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Author: Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

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Engineer fun stuff peering

PRIZE COMPETITION – guess who’s wearing the sandals #LINX88

PRIZE COMPETITION

Guess who’s wearing the sandals at LINX88. There may be more than one person wearing sandals, this being an internet engineering meeting. Steve Lalonde plus the wearer of the sandals may not enter.

The prize is either I’ll buy you a beer or I’ll buy breakfast at Silva’s Caff on Shaftesbury Ave at 8am tomorrow morning. Steve and I will be there from 8am. It’s one the of the best.

If you want to add a caption for effect feel free.

Categories
Engineer peering

LINX88 notes thoughts and ramblings

LINX88

LINX88 notes and thoughts

LINX is without doubt a big outfit. The stats speak for themselves:

  • 603 member ASNs
  • 22 new applications in 2015
  • 1454 connected member ports
  • 851 member-facing 10GigE ports
  • 13 member-facing 100GigE ports
  • over 2.53 Tb/sec of peak traffic
  • 10.212 Tb of connected capacity
  • 583 members
  • 62 member countries

The internet plumbing game is an exciting place to be. It’s a place of constant growth. And change. Where there is growth and change there is opportunity.

The model hasn’t really changed much over the years. It’s all about connecting networks with increasingly faster links. We have seemingly only just started talking about 100GigE but now LINX has 13 live 100Gig ports. It’s only a matter of time before we see their first 400Gig connection. The first Petabit per second peak will surely follow.

The thing about the internet plumbing game is that there doesn’t seem to be any sign of an easing off of growth. We still have bandwidth drivers in the early stages of the hype curve. 8K TV for example. Internet of Things? How about 8K TV over IOT? Why not?

The engineers that run the internet are simple folk. Don’t get me wrong. They are highly intelligent but they see life quite simply. Give them enough beer, food and fine wines, fly them business class and put them up in comfortable hotels and they are happy. Given this they will happily work long hours and keep the internet running on your behalf.

LINX is 21 years old in 2015. That gives you a feel for how old the actual internet is. It also allows us to have a load of coming of age parties to follow on from the 20th birthday bashes last year but that is by the by.

Look out for the next post which is all about sandals and socks.

Categories
broadband Business Engineer Net

Virgin expansion – a quick shufty at the business case & why they aren’t interested in the final third

B4RN rural broadband virgin media expansion

Virgin Media expansion

All over the news today are the Virgin Media expansions plans. Virgin plan to spend £3billion expanding their network reach from 13 million to 17 million homes. That’s £750 per household passed. If, following this investment, Virgin grows its customer base by the same proportion as the growth in network coverage they might expect to grow their base from 5 million to 6.5 million customers. That would make it £2000 per acquired customer. Let’s not worry about other customer acquisition costs.

Virgin will depreciate that cost over maybe 25 years so that’s £80 per customer per annum, or £6.66 a month. That’s £6.66 of the monthly subscription cost of a new customer being the cost of laying down the network. This would be reduced if they depreciated it over a longer period which maybe they do – I imagine BT’s strategy is to depreciate over many decades as once in the infrastructure lasts a long time. A chunk of the £3bn might well be operational cost which would reduce the depreciation but add to operations costs.

Brings it home as to why these services cost what they do. It’s analagous to why a BT line rental costs roughly £16 a month although one imagines that BT has written off most of the capex of installing its copper. Even though broadband can almost seem to be free nowadays the cost at the lower end is driven by the line rental. When it comes to superfast broadband bandwidth costs come more into play.

The revenue growth would notionally increase from £4.2bn to £5.5bn although I’m being a little simplistic and not taking the effect of their mobile business into consideration.

I haven’t seen profit numbers for 2014 but I think they are pretty profitable. Lets assume 10% profit. Could be more. 10% profit of the delta sales arising from the new investment (our guess is around £1.3bn as stated) would be £130m a year. That would be a 23 year payback time for the £3bn of cash spent. It’s a long term game isn’t it?

These numbers are very rough back of a fag packet calcs but I think it certainly gives you an idea. I’m sure there are lots of Variables played in by Virgin accountants to come up with a business case. Also I’ve almost certainly missed something out but I bet I’m not far off the mark.

A 23 year Return on Investment wouldn’t pass muster with most companies. Even BT which is in the same long term infrastructure game as Virgin. I’m told that BT’s Cornwall infrastructure project which had the benefit of substantial EC cash only showed a reasonable time to money because of that EC money. And that was something like a 12 – 13 year payback.

