reading “More Draft Comms Data Bill analysis & Gary McKinnon”
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Business Regs security

Now where did I leave that important information? #commsdatabill

You will of course recall my recent post on Big Data in which I related how many laptops are left in the back of taxis. 10,857.14 of them every year to be precise. Well I was wrong. Not only did I underestimate how many cabs there are in London but the average number of laptops left in them every year was wrong.

Today I was picked up by a driver who estimated he had found 8 laptops over the last 5 years (up from the previous 4 in 7) and that there were around 25,000 black cabs in London (up from 16,000).

This bumps up the averages. To  make it easy on myself if I assume only one a year that suggests that 25,000 laptops are left in London black cabs every year.

Now I know someone will pipe up and say that this is not very scientific and

Continue reading “Now where did I leave that important information? #commsdatabill”
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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:)

Categories
End User mobile connectivity phones

Monthly mobile data usage August using Samsung Galaxy S3

August mobile data usage using Samsung Galaxy S3It’s been a busy month on the mobile internet usage, what with the Olympics and being on holiday. So far this month, and it is pretty much over, I have consumed just shy of 20GB of internet bandwidth using my Samsung Galaxy S3. That’s 2.40GB of 3G/mobile data and 17.13GB using WiFi.

My hard drive tells me I have taken 9.38GB of photos and videos and I’m sure there are a few sound files on top of that though they won’t contribute much towards the total.

The first screenshot shows the applications that were the heaviest mobile data users.

Note that Gallery is the number one user by far. I like the way that Android pulls down albums from my online Google+ store but clearly there is a price to pay for this with the data usage.

At number two Tweetdeck comes as no surprise and I’m thinking OS Services must mean operating system upgrades and / or general system management though I’m not totally sure about this. I’d normally save any major OS upgrades for WiFi.

During the month I did a lot of speed testing which shows up in the stats as that app came in fourth.August WiFi data usage from Samsung Galaxy S3

Straight internet access/web browsing was only the 6th most popular activity! In total 56 apps used the mobile data connection to some extent in August!

The next screenshot is of the WiFi usage from the phone.

Obviously it was used a lot more when in range of WiFi.

You can see that the amount of photographs taken is reflected in the usage of Google+.

I also took advantage whenever I had good WiFi, as I did in a number of places around London, to upload videos to YouTube. This way I could easily embed a video in a blog post at a later date whilst on the hoof.

In all 55 apps used the wifi connection in August.

The next screenshot is somewhat revealing and in some respects tells me I need to get a life.

I spent nearly 26 hours in the month using Tweetdeck wtf?! That’s almost an hour a day.

time spent using data connectivity in August

16 and a half hours using chrome. Interesting to note that the times spent on specific applications haven’t resulted in those apps beign the heaviest users of mobile data. Shows how light Twitter traffic in particular is.

Then it was nearly 14 hours using TouchWiz which is the Samsung user interface. All that time spent prodding the phone. I’ don’t know how much time is allocated per prod but this seems to be a lot.

Maps I can understand – that four hours is probably a couple of car journeys.

I’m not sure I know what to do with all this information but it is certainly food for thought.

You can see from the pics that the app I used to gather all this data is My Data Manager. It’s great. Go get it and let me know about your own usage.

Categories
End User Regs surveillance & privacy

Draft Communications Data Bill – a summing up of why it is wrong

Home Secretary Theresa May launched the draft Communications Data Bill yesterday with an interview on the Radio 4 Today programme. She has also written a foreword to the Bill arguing why we need it.

I have already written arguments against why we should implement this act. All of my previous points remain and I will restate the two most important aspects here.

  • Firstly what is being proposed represents a serious threat to our privacy as a nation. The government wants to collect personal information about our private web browsing, phoning, email, tweeting, Facebook and all other internet related communications. They then want to store this information “securely” for one year so that it can be accessed buy anyone granted permission by senior police officers.

I refer you to last week’s LinkedIn password debacle where 6.5 million passwords being securely held on a server were stolen and published on a Russian website. The next time this could be details of websites you visit. It would happen if this Bill moved into law. Guaranteed.

  • Secondly the proposed measures will not catch those who the police et al are trying to catch. If you are hell bent on crime you will easily find ways of going undetected on the web.

Here I refer you to the recent court orders for ISPs to block access to Pirate Bay. One of my most visited blog posts this year and certainly high up on the list of search terms  covers how to bypass these blocks. The same will be true with criminals looking for anonymity.

I’ve been thinking of whether there is a middle ground here where ISPs collect data on specified targets rather than everyone and subject to court orders. This could work though opponents will argue that once the capability has been put in place it will be abused. My second point above would also apply so the effort might be futile and money spent wasted (it would probably cost almost the same as if we were collecting all the data).

On balance we all need to oppose this Bill. Email your MP with a link to this post.

Previous posts on this subject here and here.

Categories
Business online safety

I could never be a politician – The Queen hath spoken

I could never be a politician. The Queen’s Speech today included a Lords Reform Bill, Draft Communications Data Bill, Banking Reform Bill, Energy Bill, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill, Children and Families Bill, Pensions and Public Service Pensions Bill, Crime and Courts Bill, Croatia Accession Bill, Electoral Registration and Administration Bill, Defamation Bill, European Union (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision) Bill, Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill, Justice and Security Bill,  Small Donations Bill together with Draft Draft Care and Support, Local Audit and Water Bills and Carry Over Bills on Civil Aviation, Financial Services,  Finance (No. 4), Local Government Finance and Trusts (Capital and Income).

