My firm moved offices a little while ago, and one of the things I was looking forward to was a much better Internet pipe than we had in our old place (which seemed like a domestic ADSL shared across 100+ people). Part of the plan was a fully VOIP telephone system, something that I’ll return to in a later post, but a disaster when you don’t have a decent connection.
I wrote already about our terrible experiences with ADSL. Upon further reflection I remain convinced that the City in London might be one of the worst places on the planet to use ADSL. Seriously – I got a better connection recently when I was on holiday in the Lake District – in a rental cottage – part way up a mountain. It remains a disgrace that all of the political attention remains focussed on rural areas (and presumably their voters) rather than business centres.
I thought I’d found salvation when I came across Urban Wimax, which uses fixed Wimax terminals to deliver up to 10Mb/s (symmetric). All it needed was installation of an antenna on our roof and we could be up and running in days. Sadly I’d not counted on a belligerent landlord. We weren’t even granted access to the roof for the pre installation survey, so getting something actually installed wasn’t going to happen (having a clause in our sublease that prohibited installation of ‘communications equipment’ – presumably aimed at satellite dishes – didn’t help either).
Reluctantly I went with the only remaining solution that would provide the required bandwidth (and that didn’t break the bank) – Ethernet First Mile (EFM). That was back in mid May, and my nightmare ended in late July when the service was finally put online (substantially later than the 30 [working] days I was originally promised). What follows are the highlights (well mostly lowlights) of what I discovered as I went through the process.
Too many mouths to feed
EFM is considered within my supplier as a ‘complex product’. All of the complexity is in the installation workflow and the balkanised sub organisations that process it. Account managers, installation managers, operations coordinators, offshored schedulers, outsourced router configurers, bearer installation engineers, site commissioning engineers – I’m sure there’s more. To make matters worse there are parts of the whole that are not allowed to talk to each other – they just pass messages (do this:done that). There’s no equivalent of try:catch, as there’s basically no exception processing. If you hit an exception then you’re in trouble, as nobody is empowered to take oversight and fix things. On the same day that the commissioning engineer turned up to switch us on I also met with the product manager. He didn’t actually have a full process map for how the product gets delivered, but was trying to build one (forensically).
The product itself
Bearer
EFM has a lot in common with xDSL, as both use the regular copper pairs between your building and a telephone exchange. The main differences are that EFM doesn’t try to carry an analogue phone signal over the same pairs, and supports having multiple pairs to provide more bandwidth. Our feeble 2Mb/s connection only needed one bearer pair, which I’m told will probably be good for 4Mb/s should we ever need to upgrade. Adding another bearer pair would take the max bandwidth up to 8Mb/s.
Network Terminal Equipment (NTE)
This is a little black box that connects to power, the bearer and ethernet. Nobody seems to call it a modem, but that’s basically what it is.
Router
We got a Cisco 1841 supplied with the service (and managed remotely). This seems like massive overkill (just like the /29 that was provisioned to satisfy our request for one IP address). It’s also a clumsy bit of kit, being 1U high, but not a whole U wide (and lacking any rack mount brackets) – so you can put it into a comms cabinet, but not properly.
The commissioning engineer got a single IP up and running on the router, and showed me web access on his laptop – I even got him to tell me what the IP was before he left the building (so that I could configure my load balancer that would use the old ADSL as a fallback).
How things could be improved
EFM might use different signalling over the copper, and have different terminal equipment, but fundamentally I don’t see how it’s that different from ADSL. ADSL has provisioning processes that (mostly) work. ADSL also has end user integrated modems/routers that are mass produced at low cost. EFM suppliers needs to clone the ADSL process, and cosy up with the consumer/SME grade equipment suppliers. That’s how EFM will get to be a £100/m for 5Mb/s product that small businesses (and ‘prosumers’) will be willing to pay for on a large scale to escape the limitations of ADSL (and SDSL).
Of course an even better plan would be for telcos to work with landlords so that fibre was already installed an terminated, and each tenant(subscriber) could then just get a virtual circuit with the bandwidth that they need. Ethernet (the regular sort that only goes 100m) will always trump EFM. It would have been great if our building could have co-operated to share a relatively modest fibre connection, but the deck is stacked against this type of arrangement.
