The networks generation with Steve Broadhead

The Lows and Lows of Internet Access

2009-07-01T14:26:53Z

Apologies to any readers for the extended absence - lots of travelling, little in the way of Internet access other than WiFi hotspots that won't let you pay, neighbours of friends with annoyingly secure WLANs and other common (to me) failings.

Even when it's fixed and should work, as I referenced t'other week regarding my friend and colleague Phil Snell, CTO of NetNetTechnologies and his trials and tribulations with BTs business ADSL service. Back in France, le BT, AKA France Telecom, managed to completely screw Internet access for several days, website mysteriously becoming unavailable, access disappearing completely then reappearing, before going completely down for a morning - and we were blaming my pre-launch 3Com router that was roasting to death in 40+ centigrade temperatures. Sort your routers and DNS out garcons... so now back in Andorra and find that if I want to go fibre (a free upgrade) I am potentially without ADSL for 15-30 days. Useful that... And so, back with reignited copper, the weather decides to take control and bring a summer storm that keeps cutting the power...

Remember I said something about mobile data the other day!

More tomorrow, ADSL, Internet and weather prevailing...

Footnote: One of my few Internet successes this year was getting free - and working - WiFi on the National Express train service from London Kings X to Leeds. I see that National Express has now had the service taken into the public to stop them going under. Excellent...

What Not To Do With £200m Of Your Money

2009-06-17T12:27:38Z

So the government's Digital Britain roadmap goes into operation today.

Given that there are 245 pages of the report wot launches it, I have focused on one obvious element, which is how much public money is being spent on the great new digital Britain, that amount being £200m. Now, clearly, the government is looking to significantly increase the total amount of investment money available through various sources, but on face value, putting £200m towards a complete overhaul of the UK's wired and wireless networks is akin to me and mate going down the pub and trying to get p****d on a fiver between us.

What I still find amazing is the lack of knowledge among the advisors for these reports - come on, who are you? - of all the optimisation technologies I immerse myself in, so you can get more from what's already there, rather than replacing copper with fibre everywhere. From back-end to the mobile device in your paw there are excellent optimisation products at incredibly competitive prices, and all UK-developed.

Try jetNEXUS and Zeus for Load-Balancing and App Delivery, DBAM for WAN optimisation - DBAM now has completely hardware-free acceleration so forget Riverbed and the like; just a few lines of code on the App Server and acceleration to any client type (mobile included) is instant and excellent - watch this space for more details.

For basic acceleration and always staying connected, regardless of which network type you're on - wired, WLAN, WWAN, Mobile - try Netmotion or Brand Communications. Brand even lets you aggregate bandwidth (channel bond) across all these networks simultaneously (as available).which is pretty cool.And I'm about to start some testing with another UK start-up: http://www.voip-x.co.uk/ - cramming loads of secure VoIP channels down a very small amount of bandwidth - e.g. 256Kbps - with the ability to create private networks, so free calls everywhere etc.

And then there's Video3 - www.video3.co.uk - with a new release of its Internet conferencing software/service, so that we don't have to stop all the meetings and conferences (inc. online training) just because our travel budgets have been slashed. And this stuff works perfectly down 1Mbps ADSL lines. The Scottish government actually does know about this product because its NHS uses it, but the info clearly hasn't been passed on to Westminster.

I mean, why doesn't the government know about these UK technologies, support them and make use of them? That way, all the investment could be put into the next generation of mobile data networks and we can do broadband anytime, anywhere. I mean, who needs WiFi hot spots if you have proper mobile broadband?

So, whoever you are out there responsible for the vision that is Digital Britain, please come and see me for 500 lines of "I must take more interest in the UK data optimisation technology start-ups" and a few contacts...

And talking of ADSL and the wonder that is BT - here's another company that should pay heed to optimisation technologies. F'rinstance - at the home of the CTO of yet another UK start-up that should be on everyone's radar - NewNetTechnologies - one Phil Snell, here is his latest experience of BT's business class broadband service.

"The service was down for five days last week and from the weekend to now, so I'm using a Nokia E71 to get online."

See what I mean about mobile data being the future?

