With much fanfare we are pleased to announce the launch of our company magazine, PULSE. We have been busy over the past few months putting together some interesting and informative features on connectivity in the UK and the impact on business. This edition includes a special report on Rural Broadband and connecting the final third, a practical guide to IPv6, preparing the internet for the Olympics and, of course, Superfast Broadband.

All customers should be receiving copies in the coming days; we are going against the grain and sending these out via snail mail rather than using our marvellous network. We still believe reading a printed magazine is easier and as every other part of our business is automated it is nice to use Royal Mail once in a while.

We will look forward to receiving your feedback so we can ensure the next edition, due later in the year, is impeccable. Obviously if you haven’t been a recipient and would like a copy please don’t hesitate to contact us with your address and we would be delighted to put one in the post.

Olympic Countdown 95 days to go

Resilience and capacity planning are at the heart of our core network design. Preparing for the 2012 Olympics has been a relatively straightforward process for us because the network has been inherently built to cope with huge volumes of traffic and failure scenarios. In many ways 2012 is a simple extension of the good practises we already employ to serve our customers in a resilient and uncontended fashion.

All DSL services are always mapped from suppliers into at least two independent nodes on our core network. Key anciliary services, RADIUS, DNS and SMTP, are similarly spread across separate geographical locations, and all datacentres connect back to two others via diverse dark fibres.

In the event of a black-out at one of our datacentres all DSL based services would automatically fail-over to one of several other sites and carry on working.

Our customers typically also have demand for high bandwidth as well as uptime, so capacity is carefully engineered with low thresholds set to trigger upgrades. On our DSL platforms routers are kept at no more than 30% usage during peak hours, with average across the network typically 15-20%. This ensures that traffic re-routed during a failure can be absorbed at other sites with ease.

Ethernet, colocation and leased line customers connect and route directly via our MPLS core network backbone, and typically place a higher demand on the network. This core is also the fabric which connects together our datacentres, so we use multiple 10 Gb/s wavelengths on our own WDM equipment to provide extremely scalable bandwidth. In preparation for the Olympics we are operating with peak backbone usage typically between 5 & 10% and have plumbed in an additional 40 Gb/s of Internet transit routing capacity – enough to comfortably serve huge customer demands whilst being able to also cushion large DoS attacks.

And because demand for network bandwidth is increasing at an exponential rate, no sooner than the Olympics are over work will begin on a £2.4M upgrade of our network, designed to deliver a fabric for the most demanding applications for several years to come.

Fluidata Olympic Countdown – 105 days to go.

The Olympics is affecting business’s up and down the county in myriad ways; from those directly working on the planning and logistics, to London retailers likely to capitalise on increase in footfall. As a London based business, and a telecommunications provider, Fluidata are also witnessing many consequences of the games imminent arrival to the capital.

Disruption: Many fibre provisions in London have been severely disputed, starting from as early as last autumn. An embargo on all planned street work, affecting key parts of the London Olympic Route Network (ORN) , was implemented on 1st March 2012, and will run till the 30^th of September. Fibre orders across London will also likely see delays after this date – as carriers begin attempting to clear the back log of work. Needless to say, these disruptions have impacted on Fluidata’s ability to deliver a number of planned provisions, however with a strong DSL portfolio at our disposal we have also seen growth in ‘leased line alternative’ orders, as companies plunge for temporary next best solutions.

Demand: Increase in demand for connectivity solutions has been witnessed in London. A number of luxury hotel chains have invested in improved connectivity during the games –  expecting both an increase in custom and user demand to view the games from laptop and mobile device.

Travel: With travel in London likely to be severely disputed, we also witnessing organisations looking for remote working solutions – such as reliable home connectivity, 3G connectivity and companywide voice and video provisions. Of course with more people working from home, upstream in the office also needs to improve, once more resulting in increased demand for improved connectivity.

Those companies who are expecting a full complement of staff in the office, are also considering improvements or modifications to their connectivity. As Fluidata has demonstrated in previous months, more and more employees use work internet for viewing events like Wimbledon. The Olympics will be no different and IT mangers are investigating bumping up connectivity temporarily or, if they are a bit mean, locking down the likes of BBC iPlayer.

Trouble?: Many experts in our industry are expecting the UK IP infrastructure to be hit with a ‘deluge of data’ as more people watch, keep up to date, and talk about the games over connectivity devices than ever before. Fluidata have made improvements in our network , and though we expect more traffic than ever before , we are confident of coping with the demands and showcasing our network as one of the best in the industry. How everyone else copes remains to be seen.

We will not know the true impact of the games on Fluidata until after their conclusion, but thus far, it’s throwing up as many opportunities for us as it is potential challenges.

Dr Peter Cochrane, BT’s former Chief Technology Officer (CTO), last week claimed that the battery backup’s in the new  BT fibre cabinets could be a target to for thieves “Once the local bandits have recognised that there is a car battery in the bottom, you can bet you’re your bottom dollar that a crowbar will be out and the battery will keep disappearing”.

The kind of public statement that you suspect can’t of pleased BT, yes there might not be too many local bandits tuning in to the Lords Select Committee Inquiry, but any that were might well be adding these cabinets to their list of criminal ventures for the week ahead. Perhaps more importantly though, it raised serious questions about the resiliency of the FTTC service BT provides.

Rest assured though, BT tells us that these cabinets are alarmed, and that if the power supply were removed, the cabinet wouldn’t be affected.

Fingers crossed that this is the case, as we have witnessed numerous instances of telecoms based theft over the past few years, theft which has left customers without critical services. Two years ago Fluidata experienced a high number of clients in Luton losing service on DSL based connections, when travellers stole copper out of the ground, while there has been similar incidents reported in Swansea, Kent and Lancashire over the last few months. Theft of DSLAM’s from exchanges has also compromised telecom services over the years, as has datacentre break-in’s – most recently in King Cross, where criminals poising as policeman were able to break in, tie up staff, and steal computer equipment.

Measures are always taken to mitigate against these instances, be it improved security or new improved burglar alarms, but it’s not always possible to protect against every act of criminality or sabotage.

So next time you experience loss of service, while you might assume it’s  some kind of system glitch  or cable cut it might just as easily be the actions of a petty bandit.

The coalition are considering passing legislation that would enable GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters) free reign to monitor every e-mail, text, phone call made and website accessed by the public at large.  As well as being made to store all electronic communication data of all customers for 1 year, ISP’s would be required to install boxes across their core networks, which would allow GCHQ to dip into those communications at will.

Putting it mildly this would be an affront to civil liberties. This policy raises many questions; what happens if an individual has their phone or computer hijacked by someone with an ‘illegal’ agenda? It would be left for the innocent user, whose IP address was identified as the perpetrator, to prove they’re innocence. Those who have the ability to mask their IP addresses will simply continue to do so through proxy. From a service provider view- how would VPN data be monitored? Does the coalition fully realise the scale of what is proposed? Just as a comparison is Royal Mail expected to open and copy every piece of mail it handles as it delivers it to its rightful recipient?

As of 2011, according to Ofcom, mobile and fixed line household penetration in England alone is currently at 76%, that’s over 45 million people who regularly use the voice/data networks. E-mails and texts are in the 100’s of billions, if not trillions per annum. Moreover who’s going to pay for storing all of this?