There is a happy ending
It may be expensive, and I did have a nightmare getting it installed, but it does work well. Bandwidth seems to be as advertised, and latency is a substantial improvement on ADSL. I also have the small consolation that if I’d ordered fibre I’d probably still be waiting now.
Filed under: technology | 14 Comments
Tags: broadband, efm, ethernet, ethernet first mile, network, telco, wimax
Kindle 3G – it’s a trap
Update 22 Nov 2011 – A whole new range of Kindles have been launched since I wrote this over a year ago. The new Kindle Touch 3G only has free 3G browsing for the Kindle Store and Wikipedia. No changes have been made to the terms and conditions attached to the Kindle I wrote about, now known as the Kindle 3G Keyboard, and ‘experimental’ web browsing over 3G worldwide has remained free. At this stage in the game I’m inclined towards thinking that the trap I wrote about will never spring, and instead my prophecy turns out to only apply to later models of the Kindle reader. Get one of the older ones whilst you still can – not only does the new version not have free 3G browsing for almost all of the web, but right now there’s not even a means to pay for it.
Update 26 Nov 2011 – The Kindle DX, also has worldwide 3G is presently on sale for $259, which seems like quite a bargain to me. It’s got a larger 9.7″ screen – perfect for textbooks, and I don’t yet see a similar model in the new Kindle line up.
Update 24 Jul 2012 – It seems that 3G browsing was notionally limited to 50MB/month, and that Amazon are now clamping down on those who exceed that limit.
Filed under: technology, travel | 38 Comments
Tags: 3G, amazon, browser, ebook, kindle, web, WWAN
Mowing the Cloud
I had a good chat with JP yesterday, and one aspect of that chat related to cloud computing. This got us talking about the disconnect between goods and services. Goods have become very cheap (relative to services), and I have a couple of favourite examples. The first is bicycles. A decent kids bike has been around £100 for my entire life. That was pretty serious money thirty years ago as I tried to pick out my Christmas present from the Grattan catalogue. Thirty years of inflation mean that in real terms bikes are a lot cheaper. My other case study is my lawnmower…
When I moved house about 8 years ago I had a rotten old electric mower that had been left behind by the previous owners of my last house. It was good enough for the little patch of turf we had there, but wasn’t up to the job in the new place. I went out and bought the cheapest petrol mower I could find with a decent (Briggs and Stratton) engine, which cost about the same as a kids bike. Last summer it started to play up, and a bit of googling around suggested that it would need a new diaphragm for the carburettor. I found the part on eBay for about £2, inc delivery. When the part arrived I talked my son through fitting it – he was chuffed to bits when the mower started up again. A few days later I was talking to a neighbour who told me that he’d recently bought a new mower. His old one had started to misbehave (in much the same way as mine had) and he didn’t want to pay somebody to fix it (£60 he reckoned just to have somebody look at it) and didn’t have the engineering knowhow to do the job himself. His mower had gone to the trash [1]. Goods (mowers) are cheap. Services (getting mowers fixed) are expensive.
People based services (in the first world) have to be expensive – we pretty much all have massive property bubble debts to service.
The IT economy has similar examples. Goods (servers) are cheap – a typical 1U, 2 socket entry level box has been around $3000 for as long as I can remember. Inflation doesn’t make servers get more expensive, and Moore’s law keeps making them better. Services aren’t cheap – the people that it takes to do custom development, systems administration, project management and enterprise architecture cost serious money. Of course there is labour market arbitrage (outsourcing and offshoring), but that game’s pretty well played out, and many lessons have been learned about the delicate balance between perceived cost savings and structural inefficiencies that can occur when trying to achieve them. The other trick that we see is ‘cost transparency’. This is presented to users of IT as a fully loaded cost for a given service (e.g. an email inbox, or an application server). Look at the practicalities though and it’s all about hiding the cost of ancillaries services (numerators like project managers and enterprise architects) behind real things (denominators such as servers). It should be no surprise that this leads to some WTF conversations.
Servers it seems have become the artificial currency of the IT economy. An economy that’s being torn apart by the fundamental divergence between goods and services.
So what’s this got to do with cloud?
One answer is that cloud changes how services are delivered – fewer people, more automation, self service. As a service (*aaS) is a goods based economy not a (people based) services economy, though from a business perspective it delivers annuities rather than one off sales.
