September 2011 Newsletter
Welcome to the LUNS newsletter. We hope that these newsletters will provide our customers and clients with an insight into what's been going on within LUNS and more widely across the business areas in which we operate. The main areas of business activity for LUNS are the design & delivery of high-speed broadband networking solutions and the bespoke development and delivery of online learning platforms based on the Open Source products, Moodle & Mahara. We also provide a range of cloud-based ISP services to the education sector including email services, content filtering & caching and website hosting and management.
LUNS Lights up Wigan & West Lancashire
We have recently expanded our core network: Our latest network PoP (point of presence) has just been connected to our core fibre-optic network which means we are now delivering high speed connectivity services across Wigan & West Lancashire including Skelmersdale, Ormskirk and St Helens. This new site means we can offer more cost-effective broadband services to businesses and public sector sites across the region directly from our own infrastructure at symmetric speeds from 5Mbps to 1Gbps. Other recently connected areas include:
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Barrow-in-Furness
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Blackpool
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Carlisle
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Kendal
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Windermere & Ambleside
These are just the latest additions to our dedicated regional infrastructure which delivers unparalleled services to local businesses and councils. As a national telecommunications operator we can also offer connectivity at competitive prices across the country, please contact a member of our team for more information on 08450 50 55 50.
Ofcom Announces Plans for 'White Space' Technology
On 1st September Ofcom released a paper outlining plans for utilising portions of the radio spectrum that have been freed-up as a result of the digital TV switchover. This could prove to be a major boost to rural broadband projects in areas that have struggled to receive service via the existing technologies offered by major operators. As a company with a decade's experience of delivering large-scale radio solutions we hope to play an active role in the deployment of this technology - watch this space! Read more about this here.
Rural Broadband Funding for Cumbria & Lancashire
Nearly £30m allocated to counties: Cumbria and Lancashire have recently been awarded a combined £27.8m in government funding to improve local broadband services. The funding represents the county's share of the £530m set aside for rural broadband by the government last year which comes from TV licence payments and over £200m left over from the UK's digital switchover fund. Cumbria’s £17.1m allocation represents the second largest single amount after neighbouring North Yorkshire was allocated £17.8m; further details of the funding can be found here.
LUNS has a long history with rural broadband projects across the region and has been at the forefront of delivering services to areas across Lancashire and Cumbria where other national operators have been unable to provide service. We are optimistic that these funds will be spent wisely and help to ensure that the region as a whole can receive true high-speed broadband services.
LUNS Open Source Activities
At LUNS, we live and breathe open source software – every day we make extensive use of open source software to deliver world-leading services to our customers, to monitor and support our networks and to help streamline our back-office operations.
Some notable examples of our contributions to open source projects this month have been:
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Supporting the world leading open-source ePortfolio Mahara, release 1.4:
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As mentioned in the 1.4 release announcement LUNS were the second largest contributor to the Mahara 1.4
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We now host and support the mahara.org continuous integration server: https://jenkins.mahara.org/ which is being used as part of the Mahara Development Cycle
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LUNS staff now make up 50% of the Mahara Review team fixing bugs and improving the Mahara releases
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Enhancing and improving the messaging system in the soon to be released Moodle 2.1
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LUNS were commissioned by The Open University to extend the Moodle Messaging framework introduced in Moodle 2.0 to give more power to administrators and plug-in authors
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We developed and successfully integrated the improvements to the Messaging system which are due to be included in Moodle 2.1 expected to be released later this month.
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Supporting OpenNMS on IPv6 Transition
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As well as being one of the leading worldwide organisations participating in World IPv6 day, LUNS participated in the OpenNMS IPv6 “remote poller testing” to help ensure OpenNMS readiness for the forthcoming IPv6 Transition.
LUNS Network Design Team Recognised
Two members of the LUNS networking team have successfully completed one of the highest qualifications in the industry: Robin Williams and Scott Daniels were recently awarded JNCIE (Juniper Network Certified Internet Expert) accreditation making them only the 871st and 872nd respectively to receive this award worldwide. Many congratulations to Scott & Robin!
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