Cisco Expands On Original Beatles Theory (plus wine tip)

2009-06-10T18:07:14Z

Just back from a long weekend in Dartmouth (with many thanks to the Harbour Master's office for their unsecured WLAN Internet access) and plunged back into the mad, virtual world of IT from one where landing crabs was the essential ingredient of life (as well as eating them of course, and for this I recommend The Cricket Arms at Beesands, from where the crabs are sourced - the sea not the pub).

So, I was delighted to be thrown back in at the deep end and see that Cisco has turned the volume up to 11 on IT insanity by claiming that by 2013, telecommunications operators will deliver at least 48 hours of Internet connectivity in a single day. Which makes 14 days a week, effectively - beating the Beatles' previous record by six days.

This, it is claimed, will be achieved by multitasking and background tasking. Cisco obviously hasn't observed what happens when Vista attempts such apparently trivial tasks... Also, women might argue that - by the same metric - they can therefore deliver 72 hour days and have been doing so for centuries.

Indeed, Cisco claims we are already witnessing 36 hour days.I hadn't actually noticed. It would certainly explain UK railway services however...But if Cisco is serious about this and took advantage of my client DBAM's WAN acceleration technology (where we've witnessed up to 10,000 x acceleration on previously compressed files - scary but true) then we could get an entire lifetime covered in just 24 hours. Which provides a great solution to the question "if only I could live my life again" and gives us not so much a groundbreaking moment as a Groundhog Day breaking moment.

If you read tomorrow's blog and it's exactly the same, then you know something's gone wrong...

Wine Tip from Devon: Try Sharpham's Winery at Totnes. Excellent "raspberry tones" in its rosé and fragant, spicy whites. The reds are s**t however...

VirginMedia 50meg Broadband Week 2

2009-06-05T11:09:49Z

Well this week has been interesting, speed overall has ben good, but it does drop to around 10 -12 meg at the weekend - if this is due to a large number of users or not I am not sure. Most of the time it is at a healthy 35-45 meg range.

I am very pleased to announce that the Airport appears to play very very nicely with the Virgin box, and there have been no drop outs at all of signal, something that was happening even on the 5GHz with my previous provider. Once you start to get signal problems you become a little hawk-like with watching the signal bars on a mac, and so far all is frankly, excellent in that regard.

I am enjoying the upload speed an awful lot as well, when I am uploading vids, this can be a tiresome and boring job, but with around 1.6 meg (which I know is slower than BeThere), it steams alonn.

I have just over a week off coming up soon, and that's going to put the line to the test, as I will be using virtual worlds a lot over long periods. I am going to try and record my total useage over that time, so I can gauge what an over the top super user could potentially do.

Overall I am pleased with the service, I want to monitor the weekend situation over the next few weeks.

Rising Above The Clouds

2009-06-03T13:59:53Z

Sometimes it makes a refreshing change to get away from the plumbing that works the Internet and folks' networks, and get stuck into some application stuff instead.

After all, without apps, what's the plumbing for (other than keeping a few of us in jobs)? So, I welcomed an invite from TIBCO to attend a virtual launch of a new product, TIBCO Silver, defined as a "rapid application delivery platform which has been specifically designed for building and deploying cloud applications inside Global 2000 environments."

Well, it makes a change from Ethernet switches. First, the "venue". These virtual exhibitions crack me up - I love the little people wandering around the halls - I even thought I recognised one or two of them. And it seems to work - apparently there were 1500 registered attendees.

You could also "wander around" and get info on all areas of the TIBCO offering. Just no scantily clad girls or beer, otherwise it's a perfect replacement for the old Networks shows at the NEC (oh, and the lack of Balti's in the evening - that is a sad loss).

So, onto the presentation. While obviously pre-recorded and therefore not exactly interactive, the content itself was genuinely interesting. Basically it delivers for me on two premises - 1: it removes the virtuality from the "Cloud" and makes real Enterprise apps available in that fluffy environment and 2: it massively reduces deployment time. 'Months to minutes' is the mantra (enough "M"s) and it's one I'm all for, following what we call the "Thingamy" path, me being a big fan of said Enterprise software start-up which offers the same short-cuts to success, as indeed does my recently blogged Sunrise Sostenuto ITSM. Looks like the ISVs are coming out of the dark ages at last and realising there is more to life than developing products that are so complex that they never actually work properly. I don't need to name names...