Another answer is efficiency. Cloud service providers have the scale (and tools) to manage their estate in ways that achieves much greater asset utilisation. This may not seem that important in a goods are cheap world, but it has consequences. One is reduction in consumption of ancillary services (such as energy), but more important is the effect that this would have on the old IT economy. This is the stuff that JP was excited about. The server that was the denominator of many of those cost transparency calculations was typically underutilised. Make the server utilisation efficient and suddenly you’re sharing more people services across fewer things. The conversation with the consumer of that service just went to WTFx10 :-0
I’ve never been (and probably never will be) a CIO like JP, so I don’t think in their terms. One of the key issues for the CIO is benchmarking against peer organisations (for example their cost of XXX service measured on a per server basis). Cloud computing will disrupt this (a lot) as CIOs are forced to abandon old benchmarks (likely a painful process if these have become compensation related KPIs).
This brings me back to last week’s CloudCamp in London, where Simon Wardely made some excellent points. The first is that cloud won’t evaporate IT budgets, but will instead allow organisations to do more with their IT budget. The second is that this could mean more IT (measured in goods). Of course the obvious corollary of this is that there will be less spent on the traditional people based services. Watch out all you SFA Cloud Computing Consultants (or should that be watch out anybody in the IT services economy who isn’t a SFA Cloud Computing Consultant?).
[1] Hopefully it avoided landfill. There’s a bunch of pretty resourceful recyclers at our local authority tip.
Filed under: cloud | 4 Comments
Tags: cloud, economics, goods, services
Digital 9/11
This post is probably going to get me into trouble, but this stuff needs saying.
There’s been a sudden outburst of sanity today about this topic, so I feel obliged to throw in my 2¢.
A few weeks back I heard somebody say that we hadn’t yet seen a ‘digital 9/11’. I think what they meant here was some sort kind of event so catastrophic in its consequences that the world of IT security (I hate the term ‘cyber security’) would change forever. This got me thinking about impact and scale. The death toll on 9/11 was just short of 3000 people – the largest terrorist event ever, but a tiny proportion of the worldwide population. I would estimate that a far greater proportion of the worldwide computer population is falling victim to the various botnets and worms out there every single day. Those computers aren’t missed though, like the loved ones lost in 9/11. Malware can be removed. Systems can be rebuilt. Old machines can be consigned to the trash and new ones bought.
My take is that this isn’t really about scale. We see attacks every day that are large in scale, and this is what we live with as normal. So what about impact? This is where we head off into movie plot territory. Terrorists taking over nuclear plants, terrorists taking over safety critical systems in utilities, terrorists bringing down our financial systems. The movie plots work because we all know that these things have computers inside them, and we all know that those computers can go wrong. But that’s exactly the point – computers go wrong all the time. We’re used to that, and we work around that. Whether going wrong is caused by malice or incompetence really shouldn’t matter – we deal with so much incompetence so regularly that malice can in fact be treated as a special case of incompetence.
Will there be IT failures in the future – of course. Will some of these failures be caused deliberately (by people who we label as criminals, and a special subset that we label as terrorists) – yes. Will some of the failures cascade into high impact events – undoubtedly. Will this be the ‘digital 9/11’ that the chicken littles are screaming about (usually to get a big bag of money for some pet project) – I think not. Just as we shouldn’t be wasting resources on special anti terror schemes in the physical world (rather than just good old intelligence and response capabilities) the same is true in the online world. Be informed, and be ready to do something – whatever the cause.
Filed under: security | 2 Comments
Tags: 9/11, cyber, intelligence, movie plot, response, security, terrorist
Filed under: identity, technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: ata, identity, numbers, persona, ribbit, sip, skype, telephone, voip
Pioneer One
A little while ago I wrote about how a TV series could be released on bittorrent and paid for by fans. Well, somebody’s done it – check out Pioneer One.
I read about this last week on TechDirt, but it took me a few days to get around to downloading and watching it. My impression – absolutely brilliant. More please – I’ve donated already. I frankly don’t care how much this cost to make, the pilot reminded me of a good episode of X-files – great TV. If it only takes a few thousand of us to put our hands in our pockets for less than the cost of a DVD, and that gets us away from the mass produced tripe of ‘reality’ TV then this is my future of TV.
