My solicitor

This is not something I have done before as such, i.e. officially a solicitor on a retainer of some sort - "my solicitor". Obviously one does not go through 52 years of life without encountering the legal profession in many areas, but this is the first time I have had "my solicitor".

It has sort of come about as a result of A&A getting one. A&A have now engaged a solicitor on a more permanent basis, having used several for various reasons in the past. It is mainly down to finding someone we like.

It is one of those resources you hope not to have to use, but even little things like reviewing the wording of our terms and conditions at A&A, and so on, it is useful to pay someone to do that.

In fact the main reason for A&A getting one is to sort some letters to BT and TT over SFI issues, but more on that when the dust settles. If nothing else, it is massively helpful to have a second opinion on such matters.

I won't say the firm's name unless they are happy for me to do so. I believe it is correct to say they are a specialist telecoms solicitors.

But I thought "what the hell?" and have signed up myself to have a solicitor. I hope I never have to use you, sorry...

Dear Blogspot - just in case Verso Group (UK) Ltd contact you...

I get the impression Verso Group (UK) Ltd have given up actually talking to us - we have tried calling back many times, and offered to meet with them in our offices as he said "I'm going to come down to your office" after his 10:30 meeting last week - we were there and waiting, me and a solicitor (after all, he made several legal threats)... But I get the impression he may be trying to contact blogspot now.

Of course, that may be unrelated. It may be that there are more people than just myself causing him some concern. I could not possibly comment.

I posted on 17th March (here), but please note, whilst I mention Verso Group (UK) Ltd, I explain that it is only "apparently" a call from them - listen to the recording (which you don't host) and you will hear why, and the clear statement that the call is recorded to be posted in the public domain (Facebook). There is a clear statement from the caller that it is Verso Group and he confirms Verso Group (UK) Ltd calling as well as the call being from 02081507530 which is one of their numbers.

I posted on 6th April (here) which is a post to clarify matters as someone claiming to be from Verso Group (UK) Ltd (Dene Walsh himself, I assume) asserts that the call in question is not from them. I make that crystal clear in that post. This call recording is apparently not a call made by them. Given that it is not a call by them I am not sure they have any legal reason to suppress it.

I posted on 8th April (here) with a purely factual link to an OFCOM news item investigating Verso Group (UK) Ltd.

The call recording is not hosted on blogspot!

I own copyright in the call recording, and if you listen to it (here) you will hear that the caller is giving permission for it to be published on Facebook, where it is. I do not see that this is any concern of Verso Group (UK) Ltd if they did not make the call.

Given that I have made it clear that the recording is apparently not made by Verso Group (UK) Ltd, it is clear that no matter how stupid, idiotic, ironic, moronic, or ill informed, the caller sounds, or how unlawful such a call is to a TPS registered number, that is not in any way defamatory of Verso Group (UK) Ltd, as they were (apparently) not the one making the call. I can't see it is defamatory at all, but if it was, then it is defamatory of the unknown caller and not of Verso Group (UK) Ltd, as they are apparently not the caller.

I have offered to help - I am happy for the call recording to be used as evidence in pursuing someone impersonating Verso Group (UK) Ltd.

Indeed, I am happy to contact the call provider, Andrews & Arnold Ltd, to try and get the call traced to the real source and identify the spoof caller to assist in enquiries. Indeed, I may do that anyway - wouldn't it be funny if it really was a call from Verso Group (UK) Ltd after all - but that is purely amusing myself with speculation and not to be taken seriously in any way.

Anyway, Blogspot, if someone makes a complaint, feel free to contact me, and my solicitor will be happy to discuss the matter with you right away.

P.S. was I bang on?

Verso Group (UK) Ltd

I see Verso Group (UK) Ltd are being investigated by OFCOM

"Ofcom has issued a notification to Verso Group (UK) Limited (“Verso Group”), under section 128 of the Communications Act 2003 (the “Act”) as part of Ofcom’s ongoing own-initiative investigation."

More details here...

Remember this is the bunch that definitely did not call, me honest guv... Listen here.

Posting about A&A

This is my personal blog. The text on the right makes that clear. But I post about A&A stuff from time to time. So what's the deal?

Well, yes, this is my personal blog, and it is not in any way ever any sort of official statement by Andrews & Arnold Ltd. This is the very reason I made the blog, so I could make frank personal and even emotional posts (rants even) that would perhaps be unprofessional if made as posts by the company.

When I post about A&A I am posting because I work there and am a director. I am posting about my personal experience and about my day. I live and breath A&A - it is hard not to when you own and run a small company. But I am posting about my day and not officially as the company. I post because the company allows me to post details of things that have happened and are happening in the company from my personal perspective. Not all employees of all companies enjoy that freedom, and it is good being the boss to allow myself that freedom.

I do have to be a bit careful and draw lines - the company cannot give any employers carte blanc to reveal personal information. I try to ensure I am playing by the rules, but also that I can tell people what is really happening without feeling too constrained.

So yes, some times, details of what is happening in A&A get posted here. I like to think I can post more about the experiences and the challenges and the issues in a more frank and personal way than could be done "officially".

