trefor.net

Monday 8th of September is an important day for Internet Telephony Service Providers. This is the day by which they have to support Access to the Emergency Services by VoIP phone ie 999 must work when dialled.

There has been much debate amongst the global VoIP provider community as to how much regulation should be applied to VoIP. In the USA it centres largely on commercial issues. In other words telephone calls are taxed but VoIP calls were not taxed, at least initially. The argument was that VoIP calls are actually just computer to computer data traffic and not telephony as traditionally defined.

The incumbent telephony providers have fought hard to have VoIP  calls taxed in order to remove the competitive advantage notionally handed to VoIP companies.  Clearly it is in the interest of the VoIP provider community not to be subject to taxation. The justification for this is that it would stifle innovation amongst new market entrants. There is a case for this.

In the UK the argument is different. Regulation is not so much about taxation as personal safety. In this case Ofcom, the UK regulator, has mandated that if you provide telephony services that allow connection to and from traditional PSTN phone numbers you must provide access to the Emergency Services.

The Ofcom pronouncement comes with constraints including making sure that customers are aware that VoIP calls probably aren’t going to work if there is a power cut of if the broadband connection carrying the calls is down.

I am fully supportive of the Ofcom position.  What is going to be interesting is how the regulator responds to companies like Skype who at this time do not support 999 access and as far as I am aware have no plans to do so. Buyer beware.

If your business uses Skype then you could do worse than check out all the cases of identity theft that have been occuring in the Skype user community. For those who don’t know Skype is a free PC based VoIP telephony service that also allows paid for calls in and out from the PSTN. It has always been tagged as an insecure service which potentially opens a corporate network to hacking.

Recently Skype users have been having their identities stolen, and their accounts being used to make illegal phone calls. What’s more if you periodically top up your Skype account using PayPal note that people have found their bank accounts being debited of funds to pay for someone else’s calls. This on it’s own is bad enough but the problem is compounded by the fact that you can’t ring up Skype to complain or get it sorted. Skype relies on email contact for support with apparently slow or non existent response.

What’s more your exposure as a business is exacerbated by the fact that in stealing your identity a Skype hijacker can also steal the business contacts you keep in your Skype account with who knows what consequences.

You can read more about the Skype problems on The Register and if you want to phone a VoIP service provider to discuss how to get a professional service call 08700 949600. 

If you want to get faster broadband move to somewhere like Spain. Aha do I hear you say? Just the excuse you have been waiting for to make the move to a place in the sun? A bit drastic I’d say especially when I explain that the reason you might get faster broadband in Spain is because it almost certainly rains less there than in the good old UK.

It’s very interesting what snippets you pick up at Timico. Today, whilst gazing out the window at yet another downpour, I quizzed the tech support team as to whether there were any hot topics occupying their time. “Broadband” they responded. “We always get more broadband calls when it is raining”.

This took me somewhat by surprise but I checked it out and it is true. If you are a long way from your telephone exchange a bit of wind and rain can cause higher than normal noise on your copper cable, usually due to imperfect connections at the telegraph pole. That’s electrical noise - not something audible to mortals. It isn’t something easily diagnosed and ground based connections and leased lines do not suffer the same problem.

This noise can result in a temporary slowing of your broadband. Hence if you want faster broadband speed move somewhere where it doesn’t rain as much.

You heard it first on trefor.net.

PS if you do need tips on where to relocate the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.

The market for Ethernet circuits really seems to be moving forward apace. It is now generally cheaper to put in a 10Mbps Ethernet leased line than a 2Mbps E1 although there is still an element of geographic dependancy in some cases. If, for example, your business is based in London then the pricing for Ethernet is becoming very aggressive. It is now possible to get a 10Mbps circuit in London for half the price of a 2Mbps line which is based on an older  technology.

The competition is such that it is now very much worth shopping around. As businesses depend more and more on the internet for their every day functioning then they are increasingly turning to leased lines. The usage doesn’t appear to be driven by any particular application or function. It is right across the patch.

Timico uses a number of major infrastructure partners some of who, at any given point in time, will have a good deal or offer on the go. It may well be the case that in order to provide the optimum price and technical tradeoff a network solution provided by Timico will have connections from a number of different network partners but which is transparent to the end customer.

Employees of large companies often whinge about the constraints placed upon them by their IT departments. These contraints normally centre around security best practice.

Small businesses do not typically have the same disciplines. Timico recently performed a security audit at the request of one of it’s customers. The results were very revealing.