TIBCO SVP of Engineering, Matt Quinn said, in his presentation, that he'd built and deployed an entire application in a weekend using TIBCO Silver (imagine if the company was called HiHo) which is proof of sorts but it'd be even better if we could see it in the flesh, so to speak. He used the phrase "changing the question from not how but when?" which is a nice summation of what TIBCO Silver is looking to achieve.

All very promising though and good to see the "Cloud" being harnessed for real use. Issues such as availability, security, integration, governance and scalability are all part of the framework and deployment extends to high availability, fully redundant configs etc - proper business applications in other words, however cloudy the environment.

And we got a new TLA - TIBCO's Complex Event Processing (CEP) technology which is designed to "build in 'self aware' elasticity" - in other words it automates as much as possible, so we can all go down the pub instead. Applications can resize themselves on demand, automatically - now that IS scalability.

Note: TIBCO has partnered with Amazon for external facing applications and the first public beta of TIBCO Silver will be available on the 30^th June 2009 so check out their website for more progress on this. Sensibly, TIBCO has also partnered with VMware to move this stuff forward.

You might also want to check out my old mate Den Howlett's blog on the company:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=941

Well, all this virtual chasing around the virtual halls has tired me out - time for a bit of refreshment. Sadly, the office doesn't have its own bar, but it does have a kettle and tea bags (even in Andorra)...

International Broadband Wars

2009-06-01T07:49:59Z

First to extend a warm welcome to Heidi's blogs on her newly installed VirginMedia 50Meg Home Service broadband connection on our Networks Generation blog.

However, those who noted a recent(ish) blog in which I explained that Andorra Telecom has been busy providing FTTH across the country, won't be surprised at the announcement that I'm about to retaliate up here in the Pyreneen mountains, by taking said service which promises "up to 100Mbps". This should be installed in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

Moreover, the package - which includes free calls across the country (like saying free calls across the whole of the Lake District) and five hours of free calls per month to Europe (i.e. parents) actually works out cheaper than my 1Mbps ADSL connection + very costly calls to Europe (SkypeOut takes this pain away currently but in less than perfect audio).

Game on...

CCTV Applications I Hadn't Thought Of...

2009-06-01T07:25:44Z

Having recently written a white paper on IP Surveillance systems for D-Link, of the many applications I described within, none were related to that which has led to my morning cuppa being rudely interrupted; namely by footage on BBC Breakfast TV of a neighbourly dispute in Lincolnshire whereby three neighbours had installed CCTV cameras focused on another neghbour's house and garden to prove what dodgy neighbours they were.

The dodgy neighbours apparently are indeed a bit "dodgy" but playing up to the cameras in this instance is inevitable, such as their claimed simulated sex; she certainly had a very large bra... And the best bit - the name of the village this is all taking place in: "Wrangle".

And this isn't a one-off situation - quote from another public dispute: "My opposite neighbour is making our life hell. He has 5, yes 5 CCTV cameras at the back of his house and 2 at the front."

Of course, there are two problems here. One - The Data Protection Act, which covers the use of CCTV cameras in commercial situations, doesn't apply to domestic use, so the only laws which apply are those which normally relate to still and video photography: Two - CCTV technology AKA IP Surveillance - is now incredible cheap and connects straight into your domestic WiFi.

What I love about this stuff is that, whatever the IT vendors come up with as the raison(s) d'etre for their technologies, the person in the street comes up with far more personal applications to drive the market with. Remember - the only reason we had CD and now DVD drives in our PCs/laptops is because this revolution started with home computers when the office was still using Frisbee Net technology - or real networks of course...

VirginMedia 50Meg Home Service - 3 month Trial - Week One

2009-05-28T12:54:06Z

I was the lucky person in the team selected to test VirginMedia's new 50 meg cable broadband service. I am right at the start of a 3 month trial, and I thought I would start the ball rolling with setting the stage with my setup at home, information about the installation, and my initial thoughts.