I also post on the A&A status pages as "official" comment and news items on the A&A web site, but they are more politically correct as an official company statement.

It means I can really explain some of the frustrations. It was due to serious rants against BT back in the day when we only had the A&A status page that caused me to make this blog, and why it is called RevK's Rants in the first place. It was, back then, getting to the stage that BT were causing me a lot of very unprofessional stress and frustration. It was not right for the company to make such statements, so I make them personally in my blog. These days BT are generally much better.

I find it massively therapeutic to put my concerns down in writing. I can lose sleep over an issue for days, but make a blog post on the matter an I can "put it to bed" and sleep better. Some things need to be said and this is a forum on which to say them.

I hope that makes sense, but I thought it worth just making clear - there are people that massively confuse the personal blog that this is, and the company, and think they are the same. They are far from it. Andrews & Arnold Ltd have no editorial control or responsibility for this blog in any way. It is all me.

Verso Group (UK) Ltd

I want to set the record straight here.

When I made a blog post on the 17th March (here) I honestly thought the unlawful junk call I had received had been made by Verso Group (UK) Ltd. I am TPS registered and this was a marketing call, so unlawful.

You can see how I might have jumped to that conclusion:

• The call was from 02081507530, a number from which they apparently call
• The caller claimed to be calling from British Savers Club, a name they apparently use
• This was apparently a "lead generation" type call, the very business they are in
• The caller claimed to be calling from Verso Group, even spelling it for me, and confirming when I said Verso Group (UK) Ltd.

It was an easy, and honest, mistake to make, as you can see.

It seems that I was wrong!

Someone has called today apparently from Verso Group (UK) Ltd, and stated in no uncertain terms that "We've actually never dialled him", and "the recording he's posted has nothing to do with our business", and "it wasn't a call that was made by our company".

So clearly, on the word of a man claiming to be calling from Verso Group (UK) Ltd today, I have to assume that the call from a man claiming to be calling from Verso Group (UK) Ltd on 17th March was actually lying, and was not in fact calling from Verso Group (UK) Ltd and was, in fact, an imposter.

I do sincerely apologise for making this assumption.

The blog post makes it clear that the call was only apparently from Verso Group (UK) Ltd, and I hope that my apology here meets with the approval of Verso Group (UK) Ltd and clears up this misunderstanding.

I appreciate that it can be frustrating when this sort of thing happens - we have had A&A customers get pop-ups claiming to be a survey by A&A and then being a scam, and they too are nothing to do with us.

I am really struggling why someone would impersonate Verso Group (UK) Ltd, and to what end, but that is what they are suggesting has happened. You have my sympathies, Verso Group (UK) Ltd. Clearly you are not the sort of company that would flout rules on calling people on the TPS, or laws on company names on web sites and emails, or any of those things, oh, wait... No, really, it was not you calling, obviously.

The good news is that, now that we know the call was definitely not made by Verso Group (UK) Ltd, it is clear that there can be no issue with my posting the recording - here it is again for you to listen to. Remember, it is apparently not actually Verso Group (UK) Ltd making the call, so no matter how daft they sound, you should not form any bad opinion about Verso Group (UK) Ltd when listening to it. Even so, it does not even appear to be defamatory of Verso Group (UK) Ltd in its content from what I can hear - it is the exact business they are in - lead generation, and exactly the sort of call people report as having received from them on various forums. I made it clear in the call that it was being recorded to post on Facebook (which that link is) and he said "yes" and continued with the call. Verso Group (UK) Ltd have no say over the call recording as it was not them making it, not that they had much anyway, but they can't claim the employee was not authorised to agree to publication as it was not their employee.  They cannot claim it is private or confidential as it was not them making the call. It may be useful evidence for them if they have an issue with people passing off as them and I am happy for them to use the recording for that purpose if they want to pursue legal action against the actual caller.

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Anyway, now that is out of the way, it is interesting to report on some aspects of my day...

Last night A&A got an email, claiming to be from Verso Group (UK) Ltd,  threatening legal action, claiming that the recording is private and confidential and Verso Group UK Ltd do not give any permissions for the recording to be posted on a public domain. Well, permission was obtained in the call, listen. But this seems at odds with the claims today, apparently from Verso Group (UK) Ltd, that they never made the call. If they never made the call they cannot claim it is private or confidential to them! Maybe this email was also from an imposter! Or was it the calls today that were from an imposter. How could I know?

Today we got calls from someone claiming to be from Verso Group (UK) Ltd. Again, threatening legal action against A&A, saying "I'm going to come down to your office", suggesting that I am "hiding behind a social media page" and that he would "rather the guy had a bit of balls and contacted me". Oddly, calling back his office twice this afternoon he was in meetings or on a call and did not call back - maybe it is not his turn for the balls today? (I assume these are like executive stress balls or something).