• Poor/outdated wireless security - use of WEP instead of WPA. It takes less than 5 minutes to crack a WEP key - a bit longer if the network uses MAC address security.
• No hard disk encryption or password protection on BIOS of laptops -  the stolen laptop test.
• Use of outdated VPN client allowed decryption of IPSEC tunnel passwords.
• Multiple equipments with default username and passwords.

Timico identified over ten major security faults at the customer’s premises. In fact this business was wide open. A malicious person could have sat in a car outside the office building, hacked into the network, accessed their important server information and disabled their network before leaving. These people do exist.

The fixes were relatively quick to implement in most cases. It’s just a question of discipline, with a little help from Timico. . .

I was taking a look at the Timico open order book and was staggered to see the diversity of types of company that we have as customers. I couldn’t identify what they all did from the name alone but those I could I wrote down.

Courier, damage management, domestic appliance distributor, baby goods shop, sporting goods manufacturer, printer, skip hire, transport company, optical goods company, nursing agency, drilling services, recruitment agency, dentist, property developer, golf club, martial arts company, travel agent, design company, estate agents, charity, solicitor, farm, training agency, personal friend of mine, petroleum company (big one J ), a domain name registrar, financial services company, tyre fitter, insurance broker, an university, sportswear marketing, graphic design, cooker manufacturer, Church of England diocese, flower seller, gas services, sprayer (?), blacksmith, bathroom vendor, wine reseller, entertainment agency, asylum seeker support company, bus company, computer services, enterprise agency, theatre, flooring, cladding, electrician, soft drink distributor, advertising agency, company from the Isle of Man (incidentally where I grew up), a cooperative society, aircraft company, conflict management, shipping agency.

The striking thing about all these companies is that whilst they operate in a very diverse set of markets they all need the same communications and IT products and services. The great thing from Timico’s perspective is not only that they want to buy services from us but that the diversity offers a degree of protection from any market fluctuations in a given sector.

My favourite was a school for cocktail bartenders. There’s always going to be a need for a good barman.

It always gives me a great buzz to sit in our NOC. It’s because when we started Timico only 4 years ago there were only four of us sat in the room of Tim Radford’s parents’ stable block (it was cheap and there was no room at the inn anyway). Now on a normal working day there are more people sat in the NOC than there were in that original room. It is a world away.

Today sat in the NOC some of the engineers were setting up a MPLS PWAN for a customer. This particular PWAN had over 80 sites - a mixture of leased lines and ADSL. In itself it isn’t a big news item. It isn’t our biggest PWAN by a long chalk. However it is another new customer and an endorsment of what we set out to achieve four years ago sat in the stable block.

It is a good feeling to be at Timico.

Power consumption is, as I’m sure you are all aware, a huge issue when building data centres today. The data centre giants such as Google and Microsoft build their facilities close to sources of hydroelectric power in order to minimise their operating costs.

An ironic fact about data centres is that it takes almost as much power to cool the room as it does to create the heat in the first place. ie the cost of powering a server is as much as the cost of running the air conditioning unit to cool it down. This, compounded by the rising cost of electricity, is why people look to implementing “green” low power servers.

If someone could harness the excess heat of data centres and turn it into electricity to power the air conditioning then that would be a serious contribution to lowering power consumption and saving the planet. Credit goes to Chris Nicholls of the Timico Netops team for this idea.

I wrote recently about the effect of the Olympics on internet usage. At the time we had seen a 10% or so increase in ADSL based internet usage as people went online to watch the opening ceremony.

Well the success (hooray) of Team GB prompted even more people to watch the Olympics online. Timico saw a staggering 24% increase in peak ADSL internet usage. Ordinarily this would have caused a problem to our customers because Timico has a policy of not thottling usage - the increase in usage would normally have slowed the performance of their web access.

However in this instance we had had the foresight to order additional capacity as part of our standard planning process and were able to bring it forward so that it timed nicely with the success of Team GB.

Interestingly our customers with homeworkers showed a much lower increase in usage than those with connections into their offices - presumably this was because homeworkers could have the TV on in the corner of the home office and didn’t need to watch online.

Now that the Olympic Games are over everything is back to normal.

Not sure about the name “Team GB” though. What’s wrong with “Great Britain” - would have been far more appropriate under the circumstances. My kids, suitably enthused, have already put their names down as volunteers to help in 2012. I’d do the same if I could be sure of getting in to watch the beach volleyball.

No takers.

Nobody to save.

Still a few available.