Posts by sebbb

Brit broadband subscribers caught between crappy connections and price hikes

Re return on investments...

Maybe they could've thought about a network that intelligently was ready for full unbundling? In Italy there's two networks and they can do full PON unbundling with compact and small street cabinets housing splitters, so everyone could use the passive network as they want (GPON/XGSPON/10GEPON/whatever you want), invest together in fewer cables around the country and lowering costs for everyone. But of course, why thinking about it before... Meanwhile, I don't complain surely about my FTTP, but having these poles outside with 6 CBTs on them and wires around like it's 1910.

Critical infrastructure gear is full of flaws, but hey, at least it's certified

Re: Is anyone surprised ?

Because you know, why make things proper done when you can rush to market, sell and make money and then, eventually, think about what was needed to be fixed?

Re: But they said it's Huawei that's the problem

Are you still surprised that it was a political decision and not a technical one?

Most Londoners would quit before they give up working from home

Re: Terminlogy clarification for the uninformed please

Just fyi and because I want to give a little context (trying not to name the company...) but up until 2015 my company was pretty much a small insignificant company with maybe 20-30 employees, then it launched a software platform for automation that made it become today a 4k+ employees in the world, public at NYSE company.

I honestly agree. Infrastructure architect here, currently living in zone 3 SE London. My company is never going to do that, as we had flexible working even before the pandemic and it was actually a start-up until not long ago... but when considering new job offers, max 2 days from the office. There is no reason anyways to have rigid rules, work where, when and how needed - not necessarily in an office chair (yes, I know it doesn't apply to all jobs, but here we're about tech jobs).

I am also considering moving further out now, because it's becoming quickly ridiculous with landlords pushing up rents by the hundreds more a month "because inflation".

Lufthansa flights grounded by major IT snafu, 'construction work' blamed

Fiber... shred

Deutsche Telekom confirms too

https://twitter.com/deutschetelekom/status/1625587220785598464

https://twitter.com/deutschetelekom/status/1625824840924950528

G7 countries beat UK in worldwide broadband speed test again

Re: What is "enough"?

I have their 600Mb and tbf as we work in IT we should be able to appreciate the advantages of that. I'm 99% working from home and downloading stuff is a breeze with this connection, especially the ability to do multiple bandwidth intensive tasks in parallel is a big deal for me and there's still space for the other people in the house that would want to watch Netflix and such or download a game (which nowadays are fantastically big, there's titles on Steam around 100-150GB to pull down). I guess it depends though on the family requirements.

Re: What is "enough"?

If you want to guarantee a minimum performance with VDSL2 or GFast is going to be impossible. Distance from cabinet, crosstalk and interference from other EMFs, issues with wiring both outdoor and indoor... there's no other way around than fibre to the home to give an equal service to everyone. The fast speeds are a separate matter in my opinion, that's commercial stuff (and as I say in my post above, in some countries like Italy where take-up is incredibly slow they pushed on the big numbers to try convince customers and now we actually see that in the UK too with some of the local ISPs).

Italy's problem...

is the population digital skills (very low skilled in average) which brings to extremely low take up of FTTH, with a few other facts to consider: there's no cable at all (CATV was blocked at the time of its birth and has never been considered since); mobile data is among the cheapest in the EU (when I go to my parents in Italy I have a prepaid eSIM that for 8€ a month gives me 150GB); people are also not willing very often to carry out the adequate works needed in some cases to bring the fibre cable indoors, because Italy doesn't particularly like aerial fibre, its population likes to live primarily "in my own home" which means single detached self-built houses, it must be underground and this means those customers will happily remain on ADSL/FTTC.

So priority of people is cheap, not fast or performant internet, and zero fuss about installation.

On the other hand, nowadays you can get a 1000/300 on GPON for under 25-28€ a month and 2.5G/1G for around 34-36€ a month.

When free and open source actually means £6k-£8k per package: Atos's £136m contract with NHS England

Re: Not enough skills?