Now then… I don’t really want theme tunes or deleted scenes (I never really bother with DVD extras type stuff). Some cool merch would be a different matter altogether though.
Filed under: media | Leave a Comment
Tags: bittorrent, fan funding, p2p, pioneer one, tv
I watched this film last week, but it’s taken me a while to find the time for a quick review. I guess I must like Michael Moore‘s films, as I’ve watched most of them, though I know from experience to expect a certain political perspective that I might not entirely agree with.
I think he asked some important questions – questions that I’ve been asking myself and others for some time. Ultimately though there weren’t satisfactory answers. I really would like to know why when ‘productivity’ has gone up so much in the worldwide economy we’re all having to work so much harder than a generation or so ago? Moore would have us believe that the richest 1% of society is somehow living the grand life whilst the remaining 99% toil away, but where’s the evidence? Isn’t the real problem that today’s workers are paying down the debts of the past (debts run up to cover post war healthcare and social services) – or is that my rather UK centric point of view? Or maybe it’s all really down to our obsession with liability (and hence the huge ‘elf and safety tax on society)?
and that’s what it all boils down to… there are taxes on society that exist now that weren’t a drag on Moore’s family when he was growing up in Flint. Perhaps Wall St is one of those taxes, but is it really the dominant cause? Convince me – he didn’t.
Moore makes a point that Wall St (and by extension the finance industry worldwide) is sucking up science and engineering talent and wasting it by engaging in a zero sum game of algo trading and derivatives structuring. This is a question that’s certainly worthy of deeper investigation than it receives in the film – is that talent really going to waste, or (like in the space programme[1]) are there spin-offs to other parts of the economy/society that have benefit? Most fundamentally, where are those banks hovering up capital from? Why are businesses willing to pay fees (on transactions, or for structuring, or advisory services etc.) that maintain this status quo? If all the profits are from prop trading (as they have been for most iBanks since 2008) then who are the participants at the edge of the market who are (willingly?) feeding the beast?
Questions? Questions? Questions? – Moore asks many in this 2hr epic, but his answers are superficial and leave me with more questions.
One final question. Those people that we saw being booted off their farm (which is very sad) – what did they spend the money on (the money they got from whatever con man that sold them the mortgage they ultimately couldn’t afford)? Clearly our love affair with capitalism goes right to the foundation of society where people would rather borrow money to consume ‘stuff’ than hold a safe position on their family property.
[1] The Apollo programme was reported to Congress as $25.4Bn (1973 $s), but did it really cost the US public any more than a few tons of aluminium and a few good men. Many books and case studies have been written about the economic upside from the science spin-offs of the space race.
Postscript… I first heard the term ‘sub-prime’ in the summer of 2006 from a taxi driver. We spent some time talking about CDOs, how they were risk managed and the diffusion of complexity across the financial system that would inevitably lead to cascading failure. Neither of us put our money where our mouths were. But it goes to show that many people were lying later on when they said the failures were all a huge surprise. If a taxi driver and IT bod can see what’s happening then anybody can. I met a hedge fund manager the other day who said that he was swapping out traders for industry experts (e.g. people who understood the fundamentals of a business rather than just the numbers) – I suggested that he might hire some taxi drivers.
Filed under: film, review | 3 Comments
Tags: banking, capitalism, cdo, economics, engineering, film, Michael Moore, review, science, taxi driver
Video distribution at home
I touched upon some time ago when I bought my new DVR. The question is how are we going to achieve distribution of video around the home when analogue TV goes away?
The good old way
I spent part of fathers day setting up distribution in my in law’s new place. They live in a place where Freeview doesn’t reach yet, so their needs were simple – redistribution of the analogue TV signal (BBC1/2, ITV and C4) along with the output of their Sky+ box. This couldn’t be easier, as the Sky+ has an analogue in for the Antenna and two outputs – one for the nearby TV and another specifically for the purpose of redistribution. All I needed to do was connect the redistribution output to an amplifier (luckily their was already a coax cable running back up to the loft) and then drop cables from the amp to the other TVs they wanted. Had I researched this properly before coming up with the bill of materials my father in law could have even bought a special type of amplifier with ‘bypass’ functionality that would facilitate a Sky ‘magic eye’ – a device that beams remote control commands back to the Sky box via redistribution connection, which is great if you want to be able to change channels in another room.