I’ve listed them in one long string for effect. I guess I must be interested in the outcomes of some of them as they affect me – comms data for one. It has to take a very particular sort of person to want to become a politician. We pay politicians to sort this stuff out but do have to keep an eye on them because as we all know they can get a bit out of control.

The Communications Data Bill which caused such a lot of fuss a few weeks ago when it was leaked to the Sunday Times that it would include surveillance seems to not be getting any attention in the media today with things like Lords Reform hitting the headlines.

This must be remedied. We must rally the troops, man the battlements. In fact I think Shakespeare foresaw all this as you will see from this early version of another monarch’s speech:

Scene 1. France. Before Harfleur (Life of King Henry 5th)

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the web up with our English censorship.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest browsing in the privacy of his own home:

Continue reading “I could never be a politician – The Queen hath spoken”
Categories
Engineer mobile connectivity

Growth in traffic over O2 3G data network between 2008 and 2011

growth in O2 3G traffic correlated with device intro milestonesThis chart is a few months old now but I haven’t had it all that long and is still interesting to take a look at (click either pic to enlarge).Growth in traffic over O2 3G network between 2008 and 2011

It shows the growth in O2 3G data traffic between 2008 and 2011. See the spike when the iPad was introduced combined with the football world cup traffic (dunno why anyone bothers!).

I don’t have an up to date one which would probably be even more interesting but I suspect that is too close for commercial comfort.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be covering two main themes. These are the Olympics Games and 4G. They are different though to some extent the technical aspects are very similar. Both subjects are going to be in our consciousness quite considerably from here on.

I’m not going to be blogging or tweeting over the Easter Holidays so see you all back on the 16th April, thoroughly refreshed and ready for the sensory onslaught that will be the run-in to London2012.

PS Thanks to O2 for the chart – keep the info coming guys – everyone is interested 🙂

 

Categories
broadband Engineer

Monthly ADSL Usage Trend and Prediction for 2015

monthly broadband usage

monthly adsl usage is on the increaseIt might interest you to see my monthly ADSL usage over themonthly adsl usage trend at the Davies house last four years or so, reported in GigaBytes per month. There is a very clear upward trend – over 500% growth from the low point in April 09 to Jan 12.

There would have been a technology upgrade from ADSLMax to ADSL2+ – quite possibly around mid 09 which would explain the jump but I can’t remember exactly.

The average household usage is around 17GB a month so us Davies’ are clearly heavy users. Our oldest, Tom went to University in October 2010 but this doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect. In fact there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason why one month his heavier than another. it’s just the general trend that tells us that I should expect to be using 150GB a month by sometime in 2015.

My broadband connection by 2015 is likely to be at least 100Mbps so I will have bandwidth available that would sustain large amount of data transfer. I suspect that reality will be higher than this. We as a family will begin to use even more services so I am going to predict 200GigaBytes a month. I’d also like to bet that my mobile data usage will be in the tens of GigaBytes compared with the very low single digit GigaBytes at the moment.

Any insights happily discussed.

 

Categories
Cloud datacentre Engineer

Data centre finishing touches featuring Tim and Neil

Timico Marketing Director Neil Armstrong savours a duck kebab in food tasting - prep for Timico Data Centre opening partyracks in the new Timico data centreIt won’t be long inside an empty rack in the Timico data centre now before we actually move in to the new data centre and start kitting it out. The racks are going in as I write and the header photo shows Marketing Director Neil Armstrong working his way through a full sample buffet in preparation for the big opening night in January. His attention to detail means that he has to taste every dish.  Hollow legs that man and not an inch of excess weight on him!

Pictured below is Timico chairman Tim Radford trying to find his way out of the maze of racks.

Tim Radford inspects a row of racks in the Timico data centre

Categories
End User mobile connectivity

Mobile data usage – phone versus tablet

I use a couple of SIMs on a day to day basis – phone and iPad. The phone is always with me whereas the iPad is not.  The iPad is also more likely to be used in an area where there is WiFi. Needless to say if WiFi is available this gets used in preference to 3G in any case – longer battery life, faster and cheaper connectivity.

The usage patterns are as follows:

Month/device May iPad May phone June  iPad June Phone
Bandwidth usage (Bytes) 320,270,336 1,241,365,504 262,217,728 662,842,368
Days out of office 6 7

Clearly the phone gets used more than the iPad for accessing data. There doesn’t seem to be much correlation between days out of the office and usage though not that this small sample is particularly scientific. My days out are usually to London and typically I will leave my ancient laptop technology behind in favour of the tablet – lighter and good enough for most uses though not for any serious work.

It looks as if I am using between 1Gig and 1.5Gig of mobile data a month which is hugely more than the average of 200Megs (according to TMobile in January when they slashed usage allowances from 3Gigs to 500Megs). I may not be the average user but this must surely be the way of things to come.

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chromebook End User

New laptop

You may or may not have noticed but there was a short gap of 3 days between the last two blog entries. This is partly because my laptop was shot. It’s funny to realise how dependant you become on the computer.

I’m sure that I am not alone in saying that my handwriting skills have deteriorated over the last few years. My handwriting was never particularly good – people used to tell me that I should have been a doctor. Not having to use a pen other than to sign cheques in the office means that when I try writing anything substantial my hand really hurts.

It has been years since I have taken handwritten notes at meetings. I enter them straight into my PC. They then get routinely backed up and the record is always there and easily retrievable. Every time I get a new PC my old data moves onto the new one which means that I probably have stuff on the laptop dating back 10 years.  10 years ago what I have now would not have fitted on to my hard drive.

It is taking me time to adjust to the new keyboard. It is smaller thatn the old one and hte keys arent inthe same place so I keep jitthing the worjnr ones – see what I mean.