Chez Heidi there are currently 4 computers - 3 Macs and 1 PC (not including one MacBook that is dual booting XP). They all currently connect wirelessly to the shiny and very sleek looking Virgin Box via an Apple Extreme Base unit. I am going to try wired later on, but at the moment lets finish the introductions.

Installation of said shiny box was carried out by a very nice and knowledgeable engineer called Delroy, who despite a terrible allergy attack due to my cats, soldiered on til the end, and answered all my questions, and was thoroughly professional.

The secret to the Virgin service is the fact that they use N router technology, the Apple Extreme handled that perfectly, and all the computers in the house (apart from the elderly PC) can access the N signals. Another plus for the N wireless is that I live in a street where everyone, it seems has wifi - but no-one else appears to be using a dual band wireless router apart from me, so whilst they spend their evenings changing wifi channels (kind of like that scene with the remote control from Poltergeist), I fly happily in the distance looking back and sniggering.

So the first test using Speedtest.net just after installation yesterday afternoon, on wireless gave me this:http://www.speedtest.net/result/482571157.png, some of my later tests were in fact faster, and I tipped onto about 49.2 meg a couple of times.

The evening bought a slightly different story, the iMac furthest from the wireless source went down to as low as 30meg peak time, which I attribute to people escaping from the football that was on last night, but more testing is needed. By 11.30pm, the download speed was back up to a respectible 45meg.

So all in all at first site I am impressed, with the installation, the ease of setup, how well my Macs were catered for (I am sure it may not have been the same for a Mac owner say 3 or 4 years ago), the consistency of the overall speed, even with the drop mid evening.

I plan on testing how to optimise the XP boot of my MacBook for the connection - XP doesn't automatically cope well with that speed, and I want to do some side by side testing with the Virgin service and my still connected BT Business Broadband.

As an aside, I am a heavy duty user, I use Virtual Worlds a lot, do machinima, and am constantly uploading vids to people all over the world. This is going to be a tough test for Virgin, I am very interested to see how they do, but so far? So good.

Your Flexible (Software) Friend...

2009-05-28T09:56:48Z

I know I'm an old bore, in that I keep banging on about certain stuff, but I'll continue to do so until that stuff happens as I want to see it.

One such example is the software world and notably in the realms of network managment and Helpdesk or ITSM to use its modern moniker. I know that people's thought processes are changing and expanding to look beyond the obvious - two examples I've witnessed this year are with my mates at NewNetTechnologies who've kicked CiscoWorks out of two major customer sites - National Grid and Port of Felixstowe - in favour of their own far more adaptable (and miles cheaper) software and so I'm looking to continue this process in the ITSM world.

Old Helpdesk software is, frankly, rubbish, so I relished my latest voyage of discovery with Sunrise Software's Sostenuto ITSM product. I say product, but really it's a platform with an ITSM application sitting on top - in this guise at least. The reality is that companies can no longer deal in 5-10 year fixed business plans; 5-10 minutes is more like it. So how can they expect 10-year old (and then some) technology that was designed around the longer-term planning to actually be of use in 2009, Eco-crisis or not?

Instead, Sostenuto ITSM lets you service-manage in a way that reflects your business model and methodology, rather than forcing you down the path the software developers created with their own vision of how everything from raising alerts to trouble ticketing happens. It's much the same approach as taken by the previously (in this blog) lauded Thingamy in the enterprise software world. And it works.

Moreover, Sostenuto ITSM goes way beyond the other limiting factor in this market - b****y ITIL compliance. But that's another rant for another blog...

Anyway, anyone fancies a read-up on Sostenuto ITSM should check out my report on the following link: http://www.sunrisesoftware.co.uk/uploads/files/BBT%20Sunrise%20Sostenuto%20Flexibility%20Report%202009.pdf

There might even be the odd joke or two thrown in.

Swapping Staff For Vendor Partners

2009-05-20T11:26:57Z

Interesting to see that, just as HP announces more job losses - see front page of CW today - amounting to 6,400 in addition to the 7,500 announced last Autumn, at the same time HP is jointly investing $180m in association with Microsoft to create a complete unified comms and collaboration solution. This Frontline Partnership announcement follows ProCurve's own major ProCurve One vendor alliance announced earlier this year. HP really is swapping staff for vendors partners - almost one-to-one at this rate...

