Facebook outage hits 300 000 users in Latvia

A Facebook outage lasting a few hours knocked around 300 000 users off the social network in Latvia (the whole barely 2 million strong nation would barely be a village in Facebook if it were a nation-state). This came just days after Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis set up his Facebook page and two days ahead of the launch of Latvia's official Facebook page "If you like Latvia, Latvia likes you" (the page has been up and running for some time already. Facebook  seems to have come back online again just after 10AM local. However, this is the only report my readers will have of what happened (even though I think Latvia was among the first to notice FB going down), because my news agency simply shitcanned the story. Reasons unknown,  your best guesses may start at provincialism, ignorance and worse...
Maybe this post also belong under the headline of Failed State Latvia? in my other blog.

TechHub Riga is opening (video)

TechHub Riga, the first affiliate of London's TechHub co-working space and incubator for IT start-ups, is opening on Februaruy 9. TechHub Riga chairman Andris Bērziņš talks about what the facility has to offer and what it will be doing.

IBM's Robert Talbot (while in Latvia) talks about Watson

IBM's Robert Talbot attended a local IBM Forum conference in Riga, Latvia recently, where he sat down to talk to this blogger (wearing both my Latvian and English-language blogger hats) about the future of the artificial intelligence entity called Watson.  Here it is -- the color is a bit weird and the inter-titles are in both Latvian and English. Anyway, good luck on your med boards, Watson. 

Catching up on events - Lattelecom to go to IMS by 2017

Followup on the Tele2 fiasco

I have been remiss in updating this blog and there have been some noteworthy events that I will now belatedly relate.

First, I was more or less right about the cause of the big Tele2 crash on July 14. It was, as I said in a previous post, a “piecashit” gadget that brought down the house, but after talking to Tele2 technical director Ervīns Kampāns, the picture was a bit more complicated. What actually happened was that the system that was supposed to warn about a failure of the cooling system did itself fail, but not all the AC to DC transformers went down at once. When the first ones did, the UPS attached to the Nokia-Siemens core switch did kick in, but shared the power-supplying load with the diminished flow of current from the failing transformers. What resulted was that at some point, both the supply of current from the transformers and the UPS (which is intended to work for a short time until reserve generators kick in) was degraded and finally the core switch and all the complex systems it sustained crashed. It was, indeed, a perfect storm kind of event. According to Kampāns, Tele2 has now added additional backup and security systems, so that a repetition of the highly unlikely July 14 event is even more unlikely.

Lattelecom to go all IMS by 2017

On July 20, Lattelecom and China's Huawei announced they had signed an agreement to convert the entire Lattelecom fixed line network to run on IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) standards by 2017, with the first pilot tests to take place in early 2012. Migrating to IMS would expand the services available to fixed-line subscribers as well as offering them a kind of global mobility. Lattelecom would be one of the first telcos in the region to go all-IMS (globally, as far as I can see, there aren't too many other operators who have made a conversion, although IMS is used by some for a limited range of services)

People would be able to take their fixed-line Lattelecom numbers (actually, IP addresses attached to their handsets) anywhere in the world where there was a fixed or WiFi internet connection. Lattelecom CEO Juris Gulbis also told this blogger that the telco operator would develop applications for smart phones that would make it possible to call on the IMS network. With most Lattelecom subscribers on flat-rate, “free” calling plans, calls between two Lattelecom numbers anywhere in the world would cost only what the respective internet connection costs.

Technically, the move to IMS would mean eliminating most, if not all local switches and replacing them with two redundant switches to run the whole network. Existing copper landlines would be turned into DSL connections, while optical internet customers are already on the internet and would simply have their voice services upgraded to IMS.

The deal with Lattelecom is also another achievement for Huawei, which has succesfully challenged traditional infrastructure suppliers in the region, such as Sweden's Ericsson and the Finnish-German Nokia-Siemens. The project will be handled from the Chinese company's Swedisj office, which is located about a kilometer from Ericsson's headquarters in the Stockholm suburb of Kista. 

