“Ambassador, with these Atlas probes, you’re really spoiling us…”

Okay. So I only expect the Brits to get the title of this. Though if you’re desperate to be in on the “joke”, watch this YouTube video of an old British TV ad for some chocolates.

One of the things I do for the community is act as a “RIPE Atlas Ambassador” – that’s someone who helps distribute RIPE Atlas internet measurement probes into the wider Internet community. The Measurements Community Builders at the RIPE NCC send me a box of Atlas probes, I go to conferences, meetings and other get togethers and I give them out to folk who would like to host a probe, along with answering any questions as best I can.

Recently, Fearghas McKay of the IX Scotland steering group asked me if I had any data from the Atlas project on internet round-trip time for probes located in Scotland, to get to services hosted in Scotland, and if I could talk about it at a meeting of IX Scotland participants.

This is a fairly similar exercise to the one I did for Northern Ireland.

One of the challenges I was faced with was the distinct lack of source data. Firstly, there weren’t that many Atlas probes in Scotland to begin with, and those which are there are mostly located in the “central belt” – around Glasgow and Edinburgh. The furthest North was a single probe in Aberdeen, and Scotland is a big country – it’s around 300 miles from the border at Gretna to Thurso, one of the most northerly towns on the Scottish mainland, as far again as it is from London to Gretna. That’s not even counting the Orkneys, Shetlands or Hebridean Islands, which have their own networking challenges.

The second problem was that of those probes, only three at the time were on an ISP connected directly to IX Scotland, and one of those was down! The majority were on consumer broadband providers such as BT and Virgin Media, which aren’t connected to many regional exchanges.

I saw attending the IX Scotland meeting as a good chance to redress the balance and extend the usefulness of the Atlas platform by distributing probes to networks which could improve the coverage.

This has resulted in what is currently the most Northerly probe in the UK being brought online in Dingwall, not far from Inverness, thanks to the folk at HighNet. They’ve also got a few other probes from me, so expect to see more in that area soon.

HighNet aren’t connected to IX Scotland yet, but maybe now they’ve got access to this instrumentation it might help them make a business case to follow up on that.

I also issued a number of probes at UKNOF in Manchester last week and I’m looking forward to seeing where they turn up.

I’d really like to get some of the community broadband projects in the UK instrumented, such as B4RN and Gigaclear. These bring some of their own challenges, such as issues with equipment at the customer premises that can actually handle the available bandwidth on the connection! It would also be great to be able to draw comparisons in performance between the community fibre service and the slower ADSL service provided over long copper tails in those areas.