If only the NHS was willing to pay them enough. As I said further up, I was in the infrastructure team of a CCG and I left because there was no money for software or hardware, no upskilling of existing employees, no salary increases, but plenty of stress and responsibilities to handle.

Of course, there's always money for the manager that outsourced and "reduced running costs".

Re: IY@

and this was one of the reasons I left the IT dept at my CCG... because whenever trying to complain that low salaries = low skills the solution was to outsource it. Yeah, outsource the risk but still to low paid workers learning on their spare time. At least you have someone to blame though!

Ofcom says no price controls on full-fibre broadband until 2031, giving BT's Openreach the kick to 'build like fury'

Re: Meanwhile in the real world...

To be honest, it depends. In the area of London where I live they are building like fury indeed, in a matter of a month I saw FTTP distribution points appear everywhere on the poles. An area (south east London) where there are still streets without even FTTC available. In a city like London it is (to me) just ridiculous when cities like Milan were cabled in FTTH since 2001 (yes, 2001). Regulation won't make them build faster, it would just squeeze their margins and for FTTH rollout you need to invest upfront a massive amount of money with customers upgrading only gradually (if any, because they could very well hold on to their existing service to avoid engineer visits and works).

OVH says some customer data and configs can’t be recovered after fire, some seems to be OK, plenty is safe

erm... it depends if those customers -PAID- for off site backups. AFAIK, those who were paying for the service called "FTP Backup" are safe because those were transferred at Roubaix DC. It's the same drill with every cloud provider, example: Azure Backups, nice. Then you use LRS (locally redundant storage) because it costs less and this happens, you lost backups there as well. "But Geo-redundant storage is expensive!", will say the bean counters...

Up yours, Europe! Our 100% prime British broadband is cheaper than yours... but also slower and a bit of a rip-off

Re: Disingenuous advertising

Well... I didn't know that broadband was a toy... especially after 2020.

In Italy in the last few years the growth has been enormous on FTTP, to enable small towns (which are the majority of where people live) to not die and stimulate innovation. They brought FTTP to my town of 350 people, 30€ gets you 1000/300 line. All of this with national but also EU funds, as it was part of european objectives. The UK could've done the same thing. Oh wait...

Comcast to impose 1.2TB-a-month broadband download limits across more of America from next year

Re: $30 extra for unlimited?

Italy on Sky is 29€, VAT included, for 1000/300 unlimited.

Cisco’s 'intuitive security' tool can’t handle MAC address randomization out-of-the-box

Re: Yet another elastoplast with unexpected consequences?

But they do allow. At least in Android, you can still switch to the real device MAC address in the wireless network profile. Furthermore, if the device is company-issued, there are policies you can pre-apply to it (and I know this works in iOS as well) in order to not randomize the MAC address when connecting to company WiFi. For the public WiFis, I actually see it as a good thing, no reason to not randomize it. Same thing BTW goes with Windows 10, as it does the exact same thing now by default with every wireless connection.

Networking boffins detect wide abuse of IPv4 addresses bought on secondary market

While I'm an all-in "dictator" in my company in support of IPv6, this issue is not really 100% resolved with that, as we will still need IPv4 for a while (while people get less moany about v6). This is normal when you have a limited resource that you still need for stuff to function.

Asia’s internet registry APNIC finds about 50 million unused IPv4 addresses behind the sofa

Re: Wont someone think of the routing table?

"Just add some RAM to that router! Ah and some CPUs to not kill the entire 'net when recalculating routes"

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

Every time ElReg gets an article on IPv6 out I read a lot of us fellas on here against IPv6 and I ask myself: do you not play with stuff at home? I mean, I love to have my static /56 on my Mikrotik, I don't have to do port forwarding and weird things to host various stuff in my network... and most importantly: do you know how annyoing it is the alternative? CG-NAT? No thanks, I want my public IP. And we don't have enough IPv4s to do that. End of the story. As a network engineer, I always found IPv6 to be so much relaxed and easy than IPv4.

