Piers Daniell

There seems to have been a some power issues over at Telehouse North this afternoon. A few ISPs and hosting providers are reporting outages and most notably LINX have suffered a significant drop in traffic. This, however, was due to a port upgrade for a customer - and not caused by the power failure.

LINX provide an open peering relationship with most companies within the industry to allow traffic sharing and hence reduce costs. This is done by having fixed cost for the connections so what you find is LINX ends up shifting huge amounts of internet traffic. At its peak today they supported nearly 600 Gb/s.

We don’t currently use LINX and purely rely on transit however with a good mixture I don’t see why there should have been such a big impact but obviously a lot of ISPs rely THN!

Interesting development over the past few weeks has been BT Openreach actively telling

end users about BT’s new (or old depending on how long you have been waiting for it) 21^st Century Network (21CN). This from your perspective may be perfectly normal, however when you understand that Openreach should remain independent it shows flaws in Ofcom’s control over the carrier.

Openreach was formed to serve all ISPs independently, especially those with their own technology in the local phone exchange. Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) has become widespread over the past few years, mainly due to the demands for new technology which BT has been unable to provide. O2 and BE for example have been delivering ADSL2+ for many years prior to the launch of BT’s 21CN offering. Even now the BT product is second-rate (no Annex-M support). Therefore if they, or any other LLU carrier, need Openreach to visit their client’s site to fix a fault they should receive just that.

While I enjoy talking to my mother, I think this week I have spoken to her more than when we lived together for 18 years. It all started when her home broadband decided to fall over on Tuesday afternoon and hasn’t come back to life since. From her perspective a son who lives, breathes, and talks nothing but internet should be capable of ending her suffering and restore the internet – but to be honest I have really struggled.

For the technical among you the router has sync with the exchange and many hours left between turning it off and on again (should clear stale sessions) but still no life. Talking your mother through the process of testing the line or logging into the router is no mean feat (“don’t you think ping is a silly word darling?”), especially when you are used to talking to technical people all day. But it did remind me what it is like to be a consumer and how helpless you feel at the other end of the phone trying to get help. When she did finally speak to her ISP, after holding for an hour, they were no help. Suffice to say it is a call centre on another continent refused to escalate the matter as she has not tried a different router, removed the face plate, changed the cables or the microfilter. I mean this is my mother they are talking to, not some techie glued to his computer all day.

From what I can make out it looks like the line has been transferred in the background from IPStream over to IPStream Connect, which is part of BT’s new 21CN platform. A number of other lines in the area, with the same carrier suffered the same fate but most have made it back online now. When I called them and threw around complicated words like DSLAM, LNS and DNS nothing progressed – it still hasn’t been logged with an engineer to investigate.

It looks like if I head up there on the weekend and can’t get it working I’ll have to organise for a migration code and port the line over to our network as I know the guys here will be able to make it work. I just don’t know how the general public copes but I assume that is why niche ISPs continue to do good business by offering a superior customer service to help their clients when it goes wrong.

I am one for endorsing the merits of cloud computing, as previous articles will testify, however it does have one very major headache to overcome, the connection to it. As I have pointed out in the past if you want to use ‘The Cloud’, and by that I mean centralise your systems and work, thin client style, then you need a good, fast reliable internet connection. This obviously goes against those happy to buy a cheap service from any of the thousands of providers reselling BT services but as my holiday in Palma goes you can’t put a price on a good internet connection.

The first time you notice you have a bad one is that mid sentence your screen locks and you think for a moment that your server at the other end has had a midlife crisis. However it then dawns on you that you can’t see the weather report locally (it’s going to be sunny but just to make sure) and as you start to ping every IP you can remember. Suddenly it all comes back to life. Sure, I am from a technical background, but I there are many CEO’s out there ready to throttle their IT man (not that it his fault be he suggested this stupid Cloud thing) when they are out of the office unable to send that important memo (about how great there holiday is).

Obviously in the UK, Fluidata can come to the rescue and sell you something that won’t break but when at the mercy of other internet connections you must have a backup plan. It has taken me an hour or so to write this in between drinking my G&T, good thing it isn’t very important otherwise I would be demanding my PC went to being a laptop again.

A lot of focus on the wholesale platform is giving other ISPs the ability to bond multiple lines together to get EFM speeds using the nationwide Be ADSL2+ network. We have had a lot of success recently with Cisco’s MLPPP protocol enabling multiple lines to act as one end to end. As you can see from the below graph showing a thinkbroadband.com speed test that it achieved 26.7 Mb/s download and 4.0 Mb/s upload on two lines bonded at over 1,500 meters from the exchange. This accurately doubles the capacity of the individual lines.

We are continuing to work with our partners on developing this offering to include more than two lines so that leased line speeds are achieved across this network.

Exciting developments in the world of Fluidata with the latest announcement of us partnering with Be to offer their ADSL2+ technology to other ISPs. We have been using the network for the past two years and have developed some of our own unique technology to make the most of the 20 Mb/s down and 2.6 Mb/s upload speeds that the product can support. With this latest announcement we will be able to offer this platform directly to the rest of the industry giving more access to this leading edge network.

