Why does Facebook want to buy Opera?

The word around the campfire this week-end is that Facebook wants to buy Opera Software. Given the recent high-profile acquisition of Instagram (Facebook.com) for $1B, the whole IPO debacle (Forbes.com), and the release of a clone of aforementioned Instagram, I guess everything’s possible.

But actually I think it makes a lot of sense for Facebook to buy Opera Software. Part of the reason the IPO is such a mess is that the expected profits for H2’12 won’t be as high as expected. The reason for this? More and more people connect to Facebook using mobile devices (tablets are included in this). And it so happens that Facebook makes less money when you connect in this fashion rather than with a regular PC computer.

Why? Two words: less advertisement. In order to speed up page load times and such, FB made a “product decision” to remove some of the advertisement. With the advent of the Rise of the Tablets, this is a strategic error from Facebook.

They need new means to capitalize on their users grow the company. And Opera is already built in a way that would completely work in the way Facebook makes money. See, FB is successful as a business because the ads they display are (supposedly) directly targeted at the users that look at them. FB studies what you like, what you comment on, what groups you joined, what pages you visit (using the “Like” buttons and such now on most websites), and so on. They can then sell that profile to advertisers, and make them pay a premium for it.

How can you go from there? Well Opera Mobile, for a few years now, has got the capability to off-load some of the rendering and parsing and all that to Opera’s servers. If these servers are managed by Facebook, they could be assured that they don’t miss a thing from your online browsing activities. They would not depend on webmasters they don’t control anymore, they would not depend on you being connected to the website.

So it makes complete sense for Facebook to acquire Opera. Probably less than it would to build it from scratch – Google’s immensely popular browser is open source, and that must have helped development a lot. I don’t see FB going the open source way.

Spirent was 76 year old yesterday

(Cross-posted from the Corporate Blog)

It wasn’t called Spirent back then, but it’s the same company that was founded 66 years ago. There wasn’t much IP networks back then, but we were already in the high-end of hot technologies of the time. This is an email we got yesterday with a little bit of history:

Seventy six years ago today, Jack Bowthorpe founded a company that we all know today as Spirent Communications.  Bowthorpe started Goodliffe Electric Supplies, at No. 8 Eagle St., London, with capital provided by his brother’s father-in-law and his two sons—the Goodliffe family.  Soon thereafter, he hired his first employee, Raymond A. Parsons, who after Bowthorpe’s death in 1978 would serve as chairman until 1991.

The Company began by making and selling power line fittings and mechanical timers.   Eighteen months after starting the Company, Bowthorpe bought out the Goodliffes, founding Bowthorpe Electric Ltd.  At the same time, he went into business with Paul Hellermann, who had invented a new method for insulating electrical wiring.   Not long after, the Second World War broke out, bringing unprecedented demand for wiring.   Bowthorpe and his team developed the first technique for producing labeled wires, by ironing decals onto the insulation.

And the rest, as they say, is history as Spirent continues to build on its strong tradition of innovation.

Internet in 2015

The (presumably) marketing department of Cisco just released an amazing image showing what Internet will be like in 2015. We know that it’s growing almost as an exponential rate as more and more devices get connected, each using more and more apps. But 2015 should pass the 1 Zettabyte mark. Here’s below (click for larger image).

Spirent In The News

The last few weeks have been pretty exciting for Spirent with lots of high-end testing:

• Watch Ankur Chadda introduce PASS (Performance Availability Security Scalability) methodologies to networking blog experts.
• Do you like switching? The you might be interested in this Arista 10G switch test. How does 5.7 Billion frame per second sound?
• Do you really like switching? How about the largest ever L2-3 test ever made? That’d be 1,536 10G ports. At once. On a switch. We have a page about this Juniper QFabric testing.

Last but not least, I was presenting Network and Application Layer Testing during the Fortinet Partner Event, last week in La Défense, Paris. It was great to see all these persons interested in performance testing!

Realistic Latency Measurement in the Application Layers

We are often asked how to measure the one-way latency with Avalanche, or “why don’t I see a one-way latency metric in my results.” This entry will explain why we don’t measure the one-way latency, and how you can measure the two-way latency.

In order to measure the one-way latency, you have two options:

1. Use TCP TimeStamps. TCP TimeStamps are a TCP Extension and can therefore sometimes be blocked or  stripped off by Devices Under Test. And we learn from the RFC 1323, that a “1ms precision can run up to 8 Tbps.” By using a L2-3 tester, you could get an incredibly more precise measurement (Spirent Test Center has a precision of 2.5 nanoseconds at 100Gbps, scaling to the Tbps).
2. Add a signature field in your frames. For high-accuracy you need dedicated clocks, and we use a highly accurate one in our Spirent Test Center modules. This is fine for L2-3 testing because it’s the only way to do it, and also because it doesn’t impact the payload. However, when you test a full Application-layer product, where do you put that timestamp/signature? Nowhere. All the fields of all the layers are used by their respective protocols. If we add a signature field, our traffic is not 100% realistic anymore.

Last but not least, both of these solutions only work in two-arms testing scenarios – since you need the receiving end of a packet to implement the logic to measure and report the latency. Two-way latency works in both two-arm and one-arm scenarios.

Avalanche measures latency in a passive way – by measuring the state of the TCP connections. It limits the measurement to the two-way latency, but it gives us all kinds of interesting information. More importantly, we perceive the end-users perspective. Keep this in mind: the goal of any network is to provide data transfer in the most efficient way possible for the users. Their perspective, at the end of the day, is all that counts! 

What matters when you move up in the stack is, for instance, the HTTP response time, or the time it takes to open a connection – because those are the metrics of the protocols belonging to the OSI layer you are currently testing.

Not a L4-7 Entry

This post has got nothing to do with L4-7 testing or stateful engines. It’s about video games, because this is my other passion. Today, on the amazing Good Old Games website, you can get Fallout for free – and legally.

Fallout was released in September 1997 and is one of the best post-apocalyptic, turn-based, role-playing game (yeah, that’s quite specific) game ever released. And today you can get it for free.

While on the topic, there’s currently a Kickstarter Project to fund Wasteland 2. The original Wasteland was released in 1988 and inspired Fallout. The only reason the name and franchise are different is because Electronic Arts (which published Wasteland in ’88) didn’t release intellectual property rights to Interplay (which published Fallout in ’97) so the later publisher just changed the name, setting and back story.

If you claim to love games, get Fallout now. Or wait a few days and pay 5 or 10 dollars, which is the usual range for games on GoG.

Meet Spirent at CPX 2012

This year again Spirent will be present at the Check Point Experience (CPX), both in Orlando (April 17th-18th) and Berlin (May 30th-31st). We will be in the Performance panel to demonstrate, well, the performance of the 61000 (remember we did this last year at the introduction event too) and 21000 appliances. We will also be present on the Crossbeam booth.

So make sure to register either for Orlando or Berlin! I look forward to meet you there.