So yesterday I gave the first airing of a talk I have wanted to give for a while called The Realities of LLU in Ireland at UKNOF7. The Title is a bit silly but such is life.
I am planning to give this talk or a version of it at BarCamp Dublin in a few weeks but I have some doubts over how suitable it is for the event.

The talk covers a number of areas including brief history of irish telecoms that impacts on LLU, How an operator goes about unbundling an exchange, how do we unbundle customers to deliver services and finally what are the coming changes that will impact on LLU. The slides form a lose structure in which I talked about the nature of the ISP market in Ireland and anything else that seemed related.

John having recently joined the UKNOF Programme Committee ment that Colm from Joost and Donal from HEAnet were also giving talks which were really informative and in the case of Donal’s talk on NOC tools it gave me some interesting ideas for tools to use within Magnet.

For good measure a boat as well. Got home this afternoon after being caught up in the fun in heathrow last night. Full story to follow.

Apologies that this is work related but it needs to be somewhere google can find it.
Every so often I see someone complaining on one forum or another *cough* boards.ie *cough* complaining that we do not let customers configure the firewall on their modems. There is a reason for this.

The reason we don’t let customer configure their modems firewall is that it doesn’t do anything. Our modems are not acting as NAT routers / PPPoE Clients. They are basicly switches. This means no layer 3 handling, no need to map ports. So any config a user might apply would be ignored. Also should a user put the modem into routed mode a TV stream or two and it will melt. DSL modems are not exactly high powered. The other reason we do not let users fiddle with the modem is because we have QOS settings to protect both the TV and Voice traffic.

So how does it work: You plug in your PC and it requests an IP address via DHCP. The DLSAM and the provisioning system have a quick conversation and then assign your PC an IP address. A unique Public IP address which supports any application. The only filtering we do on a customers port is some basic stuff to prevent common viruses and spam bots.

If you then plug in another PC, your friends laptop when they are visiting, that new xbox you got for your birthday they will just be assigned an IP address of their own. Magnet’s FTTH and LLU networks have been certified as suitable for use with xbox live. 95% of the tests didn’t apply to our networks because we don’t do things like NAT.

The reason we do not let users configure the firewall is that it has no function.
Anyway here ends the Rant.

Someone just posted the sign below above our water cooler in work. I despair for the state of the world.

So what were we looking at using the silly 3D glasses.

This was painted by people during the Customer Appreciation Event at Networkers with the help of some professional supervision. The blue and greens work really well with the glasses to give the impression of multiple layers somewhat like a Printed Circuit Board.

So I was testing our new EPG (Electronic Programme Guide, the menu system on the Set Top Box) at home and one of the nice features is you can view the channel listings with the channels sorted by popularity the data for which is gathered in real time. This is a really cute feature which shows the potential which an IP based system can deliver compared to traditional systems.

There is one downside. You get to discover that the most popular channel is showing Celebrity Big Brother. I despair for the general population, well at least 17% of them. I think I should insert lots of dummy viewers to skew the stats in favour of programmes that I know are good and therefore encourage people to watch better TV.

Living it up here at networkers in Cannes. Just spent all day learning even more multicast. Brain melting. Cisco Ireland have offered to buy me dinner though. So things are looking up.

Having been reading boards.ie and this rant is mainly because I can’t just flame all those people with misguided understanding of the ISP market as it would make work look bad. Anyone not interested look away now.

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Going to be very busy for the next few weeks but it should be fun.

He has finally achieved the holy grail and managed to find someone to pay him to watch TV.

I despair for the world.