Having once again set off on the acquisition trail I thought I’d check out the level consolidation that has been going on in the ISP industry.
ISPA helped out with membership stats for 2010 and 2005 that make interesting reading.
Back in 2005 ISPA had 120 members, excluding Virtual ISPs who white label someone else’s service. Today there are 137. Nothing startling there you might think. The devil, however, is in the detail.
58 ISPs (48%) on the 2005 list are not there in 2010! 25 small (42%), 7 medium (58%), 21 large (57%) and 3 corporate (33%) names have vanished from the UK ISP landscape.
What surprised me was that the disappearances in the small category were not greater but there again if an industry is going to consolidate then the larger companies represent the low hanging fruit.
I’m sure that some of the names present in 2005 have just decided not to be members of ISPA in 2010. Cisco, for example, have either decided they no longer need to be part of the ISPA party or are moving away from the internet as a market! They are of course not an ISP anyway. The trend though is clear.
Some of the household names/victims that are not in the 2010 list are shown below for effect. Most have been acquired and/or rebranded:
Bulldog Communications Ltd
Pipex
Telewest/Blueyonder
Easynet Ltd
Energis Communications Ltd
Thus Plc
NTl
Wannadoo
Mistral Internet
PSINet
Video Networks
The Digital Economy Debate has generated a flurry of responses today – no doubt people getting messages out of the way before the rugby this weekend!
Firstly the UK hotel industry, via its mouthpiece the British Hospitality Association, has issued a press release expressing grave concern that their members could have their internet access cut off because of the illegal activities of naughty guests.
The miscreants will of course have long checked out by the time the long arm of the law reached out to behind the reception desk.
From personal experience (of having hundreds of hotels as customers and not of Torrenting whilst staying at them) hotels are particularly prone to guests taking advantage of the internet in the room to download material via P2P.
A long long time ago, way before Timico, I worked for Mitel who had at that time something like 80% of the UK hotels using their phone systems. Research in those days suggested that 90% of all internet surfing out of hotels was to pornographic websites. It was more unusual for people to have broadband at home and access from the office was strictly filtered.
So the BHA now joins the Educational system in wanting immunity from prosecution under the Digital Economy Bill. McDonalds will be next. At this rate a large part of the UK broadband estate will be seeking immunity from the Bill.
Also speaking out today is Parliament’s own Joint Select Committee on Human Rights which says the Government’s response to the problem of illegal file-sharing in the Digital Economy Bill may have created over-broad powers.
Andrew Dismore MP, Chair of the Committee, said: “Illegal file sharing is itself a breach of important rights, but the concern we have with this Bill is that it lacks detail. It has been difficult, even in the narrow area we have focussed on, to get a clear picture of the scope and impact of the provisions. The internet is constantly creating new challenges for policy-makers but that cannot justify ill-defined or sweeping legislative responses, especially when there is the possibility of restricting freedom of expression or the privacy of individual users.”
At least people are starting to shout louder. Andrew Dismore MP seems to have his head screwed on.
If you want to keep up to speed on the debate in the Lords go here.
With all the fuss in the press about Google and their possible exit from the Chinese market I got a timely email this morning from the (a?) Chinese Domain Name registry.
We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on February 03,2010, One company which self-styled “LSHB Technology PLC” are applying to register “Timico” as Network Brand and Domain Names as below :
“timico.asia
timico.hk
timico.in
timico.mobi
timico.net.cn
timico.org.cn
timico.tw”
After our initial examination, we found that the Network Brand applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it, hope to get the affirmation from your company. If your company and this “LSHB Technology PLC” as the same company, there is no need reply to us, We will accept their application and will register those for them immediately.
If your company has no relationships with that company nor do not authorized, please reply to us within 7 workdays, if we can’t get any information from yours over 7 workdays,we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by “LSHB Technology PLC”. Thanks for your cooperation.
Best Regards,
Amanda Hua
Senior Consultant
PX-Dnr
I could respond to this in a number of ways, in the first instance by simply ignoring it as the clever marketing scam that it is. I could also reply politely telling them that I am flattered that Timico is sufficiently on the map to be imitated by organisations in other countries but to go ahead and sell them the domains.
Alternatively I could put out a press release in support of Google with a public affirmation that Timico has pulled its plans to move into China. I can think of better places to start our overseas expansion anyway: the Maldives, the Caribbean (that’s Carrribbean to American readers), Wales.
I was talking to some people today about what type of broadband they had. One of them surprisingly said she didn’t have broadband. I found this astonishing. However the truth came out when she told me she just used next door’s which was unsecured.
Whatever you think of the morals of this it is a real life pointer as to the problems of proof when it comes to accusing a broadband owner of illegal downloading.
I present here, for your delectation, the winner of the “dontdisconnectus” “Sing our Petition” competition. The opposition to the Digital Economy Bill is building but it has some way to go yet I feel.
The Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has launched a public reporting webpage (on the Directgov website) for terrorist-related material found on the internet.
The public can report URLs of suspected terrorist material direct to a police unit who will investigate. If the website is found to be in breach of the Terrorism Act 2006 the police will issue a Section 3 Notice to have the content modified or removed presuming it is hosted in the UK.
The type of content users may report can be found here on the Home Office website and the reporting page itself here.
As part of the fight against terrorism this must be good though I imagine it will be difficult to maintain an adequate level of publicity for the scheme so that people know where to look to report a website.
Also the savvy terrorist will use hosting provider in a country that doesn’t care or doesn’t have the same laws so unless this initiative was conducted on a global scale it will probably only have a small effect.
