Me (quietly): Hey, quick question, $other_manager, is he dyslexic?
HR Manager (loudly, not caring): No, he’s just stupid *walks off*

Can’t say fairer than that….

BT Openreach, the part of BT responsible for the exchanges and the physical copper that comes to your door, has an address matching system. You get a bronze, silver or gold match depending on whether BT Openreach already knows about the address (gold), whether Openreach doesn’t but it can find it in the Post Office database (silver) or not at all (bronze). Problem is that unless you have a gold match, you can’t book an engineer and since it’s a datacenter and there’s special site instructions for access and location, we want a match.

So, in goes the address for Redbus Sovereign House. Excellent – 3 Gold match addresses. We chose the top one and Simon and I stop for a second and blink. The address is <some ISP>, Floor 8, Telecity Redbus, Sovereign House, Marsh Wall, London. Problem with that is that Sovereign House only has 5 floors.

But it’s a gold match. So we booked it. Now we wait for the Engineer to call us when he arrives on site. “Er, hi, this order. Um, I can’t find the location listed…”

In principle, I have no problem with this – in fact, to a degree, I welcome it. It brings Skype back to the realms of telephones in terms of law enforcement and contrary to Big Brother theorists, despite even my own somewhat dubious police experiences at times, I do believe that this is a good thing and that the law enforcement agencies are, in general, trying to Do the Right Thing.

Skype is telling those users that they are going to withdraw the 0207 numbers they’ve paid for. As an apology they’re giving users 12 months free SkypeIn for another London number – only this time on the new 0203 range. They offer no explanation for why they’re doing this – so what’s going on?

A little digging shows that the numbers sold by Skype are actually allocated by Ofcom to a company called Gamma Telecom – a fairly well-known UK telecommunications provider. So Skype is renting the numbers from Gamma and re-selling them onto users. That’s not so bad right? I mean, it’s like setting up a company that leases cars and you then rent those cars out to people. Except you don’t usually put the make, model and registration number of your car on a business card as a means of contacting you.

Now, personally I have to question the sense behind buying a SkypeIn number for business use, but that’s a separate conversation. The simple fact of the matter is that Skype knows people are using this for business purposes – they’re actively marketing it to businesses – and yet they’ve let this situation develop. What’s the actual root cause is unknown – it may be that Skype and Gamma have had some kind of commercial disagreement, as happens from time to time, and Gamma are withdrawing Skype’s services. Either way, this is a hard blow for Skype to take, especially following their recent two-day outage.

Happily, I can say that the way we’re designing Freewire means that this won’t happen to us. Although we don’t offer a public number at the moment, we’re going about it the right way – we’re a proper telephone service provider, and we’ll get our numbers from Ofcom. We have interconnect agreements to allow people to contact us from all over the place. We’ve built a carrier-grade platform that can provide a reliable service. And we will, at some point in the near future, be able to ‘port’ numbers in and out – so not only will our users be able to bring their numbers with them, but users who are leaving will be able to take their numbers to their new provider.

Isn’t this how all telephone providers should operate?

By no means is the work over though. There were a number of features that we’ve had to defer to version 2.1 purely because we didn’t have time to implement them – and this is one company where the development cycle is important. We even had a feature that we fixed yesterday and managed to get it working in time – but it couldn’t go in to the final delivery since we’d already stopped making improvements and were just concentrating on fixing critical issues. We’ve got other projects – we have to integrate the existing phone systems of the Universities that we’re present in; there’s the whole Cable and Wireless project which is going full steam ahead; there’s rolling out in other territories and there’s the dozens of fantastic projects that the sales guys are bringing to us that I can’t even think about right now. Of course, we’ll have the usual spate of support issues, I have no doubt, but our testing is complete and we’re live.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to writing a few articles about some of the cool and funky things we’ve been doing recently that I haven’t had time to blog about because I’ve been doing them. I’ll also be blogging about what we’ve got coming. Suffice to say, this project has me really excited – and the company I’m working for and people I’m working with makes that a safe but excited feeling – there’s things in place to make sure that above all, it works.