My mates in the ProCurve division will be a significant component of this latest "in your face, Cisco" proposal - all the more reason then for them to "take advantage" of some of the wonderful UK start-up technologies I've highlighted in this blog and via test reports on the Broadband-Testing website!

Going back to that front page HP story, also interesting to note the losses highlighted over the past 12 months - sales of servers and storage equipment fell 28%, personal computer sales fell 19% and printing sales fell 23% from figures for the previous year. What it doesn't say is that the ProCurve networking division GREW by 35% in the same timescale.Sure those sales are down this year - whose aren't? - but it still shows how little HP seems to genuinely value the networking world.

I meant, just how many printer cartridges can you sell?

Virtual Time Travelling

2009-05-14T15:04:47Z

I couldn't help noticing that Microsoft - in a bid to compete with VMware's new world of Cloud Computing (i.e. new take on old variation) - is offering live migration with its hypervisor on a newly available download of.... "Windows Server 2008 R2" - and I could have sworn it was 2009...

So anyway, the new release will enable you to migrate between two CPUs from the same source vendor (e.g. Intel - ths slightly poorer Intel that us, thanks to the EU) even if they are different models. Wow eh, progress...

The big question is - who is simply playing with virtualisation and who is really making it stick? VMware has no other option - virtualisation, sorry - the cloud - is its only world. Microsoft, on the other hand, has nothing clearly obvious to gain in the move from real to virtual - environment, product and profits.

I guess the same thing applies to the users - who is simply piloting and who is already reliant on a virtual world, whether in the data centre or outwards from the edge? The reality is that the various layers of virtualisation do now actually work, so the "hype" in hypervisor is less so than it once was. With Cisco also getting further into the "cloud" it seems there is no way back.

But with the 'net still spectacularly less than perfect and feeling the strain ever more daily, fundamental backbone providers such as BT leaking profits faster than an American car manufacturer and spending cuts abounding, surely something is going to break at some point and that could be a pretty irrepairable break when it happens.

Batten down the hatches chaps.

Broadband Wideboys?

2009-05-06T17:32:36Z

Interesting to hear that Virgin is piloting 200-400Mbps Broadband (in Kent, so they be hopful of a good result (bad spelling makes bad gags) without really knowing what applications it will be used for.

Here in Andorra they've also been rolling out FTTH and have that great application to run over the 100Mbps feeds they're offering - Internet access. T'trouble is, the comms speeds out from Andorra (can't be so much a fat pipe as a thin roll-up) is rubbish and the DNS is almost always out of sync, so it's the finest waste of bandwidth availability ever.

Contrast this with a story this week in The Grauniad (still no spelling mistakes) on the excessive global footprint of the Internet: - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/03/internet-carbon-footprint - and how the web providers must limit this and you see the folly of giving homes 400Mbps to watch Corrie Omnibus reruns on. Meantime, we continue to test and validate fantastic optimisation technologies - DBAM Systems, jetNEXUS, NetMotion - to name just three companies I'm currently working with that problem more for less (and with less) and you wonder why this technology isn't de facto standard in every application and content delivery mechanism in the world, whether running across hi-band fibre between server farms or narrowband connections to middle-Africa or any mobile handset and all stops in between.

The reality is that you don't need 200-400Mbps into the home, not for any useful application (or most useless ones either). Billions of WLAN connections are used daily and this is typically over shared 11Mbps or 54Mbps networks (and then only half of that bandwidth is really available to start with) and then there's mobile and yet video is popularly run across these networks. And with .11n - see soon to be released Broadband-Testing report on ProCurve's recently (ex-Colubris) acquired WLAN technology - we have genuinely usable wireless bandwidth now. Why continue to put fibre into the ground? Even if it's already there (which is commonly is, but wasn't in Andorra) it costs a fortune to light it.

Surely if there's a message for the screwed up global economy that is 2009 it's 'optimise and rationalise', not bloat out on bandwidth?