Note there were according to the Office for National Statistics 26.7 million households in the UK in 2014.

So Virgin’s investment takes them to around 64% coverage. Their existing network reaches around 49% of the population so for £3m they get 15% more. If we were to extrapolate these numbers then the whole country would cost £20billion to service. I realise it isn’t as simple as that but the number isn’t orders of magnitudes adrift from the Caio report of a few years back which estimated the total cost of rolling ubiquitous Fibre to be around £29bn.

If we keep the maths simple and assume that rural areas would cost the same per household to service, which they won’t the cost of extending the Virgin network to every household would be just over £7bn. I don’t have the additional cost of servicing non-metropolitan areas off the top of my head but it wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t represented by the £9bn delta between my own calcs in this post and Caio.

So the cost of providing a high speed broadband infrastructure to the last third for a new provider feels as if it would be something like £16bn. We don’t have a number were BT to be the provider but BT will already have a chunk of infrastructure in place towards fulfilling the job.

My guess is that there’s no way based on these projected costs that Virgin would ever seek to invest in the “final third”. Their RoI/payback would stretch almost to the next century. This is just a bit of an exercise but it does serve to illustrate the long term game that is the telco business.

Categories
Apps End User

Sky News on Snapchat

Obvious one really. Nobody wants to watch repeats of the news so Snapchat seems to me to be the perfect vehicle for it. This is why Sky News and Sky Sports have announced a new Snapchat app.

The one thing I have had against Snapchat, apart from the unwanted spam from Team Snapchat that I can’t seem to switch off, is the fact that it’s an ephemeral service. It doesn’t store what is sent. This is likely why people use it but I like to fill up data centres with stuff that never gets looked at again and just contributes to the growth of big data.

News is different. How often do you find yourself saying to yourself “o gawd not this again”. Usually when your on a car journey and have to listen to multiple bulletins about politicians having a go at each other about how they are all such slimebags1.

There is only one thing better than having the news on Snapchat and that is having no news at all. The world would be a happier place if all we could watch were repeats of Dad’s Army, Tom and Jerry, Top Gear and Futurama (only the first two were mine). The Tom and Jerry has to be a Fred Quimby though. I digress.

This Sky announcement is another step towards the ever shortening of our attention spans. In fact why do they even bother with Snapchat when Twitter is clearly the ultimate medium for this kind of stuff. Not only is a tweet very quick and easy to ready but half the time it’s disappeared below your screen so quickly that you haven’t even had a chance to read it. Perfect when it comes to bad news tweets, or election tweets from politicians having a go at each other yet again.

I specifically note the political thing because I live in the bellweather seat of Lincoln and we have them all mooching around kissing babies, inspecting new bits of equipment that will lead to new jobs and generally seeking media exposure of any kind. Today it’s Geo Osborne. Next week it’s Glen Millerband Dave Ed Miliband.

Dunno why I’m getting overtly political just now. I am not affiliated with any party btw and am happy to engage with politicians of all hues. I only recently found out (after 26 years of marriage!) that my wife is interested in politics. This might explain why son 1 did a degree in history and politics and why son 2 is lining up to do the same.

Son 2 in particular can’t understand my apathy and unwillingness to engage in political discussion over the dinner table when all my TV (1) and Radio (many) appearances have by and large been to discuss political stuff.

I’ve rambled on far more than intended and certainly not in keeping with the short attention span instant gratification we demand in our lives nowadays.

Arrivederchi.

1 OK I believe the word currently in favour is “dodgy” but it’s all the same and all said under the protection of parliamentary privilege 🙂