Anyway, enough for now, I’m off to see what’s broken this morning.

We’re in the week leading up to our first live customers on the system so to say we’ve been busy would like be like calling the surface of the sun “warm”. I’ve been working hard trying to get our voice platform finished. Yesterday and today, I decided to take a little time off – it’s been too long since I had a day to myself. As luck would have it, my DIY plans went out the window when the pager went off yesterday afternoon. I rushed up to base and had myself a little blue-light drive up to Dolygaer Outdoor center in Alpha. There the ambulance service had asked us for some assistance to bring down a mountain biker who’d gone over the handlebars.

With that sorted I headed home with the intention of putting some shelves up. Sean and I sat down to some food and feeling that I still needed to catch up on sleep, I closed my eyes for an hour or so on the couch. Unfortunately, around 1900, I was rudely awoken by the pager and headed off again – this time to the Neath Valley waterfalls to find a missing diabetic woman – fortunately she was found on the side of the road and so we finished that one off pretty quickly. On the way home however, we were asked to respond to another incident – a missing woman somewhere around Pen Y Fan. We diverted from base and headed off. Brecon had already spotted what they thought was her but they were on the wrong side of the valley. Once we got to the Neuadd pumphouse, it was just a matter of heading up onto the ridge and walking the lady down. It was a long day though, ending as it did around midnight.

Today I headed off to WICC to represent the team in a climbing competition – far from being a serious competition, this was a bit of fun. Taking a Landrover and some buckets to collect money down, I met up with Lee and Mal and Louisa. Not being the strongest of climbers, we were somewhat relieved when the piercing sounds of the pagers going off meant that we had to bow out early. Racing away from the climbing center in a blaze of blue lights, we headed through Nelson over to Cwm Carn Forest Drive to pick up another fallen cyclist. A quick assist to the Fire Service and we headed down for a quick ice cream before heading home.

So tonight I will sleep well. Thank God, because I think I need it.

So the weekend has been spent doing pretty much nothing. A bit of food shopping and sorting out clothes happened yesterday – nothing exciting. Today however we’ve been hard at work. Remember how I posted about that lovely bright green I painted my bathroom? Well, those of you who know my house know just how bright that colour is. As a result, I’ve decided to finally get around to toning it down a bit so today Sean and I have been sanding the walls down ready for a repaint. It’ll need a few coats of white to bring it to a nice even colour and then I can try out some testers. Looking forward to this.

Next week is going to be fun and very busy. As we’re putting together various parts of the network I’ll post them up here. It really does surprise people sometimes about just how much thought we’re putting into making this platform resilient – especially the voice side of things.

Besides that, things are coming together. We’ve had (almost) the last delivery now – our PDUs are here ready for installation next week. We’re still waiting for some Foundry load balancers to arrive from the USA but once they’re here that’s it. This evening I’ve been getting ready to install our billing application, the snappily-titled “Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management” platform (everyone still calls it “Portal” – which is what it’s name was before Oracle bought them). I’m working my way from the back forwards, so with Oracle working on the backend, I can get get Portal working and have something to test it against. Once that’s up and running, it’s mainly a case of getting our own software to talk everything then.

Exciting times. Busy, but exciting.

I’ve been reading the document for Inuk since not only does this affect us but I also want to submit a response to it to make sure that our views are heard. The report has some astounding figures. Some 10% of the UK population currently have a VoIP service – a number which has double in the past 12 months and bodes well for us. This a booming market and this is in part why Ofcom wants to bring in these changes.

In their survey, Ofcom discovered that of those who have a VoIP service of some sort, some 76% of all respondents were confused about whether the service offered access to 999 (or 112) services – an appalling figure. Ofcom themselves in the last study left the industry to sort itself out over this and set out some guidelines. I think that there are a few problems here. Firstly, there’s only one incentive for VoIP providers to fork out and provide 999 services – number portability. Ofcom won’t let you participate in number portability unless you offer 999. Number portability allows consumers to take their number with them when changing providers and is broadly seen as one of the key features of the UK telecoms industry.

