Fibre to the Premises On Demand

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Today I’ve noticed (following the announcement a week or so ago by Openreach) that the BT Wholesale line checker thinks that Fibre to the Premises on Demand (FTTPoD) is now available at my property.   This is what the checker displays if your exchange/aggregation node is enabled:

btw_availability_checker

FTTPoD differs from the “normal” FTTP product in that you have to pay a hefty installation fee to get it installed, running into four figures, depending on distance – but once installed, the rental is charged at “normal” FTTP rates, although you’re tied into the top price 330/30 Mbit/s tariff for the first three years.  Once this period is over, it effectively becomes a “normal” FTTP line and you can have any speed that you want to from Openreach’s portfolio (e.g. 110/10, 220/20, etc.)

The advantage of FTTPoD over FTTC is that absolutely no copper is involved, so there’s none of this “up to” 80Mbit/s nonsense – although it’s not a guarantee, you get none of the disadvantages that using DSL brings, like interference and Christmas tree lights causing errors and slowing the connection down.  Due to the way that GPON works, the downstream bandwidth is shared and split up to 32 ways, and the upstream bandwidth is effectively guaranteed since it uses time-based multiplexing to give everyone an equal share of the upstream bandwidth using time slots.  So, in theory, although you could get less than the maximum bandwidth downstream, all 32 users would be having to max out their downstream links before that would happen.

FTTPoD will eventually be available to everyone who is currently connected to a FTTC cabinet.  This is because Openreach fit a so-called “Aggregation Node” (AN) in the road which the FTTC cabinet is connected to.  The AN is effectively an optical junction box where the FTTPoD fibres are fed from the exchange, so for the installation fee you’ll get a fibre installed all the way from the AN to your premises, which will be connected to a fibre back to the exchange, so it really is entirely fibre from the exchange to your house, and it really does not go through the FTTC cabinet, as some people erroneously seem to believe.

It is possible to fit an AN in the road and supply FTTPoD or FTTP without building an FTTC cabinet, so it’s possible this option may be offered in some places, perhaps in Exchange Only line (EO) areas where there is no cabinet between you and the exchange at all, but never the other way round – if you have FTTC already, you will be able to get FTTPoD eventually since the cabinet has to be connected to the AN.  Openreach are rolling out FTTPoD slowly to FTTC-enabled areas, announcing groups of new exchanges quarterly, so not everyone is able to get it yet.

The other catch is that MOUs (e.g. multiple occupancy offices) and MDUs (e.g. blocks of flats) are not eligible for FTTPoD, so those properties may well have to wait and see how the G.Fast trials go, which are supposed to provide up to 1Gbit/s over short runs of copper which are fibre-fed to a distribution point outside the property.

The End of Year IPv4 Report

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So, here we are at the end of 2013 and let’s see where we are.  So far, APNIC and RIPE have ‘run out’, and the next two registries likely to be depleted in the next year or two are ARIN and LACNIC.  Until recently, it was likely that ARIN would run out first, and then ARIN and LACNIC were pretty much neck-and-neck for a while, but in recent months the demand for IPv4 in the LACNIC region has been accelerating quite a lot, and we’re now at the point (as of today) that LACNIC are now depleting their resources quite a bit faster than ARIN are.  Geoff Huston has the figures as of this morning at 1.5 /8s for ARIN and 1.3317 /8s for LACNIC, a difference of approximately 6 weeks.  If LACNIC continue this rate of depletion I suspect they will be down to the final /10 (as ARIN and LACNIC have different rules to RIPE, who reserved a whole /8) a fair bit sooner than the beginning of 2015.  As to why LACNIC has shown such a spurt in recent weeks, that’s anyone’s guess, but the next few months could be very interesting if current trends continue.  Just as well Comcast in the US is well on the way to rolling out IPv6 to 100% of their customer base then!

Happy new year!

New VT Clock

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Everyone’s probably seen these at least by mistake at least once, the humble VT Clock is used to cue up TV programmes to give the operator an indication of how much time is left before the programme start.  Even today these are fairly widely used even though more and more is now digital.  I created one some time ago, badly, using the GIMP and (to my shame) Visual Basic to animate the clock hand.  Originally done in standard definition (and the original version probably wasn’t even widescreen), it was looking a bit tired and old so I decided to do a new one.