But analogue is going away
In the next couple of years the analogue TV signal is being switched off across the UK. This means that there’s no immediate point in TV makers incorporating the electronics to receive analogue signals, and as I observed with my DVR many equipment makers are assuming that you’ll connect via a better quality connection than UHF RF (e.g. HDMI, Component, Scart etc.). So both ends of the analogue connection are disappearing – so what are the alternatives?
Wireless Senders
These are boxes (normally shipped as a pair – a sender and a receiver) that retransmit a composite video and audio signal over unlicensed spectrum (2.4GHz). In my experience they’re awful, which is pretty predictable – composite video is the lowest common denominator to video interconnect (and only one step of degradation better than UHF), and the 2.4GHz band is full of other stuff that you probably already have – WiFi, DECT phones, MicroWave ovens (though you’d hope they’re not leaking).
Wired Senders
I’ve seen devices that can take a VGA signal from one room to another over Cat 5 cabling. These seem to work OK, but the one’s I’ve come across seem to be aimed at the business market rather than domestic use (with pricing set accordingly). I also suspect that they’re not properly network friendly – expecting a dedicated set of twisted pairs.
Media servers/players
I’m a big fan of media servers (and associated players like the Kiss DP-500 it’s HD sibling the DP-600, which I’ve had for some time now [1]). These are fine for watching content libraries in different rooms, but there are some issues:
- Building a legal content library is tough – video has been slow to follow music into using formats with DRM and other encumbrances.
- It’s not a multi room solution – even with multiple players there’s no way to achieve audio/video sync as you walk from room to room.
- It can only deal with stale content rather than live events.
Slingbox
Slingbox make devices that can digitally encode a video signal and stream it to a receiver. Sadly these are crippled so that only one receiver can connect at a time, and it also seems that the dedicated receiver (the ‘SlingCatcher’) isn’t made any more. I also had concerns about picture quality on these, which were conceived to stream SD video over the Internet (though an HD version came along later) rather than high quality video around a house.
Pay up
You can of course just pay content distributors (like Sky) for multiple boxes for multiple rooms. This works fine for live events, and covers watching different recordings in different rooms, but doesn’t deal elegantly with watching the same recording in multiple rooms – time for some home network friendly features on those boxes perhaps (once the Holywood DRM Stasi figue out a way to lock things down to their satisfaction).
and that’s about it
it seems that multi room TV is coming to an end, but I have some ideas…
- HDMI redistribution – seems like a really good plan, at least that is until HDCP enters the frame. Sadly the whole point of HDCP is to limit HDMI to a conversation between one playback device and one viewing device. I keep wondering what happens when TVs with HDMI/HDCP get beyond their useful lives and hackers start doing their thing? If it ever happens then HDMI redistribution would be tricky cabling wise unless it can use a home network in the middle (which brings its own challenges with bandwidth).
- Live re(encoding) – it’s been possible to do real time MPEG4 (or similar) encoding of SD video for some time on a single x86 core. With a bit of dedicated GPU assistance I’ve no doubt that HD would be feasible these days. All that would be needed then is players capable of doing streams rather than files (hardly a problem). This is basically Slingbox for the home (with maybe extensions over the Internet for remote viewing).
- Get at the digital stream at its source. PC based DVB cards offer the opportunity to stream and/or record TV and serve it up to various ‘receivers’ (and I believe Windows Media Center pretty much does this). The problem is that such cards are only available for free to air broadcasts – no commercial satellite or cable (and likely no free to air HD if the BBC/Ofcom give in to Holywood).
Any other thoughts – please comment below?
[1] These days a 3rd generation games console like an XBox 360 or PS/3 can also double as a media player. Even the Wii can join the party if you hack it a little (with official support often rumoured but never released).
Update 1 Jul 2010 – and a few days after writing this along comes HDBaseT (thanks to The Register for flagging this up). No mention of multi room capabilities, but it looks like exactly the right enabling technology (and could probably be somehow combined with the StarTech stuff that Patrick mentions in comments below).
Update 7 Jul 2010 – the BBC has an article out saying that ‘Analogue TVs no longer sold by UK retailers‘. It lacks detail – how many of those TVs sold in May were capable of receiving an analogue signal (most I’d bet)? The trend was however already clear.