Network Management - 2009 And Still Being Reinvented

2009-04-23T03:26:24Z

I don't want to admit to how long I've been looking at network management products for.

I could say, ever since the days when you started computers up with a winding handle but, of course, that's the future not the past. Best part of 10 years ago I tried to start an industry body with the illustrious acronym - NGNMF - Next Generation Network Management Forum; had an inaugural meeting that was well attended by all who found SNMP offensive and useless, and went precisely nowhere thereafter. A bit like SNMP itself really...

So it was with both relish (rather than pickle) and no surprise whatsoever, that I spoke with a UK start-up this week, Cyclone Technology, whose netPrefect product is another attempt to solve the enterprise-wide issue of network management, coming from an "SNMP is a load of old b******s" standpoint. Phil Baxter, yer man behind netPrefect, sees the product as slotting in at the layer between the OpenView/Tivoli/CA top level - i.e. the products that cost $$$$ to draw a nice picture of the network and alert you to all the stuff you already know about and hide the stuff you really want to know about - and the products that dig in a little deeper and more specifically, such as the config change management and related problems that the likes of NewNetTechnologies deal with, which I've covered in this blog previously.

For me, a product such as netPrefect, which, among other things, carries out predictive trend analysis, in-band and out-of-band monitoring, remote access, and customisable threshold alerts and reporting should, given a basic discovery tool, be capable of replacing those mammoth SNMP managers of managers it - like all others - has to support.

It's not just wishful thinking... Back to NewNetTechnologies - the company has had a couple of very large customers (unless the likes of National Grid don't fit the description) throw out CiscoWorks in favour of NNT's Change Tracker product, simply 'cos it does exactly what it says on the tin, promptly and cost-effectively. Which kinds of sums up what's needed in IT in 2009?

So, we'll be keeping an eye on the netPrefect product - hopefully I'll be getting my hands on it to test and position accordingly - and others, to see if we can finally bring NGNM (forget the Forum) home to roost...

Where The Sun Don't Shine

2009-04-21T13:09:52Z

Not at IBM that is, but it does so at Oracle.

Makes a lot more sense, of sorts, for Oracle to acquire Sun that it did IBM. Sun and Solaris are valuable platforms for Oracle, so it's asset protection as much as anything I guess.

Also - Sun gets a parent company with far more "pretentious-moi" HQs in the Bay Area. If you haven't seen Oracle's HQ - Google - still looks pretty far out in 2009. Interesting too for all of Sun's partners, one of which is my old mates at Zeus - Application Delivery Control or posh Load-Balancing in old money. Now, there aren't many Oracle applications I've seen that couldn't benefit from a bit of delivery control...

The question is, given Oracle's propensity to enjoy profit-making, what happens now to MySQL? Look out for those "Upgrade to Oracle"offers real soon now.

Who Really Owns The 802.11 In Your WiFi?

2009-04-08T10:34:19Z

Interesting news from our friend HP (especially since I'm testing ProCurve newly acquired from Colubris WLAN controller) in that it has settled confidentially with Australia's science agency CSIRO which has a longstanding patent claim against many of the well-known WLAN product vendors.

Not only will this prove expensive for HP (so that's why all it's staff had to take pay-cuts) but for the many other vendors who will now be expected to follow suit. These include the likes of giants such as Microsoft, Dell and Intel, WLAN tech guys Buffalo and mainstreamers such as D-Link, Netgear and Belkin and even Nintendo. So maybe it's not only Ryanair that is looking to make you pay extra for a wii...

The patent originally granted to CSIRO back in the mid-'90's revolved around the design of multi-path wireless that equates to the MIMO-based 802.11n standard - so enabling bandwith increases by an X factor - five in the case of the patent I understand. Funnily enough, around that time I was also doing some testing with a wireless start-up called Supergold that - even then - had 22Mbps working, but in an infra-red environment; this was the tip of the codepage iceburg; we were predicting 100Mbps+ easily in the first iteration of the product.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world went down the RF route, so Supergold was effectively scuppered. Makes you wonder just how many more "might have been's" there are out there in the wireless world...