This time, I thought it would be worth seeing if I could do it entirely in a graphics package without having to resort to writing any code, which turned out to be surprisingly easy, once I’d mastered how Inkscape worked.  Basically, the procedure involved drawing a dash at the 12 o’clock position, then duplicating it so that I had 40 seconds round the clock face.  Then I drew a middle circle (the clock design is in homage to the original electronic Cox and Courtyard clocks) and a ‘second hand’, all in layers so that the middle circle was uppermost.  Then I drew the text on the screen, and finally generated 38 images or so by rotating the clock hand to the desired position and saving a PNG of it.  Once I’d got it all exported, I assembled the entire thing into Sony Vegas and made a video out of it.

As the clock was designed in Inkscape, this means it can at last be scaled to any resolution you’d like.  My monitors are 1920×1200 (16:10), so a 16:9 1920×1080 picture would have done, but I thought I might as well make the clock in 4K Ultra HD (3840×2160) for a bit of future proofing, and then generate a 2K version after that.

Here’s a sample of what it looks like, with a completely made-up slate details of course… (the font used is Tiresias PCfont, which is almost identical to the Tiresias Screenfont typeface used on Freeview boxes in the UK.  You can download it at http://www.tiresias.org)

vt_clock_web

“Pure Audio” Blu-Ray discs – what is the point?

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Recently, the recording industry (and in particular Universal Music) have announced the joyous news that you are now able to get “High Fidelity Pure Audio” format (that’s an audio Blu-Ray disc to you and me, only playable in Blu-Ray players), supposedly in up to 192kHz/24-bit audio which, it is claimed, will sound vastly superior to the 44.1kHz/16-bit audio CD which has been around for 30-odd years already.

Apart from perhaps the ability to release multichannel recordings on a physical disc without Dolby Surround encoding it (which could be done with, amongst other things, the FLAC file format anyway), what is the point of using such a high sample rate?  Have they not read http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html yet?

Review: Waitrose

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Why am I reviewing a supermarket, you might ask?  Well, yesterday was the grand opening of the new Aylesbury store, so I thought I’d pop along and see what it was like.  The supermarket is around 21,000 sq ft so not too big and not too small either.   The building is brand new and has a car park above it, owned by the district council, which is a bit of a pain if you drive to the shops since it means you have to pay £1 per hour (max 2 hours) to park there and then spend at least £10 to get your parking fee back from the store.

There are plenty of checkouts, and some a few self-service tills, and a few “quick pay” ones for those people who want one of their credit cards.  I didn’t get time to try out the cafe, but it looks quite nice, so I might grab a “free coffee on production of your loyalty card” sometimes and give it a go.

There’s all the usual meat, cheese and other counters available.  I thought the counters were a bit small, but I wasn’t really looking very hard as I was in a hurry buying a few items on the way round.

Despite it being a relatively small store compared to (say) the big Tesco store in the town, it did have a small range of non-food items which is nice.  The aisles are quite wide, and the prices don’t seem amazingly worse than any of the other major supermarkets I’ve been to, as long as you stick to the “essentials” range.

So, all in all, only a quick visit to the store, but I think I liked it, and the staff seem friendly and helpful, as you’d expect from John Lewis.  Maybe I’ll do a weekly shop there next time I need to go shopping and see what it’s like properly then.

And just when you thought you’d heard the last of the Horse and Jockey traffic lights saga…

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…the Bucks Herald are at it again, and as all regular viewers to this blog know, there’s nothing the BH likes better than whinging about traffic lights.  Their article at http://www.bucksherald.co.uk/news/more-news/updated-council-responds-to-traffic-expert-s-fears-over-new-aylesbury-lights-1-5355185 is frankly typical of their nonsense, which we all had to endure endlessly the last time that Bucks County Council stuck up a set of traffic lights.  This time a new set of lights have appeared on the junction of Tring Road and Oakfield Road (basically paid for and for the benefit of the new dairy) and apparently we’re expected to believe that drivers might get confused about what a green light means!

The Highway Code is quite clear on this one – “GREEN means you may go on if the way is clear. Take special care if you intend to turn left or right and give way to pedestrians who are crossing”.  Therefore, it’s safe to go as long as your way is clear, and if it isn’t, you should wait until it is.  Including turning right.

Of course, as the council stated, the whole reason they did it this way was to allow traffic to turn right off-peak when the road is clear – which outside rush hours is generally not a problem at that junction – as a large proportion of traffic actually does the turn anyway, much like what happens at the Horse and Jockey lights.  You might improve the junction by putting a yellow box junction in, but otherwise I can’t see what’s wrong with it.  If people are confused when traffic lights don’t have hand-holding green arrows for every conceivable direction any more, we really are in trouble.

