Engagement and Support within our Industry

People networks

We’re keen supporters of collaboration within our industry, engaging with our peers and colleagues to share ideas and knowledge. We’re members of several “people networks” and communities and we operate a number of services which benefit colleagues in the industry.

We believe that these are valuable activities where we can give to, and receive support from, colleagues in other businesses, meaning that we are better placed to provide services to our clients and their customers.

UK Network Operators Forum

UKNOF is a well established open forum for operational, technical and engineering information exchange related to networking technologies and practices.

We’ve been involved with UKNOF since 2009, and since 2018 we’ve been a member of the Programme Committee which is responsible for finding new content for the talks, reviewing potential talks/presentations and helping with the successful delivery of the agenda on the day.

Our CTO Marek Isalski has given several presentations at the tri-annual meetings on a diverse range of subjects:

UKWISPA

The UK Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (UKWISPA) is the official trade body for wireless ISPs. We’ve been Software and Consultancy Partners since 2019. We attend the regular member meetings and in 2019 we presented MikroTik in the core.

London Internet Exchange (LINX)

LINX is a mutually governed internet exchange point (IXP) and is one of the largest neutral IXPs in Europe. We’ve been members since 2019 and we’re currently Silver Partners. Because we’re LINX Connexions Partners we can offer our customers peering at LINX LON1, LON2 and LINX Manchester. We participate in both London and Manchester member events, including panel participation and giving presentations.

  • LINX London — we were a member of the panel discussion at LINX Live in September 2020: “The strength of the networking community during a crisis: working together, evolving your physical network as well as your business strategy to survive”, moderated by LINX’s Head of Global Engagement Nurani Nimpuno. Watch the presentation here.

  • LINX Manchester — Steering Eyeballs Closer to Content: Wholesale Networks Tricks for Local Traffic Delivery Watch the presentation here.

NetMcr

We’re one of the organisers of NetMcr: an informal monthly social for networkers in the Manchester area. Members meet monthly and there’s usually a presentation or two and of course some beers. Recently the virtual meet-ups have been joining forces with NetLdn - there were around around 150 participants at the last meeting.

Services

There are a number of services that we run that benefit the broader network community:

Privacy DNS

We provide an open privacy DNS service]#privacy-dns). Based on Pi-Hole, blocking advertising providers helps to reduce the attack surface of visiting websites and reduces the risk of your browser being infected during your surfing by a compromised advert carrying a drive-by exploit payload.

Wi-fi on “AS41495 Faelix Limited”

We often find that wireless networks in datacentres can be unreliable, so we operate our own open “AS41495 Faelix Limited” SSID in 8 datacentres and anyone in the datacentres can use it. We provide unfiltered internet access with IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity.

VyOS

We’re active contributors to the VyOS project. Vy0S is an open source network operating system providing a free routing platform that provides the functionality available from the commercial platforms.

NTP

We’re members of the NTP Pool project and we have deployed our own NTP infrastructure operating a significant number of public NTP servers.

Jitsi Meet

We have deployed an instance of Jitsi Meet, a free open-to-everyone video conferencing tool at faelix.tv.

Cryptpad

CryptPad is a private-by-design encrypted collaborative editor for notes, documents, kanban boards, polls, whiteboards and more. It’s easy to access via your web browser, and uses 100% client-side encryption. This means that all files are stored encrypted so even we, as server administrators with full access to the hardware, cannot read the documents.

You can use our CryptPad instance to create collaborative documents for taking notes and writing down ideas together, and you can share access to each “pad” simply by sharing the link.