I don’t generally use this blog as a vehicle to promote my employer, Timico. On this occasion though we have hit the news with the acquisition of Fareham based ISP NewNet.
“Uhuh” do I hear you say? Well there are a few points worth making.
Firstly there is an ongoing consolidation happening in the maturing ISP industry. We are seeing it at the top level, most recently with Carphone Warehouse’s purchase of Tiscali, and also in what might be termed as the Tier2 level in which Timico now operates.
Many companies in the mid size space have already been gobbled up by the biggies on their way to building market share: plus.net, bulldog, pipex et al spring to mind.
A void has to some extent appeared in the market for provision of quality ISP services to UK businesses. Many of those who used to do it are now part of big corporations where low cost is the most important issue, not customer service. Some have stayed independent, Zen being the obvious name that springs to mind, but their number is dwindling.
The challenge for ISPs addressing the business market is how to be able to sustain the necessary investment in infrastructure (eg MPLS, 10GigE, storage/cloud) and also to maintain the high levels of support demanded by a business customer whose internet connection has become mission critical.
Most ISPs in the UK today are still small operators whose idea of 24×7 operation is to give out the mobile number of the owner to a customer, or simply not to offer the service. This is neither scalable nor in the main satisfactory.
The Timico acquisition of NewNet makes great sense all round. Both companies have the same customer focussed culture, focussing on high levels of service. NewNet considerably extends the Timico capability in terms of co-location and hosting. Timico brings to NewNet a range of fixed line and mobile services and the combined entity is very much greater than sum of the parts.
The cogs of Government continue to grind. I know many of you yawn at some of these regulatory posts but man cannot live on network diagrams alone. The 5th day of the Digital Economy Bill House of Lords Committee stage was held yesterday.
No non-Government amendments made it through but a number of important concessions were made.
Clause 11 in particular concerns “Obligations to limit internet access”. The brakes are being put on this in that no order to cut off someone’s internet access could be made until 12 months after Ofcom has looked at this issue and come up with a Code of Practice.
It is now also proposed that it becomes a requirement, as opposed to an option, for the Secretary of State to request a report from Ofcom on the “suitability of a technical obligation”, ie whether a consumer gets cut off in a particular instance (I assume).
There will also be full appeals process which could be heard by a tribunal before any technical measure is imposed. It will still lead to a pretty messy situation downstream even if it delays the day of reckoning.
Note this is still not backed up by any sign of copyright licensing reform that will make it easier to download music in a legal manner.
There is a lot more to read about but you can do that yourselves here - if you have a few hours to spare and don’t mind finishing up with a headache. Despite all the glamour and the luxury expense fuelled living :-) a lot of what MPs do is deadly boring and is reported in such technical legalese as to make it often undecipherable to the “man on the street”.
It is worth noting something else. ISPs regularly receive “abuse” reports from Rights Holders. These letters informing an ISP of supposed illegal downloading activity from one of their customers’ IP Addresses
At last week’s UKNetwork Operators Forum (UKNOF) meeting a representative of Janet, the UK Education network, said that of the ‘abuse’ reports they received last year, 10% turned out to be for the IP addresses of printers, 15% were address space that wasn’t actually being used and 50% only had a 0 second interval for the time that material was being offered for download.
By this token, and I admit only in this anecdotal case, 75% of the supposed illegal activity would never pass scrutiny. This suggests that it is going to be very difficult for anyone to determine the validity of such an assertion by a Rights Holder, be they a judge, ISP or anyone else. There is no way an ISP would want to get involved with this without someone picking up the costs and being fully indemnified.
How is Facebook a business tool? It is interesting to understand how people use it at work especially considering that businesses do get concerned about staff wasting time. I have in the past defriended someone because they seemed to do nothing but talk about their car whilst working from home.
A quick snapshot this morning of status updates by my friends show:
MD of a wireless networking company
someone I used to play rugby with
VoIP Technical Authority from one of the worlds leading communications electronics manufacturer
international product manager for cellular handset manufacturer
renowned ISP consultant
university PhD student
international tech journalist
UK Member of Parliament
international cricket website
rugby playing prison warder
gateway presales engineer
MD of international telco startup
product manager for mobile network
global voip and social networking guru
owner of a social media startup
networking engineer
rural broadband activist
It doesn’t matter what the nature of the conversation is between my Facebook friends. It is rarely to do with specific business issues. The point is it is just a hugely productive tool because it builds up an ecosystem of contacts that makes it easy for me to talk business with them another time, and not on Facebook. It is the internet version of a round of golf.
VoIP QoS should not be an issue if the network is managed correctly. This means the LAN, the WAN link and the core network of the service provider.
If the WAN link is an ADSL then it can be susceptible to congestion at the exchange though in my experience this very rarely happens, even at times of extreme network usage such as the Olympics or last summer’s cricket. Problems here typically stem from underprovisioning of bandwidth. An Internet Telephony Service Provider should also be operating an uncongested core network and a properly designed LAN should never give problems.
Problems do still occur but if you have the right tools these should be straightforward to detect and sort out. One of the ways we manage our network is by using probes embedded at key point in the network.
The diagram below shows the output of one such probe earlier this morning. We are looking at connection downtime, lost packets or packets arriving in the wrong order, jitter and latency or delay. It can be seen that latency is almost the only measurable effect. All the other numbers are too low to count. Even the worst case latency figure seen here of around 46ms is not going to be noticed by the human ear and most of the calls are below 20ms.
This is a very useful tool for IT managers having to run multiple services over a multi-site Wide Area Network and allows them to spot problems before anyone notices and starts to complain.
