Month: May 2008

Categories
broadband Business

Heaviest Virgin Media Downloaders Face New Daytime Go-Slow

This is an article reproduced from The Register.

It is basically a perfect advertisment as to why people should use a quality ISP as opposed to a “pile it high sell it cheap” operator. Timico’s policy is that “we don’t throttle….. we just ask users to pay a usage based surcharge if they choose to use a lot of our bandwidth….SIMPLE!”

If business users chose to go with an ISP who operates the type of policy outlined by Virgin below then they are going to get a non optimal experience.

the story goes

Virgin Media will double the number of hours it throttles the bandwidth of customers who hammer its network day and night, changes to its traffic management policy have revealed.

The tightened regime means that between 10am and 3pm subscribers to its “M”, “L” and “XL” packages will have their connection throttled for five hours if they download more than their full speed ration.

The decision follows recent regional testing of extended restrictions in London and the North West. Previously the brakes were only slammed on for five hours if limits were exceeded at any point between 4pm and 9pm.

Now, “M” customers who bust 900MB during the day will have their theoretical maximum download halved from 2Mbit/s to 1Mbit/s. “L” and “XL” users’ usual headline speeds of 10MBit/s and 20MBit/s will be slowed by three quarters if they break daytime download limits of 2400MB and 6000MB respectively.

The download thresholds for the daytime broadband throttling period are double those of the evening period, which also restricts uploads. We’ve reproduced Virgin Media’s explanatory table below:

Virgin Media says that at current levels of demand, one per cent of its 3.8 million customers will be affected by the new daytime restrictions. In the evening, when ISP networks are under most strain, traffic limits are aimed at the top five per cent heaviest users.

A spokesman said the new rules are necessary to ensure quality of service for the majority. The move will nevertheless anger some who have been tricked into believing that “unlimited” broadband actually exists by years of crummy marketing by the ISP industry.

The cable monopoly, created by the merger of NTL and Telewest in 2006, is currently working to boost its top speed to 50MBit/s as part of its strategy to put broadband at the centre of its quadruple-play offering. recent trials to ramp Virgin Media’s 10Gbit/s backhaul to 40GBit/s in support of the upgrade were successful. ®

Categories
Business voip

How will 21CN affect my telephone line?

We had an enquiry from a customer this morning:

“I am persistently being contacted by David from ***** who has advised me that with 21CN BT are changing every business line from Analogue or ISDN to a SIP network and that there is no choice in the matter”.

David was trying to get the customer to move to a SIP service by telling her that she would need to do it soon in anycase so she might as well preempt it by doing it now. As a SIP provider I am not averse to selling SIP services but this has to be approached ethically.

From the customer’s perspective BT aren’t getting rid of analogue lines or ISDN. What they are doing is changing the connection at the exchange so that all calls will run over voip between exchanges. This will make the network more efficient/cheaper to run and potentially allow for the introduction of new features in the future.

So any kit the customer has should still work and they will still be ordering new lines as they do now. They needn’t worry about having to re-equip their office.

Potentially there will be new products such as the ability to order broadband and voice as a single line. This is effectively what LLU operators do today though some may sell it as a free broadband line (comes with notoriously “cheap” quality and customer service etc).

Categories
Engineer servers

Virtual Server Virtuosity

At Timico we recently installed a complete network solution for a customer in the UK. The requirement included installation of a domain controller, file and print server, Microsoft Exchange 2007, Microsoft SQL server various databases and for their document management system and a Citrix ZenApp for home workers to run the document management system remotely.

The company also needed to store lots of documents. They have a paperless office and all documents are scanned in by the document management system which required a redundant Storage Area Network (SAN).

100% uptime or as near to this as possible was also wanted but this came in tandem with a fairly tight budget which isn’t always consistent with high reliability.

The architecture that the Timico team came up with involved running all servers and the SAN in a virtualised environment. In this way the design challenge could be met by using only two physical servers called nodes that provided a fully load balanced and virtually clustered redundant solution.

By doing it this way we saved rackspace (5U) and power and 2 servers – we would otherwise have been looking at a pair of virtual servers and a pair of SAN servers.

Did it work? In the first week a hardware problem caused one of the 2 server nodes to temporarily fail. This was picked up by Timico’s monitoring desk but the customer, however, did not notice or experience any loss of service.

I’m Virtually Certain that this is the way forward.

Categories
Business UC voip

Cisco SMB day, generation Y and Unified Communications

Very interesting time at the Cisco SMB day held at the Mercedes Motor Museum in Brooklands.

Bernadette Wightman, SMB Operations Director said Cisco are expecting SMBs to be worth $1Bn to them in 2009 and today’s channel event is their first big push towards getting there. The gradual migration of the Linksys brand to Cisco is also an indicator. Cisco have traditionally been too expensive a solution for the SME market and it will be interesting to see how this changes.

Unified Communications and Web2.0 was a big part of their messaging with a big focus on the change in demographics about to hit business.

The biggest users of Web2.0 are those consumers of social networking sites belonging to generation Y. In other words those born after 1980. Currently the decision makers belong to generation X, those fortunate enough to have been born on or after 1964. As someone who came into this world in 1961 I must therefore fall into “generation W” which is somewhat disconcerting.

The point it that the biggest users of Web2.0 will within 4 years represent 20 million of the workforce in the UK. As the SMB sector (under 250 employees) represents 62% of the UK workforce Web2.0 technology will have to be to be an important part of the product offering of vendors in the communications space.

The second keynote was by Anthony Hilton, Financial journalist and former Managing Director of the London Evening Standard. He suggested that whilst some market sectors such as banking and house building were being hit hard during the current financial uncertainties, other parts of the financial services sectors such as insurance and savings were doing well as consumers stopped borrowing and started saving their money.