I’m also not convinced by the opinion of their “expert” either…

Just wait until the next set of lights are finished a mile down the road; we’ll have a repeat of the whinging again in six months’ time no doubt.  Does this really sell papers?

ARIN reaches Phase 3, with only two /8s left

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Today the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) reached the next milestone in its IPv4 exhaustion journey.  There are now only two /8s remaining left, and one of those is the “last /8” which both APNIC and RIPE are already down to.  By current estimations (and particularly Geoff Huston’s), we’re probably about a year away from reaching the final /8 at ARIN.  This, of course, depends on whether the current depletion rate is maintained (which is what happened in the RIPE region), or whether there is an APNIC-style “run on the bank” and panic sets in.  Either way, ARIN’s page on the subject is interesting, as it breaks down the number of contiguous blocks available between /8 and /24.  If any of the big ISPs want a really block, they’d better get in quick, since at the time of writing there’s only one /8 left, two /10s, one /11, two /12s, one /13 and three /14s.

Interesting times ahead, and it will be fascinating to see which way it goes.  Especially as ARIN does not appear to have adopted a “final /8” policy as APNIC and RIPE have done, so it really is a dog-eat-dog race to the finish, pretty much.

New OpenPGP Key

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Just to let you all know I have a new OpenPGP key, which is 4096 bit RSA.  Available from all the usual PGP key sites, or you can download directly from the Contact page should you prefer, where you’ll find the fingerprint details.

Why you should never trust companies who make promises containing the word “forever”, part 4,294,967,296

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Google recently announced that they would be turning off their Google Talk service and replacing it with Google Hangouts instead.  Whilst normally I wouldn’t care at all about this, and to a certain extent I still don’t, by doing this they have gone back on something that Google said some time ago about using open protocols and the word “forever”.  Not that this was in any way a surprise to me that they’d do something like this, but it may be to some people, since their whole business model relies on selling your data which you provide to them for nothing, so if they’re not making money on a certain feature, I’d imagine they’d have no qualms about pulling it to suit themselves, rather than you.

As you may know, Google Talk was based on a protocol called XMPP (or Jabber as it was formerly known), which is an open standard for instant messaging, defined by RFC 6120-6122 et al.  The advantage of using XMPP, in addition to the fact it is an open standard, is that there are a huge variety of XMPP clients and servers you can use, whether on PCs, Macs, Linux, or tablets and phones, and they all interoperate fine, in the main.

Google’s decision to stop federation of XMPP between “third-party” (to Google) servers and their own basically means they are limiting the use of their servers to Google account holders only.  I expect that in due course, Google Talk itself will be retired fully so that their own official client will no longer work.  (The Android app has already been replaced with “Google Hangout”.)  This is not unlike Facebook Chat, which also uses XMPP, but at least they have been clear from day one that they will not be federating with anyone else and have always operated a “closed” server.

It’s a stark reminder that when a company promises “free”, there’s usually a catch, and if they promise “forever”, that means “until we feel like discontinuing it”.  People who were relying on both of those terms meaning what they say they do, have just received a nasty shock.

If you were using Google Talk to communicate with my XMPP server, then you will now need to find another XMPP account to use instead.  Thankfully, there are many different servers around the world who offer such accounts, one of the best known being jabber.org but many other sites are available too, and this link has a list of some of them.  You can of course, if you are able to, run your own XMPP server using one of many open-source or commercial XMPP servers available.

Once you’ve registered an account, if you need an XMPP client, there are many to choose from, and many are open source.  Popular ones available for Windows, Mac and Linux include Psi, Pidgin, Adium, and many more.  For Android users, Xabber is available for Android from the Google Play store, and there are also plenty for other types of smartphones (though I have no direct experience of them).  Some of these clients also can do voice calls now, which again due to a choice made by Google, was never available between third-party servers and Google Talk, only between their own customers.

At least Google’s decision hasn’t killed XMPP, the protocol, which is still an open standard, and still has millions of users worldwide, I’d encourage everyone to continue to use a standard which isn’t going to go away because one particular (large) company says so.

(And, in case you’re wondering, my Google Hangouts app on my Android phone is still disabled, just as the Google Talk one was before it.)