With both written and verbal legal threats against A&A, we had our solicitor on site all day as he said "I'm going to come down to your office" after his 10:30 meeting. We waited, and waited. Solicitors are not cheap, so I hope he does not mind the the bill if this does go any further against A&A. Hopefully he'll consider the matter settled with the above apology. I wonder how many of the complaints on the various forums and even the Verso Group (UK) Ltd Facebook page are actually by imposters! What a terrible situation to be in.

As I own copyright in the recording I am saying now that people can copy and repost it as much as they like and laugh at the irony of a company (even if it was not in fact Verso Group (UK) Ltd) trying to sell me better broadband!!!

Number porting, Broadband, and VoIP

Hopefully I am not jumping the gun here, but we'll know for sure in two weeks.

Normal landline phone services have phone numbers, and some times there are numbers people have had a long time and do not want to lose.

People want to move numbers to VoIP. This allows the numbers to be handled in a much more flexible way than a landline - easy to route to different places, diverts, and well, almost anything. You can set up your own VoIP platform and do almost anything. It is also really good if moving house as it means you can keep your number. VoIP usually has lower running costs and call costs too.

Broadband is usually provided on a normal landline phone number, and requires that phone line to stay working or else the broadband gets ceased - making it expensive and time consuming to re-instate it.

Maybe you can see where I am going with this. People with a landline, and broadband, sometimes want to move their number to VoIP and not kill their broadband.

We have known for some time that this is, in theory, possible, but only now have we managed to find the exact incantation that should allow this to be possible. Yes, my wife is sat in the front room knitting and watching Happy Potter. Working with BT does make me feel that I need to spend a few years in Hogwarts before I try the correct XML spells on BT.

Normally, a number port is "Gaining Provider Led" and means that the new operator asks to take the number. 14 days later, if no objections, the number moved over. But this is the rub - the porting system is done on "service" not number. Having ported a service, like a normal landline, the service is inherently ceased as a result of the number port. That ceases the broadband.

However, we now know there is a modify order called a Renumber with Number Export which should renumber the landline, and make the old number available as part of a number port out to another operator. The Renumber part should not in itself break the broadband. Well, that is the theory.

We have this in progress on two of our lines and will know in just over 2 weeks if all works.

This means we'll be able to take over the phone line for someone with broadband, allow incoming calls on the line and outgoing on VoIP, and then move the number over to VoIP totally 2 weeks later. If we are really lucky, it may be possible to do the take over and renumber and port all in one go.

The line is then broadband only and somewhat cheaper (we charge £10/mon) and the number and telephone service is VoIP (we charge £1/month plus call charges). I don't know yet what this will cost but I don't think a renumber is that expensive. We'll have to price it up.

So, fingers crossed!

Update: First attempt went badly with renumber cancelled by number ports, and then ceases due to port not properly cancelled on BT systems, and a mess we are trying to get sorted. However, the good news is we now know how the process works, and it appears it really is possible to so what we want, so we are testing again.

Growing pains - pain relief

I am pleased to say that this mornings work seems to have been a total success. It did take a lot longer than expected with several "quirks" in the cisco switch as well as one in the FireBrick.

Several people have asked what we are doing, so I thought I would explain.

We used to have a simple set up of one LNS (L2TP Network Server) to one BT back-haul fibre. This worked well. As we expanded we increased the number of BT links and LNSs.

However, when we added BE and later Talk Talk back-haul we use the same LNSs. This is so we can do bonding between BT and TT lines. This worked pretty well.

The snag has come where we need to expand the number of LNSs we have, but we don't need more BT links (yet). Indeed, we may need more TT links soon. The link of one LNS to one BT link no longer works.

So this morning we undertook the biggest restructure of our broadband handling network for around 8 years.

The change is that each BT and TT link now has a separate BGP connection that is not the LNS. This then links over to a pool of LNSs to spread the load, and allow more LNSs. We have deployed three more FireBrick FB6202 LNSs this morning.

This does, however, present some issues. The big one being how we balance the load to and from BT.

For traffic to BT/TT, we are using ECMP (Equal Cost Multiple Path). This balances traffic, but does so using a hash of IPs and ports. The snag is that there may not be many IPs and ports involved in L2TP. The ports are 1701, and in some cases there are very few IPs. BT actually expose all of their hundreds of LACs to us, but TT expose four!

The traffic from BT/TT is not so easy - we can't expect BT or TT to use ECMP, so we have to balance some other way - and we do this by using specific LNS endpoints. The snag is that you want to share N LNS endpoints over M links somehow? It is not simple when they do not divide up nicely. So the answer is a set of IPs NxM, allowing steering of sessions to hit one of these with reasonably even distribution, and allowing both an even spread over the LNSs and at the same time and even spread over the links to the carrier.

This has the side effect of giving the hash used by ECMP more to play with.

The end result is a much cooler looking "weather map" of our network with a lot more LNSs in use. It also means we can go back to rolling over night updates of LNSs, which we expect to do over the next few weeks.

It allows more LNSs to be added without breaking things, and allows more links to either BT or TT as needed.

The next step is some fine tuning of our external links to transit and peering, but for now, we have the capacity we need to grow for some time.

This is hard work, and expensive kit, but it is well worth it.

Thank you for your patience.