I asked him how he saw the technology markets being affected compared with the last post 9/11 and dot com bubble bursting recession. He expects that the current financial crisis will drive business towards adopting Unified Communications products that will save them money and improve productivity. However the likelihood is that these products will be based on fairly mature technology that has been around and in use for the last five years.

Much of what is being discussed as being targeted for business is still some way off being a production item. This is despite the fact that Web2.0 in theory allows for rapid introduction of new features and products. Witness the statement that 5,000 Facebook applications were built by 90,000 developers in 7 weeks.

On display was a mockup of Webex Connect, the next gen Web2.0 offering from the hosted provider. Webex’ biggest take up has been in the SMB space but what we saw, which was a convergence of much of what is Web2.0 was not slated for production until 2010. Look out for “dusting” which is where content on the screen of your mobile device is waved or “brushed” onto your desktop when you arrive at the office.

I can’t help but think that one day these elongated product development cycles will be a thing of the past. In fact I can see the day where companies are unable to come up with product roadmaps beyond 6 months because the pace of development will be so fast that no-one will be able so see further out than that.

That being said Cisco is making all the right noise in this space and is clearly putting its money where its mouth is. One of its biggest challenges will be to recruit a channel that faces SMB customers where traditionally its big partners have gone after big Enterprise money. This fact will potentially easy open the door for new entrants into the Cisco reseller space as there is less likely to be competition from the incumbents.

Categories
Business mobile connectivity phones voip

ITSPA Dinner and Mobile VoIP

telephone dial graphic for Timico mobile VoIP App

Mobile VoIP discussed at ITSPA dinner

ITSPA, the UK trade association of the internet telephony industry, held its Spring Dinner last night, attended by the great and the good of UK VoIP.  The event was held at the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists which must be one of the youngest Livery Companies in the City of London.

 

An interesting variety of organisations were represented ranging from equipment vendors Vegastream and ITSPs small and large. I sat between the Tesco and BT representatives, neither of who were willing to divulge the size of their subscriber base although word has it that BT has between 1m and 2m residential users.

 

After the dinner I led a debate on a number of subjects of interest to the VoIP community and one hot issue was mobile VoIP. Nokia are rumoured to not be providing a native SIP client in the N96, the next version of the N95, although the E Series will still have it.

 

This is clearly a strategy reversal on the part of the handset vendor, presumably the result of pressure from the mobile operator community. Mobile Operators are saying no to consumer VoIP. However it is harder for Nokia to take the same approach with it’s E series which is pitched firmly at business and which is the handset of choice for a number of iPBX vendors’ in premise FMC solutions.  

 

As it happens not many ITSPs use the native Nokia SIP client at least not without some element of plug in to make it work and many use third party applications.

 

Coincidentally I spent some time discussing mobile VoIP with Tesco’s Anna Boukovskaia who told me of their plans in this space. Back in the office on Friday I noticed that The Register had an article on the subject: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/22/tesco_voip/

 

Tesco isn’t using the Nokia client and I imagine will be able to migrate to the N96 when available.

 

 

There are plenty of other mobile VoIP type topics but I’ll leave them for another day.

 

 

 

Categories
Business voip

Champions League Final

Just watching the Champions League final between Man U and Chelsea. It reminds me of the last time Man U were in the final in 1999. I was at the airport in Newark,New Jersey and rang my mum up back in the UK to find out who had won. She told me that the game was not yet over but that Manchester were losing 1 – 0. As I spoke to her she got very excited because Man U scored twice in a short space of time and won the cup. 

The point of the story is that I was on a tour of the USA visiting VoIP software vendors, and in particular those who could supply us with DSP Codec algorithms. I was working for Mitel Semiconductor and we were developing an integrated VoIP processor for small gateways and handsets. We ended up being first to market with competing against TI and 8×8 and launched at the Fall VON show later that year.

I can’t quite believe that I have been working in the VoIP space for around ten years now. It’s pretty amazing to have seen the whole technology move from something on the horizon to a mainstream industry.

PS I am a Liverpool fan 🙂

Categories
Business fun stuff

Hello world!

This blog has been started to enable me to comment on what is relevant to  consumers of communications products in businesses in the UK. The industry is going through a more rapid change than it has ever seen and perhaps for the first time we are beginning to  see how VoIP and the IP revolution is going to move telephony on from straightforward voice. With the advent of Web2.0 we are moving on from searching for the killer app (and deciding in the absence of being able to find anything that it must be voice after all!) to experiencing a rich mix of communications capabilities and services. What is more our imaginations are being inspired to come up with new ideas at an unprecedented rate.

 

Having seen it all start in the consumer space companies are now beginning to understand how to apply web based services for business. At Timico, for example, we use the whole gamut of technologies that might be considered to have started in the consumer space and moved into B2B (presence, IM, blogs, wikis, VoIP to name but a few). We were the first service provider in the world to introduce SIP trunks based on the AS5200 SIP platform to the Nortel BCM PBX and first to provide a mix of Nortel hosted carrier-side Unified Comms services as an overlay to Enterprise products.

 

Capabilities that might have historically been in the  domain of the  large enterprise  are now entering the world of the smaller businesses. Access to smaller customers is being made easier by the advent of e-business. Reach is increasing and costs are coming down.

 

There are other interesting dynamics at work. The move to a web based environment is creating a huge demand for collocation space at a time when power is at a premium and the green agenda is coming to the fore. This is in turn bringing forward developments in power reduction and the implementation of virtual technology. Increased web usage is driving up costs for ISPs whilst at the  same time users expect to pay less. Investment decisions are becoming more complex as are the technologies needed by business and as a result outsourcing is becoming more and more the norm.

 

It is an exciting time to be playing the game and in this blog I will be discussing what’s new, what’s useful and hopefully having a good time whilst at it.