Internet samurai says he'll sell 14,700,000 IPv4 addresses worth $300m-plus, plow it all into Asia-Pacific connectivity

Re: No v4 unless you're doing v6

It should be something absolutely like this, and whoever's too lazy to learn something new (well... more like 20+ years old...) can find another job. My company (transit folks...) already has a peering policy that it will accept only dual stack on new agreements.

Read again slowly and carefully the last sentence, after the semicolon...

IT services sector faces armageddon as COVID-19 lockdown forces project cancellations – analysts

Re: Big outsourced contracts will fail but the right startups won't

I've been also working from home since three weeks ago and I've never had so many customer calls remotely... Everyone want automation now and the fact that we are not ONLY India based, but global and sparse, make everything easy and we can just keep going business as usual, just doing it from home. Maybe IT companies should start thinking again that saving the penny today doesn't save the pound tomorrow...

Equinix closes data centres to customers, contractors in France, Germany, Italy, Spain amid coronavirus pandemic

If people stay home and follow the hygiene rules there shouldn't be a huge impact. Of course, if people want to follow Pa Johnson instead...

Corporate VPN huffing and puffing while everyone works from home over COVID-19? You're not alone, admins

Re: Split-tunnelling? Security madness, surely?

If you refer to teachers, well it's their home and they're adults. If you refer to children, well it's their home and the parents should be responsible and know how to deal with their children. Ah wait...

Re: Not just VPN accounts

IF they are going to buy them. "Nah, just reset that grace period"

Broadband providers can now flog Openreach's new IP voice network in bid to ditch UK's copper phone lines by 2025

It's nothing new in other countries though. In Italy it's been the case since the introduction of VDSL2, actually there were also some ADSL offers with VoIP telephony. There is an issue yes with FTTC being not under UPSs, but also in other countries which are switching fast to FTTP the issue is no more: FTTP is finally the needed switchover from copper that retains backup facilities in the local exchange and it still works with no power. Not being able to have a decent service in London in 2020 is honestly shameful.

We need to make it even easier for UK terror cops to rummage about in folks' phones, says govt lawyer

Re: Wipe Password

iPhones do that, you can set that after 10 wrong attempts to unlock the phone gets wiped completely.

Looking for a great value broadband deal? War-torn Syria will do you proud

Re: Price per Mbps

Being an italian living in the UK, I know very well the situation. However, not all north regions are that healthy, especially the one where I come from (Friuli Venezia Giulia). You're right in saying that one of the very big issues is disperse houses that characterise the italian towns. But I think that this year will really come with acceleration, most of the problems with authorisations and planning have been solved and completed and the works are now a lot more smoothly running. In my area in the mountains it is quite at a good point, maybe the fact that we had even no ADSL most of the times fuelled our appetite for broadband and councils were very interested to get it done fast and quick. Putting fibre everywhere is after all the biggest project in telecoms history since the development of the copper PSTN.

Of course the incumbent wants to get in the way of that deployment, especially when despite the long standing calls for spinning off the network we still have an infrastructure completely owned by the incumbent which also controls investment (on this point we have to admit that the british have done it better with Openreach)... TIM won't ever give up the property of the copper network (given it was used as guarantee for their enormous debt made post-privatisation).

Re: Price per Mbps

Majority of Spain is FTTP, as the article said, so physical issues that affect copper (hence the performance drop) are not an issue with full fibre. In Italy as well, which is mentioned in the ranking as one of the cheapest, you get 1Gb/300Mb for 29€. The issue with Italy at the moment is adoption, people are not switching that fast to FTTP as they should, so the speed average remains low. However, when the rollout in rural areas will also complete around 2021, things will be pretty much looking like Romania (apart from the wires hanging from the poles).

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

Re: "We have now run out of IPv4 addresses"

In fact sometimes reading comments on IP tech I wonder if this is a website with technical and enthusiast people or just a bunch of tired-to-chase-tech people that would rather stick with their (99.9% of the times) switchzilla gear of 1999 and have no Internet at home. I don't know, it's sad that professional IT audience doesn't understand that "keep patching it again Tony" doesn't work for long and they need to start their brains and learn something new, throw away that CCNA book. And then I wondered why half of people showing up for interviews at me had no mental flexibility to solve problems.