Wholesaling the network is different to dealing directly with consumers as it is important to give as much control to the partner so that they can add their service rap to the product. We believe we have achieved this with the L2TP interface and direct access to the DSLAM at each exchange giving partners unparalleled visibility of each customer. This not only gives the partner better tools to support their clients but also reduces the burden on us to invest in a call centre and instead we can continue just to invest in 3^rd level engineers.

One interesting aspect of this network is the support for Cisco hardware. Tiscali recently had to announce to their channel that their ADSL2+ with Annex-M wouldn’t work with Cisco whereas we have been using it for a number of years without a single issue. This is probably due to the Alcatel chipset being deployed in both the routers and the exchanges. This is an important point as most businesses like to deploy Cisco hardware as ‘you don’t get fired for buying Cisco’.

Hopefully all the years at the receiving end of the channel will have translated into a superb partnership experience for ISPs looking for alternative providers.

The playroom in the office is finally up and running. Bit difficult to make it out from the photo but sits alongside the video presence suite and gives visitors a chance to view all of Fluidata’s connectivity products in action. I think it must be a first for an ISP to showcase all their products but I think it is important in helping customers decide which service is best for them.

It is all well and good saying to a potential customer on the phone that the solution being proposed will do what they require but it is a different matter all together to demonstrate it. Too many in the telecoms industry hide behind contracts and long lead times, so to cut all the red tape and just show the product will give us a distinct advantage. Visitors can either see the products being demonstrated or can bring in their own equipment to test with. The room has a couple of screens and a generous number of power and connectivity ports alongside the mandatory Wii and kick back area.

One of the biggest aims of the playroom is to effectively demonstrate the range of failover and aggregation products which customers are skeptical about prior to purchasing. With Fluidata being the only carrier in the UK to successfully bond multiple technologies and carriers it is important for prospective clients to see it cope with VoIP, Video and Data. Also with the range of different ADSL2+ technologies available across the country it is useful to test the Telefonica O2 product next to the Cable & Wireless and BT 21CN products. Next to all the copper there is even a fibre line so pretty much any topology can be copied and tested.

If you are interested in seeing this room in action, then give the sales team a call and arrange an appointment. In the meantime I’ll keep you up to speed on any further developments.

Recently had a new fibre line installed into the office for general office use, VoIP and video. As you can see from the picture it is bloody fast bringing a 50 MB file from the internet to my desktop in the office in 4 seconds. However one thing bothers me and that is in general office use it seems not much quicker than the ADSL2+ line it replaces and if anything is too fast and hence feels slow! Odd thing to admit being that I work for an ISP but for all the hassle on installing it, excess charges and the time it took I could now do without it.

Obviously for certain purposes such as file backups, replication or shifting large files it is fantastically fast. But it is only now I have tested a leased line like this for general use and my experience isn’t mind blowing. I assume it is because the rest of the internet doesn’t work that fast and just how quickly do you want that email or read a web page? Most websites and services have been optimised for 3G and broadband so jumping from 20 Mb/s on ADSL2+ to 100 Mb/s on a leased line just doesn’t give the increase I thought I would see. It certainly isn’t twice as fast let alone five times.

In the datacentres we have many Gb/s of data flying around so I can see the benefit of a fast pipe but for the office there still seems to be some life left in good old copper.

Interesting report on Digital Britain has been released today. Not much there to help connectivity for business, the government seems to think it is important to offer faster speeds for those who share videos and illegal content rather than meet the need to help Britain’s economy grow.

For one they seem intent on forcing ISPs to delivery 2 Mb/s to every home in the UK. Such a demand won’t affect us as we don’t invest in the last mile and instead deploy the best services available to our clients but will be crippling for the likes of Virgin/BT. The Government don’t seem to understand that homes are geographically diverse and something called physics prevents services working at 7 KM from the exchange. And no, satellite is not the alternative especially as they imagine everyone will be using interactive TV and video conferencing.

Why when producing such reports don’t they actually call companies who deal with these problems on a daily basis? They currently rely on the management of the larger Telco’s who are so far removed from what is actually happening the picture is all wrong.

Another politician without a clue on the industry they are governing? Well if you believe the hype on the forthcoming Digital Britain report then it looks like another own goal for broadband in the UK.

What the government seems to forget is that a new, fast digital Britain requires investment and much more than any private enterprise is ever going to recoup. On the one side you have Ofcom and the Government demanding lower prices to consumers and better reliability while now demanding more speed. As I have discussed before, fibre across the country would probably only be taken up by around 20% of existing broadband customers so in answer to their concern that there would be a digital divide – those who can afford it and those who can’t. In the same way there are people who can’t afford to use the trains or fly – if the government isn’t going to make the investment then it needs to provide a financial return for businesses to invest.

ISPs are very much like the train companies trying to operate on the old railway links. We know from experience that private investment wasn’t enough to make the differences to the railways with the re-nationalisation of Railtrack so why will telecoms be any different?

It will be interesting to read the final report, but I assume as with the majority of reports written for our industry, it will set out the dream with little practical detail on how to achieve it.