Dave’s Downtime

As you can see the site has had a bit of a face lift.  Thanks to Rob for the assistance with the guides and the Gimp [and if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry….it’s nothing perverse]!

Comments welcome about the “new look”!

Again, more archive material that has been looking for a permanent home.

This time a subnet calculator program for J2ME capable devices/phones, that I created a few years ago.

I put a link to this in the new link section that can be found on the main pages “side bar” .

Enjoy!

I was working my way through some old backups this weekend and found some old university work.  Most prominent of which was my old “Global Brain” research and comment from old Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence module.

This used to have a permanent home on the University of Derby’s website, but itlooks like that they have removed it!  [boo!]

So I have put it back up on the new website, where it can languish, collecting dust for another 11 years. [has it really been that long - sigh!]

I am currently getting ready to write a “primer” whitepaper for my clients regarding the implications of IPv6.  This has involved reading a lot of literature from a variety of different sources, all of which offer an explanation of what IPv6 is and why is its implementation is imminent. [is that too many “I"s for one sentence?]

These explanations can be summarised as “we are running out of old [IPv4] IP addresses and IPv6 offers more.  A lot more.”

Each of these technical explanations then offers an analogy about how many IPv6 addresses there really are.  Some have come up with various ingenious/improbable/crazy ways to express this really large number.  I thought I would share a few with you:

To put this into perspective: there are currently 130 million people born each year. If this number of births remains the same until the sun goes dark in 5 billion years, and all of these people live to be 72 years old, they can all have 53 times the address space of the IPv4 Internet for every second of their lives. Let nobody accuse the IETF of being frugal this time around.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/03/IPv6.ars/2

This extra character length allows IPv6 to produce 340 undecillion - that's 34,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - IP addresses. Or, to put it another way, several billion addresses for each person on earth.

[http://www.silicon.com/technology/networks/2011/03/02/ipv6-cheat-sheet-39747054/]

To help put this number in perspective, a 128-bit address space provides 655,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 (6.5´10²³) addresses for every square meter of the Earth’s surface.

[Microsoft Corporation - Introduction to IP Version 6 - 2008]

If each IP address is the size of small drop of water....the IPv4 space is about the size of a telephone box...the IPv6 address space is about the size of the sphere of Mercury. [Nigel Titley (RIPE NCC Chairman, 6UK Chairman and also Easynet's Global Peering and Transit Manager) - Easynet Breakfast Briefing on IPv6 - 22nd September 2011 - London]

IPv6 addresses are being currently being allocated at a very fast rate, and with really large allocation size per applicant. If this contiues for the next 50 years....we will have used approximately 2% of available addresses. [Nigel Titley (RIPE NCC Chairman, 6UK Chairman and also Easynet's Global Peering and Transit Manager) - Easynet Breakfast Briefing on IPv6 - 22nd September 2011 - London]

If you have any more examples, please post them here.  I find them vaguely funny.

I awoke this morning to find my bed-side radio, which is usual tuned to be Radio 4, informing me that UK broadband users are being swindled. The nasty terrible Internet Service Providers are over selling their products and the whole industry was guilty of mis-advertising.

I then went downstairs, and BBC breakfast news continued to tell myself and the British public they were being ripped off. Not that I watch BBC Breakfast News for it quality output or noteworthy delivery of journalist content, you understand. But I do like to start the day with a good old rant and shout at the screen, and I find that the moronic BBC presenters on this show generates the correct amount of hostility. (This is opposed to ITV’s breakfast telly, which usually results in me destroying the TV set).

Ofcom comes up with its report into advertised broadband speeds and actual user experience, and the pessimistic press suddenly appear to tell us all we have a significant consumer affairs issue. They only focusing on the bad aspects of the report, and make out that it’s the telecommunications industry’s fault that Mister Joe Public can’t download his porn in double quick time.

I totally disagree with the way that this issue is being reported. There are various things that are set out in the Ofcom report, which I have read in detail, that seem to be missing from the popular press' coverage. In the interest of fair-play, I would like to offer some kind of balance, by pointing out some of the findings overlooked by more sensationalist outlets:

Residential super-fast broadband and high speed Internet is on the increase. By quite a lot. To quote directly from the report:

"...test data suggests that average download speeds in the UK increased by 5% between May and November/December 2010, this following an increase of 27% between April 2009 and May 2010."

[Point 1.5 - http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/telecoms-research/broadband-speeds/speeds-nov-dec-2010/]

My second gripe is with why an “Up to” advertised speed is such an issue. I’m an intelligent man. I know that if someone quotes a figure and it is prefixed with the words “Up to”, I know that they are talking about a range from zero to that number. In a similar way, if someone is advertising a product at “prices from”, I understand that this is going to be the minimum price and I am unlikely to buy the product at the price. It is a guide. I agree with Ofcom’s recommendation that a Typical Speed Range (TSR) should also be included in advertisements and sales literature, to give an indication of what an average user experience will be. But again, the end consumer needs to realise that this is still just a guide. That’s why telecommunication links are always sold “subject to survey”.

It is going to be a long time before we get to accurately quote actual line speeds for all users, as ranges of line quality and distances from exchange vary from property to property, region to region and technology to technology.

The press coverage also focuses on the bandwidth speed only. There is no mention of service availability/stability, price, latency/delay or customer service. All of these things are important factors when deciding on a broadband provider.

So….to summarise….things aren’t all bad….users should wise up….the press should be more positive and stop scaremongering….and life may end up being a little better for everyone.