Re: The internet will be privatised

There are techniques for avoiding IPv4 in an ISP network and still provide access to IPv4 Internet to customers. It's the reverse situation of tunnelling IPv6.

Yes, Sky gives you a static (as it should be) /56 global subnet.

London has decent 5G availability but speeds lag behind Birmingham and Cardiff – research

London has decent 5G availability...

but in SE16 there's still ADSL2+, while in Milan metro area there was FTTH 10/10 in 2001... and now it's 1000/100. Meh.

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

Re: Seems fine to me

Mainland Italy to Sardegna as well, there's a big HVDC cable of 1MW @ 500kV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAPEI

Plan to strip post-Brexit Brits of .EU domains now on hold: Registry waves white flag amid political madness

Re: Does the UK require citizenship for .uk domains?

Erm... for .us there are requirements:

"an individual who is a citizen of, or lives in, the United States and any of it possessions or territories.

An organisation or company based within the United States, or any of its possessions or territories. This includes all non-commercial, federal, state, or local governmental organisations, and their respective subdivisions, as long as they are based within the United States.

A foreign entity or organisation with a bona fide presence within the United States or any of its possessions or territories. This means that a foreign business or entity can register the domain, as long as they maintain an office or similar property within the United States, or regularly engage in lawful activities within the United States. For example, this includes the sales of goods or services within the United States. In cases such as these, the applicant must state their country of citizenship."

As there are for a lot of other domain names. I wanted to register once a .no domain, but Norway restricts that to citizens, residents or companies based in the country...

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

Re: Fraud?

"consider instead purchasing the relevant UK satellite broadcast package to view the programmes" muahahahahah I think I'll just give up TV, license, decoder to view my italian channels and just wait praying no hunger will come before my relocation to Germany in June.

Sod 3G, that can go, but don't rush to turn off 2G, UK still needs it – report

Well, think about time signal via LW which controls the so-called "radio controlled" clocks. It pretty much covers the entire world via giant masts around the continents, with powers of a few hundred kW, when they could use GPS... but the circuitry to put GPS in clocks would make them more expensive and complex to build, hence it's just easier to keep going with that.

Openreach's cunning plan to 'turbocharge' the post-Brexit economy: Getting everyone on full-fibre broadband by 2025

Re: Digital leader?

That's because for now there is a very slow adoption rate. Contracts used to be 2 years in Italy, with some being even 4 years (48 months contract!) And the average speed is not helped by the fact that Italy, among all countries, has a population that is massively scattered across the land, not concentrated. Think that Rome (which is the largest city) is only about 3mln people.

As for the pricing, well simply google one of the carriers, Tiscali, Vodafone, Fastweb, TIM... you can see the offers online. And the two infrastructure providers have coverage maps on their website, FlashFiber and OpenFiber (state owned).

Re: Digital leader?

Considering that even in Italy, in every medium city (or province main city) you get FTTH 1000/300 for 30€ a month... the UK is by far no more the digital leader. And now with EU funds they're rolling it out also in rural areas, so soon even my parents will have better connectivity than me in London.

How to fix the global slowdown in broadband rollout: Redefine what broadband means

Re: Rural Broadband?

In Italy (but not only, however I take this as an exceptional example which was awarded also by UK's regulators) a public network is being built to bring FTTH to rural areas by 2021, it started in 2014 and there are already customers active on 1G/300M. Major cities were already covered in the past years by private investment (actually Milano had FTTH in 2001... 10M/10M). The network will be operated by any operator that wants to rent a line and provide service and it will generate revenue for the state. Ah but wait, those were EU funds...