Did an obscure "piecashit" gizmo bring down Tele2 in the Baltics?

I got an official description of what happened July 14 to knock out Tele2's core switch (?) and take down (for some, briefly, in Latvia, well into the night) services to around two million customers in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Despite it being a Swedish-based international telecoms company, the network crash in the Baltics (as far as I could see) got exactly fuck all coverage in the Swedish media, which, like much of Scandinavia, is zoned out in a hammock somewhere or on the beach in Greece before, to use the Latvian expression, the place goes to the Devil's mother.
Basically what happens is this: the core switch, possibly a Nokia MCSI runs on 48 volt DC current, which is fed to the device through a AC/DC transformer getting it from the 220V grid. The transformer apparently can get hot, so it has a "climate control" (read air conditioner or chiller on it). Because the AC/DC transformer is mission critical, the climate control comes with a temperature sensor and some kind of alarm that alerts Tele2 technical staff that the system has failed, but giving them enough time to prevent damage to the transformer. The alarm and the sensor are what may have been the "piecashit" gizmos that ultimately crashed the network. The alarm failed to go off until it was too late. By then, the transformer had overheated and shorted out, knocking out the switch. With no transformer, there was no way to power up the switch until extensive repairs had been made. In addition, very complex systems like mobile phone network core switches do not usually reboot very easily, especially after a power-failure induced crash.
Utility power was still on --Latvenergo's  press secretary freaked out a little when the media blamed electricity for the failure and said, rightly, that the electricity from the utility was never interrupted, it all happened inside the walls of the Tele2 facility. So it does look like one fucked gizmo brought down everything..
Except -- was there really no UPS (providing DC electricity) attached directly to the switch to keep it going for a while until the techies fix whatever broke or switch to generators? Perhaps the emergency protocol was to go directly to the generator, forgetting the possibility that the transformer, thanks to some cheapo gizmo, could blow? This is how we learn...

Charlie Foxtrot visits Tele2 in Latvia and the Baltics

As I understand it, you weren't supposed to use obscenity on US Army radios, so instead of saying that something was a clusterfuck, you said Charlie Foxtrot instead. Well, today, and to some extent, still, tonight (2100 local time, July 14), Charlie Foxtrot visited Swedish-owned Tele2 in Latvia and took a chunk out of Lithuania and Estonia as well, knocking a total of well over two million customers off the network (just over a million in Latvia, a million pre-paid users in Lithuania, and the undisclosed prepaid part of a total of 467 000 users in Estonia).
The problems started just after 1400 local time when, according to Tele2's official version, a disturbance in electricity supply took down a major switch. To me, this was an immediate, red-flag WTF?? because mission critical switches have, by default, big motherfuckers of UPS (uninterrupted power supplies) that will keep things going until utility power is restored or switched to emergency generators.
My theory is more that there was some kind of perfect storm event or someone stumbled across a power cable (between the UPS and the Mother of All Switches, if that is possible) causing enough of a power fluctuation to crash the switch at a software level and perhaps fuck up some vital hard disks. That is just my guess.
Business and post-paid customers in Lithuania were unaffected, and in Estonia, pre-paid customers were only down for around 20 minutes, or so the spokesperson said.
Whatever happened, it possibly showed the downside of Tele2  and possibly other operators rationalizing their networks by concentrating services in one switching center (for smaller countries like the Baltics). It appears that prepaid service (billing, switching) were run for all three Baltic countries on servers/switches in Riga. Given how mission critical (more mission critical than if the supporting device and software systems were distributed) the Riga switch is, one wonders how there could be any event involving electric power that could take it down. Some part of the truth may come out tommorrow (July 15).

Another look at Kista Science City

Unfortunately, I didn't get around to posting this video on this blog because I was busy with other stuff and then, from May 26-June 6, I was in the US for a personal visit. I don't think much has changed from what Åke Lindström said when we met on May 23. So here, ahead of the Midsummer holiday that the Scandinavian and Baltic nations share, is an insight into what is going on at Kista Science City.