National Grid Wireless

Today we received the documentation from NGW for locating transmitting equipment on their masts.

Not sure I believed the 23 stage flow chart they follow as part of their project management remit. It makes the Royal Families family tree look like a flipping seedling...

Looks like I am going to have a peaceful afternoon in the gents solstice with a couple of feet or spare loo roll ;-)
.

Www.NireNet.Net

Dedicated Servers

Today I have just placed an order for a pallet of Pentium 4 machines to provide dedicated servers to you chaps in NI.

They have come in at a stonking price as they are bankrupt reseller HP stock. We have alwasy said we won't supply beige box carp, but if you guys / gals want to put your own in that is fine. However beige box is generally too higher a support overhead. It is a different matter if the support is within your hands-on time, then effectively it is being paid for, but for our equipment leased as dedicated servers, this is not something I want.

They are quite impressive machines, a selection of P4 2.4 to 3.02Gig machines, all capable of twin hard disks and plenty of memory.

I have to pat myself on the back tbh as it was an excellent purchase. I would expect we can delivery a P4 2.4Ghz, 256meg memory and 20gig disk for around fifty quid setup and less than fifty quid a month.

Upgrades to standard spec will just be commercial list pricing from which ever supplier we buy the bits from with a very slightly increased monthly price if you have twin hard drives (due to maintenance costs and increased power consumption)

They are all capable of a selection of flavours of Linux, and CentOS, RH and Ubuntu drivers are HP default, as well as MS Windows.

Anyone want to pre-order a shelf full?
.

Www.NireNet.Net

Racks

Alex might have found a blinder today.

It is just possible we have located a decent rack re-furbishment company who seem to deal in decent quality kit (Compaq/HP/Kneurr/Prism) and if they do a decent job at a decent price, we might just be able to rag a rack setup price down to something really sensible.

All part of the service!
.

Www.NireNet.Net

BT 21CN Interconnect

Have just returned from a BT conference about the roll out of their 21CN network and how it affects existing broadband ISPs. Its a good job the coffee was strong as otherwise I could have had a free afternoons' sleep.

Anyhow, we are going to lodge an objection to their plans (many ISPs already have so we may as well join the list). The deal is that in the new 21CN network, BT will hand off "broadband" traffic to ISPs at a number of locations around the country. They are zoning regions and creating two (or more) aggregate nodes in each zone from which an ISP can gain access to local broadband customers' traffic. They have also proposed a charging model based on how far the ISP interconnects on BT's network from the customer.

While this all sounds fine in theory, they seem to have left Northern Ireland out fo this equation. NI has two "metro" nodes which are multi-linked back to the mainland via resilient and redundant routes which is all fine. However there is no Core node (where the ISP interconnects) which means all ISPs will have to take their NI customers' traffic in Manchester or similar, making the distance based charging model a bit of a farce for NI customers as they won't have the (potentially) cheaper "local user" based charging model available.

In reality I would imagine most ISP's will only interconnect with BT in say three locations and will take a balance of some local and some more distant customers and average the charge per customer, but we were looking at putting a local interconnect point in NI bringing the cost right down for local customers.

I will write and propose an objection to Ofcom and BT tomorrow to see if we can have any effect...
.

Www.NireNet.Net

Hot Property # 1

This morning I received an email stating that our requests for the #1 unit are in progress. Some have been agreed already (bolstering security, CCTV etc) and we are now awaiting approval for the Generators and Air-Con.

The agent doesn't think there will be a problem with either, and has granted access to work in the unit under license until occupation too. This is all excellent news and maybe, just maybe we will have the unit we want with agreement to allow us to use it to serve you folks in the very near future!
.

Www.NireNet.Net

Property Viewings

Ok, finally home.

Well we've seen all four units, and after spending the weekend driving around to choose them we did it well. All the units are usable and we can deliver services to you folks from them all.

However we do have some favourites. One unit is a dual floor one with plenty of space for the generators and the air-conditioning and outline approval from the agent on the spot. This is currently number one.

Second we have the brand new unit which we met the landlord at, and again seeing it was the landlord we could have answers to all the questions on the spot. The only downside to this unit is that there is no false ceiling in and it will be impossible to climate control the space without, so we have 2000 sqr foot of fire retardant suspended ceiling to install before we go any further. Bugger.

Unit three was the ex call centre and this is pretty good and will be quick to move into, but the power supply is completely inadequate and I am not really sure how they ran that many PCs from the incoming supply.

Finally the first floor office, well it has all the right space for generators and air-con but its not particularly secure and also its first floor and there is no lift, and I don't fancy lugging all the racks up the stairs, so that is number four.

We have sent confirmation emails to all the agents and await their written consent for all the requirements, but have not turned any of the properties down yet, having been burnt on this previously.

As soon as we have a response from at least number one and two, we will get them to produce outline contracts and get our WAN circuit orders in. Hopefully this will be during this week with a bit of luck.
.

http://www.nirenet.net/

Property Viewings

I am currently sitting in the hotel reception waiting for lazy assed Alex to get out of bed so we can view four properties today. He overslept and we are supposed to be 30 miles away through rush hour traffic in 55 minutes!

We have four viewings today and are no doubt going to have all the same issues about bolstering building security, adding substantial air conditioning and standby generators, and re-wiring the whole building etc.

The properties are: one brand new retail / industrial unit, one pair of combined retail / industrial unit which is currently occupied by one company who are going to revert to one unit, one ground floor in a large office complex (an ex call centre) and finally a first floor very presentable office with no lift!

As usual in our good planning, we have the appointments booked an hour apart but two are almost next to each other and the other two are the other side of town. Of course we didn't book the adjacent ones in adjacent hours so there will be much high speed driving around the area.

I will post more when we've seen them.
.

http://www.nirenet.net/