Switch about to get real: Openreach bod on the challenge of shuttering UK's copper phone lines

Re: Network impact

You're clearly overthinking here... In other EU countries voice goes over a separate VLAN which carries private addressing to the SIP servers inside the ISP net, no need for anything you said. I had VoIP since 2010 on ADSL in Italy, if the ISP knows how to do networking (erm... yeah ok, major problem here) there is no issue at all. Although the wiring part is a very frustrating thing here in the UK, where in EU countries you have decent conduits with telephone wiring inside the walls, not a stapled line that gets removed every time you renew your house. So you have sockets in more rooms, you disconnect that internal wiring from the outside line and you connect the modem analog out there. All fine, you can keep going with analog phone inside your house.

Re: Will my traditional telephone still work?

Do rotary phones still work? I don't have one and never even connected a phone into my line in London, but in Italy all rotary phones ceased operations when they digitalised the exchanges, only DTMF phones since (I think) 2001. And since 2010 with FTTC and 2015 with FTTH there is no option to have analog line at all.

If they had done this seriously like in other EU countries, ISPs just give you a modem/router with built-in VoIP converter or you can just buy your own and they give you configs to setup VoIP (or autoconfiguration through TR169 like on Fritz!Box). For those with bare phone line, a small ATA preconfigured can be shipped to you.

Rolling in DoH: Chrome 78 to experiment with DNS-over-HTTPS – hot on the heels of Firefox

The major reason for what is happening here is this in my opinion: there is a technology, people don't want to adopt it or it's very slow in adoption. Then, let me use that for myself and embed it into my application. It's like IPv6 guys, nobody gives a s**t about it, so people have been trying to invent absurd alternatives like 6in4 and such. If adoption is the problem and I want to use something in my product, I'll implement it on my own. I think this is exactly what happened here at Mozilla and Google. If tomorrow MS comes our with a native DoH/DoT client in Windows, rest assured that perhaps these guys would give you the option to keep going with the usual way.

I don't agree with baking DoH into applications as somebody said here as well, that should still be a system-wide setting.

However, I do not agree with people thinking DoH is the wrong choice. I absolutely have no idea why I would want my ISP to intercept and log whatever I'm doing with my Internet connection, therefore why I installed on my home pfSense a nice DoH client and use it as default DNS for my whole network.

And as the discussion for local company networks goes instead, there's not much else to say IMHO: it's your network, you can block the IPs of the DoH servers, run your own beloved DNS and live happily ever after.

Get ready for a literal waiting list for European IPv4 addresses. And no jumping the line

They give away addresses until people dries them up, if you look closely also, IP lookups on PlusNet addresses seem to come from BT static addressing (their DNS is on the same subnet I've been given...)

Virgin Media promises speeds of 1Gpbs to 15 million homes – all without full fibre

Re: Gosh!

In Italy, Open Fiber (wholesale-only, 50% owned by the national electricity provider) is also rolling out FTTP at speed re-using their ducting and poles (outside cities), also when planning with councils they reuse as much as possible public lighting ducts to reduce the amount of digging. In 2015 we only recently started to have FTTC available, now every major city has access to 1Gbps FTTP. But it was the government, no EU legislation needed...

Re: 202?

It's all about willingness. In Italy VDSL on exchange-only lines (or "rigid" as they call them) has been deployed with 8b (higher power, frequency shifted) profile and off you go.

UK.gov drives ever further into Nocluesville, crowdsources how to solve digital identity

Re: Not that difficult...

The problem in that is (again) IDs and/or a form of DB with PID.

Italy, deemed to have the most insecure and counterfaited IDs in EU, started a few years ago with EIDs with chip and certificates. Now you'll be able to open bank accounts online, sign contracts etc because the service can verify the certificate validity against CA authority (Ministry of Interior, public run).

Even more, there's also a basic service that uses post offices to verify physically your identity and activates a pair of user ID/pass with MFA that you can use to prove your identity online in reading mode.

*Spits out coffee* £4m for a database of drone fliers, UK.gov? Defra did game shooters for £300k

Re: Insane

Don't give it for granted tho, given that favourite NHS fluffy stuff is Microsoft's...