This year when we did Tough Mudder I was able to bring along my new GoPro camera to capture some of the action. While I still have much to learn about holding the camera steady and how to use video editing software it does give a flavour as what the event is like.

BT’s latest move forward in the deployment of infrastructure to underpin high-speed connections is Fibre to the Premises on Demand (FTTPoD). Unlike BT’s current FTTP offering, where fibre is run along pylons directly to the house, FTTPoD uses existing FTTC infrastructure as much as possible. Fibre optic cable is laid up to cabinets that are FTTC enabled in order to reach speeds of up to 330 Mb/s down and 30 Mb/s up. A pilot has already been launched, with results to follow shortly.

If this services was easily accessible to the general public, FTTPoD could be a big step towards competing with the likes of Hong Kong and South Korea in terms of average speeds. However, the number of the general population that will be able to access this service may be limited. FTTPoD runs off BT’s existing FTTC cabinets, which are still out of reach of large sections of the country, and in many areas may never be rolled out. BT has generally targeted highly populated residential areas for this infrastructure, leaving business areas out of reach. FTTPoD also cannot be installed into multi-tenanted premises, which further shows that this is not designed as a business service.

From what information we currently have available, the on-demand product will have a high install cost, but without contention or uptime guarantees normally associated with EAD services. This will raise interesting questions on how this service will be marketed – will home users be prepared to pay hundreds for the install in order to get speeds that arguably are not required by the majority? Will small business owners jump at the chance to access speeds previously only available through leased lines or bonded FTTC. While the install costs may well fall in line with the work that needs to be carried out, FTTPoD is offering BT a chance to begin the replacement last-mile copper lines with cheaper, faster and easier to manage fibre optic cable. No doubt over the next few decades copper will be phased out and fibre will be the main choice for last-mile connectivity, so this is a chance for BT customers to foot the bill for them.

While the lack of contention guarantees and SLAs will put off businesses that are more reliant on their connectivity, this technology could be very appealing to prosumers and start ups. It will be interesting to see if BT’s restrictions will impede businesses putting this to use once it is roll out across the country.

Last Saturday, 27 Fluidata employees completed 20Km of hardcore obstacle course designed by British special forces, Tough Mudder North London. Doubling the amount of company participants in 2013, we raised over £7,500 for Parkinson’s Disease UK and tested our mental grit, stamina, strength and camaraderie for the second year running.

This year we entered as the biggest group Tough Mudder UK has seen to date, and we successfully completed the challenge without any major injuries (only a few bruises). The relentless training, long distance running, and dieting helped to prepare the team to run through mud, electricity, fire and an ice filled plunge pool. The atmosphere in the office has been at high spirits and the team will continue to train over the coming months to keep in shape and prepare for the next big challenge.

The question is what is next for the Bandwidth Bandits?

In death, as in life, Margaret Thatcher divided opinion. Obituaries penned celebrating the ‘savior of the nation’, while others celebrated the demise of a merciless class war commander. What we can perhaps all agree on is she was fundamental to shaping the world we live in now; as citizens, as workers, as business’s – our lives, for better or for worse, owe much to her actions. Of course in some quarters her legacy is more marked than in others, unbeknown to some the telecommunications industry is one such place.

The privitisation of BT in 1984 represents both a watershed moment for Thatcher and her government as well for our industry. Whist it also reveals much about how the ‘Thatcher Revolution’ gathered pace. Before 1981, all telecoms services in Britain were provided through the Post Office Telecommunications (known as BT from 1980). Widely considered a ‘natural monopoly industry’ ( due to the high infrastructure costs associated with it)  liberalisation of the market had been given little consideration up until the late ‘70s. However against the backdrop of public dissatisfaction with increasing delays for telephone line installation and with new technologies reducing capex costs required to enter the industry, this was soon to change under the first Thatcher government.

The 1981 Telecommunications Act removed BT from the Post Office and this was followed in 1982 by BP, Cable and Wireless and Barclays setting up Mercury – injecting competition into the market place. However at neither of these junctures is there evidence that privatisation was the ultimate vision of Thatcher or her government. Denationalisation was still viewed as a radical and risky policy against the backdrop of 30 plus years of state ownership consensus and state sales prior to ’84 reflected this tentativeness; in that they were small and discreet. The reasons for the sale coming to fruition were on the most part pragmatic; responses to the problems of the time formed gradually through multi-stakeholder negotiation.

Modernising BT was a key objective under the move to separate it from the post office, however financing that moderinisation was a challenge; in 1983 the government’s finances were deep in the red, with a deficit of around 4% of GDP and nationalised industries were competing with key services (health, education etc) for the treasuries limited coppers. Transferring assets into the private sphere not only opened up the options to find investment via other sources (i.e the city) but also raised money for the public purse.

Whilst the primary motivation for the sale of BT was raising funds for future investment, public shared ownership was also attractive to Thatcher for both pragmatic and ideological reasons. Knowing that both Labour and the unions were likely to be opposed to privitisation, the government was able to offer BT employees pre-registered share options (of which 90% took them up on) as a populist bulwark to any attempts to reverse the trend. In tandem with the ‘Right to Buy’ policy, it also began to shape the neo liberalist narrative Thatcher was developing on ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’ and empowering the people through private equity purchases.

The sale of BT encapsulates how Thatcher’s early pragmatically reasoned social and economic policies evolved into a political ideology. Arriving at the conclusion to privatise was a policy building process over a number of years, which always kept a firm eye on what was considered acceptable. When, in November 1984, more than 50 percent of BT was sold to the public through share option, it became the largest ever most successful SOE privatisation exercise in the history. It was also an almost immediate political success, popular with the millions who purchased shares, invigorating the UK stock exchange (very much the beginning of the ‘Big Bang’ in the City) and raising money for the government. The sale would pave the way for a further 40 mass market sell off’s during the Thatcher years and irrevocably altered the relationship between state and market. In many ways the embryo of ‘Thatcherism’ was also hatched during the process – setting a template that one could argue has been followed by all subsequent British governments, as well as many others internationally.