Secondly, 999 access is one of the ‘gating criteria’ defined by Ofcom. These four features separate the wheat from the chaff – they are the minimum requirement for a provider wishing to offer a Publically Accessible Telephone Service (PATS), the type of provider with the greatest power. Once you are a PATS provider, however, there are many things that you are required to do to provide a service that could potentially cost a fair amount. Although in their recent document, Ofcom has evaluated the impact on potential loss of life due to this situation against the potential costs of becoming a PATS provider and found that the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks, the drawbacks are all direct costs to the providers, whereas the benefits are all based on the saving of lives. As a result, providers see a direct cost but no direct benefit only indirect benefit.

The problem is that some of these conditions that you have to meet as a PATS mean a lot of work and money – and that would necessitate a fairly serious change in the way that Skype operates. In fact, it’s arguable that Skype cannot meet at least one of the general conditions because of the way it uses P2P technology. So is this the end?

Probably not, however this ruling is going to hit Skype quite hard. I can’t see them offering 999 services – it’s too much work and money for them to invest. However it does mean that they’ll have to change their business model in the UK. It’s going to be a difficult time for them, so watch this space.

And our platform? Well, I predicted that this was going to happen back in March when I composed a report internally. As a result, we’re already geared up for this. Our product will launch in September with the capability to call 999 and we’ll be meeting all of the General Conditions set by Ofcom. I’m pretty proud of that fact – it means that we’ve got a service you can compare with the likes of BT. A whole different league to Skype.

The company I joined is called Inuk Networks (pronounce In-ook). They are what’s known as a triple-play provider – providing TV, Telephone and Broadband services through a brand called Freewire. So plenty of people do this already – Sky, NTL and Virgin to name three – what’s different about Inuk and Freewire? Well, the difference is in how we deliver our service. Our entire service is delivered over IP.

Sky have a satellite distribution system which means you need a dish on the side of your house and NTL and Virgin are cable-only services, meaning that they not only have to have cable in your area, but that they also need to dig up your street a bit to put a new service in. We’ve taken a different approach. With so many homes and premises these days getting broadband and the amount of bandwidth available to the home increasing, we’ve chosen broadband as a delivery mechanism. But isn’t this terribly inefficient and costly to stream all that video down an ADSL connection? Well, yes, but we’ve been clever about this.

Basically, we use multicast to send our TV streams to the end user. That’s basically a way of only sending out one stream from our end and having each router replicate the stream for each path it needs – this page on our website explains it clearly. That means that we can scale to millions of users and still only need to have the same amount of bandwidth going out of our network. It also means a scaleable and efficient delivery mechanism for HD – yup, we could potentially deliver HD streams to your home over your DSL connection. So, that’s great – anyone can get it right?

Well, no, and this is where it gets a little difficult. The way that BT has built their DSL product it pretends to be one piece of cable from your house all the way back to your ISP. The ISP then pays for the bandwidth they use. The problem with that is that multicast needs a common path between two households to make it work. For example you and your next door neighbour probably share the same exchange. Your telephone line ends up in the same building with the same equipment. Then there’s one pipe back from your exchange all the way into BT’s core network where it then goes to the ISP. Great! Well, no. The way ADSL works is that the connection is ‘tunneled’ and basically all you see is a cable between you and the ISP. This means that it doesn’t scale well. Which is bad news.

Of course with any bad news, there’s good news, and it’s called LLU or Local Loop Unbundling. This allows someone to take the telephone line to your house away from BT and build up your own delivery network. Effectively it’s like cable except you’re using BT’s existing network. The good news about this is that it’s already here – we’ve signed a deal with Cable and Wireless to provide an IPTV system over DSL connections. Even better is the assertion that if other people are doing it, BT isn’t going to be far behind.

So that’s what I’m up to. I’m going to be posting more stuff up here as time goes on, with a few posts appearing in fairly quick succession. Our rollout is happening at the moment and we’re expecting to go live very, very soon so watch this space. So yeah, it’s groundbreaking, it’s fun and I’m really enjoying myself. So you’ll excuse me if I’m a little bit scarce for a while.