Only got a handful of products on there at the moment:

• Zycoo ZX20 SOHO VoIP PBX – seriously good feature/price ratio, tiny and silent.
• IPDP SIp Intercom with Video – finally a cheap IP video intercom that isn’t rubbish.
• Motorola NYXBoard a really good media center remote that everyone in the house can work out how to use.

I’ll be reviewing them here over the next few weeks – so keep your eyes peeled!

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Goodbye to the old

Ok, so first of all, I’m not working for Pluss anymore as their Server & Network Architect – which in itself is a massive change. I had spent nearly 7 years there, hammering their IT infrastructure into shape and building a competent and capable team with Steve Taylor the IT manager.

When I started it was just Steve and I, running servers, printers and phones for 120 users across 10 or 12 sites in the south west, when I left, there were 12 members of IT staff running everything with an electrical pulse across 30+ sites for 650+ staff across the country! Good times. I have learnt a massive amount from that experience (you have to learn fast when there is only a tiny team and a tiny budget), but if I had to sum it up in one sentence it would be this:

You can always find a better, cheaper, more elegant way to design, create, build and fix anything you’re doing so long as you have enough time, are stubborn enough and are supported well enough to keep on looking for it.

Pluss presented challenge after challenge, economically & technically and I became a better engineer because Steve left me to get on with the job in hand. It was a relationship built on trust – although  supportive and full of ideas and suggestions, he ultimately trusted me enough to know I’d find the right solution and I trusted that he’d find a way to get that solution sponsored and financed.

Hello to the new

So whats next? If you know me well, you’ll know that I’m a massive fan of disruptive innovation – I love new products and vendors who’s very purpose is to be the best at what they do whilst forcing others to rethink their own technology, products and methods.

When working for Pluss I discovered a great many products that no one else had heard of, and put my trust in these to deliver some incredible cost savings and technology improvements. Things like the 3CX phone system which we installed to deliver 290 handsets across 37 sites in 3 weeks for less than £30k, and Peplink Load Balancing and VPN bonding Routers which we installed as a replacement to MPLS between all of our sites that paid for itself in the first year and gave us an additional £60k of savings on line rental and managed service provision.

Well I am very proud to say that Peplink have asked me to join them as a full time sales engineer and product evangelist – which is obviously awesome. Peplink are in the top 5 most disruptive networking vendors in the world today and its great to be a part of what they are doing.

There is a lot of great new products coming and I will be sure to blog about them here so keep your eyes peeled.

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It think its turned out pretty well More about the project in the portfolio here.

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Built on wordpress, the site includes facebook gallery integration and a full event management system with a dynamic calendar.

Go and take a look if you get a moment – I think it turned out pretty well www.gulleywood.co.uk

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They have taken their elegant, and beautiful web based management software (if you’ve used their UnFi APs you’ll know how great it is) and built a collection of power management and environmental sensors that can be managed from it.

‘So what?’, I hear you say, ‘Home automation is nothing new’, and you’d be right  but then you’d be underestimating Ubiquitis ability to completey disrupt industry sectors. If they do the same with mFi as they have their UniFi wireless range, then mFi will be aggressively priced, easily to use, quick to install and configure and a pleasure to live with and maintain and expand over time. Anyone who’s played with x10 protocol products will tell you that when it works its pretty clever, but its never as easy or as cheap as it ought to be.

Take a look at the mFi range here http://www.ubnt.com/mfi

I can’t wait to play with it. Of course the next big questions are when can I get it in the UK (with our 3pin socket configuration) and how much is it going to cost?

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With the floorboards up and power cables being chased every which way I’m taking the opportunity to pull through some data cabling for IP/Voice/Video distribution.

My problem is – how much should I put in? 4 runs per room? 6 by the TV position in the lounge just in case? What about security? IP CCTV, SIP gate intercoms? I’ve bought 4 boxes and I’m not sure if it will be enough….

No matter how much I do put in – I’m sure that at some point I’m going to wish I had done ‘just one more run’ to a location – so maybe a sensible middle ground would be better – four runs per room, realising that at some point I’ll likely have to pull more so making the routes as easy as possible and even leaving draw strings in place for when the time comes…

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What do you do if you have a Pepwave MAX  HD2 kicking about and a quiet hour or so? Thats right – you stick in in your car to provide vehicle internet!

Solar Powered VoIP

I had a small solar panel which I have been itching to find a use for – So I figured  I’d hook it up to the MAX HD2 and see what happened. I mounted the two GSM antennas on the roof, along with the WAN Wifi antennas and left the AP Wifi antennas in the car on top of the MAX itself which I put on the floor behind the passenger seat.

Sure – this isn’t the perfect place for the MAX, but I was just playing and I couldn’t work out how to best mount it in the boot. (I must look into engineering a mount for it I think).

With my car parked on my drive, the MAX connected happily to my home wifi AP and created a Speedfusion tunnel back to my work using it and a pair of 3G connections (three and BT). I grabbed a Yealink VoIP handset and plugged it into the LAN ports of the MAX – moments later it registered with our PBX and I could make calls.

VoIP Car Phone

Now all i need to do is reengineer a yealink handset to fit into my glove box lid and I’ll have an old school carphone using bleeding edge connectivity provided by the MAX.

A bit Silly? Perhaps – but its still very cool

PS: I forgot to mention that the HD2 comes with inbuilt GPS. Not only can I track the car using google maps, but it also provides streaming NEMA location data over the VPN so I can track it in real-time too if I want…

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Unless you’ve been living on Mars you’ll have heard the interest and excitement surrounding Bring your own device (BYOD) recently, where corporate IT is gearing up to support users who bring their own laptops and smartphones/tablets to work and consume business services.

Bring Your Own Bandwidth

Well, what if we could do the same with users home internet connections? Many of us have fast internet connections at home - especially if we’re using the likes of virgin media cable and BT infinity 2 Circuits. Some of these can only be purchased by individuals as they are specifically targeted at the consumer (Virgin Cable being a good example), so if a business wants to support users at home by installing broadband for them the options are more limited.

Having two broadband lines installed with independent routing and switches seems a little inelegant though, surely the best way would be to be able to use all of the available bandwidth across the consumer and business broadband connection .

WAN Link Aggregation

With Peplink routers we can do just that, bond multiple internet connections so that we can use all of the available bandwidth. Speedfusion is the name of the technology they have implemented to enable this, and it creates a VPN tunnel using bandwidth aggregation across all available broadband links in both directions. The biggest benefit for home workers though (apart from an increase in bandwidth back to HQ) is the resilience. If one broadband connection fails or falters, the connection is maintained across the other links.

Traffic Separation

Of course, in most cases we want to be able to segregate the internet traffic so that only business related traffic is sent across the VPN tunnel to HQ, the rest should just go straight out to the web.

With Peplink outbound policies and load balancing algorithms this is easy to configure, and QOS / traffic prioritisation can be used to make sure that if someone else at home hammers the internet connection (your butler maybe, watching the great British bake off streamed live) that it doesn’t negatively affect your work related traffic.

Find out more

Bring Your Own Bandwidth is possible, sensible and available now using Peplink Load balancing, WAN aggregating routers. Get in touch to find out more.

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