As for the impact on telecommunications, opening up the sector allowed for other operators to enter the market, challenge BT, and invest in new technologies (such as mobile and Internet services). Of course without regulation BT’s ‘natural monopoly’ ( i.e owning the underlying infrastructure) would have made for an uneven playing field so Oftel ( later Ofcom) was established at the point of denationalisation to introduce price caps and optimise BT’s levels of efficiency. Ofcom oversaw further moves to liberalise the market in 1991; when authorising independent companies to bulk-buy telecommunications and sell in packages to customers, and again in 2003 when opening up the telephone exchange for LLU operators.

As of 2012, there were over 200 fixed telecommunications providers, over 100 mobile service providers and over 1,000 Internet service providers operating in the UK. For most consumers there is a wide array of services and providers to choice from and value for money to be gained from doing so. But not for everyone. Many areas of Britain (mostly rural) are without access to fast broadband; for those the wrong side of the ‘Digital Divide’ , in an increasingly digital world, there are serious social and economic consequences, for communities and individuals. The reasons for this divide? It’s hard not to arrive at the conclusion that privatisation constitutes the root cause; given that historically operators have reframed from investing in areas where there are unable to identify significant ROI. The establishment of BDUK (Broadband Delivery Fund) in 2009 represents a move from the government to intervene in the market and initiate state led solutions to this problem.

When Margaret Thatcher set the wheels in motion for the liberalisation of the telecommunications, she did so with more modest than radial intentions. Just a few years later, she would find herself presiding over change which would not only revolutionise the telecommunications industry, but which constituted a seismic shift in the relationships between the state, individual and market and had both immediate and long lasting economic, political and social consequences across the UK.

When people now debate Thatcher’s legacy, they debate the merits of policies and philosophy’s which were sharpened, developed and ultimately given momentum, by those changes to our industry, over 30 years ago.

Cyber War is, we are told, happening increasingly all around us. However it doesn’t normally (touch wood) affect the average man in the street, until last month that is when millions of ordinary Internet users were caught in an ugly crossfire between warring companies; suffering delays in services and disruption to access.

The target of what became the largest DDoS attack in history (up to 300 Gb/s) was Spamhaus – an anti-spam website whose practices and methods have made them unpopular within shadier corners of the internet. The attack, began on March 18^th, fully saturating Spamhaus’ connection to the rest of the Internet and came close to knocking their site offline. If not for the intervention of Cloudflare (who provide protection against such attacks) it’s likely it would have done. Cloudflare ‘rescue’ story below.

http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-ddos-that-knocked-spamhaus-offline-and-ho

The Spamhaus DDos attacks may be the biggest to date, but they are not in isolation, rather they are the latest in a long list of recent incidents. American Express and HSBC fell victim to large scale attacks last year and it’s a trend security vendor Kaspersky expects to continue. “In general, attacks of this type are growing in terms of quantity as well as scale. Among the reasons for this growth is the development of the Internet itself (network capacity and computing power) and past failures in investigating and prosecuting individuals behind past attacks.”

Another trend that we are witnessing is that of cyber criminals exploiting a fundamental feature that allows us to use the internet – DNS. Domain Name System converts from name to IP through your computer asking a server what the IP address is. However the chances are that the server you ask won’t know the answer, so it will go and get it for you from a list of known authoritative servers. Once it has the answer it will reply back to original sender. These ‘recursive’ DNS servers are the life blood of how we use the internet, without them you would have to memorise each IP address!

However there are thousands of ‘recursive’ DNS servers out there which will accept queries from any IP address. If spoofed DNS packets are then sent to those unsecured servers they are susceptible to what is known as a DNS amplification attack – where only 3 or 4 KB of data can be sent, but where the request can generate as much as 100x that amount. This means that even with a relatively small number of nodes the bandwidth hit can be enormous. Combating these attacks is possible, but the way in which we do so may hinge on the answers to many other much broader questions about the future of the internet and in particular – who governs it.

Looking at the Spamhaus attack, it would appear that both unsecured DNS (by design) and unsecured DNS (by misconfiguration) were responsible for the amplification of the attack. One way of nullifying this would be for all ISP’s to only allow their customers IP’s to query their own DNS servers (as we do at Fluidata) however the processing overheads deter many others from doing so. As it stands customers also have the option to build their own recursive DNS servers on their own infrastructure; moving DNS outside of the ISP’s responsibility and increasing the potential for misconfiguration; which can be exploited for malicious purposes.

In theory ISP’s could form a united front against DDoS attacks of this nature; through insisting that customers only use their recursive DNS servers and ensuring that those servers are secure. To increase security further BCP-38 could also be deployed – providing filtering on every edge port so that customers cannot spoof traffic from their links. However the move to a more regulated system would rely on (if it was to be truly effective) cross national coordination and likely meet opposition from service providers who do not wish to incur the processing overheads associated with such measures.

Overcoming that opposition (i.e. by turning regulation into something more akin to legal statute) would inexorably carry this issue into the contentious territory of who governs the internet, who polices it and whether anybody has the right to do; a proverbial Pandora’s box with far reaching consequences and considerations for subjects ranging from security to freedom of speech, right to privacy and the debate over the openness of the web. Given this, raising awareness around responsible DNS use seems the most viable course of action; the Spamhaus attack legacy might just be encouraging people to think a little more about it.