Filed under: technology | 2 Comments
Tags: analogue, digital, distribution, freeview, redistribution, Sky, tv, video
Re-energising Pleo
When I first heard about Pleo I knew that I had to get one. My son is a huge dinosaur fan, and a toy robot baby Camarasaurus was sure to be a huge hit. I ended up ordering two ‘first hatch‘ Pleos in the hope that I could turn a quick profit selling on the 2nd one on eBay, but in the end it went to live with @khairoun and @monadic (after he’d been so helpful bringing them back from the US as they weren’t available in the UK).
Xmas turned out to be a little tricky, as we were visiting family in Spain, but I managed to tuck Pleo into my hand luggage, and when the day came there were huge smiles all around. The pet dinosaur was the huge hit that I expected.
But there was trouble… UGobe had clearly built this to price (albeit quite a steep one) and the huge compromise that they’d taken was using a NiMh battery pack. This took ages (3-4hrs) to charge, and at its best lasted about an hour of play time. I bought a second battery pack, but that only provided temporary reprieve. It didn’t take long before the battery packs wouldn’t work at all. Most frustratingly the battery packs were simply 6 AAs bound together; if they’d used regular AAs then it would have been no problem keeping the beast going.
So Pleo stopped being a playful pet, and just became another (larger) plastic dinosaur amongst the herd.
When the recent 2.0 firmware came along I thought I’d try the upgrade. A fully charged battery pack managed to last just about long enough to run the upgrade process, but wasn’t supplying the juice to allow movement. So I started looking around for alternatives…
and discovered what UGobe should have put in there in the first place. A battery pack using Lithium Polymer cells from a firm called UCube. Of course these are impossible to get by normal means in the UK, but as usual eBay came to the rescue, and I ordered a battery and charger ‘egg’ from a seller in China.
With the new battery inside Pleo walks (and roars, and sings) again – better than ever :) It’s such a shame that UGobe didn’t use a battery like this in the first place. With a decent battery Pleo really is one of the coolest toys ever. I just need to teach my son a little more about batteries now – he’s now asking if we could get an even better battery that would make Pleo grow (and poo).
Filed under: technology | 5 Comments
Tags: battery, LiPoly, NiMh, Pleo, UCube, UGobe
Excessive network?
Yesterday the kids got a hand me down TV from their grandparents, which caused me to do a bit of reconfiguration of things in their play room. The HomePlug adaptor in the garage had died a few weeks back, so I’d swapped it for the one connected to their little used X-Box 360. Anyway, to make up for the absent HomePlug adaptor I found myself running a cable to another switch, which got me thinking that my home network is growing a bit on the big side…
Study: I have an 8 port Gig-E switch for my PC, his’n’hers laptops, B&W laser printer and a SIP ATA. The telephone wiring in my house was done using Cat-5, so I’ve set up a wall socket to use a pair for telephone and 2 pairs for ethernet running to…
Coat (comms) cupboard: This is where the telephone line comes into the house, so I have my ADSL router (connected via a Type A faceplate), a spur to the lounge (another repurposed ‘telephone’ line) and a HomePlug adaptor that goes to the…
Garage: I very much wanted a proper line out to the garage, but after many failed attempts to follow the same conduit as the power cable I gave up and used WiFi. The WiFi was never terribly reliable, so I switched to HomePlug a few years back, which has been much better (typically giving me about 50Mb/s to my backup box). To keep things simple I also use HomePlug to the…
Kids playroom: Where they have a PC each, a media player, two games consoles and a colour laser, collectively hung off a pair of 5 port switches. This just leaves the…
Lounge: Where I have a WiFi router, which has a switch in it too, one port connected back to the coat cupboard, and another running to a media player.
So.. that’s a total of 5 switches (including a WiFi router and ADSL router) and 3 HomePlug adaptors. I’ve not even begun to list the WiFi connected devices.
I wonder when home builders will start doing a better job of accommodating this type of stuff? I asked my builder if they could run some network ports (and surround sound cables) when they were doing the rest of the wiring some 8 years ago, but they weren’t interested in helping (the Cat 5 ‘telephone’ cables seem to have been an unintentional kindness).
So – what’s ‘normal’ these days – 24 ports? More? Less?
Filed under: technology | 3 Comments
Tags: adsl, HomePlug, network, router, switch
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