Adrian Wooster's "Musings on Broadband", available from online publishers Lulu, is a collection of thoughts on how broadband is developing and what the next generation will look like. The book explores the direction the Internet and broadband is heading, and how it can be developed with a greater focus on community and customers, and with an eye on the future.

Highlighting how technology and commercial choices can have a significant impact on our ability to use the Internet as we might want, the book explores the state of competition and the health of the broadband market with an eye of how open community networks can play a critical part in shaping the next generation.

Click the icon to reserve your copy! 

GTC want to make it clear that we are not a satified customer of Team Discovery or of  Gaskin Associates and their many incarnations as their website proclaims.  Nor would we recommend them to anyone. They had no hand in the development of our web presence and have used us as a reference site without our permission.

Over recent years there has been a flurry of new devices and solutions aimed at the wireless network space; perhaps the most prevalent has been LocustWorld with its almost turnkey community-network in a box solution. Like many of these solutions, the design decisions appear to have been made on the basis that wireless is somehow different from other network systems, and that mesh networks are new. To an old-school network architect this will seem daft, but the growth of wireless mesh networks seems only to match the decline in the number of network architects. 

So is LocustWorld an example of good network architecture?

This essay explores whether wireless mesh networks really are different. Contact us if you'd like to know more.

Looking at they way broadband and in particular wireless networks are developing reminds me of some work I did back in the '90's on the importance of maintaining a proximity to the business. Think of a network as an eight-layer model – seven OSI layers, from the cable to the applications, plus an all important human interface which incorporates a whole host of relationships like “customer”, “business”, “consumer”. How a technology handles the eighth layer becomes all important; regardless of how removed a layer is, if you can't relate to this interface, you are simply not adding value.

This short paper by Adrian Wooster examines the impact of skipping past an understanding of customer requirements, and heading straight for network engineering heaven when developing network services, uncovering why UK telco's are falling behind in the race to better broadband along the way.

Contact us if you'd like to understand more about architecting a network for the future rather than designing for today. 

BT have announced plans to wind down operations at Goonhilly Down, the atmospheric and historically important home of satellite communications. The majestic dishes have played critical parts in some of the most important passages of the twentieth century from the birth of space technology to Live Aid and beyond.

Aurthur, the original satellite dish constructed for the first communucation via Telsar is now a listed building and protected, but the site as whole has played such an important role in the development of British and world telecommunications and media that perhaps the whole site should be protected.  The visitor's centre is a must for anyone with even a passing interest in technology or of twentieth century history, and BT should be applauded for the accebible and interesting way they present what is afterall rocket science - lets hope they recognise the importance of Goonhilly and retain the integrity of the down if only as a world heritage site.