A Series of Tubes
An independent technology podcast…
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A Series of Tubes #63 — Networks as foreign aidSeptember 4th, 2008George McLaughlin learned about research networks the best way possible: inside AARNET for much of the 1990s. Since then, he’s taken his experience to the developing world. Before the end of this year, he’s due to start work on TEIN3, a project to deliver next-generation networking to an even bigger footprint. Richard Chirgwin talks to George McLaughlin about TEIN3, a project that’s even attracted the attention of the World Bank. In this week’s sponsor interview, Tubes talks to Nortel’s Marty Hatcher about how to talk IP communications to the SME market. A Series of Tubes #62 — What if we were nice to customers?August 28th, 2008Last week’s Tubes looked at how ISP customers can defend themselves from covert interference with their packets, using the EFF’s Switzerland software. There are, however, other ways to skin the “net neutrality” cat: what if, instead of punishing traffic they don’t like, ISPs found ways to help customers apply their own “premium service” decisions. Tubes discusses this with Parham Momtahan, VP of advanced technologies for subscriber management software vendor Bridgewater Systems. Tubes would also like to apologise for the absence of Nortel’s sponsor spot this week, due to an unexpected illness in our scheduled interviewee. A Series of Tubes #61 — A Swiss state of mindAugust 22nd, 2008The EFF in America, long battling against carriers throttling traffic streams like Bittorrent, this month added a new weapon to its armoury: Switzerland. Switzerland acts as a kind of error-check on traffic, so you can tell the difference between what you thought you sent and what the other end of the conversation received - and its author, Peter Eckersley, found the time to talk to Tubes last week. In this week’s sponsor interview, Richard Chirgwin talks to ProCurve’s Fotios Kotsiopoulos about QoS management in the enterprise. A Series of Tubes #60 — Very Tiny TubesAugust 7th, 2008We’re just at the beginning of a new age, where the wierdness of quantum physics becomes the workhorse of networks. For example, the city of Vienna is to get a prototype network usign quantum cryptography to secure communications. Tubes didn’t travel to Vienna, instead keeping our interview closer to home: this week, Richard Chirgwin interviews Dr Stephen Bartlett, Senior Lecturer at Sydney University’s Quantum Information Theory Group in the School of Physics, to talk about quantum communications - now and in the future. And in this week’s sponsor interview, Darren Leffler, product and solutions marketing manager for Nortel, talks about virtual conferences and Web 2.0 customer service. A Series of Tubes #59 — Filtering the tubesJuly 31st, 2008One thing you learn on the Internet is to stay out of the politics. For every view there’s a counter-view, and Internet politics is very polarised. However, when ACMA - the Australian Communications and Media Authority - released the results of tests showing improved performance from Internet filters, Tubes had its curiousity piqued. So in this week’s episode, Tubes talks to Devin Redmond, business development vice-president of filter vendor WebSense to ask “what’s changed?” Are filters more accurate, faster, with fewer false positives than they were in the past? If so, what’s driving the improvements in performance? A Series of Tubes #58 — Will Internode stir interest in IPv6?July 24th, 2008IPv6, long in danger of death by disinterest, got some media interest this week, with Internode’s launch of an IPv6 service, perhaps the first such service from an Australian ISP. Richard Chirgwin talkes to Internode’s founder and CEO Simon Hackett about what made him decide to launch the service, and what it might mean to customers. In this week’s sponsor interview we hear from Nortel’s Ryan Perrera, Leader for Metro Ethernet Networks, Portfolio Management for Asia, on the demands the growth of metropolitan Ethernet services is putting on carrier backbones. A Series of Tubes #57 — The Science of a Really Fast NetworkJuly 17th, 2008You or I won’t need an all-optical switch at the homestead any time soon, unless you’re hiding a terabit-per-second Internet connection under the sink. Still, it’s an interesting concept: fire a photon at a cloud of electrons, and get a really fast optical switch for backbone networks. Richard Chirgwin talks to Dr Ben Eggleston of CUDOS to find out why it’s not just sci-fi. And in this week’s sponsor interview, we hear from Fotios Kotsiopolous from Procurve about the integration of Procurve network security technology with Windows Vista’s NAP policy manager. A Series of Tubes #56 — Can ADSL2+ and the NBN get along?July 9th, 2008Probably the silliest urban myth surrounding Fibre to the Node (FTTN) is the idea, promoted in some national newspapers, that optical signals interfere with electrical signals. However, there is a problem: the VDSL-based network proposed to connect nodes to homes can cause problems for ADSL2+ services from the same exchange - and ISPs fear that their ADSL2+ investments will be stranded by the NBN. In A Series of Tubes, Richard Chirgwin talks to ADSL standards expert Dr Paul Brooks of Layer 10 Consulting, about whether VDSL and ADSL can co-exist. A Series of Tubes #55 –- Extending the LAN over the WAN with VPLSJuly 3rd, 2008Our guest this week on A Series of Tubes is Dr James Kershaw, product manager at junior telco Nextgen Networks. Nextgen is marching to a slightly different drum in its enterprise services: while most carriers have focussed on rolling out all-IP national networks, Nextgen has built a national VPLS (Virtual Private Label Switched) network. In this interview, Dr Kershaw talks about the reasons behind Nextgen’s choice of technology, and why the carrier believes a transparent end-to-end Ethernet LAN makes life easier for its customers. Also on the show this week, we’re joined by Neville James, channels and marketing manager at our sponsor, Nortel Australia-New Zealand. He’s talking about Nortel’s green computing initiatives. A Series of Tubes #54 — AARNet’s astronomical bandwidthJune 26th, 2008On this week’s edition of A Series of Tubes AARNet’s Optical Operations division infrastructure specialist Ivan Phillips joins the show to discuss the networking technology in eVLBI (electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometer) telescope experiments. For the uninitiated, AARNet stands for Australia’s Academic and Research Network. In eVLBI, telescopes separated by long distances (in this case, Parkes, Narrabri, Canberra, China and Japan) are linked together to create a telescope with an effective diameter close to that of the Earth. Such projects need big pipes, with each telescope generating more than half a gigabit of traffic per second. The resulting project doesn’t just help the scientific community; it’s also part of getting Australia involved in major international educational and grid computing projects. As you’ll hear, A Series of Tubes has a new host, Richard Chirgwin. He’s got loads of experience as an analyst and a journalist and really knows his tubes! You can contact Richard with story tips and feedback by e-mail: rchirgwin at ozemail dot com dot au. |
