Ahoy! We’re excited to announce we’ll be returning to Electromagnetic Field Festival for a third year! The event will be held at Eastnor Castle near Ledbury between July 16th – 19th.

We will be providing our usual site-wide copper telephone network, with additional support for faxing, 56k Dial Up, Viewdata and Bulletin Board access.

This year we’re also hoping to double (or is that triple) down on our ISP offerings, as we will hopefully be providing ADSL, VDSL and GPON services in a limited “trial area” which we’ll confirm a little closer to the event.

DSL (FTTD - Fibre To The DK)

We have kindly been donated some Zyxel VES1724-55C VDSL DSLAMs, that can also fallback to ADSL. If you’re interested in finding out more, Alex Horner has documented them here

The DSLAMs will be configured to replicate the UKs Openreach setup, using VDSL profile 17A with PPPoE on VLAN 101, meaning you can bring your favourite CPE along and it should just work.

GPON (FTTT - Fibre To The Tent)

Our R&D lab has been busy experimenting with newfangled GPON technology which utilises lasers to offer up to 2.4Gb/s down and 1.2Gb/s up. Naturally we’ll be massively oversubscribing the service to maximise our profits.

There’s no previews of the hardware yet, as we’re already on the second iteration, with a third on the way.

To use the service you’ll need to bring a suitable pre-terminated fibre, and a compatible OLT/ONU. Recommendations for both will be published closer to the event.

Wholesale ISP services

Rewby and Charlie have been hard at work building a “wholesale” ISP platform.

Perhaps you’ve been tinkering with networking. You’ve got an AS Number and a subnet, but you’re still trying to figure out what to do with them? Well, now is your chance to be a real ISP. You can setup an LNS, announce your subnets with BGP to other ISPs at the onsite EMF-IX and use your own IPs to connect to the internet using Dial Up, DSL or GPON. Or all three!

Wholesale services will be implemented with the traditional LAC and LNS model - The subscriber configures their CPE to connect over PPP/PPPoE, and the wholesaler’s LAC forwards it over L2TP to their ISP to terminate and provide their own IPs / connectivity. We’ll provide some documentation on setting up an LNS soon.

These unprecedented levels of bandwidth have also meant we’ve had to invest in more enterprise hardware, with some “patches” to increase the throughput 👀

Notes

• To avoid interfering with the onsite WiFi, please disable WiFi on any routers or CPE, ideally before arriving onsite.
• Theoretically GPON will run over many kilometres. Whilst it might be tempting to run a 500m fibre across the campsite, please keep it sensible and avoid crossing roads, paths or other busy areas.
• Everything’s best effort and is subject to change. You might have heard of “Five 9s” uptime - we’re aiming for Nine 5s. If you want reliable internet, we suggest using the WiFi and Ethernet services provide by the NOC team.
• If you want to experiment but you’re packing light, we’ll have some demo equipment you can use so you can tick the box of “I ran an ISP at EMF”.