Categories
Apps End User fun stuff

Randomly dictated

uc executive dinner voice recognition cloud provider survey technology marketing

voice recognition

Giving the kids a lift to school this morning. T I thought i’d fill in some time was waiting for the kids to get ready by randomly dictating a post.
New line
I i also did this yesterday from the cafe in the office because i didn’t have a key with me and i was there before everybody else. 3 lot of errors in that situation because i had to keep my voice down and i’m not sure of the quality of the wifi in a cafe. I’m finding that at home when i don’t have to whisper or atleast speaking subdued tones and with good wifi at i’m able to speak quite quickly and the dictation turns out quite well. In fact it looks as if ur speaking more quickly turns out a better quality of dictated post. At least with the interpretation of the words are concerned if not the quality of what is being dictated.
New line
You could actually get quite used to do this if it wasn’t for the fact that speaking out loud in the office is going to be a disruptive to the other people in the office a good way, and efficient way of writing text. Nowadays my handwriting skills are very poor because most of the time i’m using keyboard i can see in future if my typing skills might suffer because i will just be using my spoken word.
New line
In one sense this will be coming full circle time with only the spoken word existed there was nothing there in terms of the written word available or having been invented yet and in fact the language that use these days probably reflects the language used by cavemen from the stone age in it uh know what i mean. I’m sure that the cavemen would be insulted to think that i was saying that their language wisdom downs but she hasn’t arrived on the scene at that time.
New line
Which 8:35 there are signs of life signs of children getting ready getting the shoes on. I’m already ready i’ve had my coat on for 15 minutes. I had to go out and check the diesel levels in the jeep. Where ok i can get them to school so i don’t know that getting back from school. 🙂

Stardate wednesday bingley to school mr spoc

 

There ya go – back to typing now. It’s not bad, and I know I’ve written about it before but I thought it was worth an update. The most interesting aspect of it was the fact that it quite liked me speaking quickly.

Categories
Business End User media

Will Premier League TV deal drive up cost to punters

premiership tv rights

Premiership TV rights see 70% cost increase

In the news is the fact that BT and Sky have paid 70% more for the next chunk of Premiership TV rights than they did the last time around. In one sense this doesn’t affect me whatever. Although being a sportsman I do take a passing interest in all sorts of sports, the Premier League strikes me as a vehicle that attracts bad sportsmanship and a poor example to kids. Such is the money at stake.

We have a very competitive broadband market in the UK. ISP’s have been trying to layer services to squeeze more cash out of us and TV certainly brings more margin. BT recognises this which is why it’s dipped its toe in the TV market and why it has been going head to head against Sky for sporting rights.

For Sky this is almost a life or death matter. Sports have been Sky’s Unique Selling Point for donkeys years. Without this USP their offering is significantly diluted.

So in a market where it’s been a race to the bottom for some years now this sizeable increase in the cost of providing TV sports services is likely to squeeze margins further or result in price increases that wont go down well with punters. Over at broadbandrating.com we saw high levels of complaints when ISPs had to increase their analogue line rental costs, even though these increased were in the region of pence not pounds. Virgin saw even more negativity when their TV pricing shot up again.

Where I’m getting to is that whilst normally a competitive market drives down costs, in this case it’s driving up costs because the key bit of content, football, is sole sourced and has no incentive to roll over and play ball with lower prices (sorry).

There is no indication as yet as to how this might affect end user prices for Sports TV packages but Sky and BT need to show a decent return to shareholders and they can’t always absorb this kind of cost increase. I guess we will find out soon enough, for what it’s worth.

That’s it for now. Ciao amigos.

Categories
charitable Engineer

Support Ben White – he could do with your help

support ben white

Support Ben White

Ben White is a really nice bloke. He is a networking engineer and used to work for me at Timico before growing out of the job and heading for greener grass. Ben is also a really good networking engineer. In fact he is both a really nice bloke and a really good network engineer.

Ben has a problem. He is into adrenaline rushes and has for years been into freefall sky diving. Unfortunately last year he had an accident. The upshot is a broken back,  5 months of hospital and rehab, 4 major operations to fix a broken femur, 6 broken ribs, 5 broken vertebra and to stabilise a crushed spine, while coming to terms with being a T10 complete paraplegic who has no feeling or movement below his belly button.

He is lucky to have the love of Jen who writes:

“It turns out, the hardest part of this journey so far is coming home and being faced with a house that fights you at everything you try to do.

Ben sustained his injuries during a hard parachute landing at Hibaldstow drop zone in July 2014, while training for the skydiving world championships. British Silver medallist in freestyle, just 4 weeks before the competition, Ben’s life changed forever and his dream was over. Now he faces challenges he never thought he would have to, struggles that wouldn’t even occur to most people as we do things like sit down on a couch and get up again naturally without even thinking about it. It takes Ben 2 hours to get up and get ready in the morning when it otherwise takes me 30 minutes. Basic things are obstacles to overcome and I just want to help Ben, by making his house wheelchair friendly. I want him to be able to shower and to cook a meal and to leave the house to get milk without needing my help.

Unfortunately Ben does not quality for a government grant to make essential adaptations to his home, which include wheelchair access to the property, and through floor lift, washing facilities and an accessible kitchen as well as items such as a lightweight wheelchair and other recommended equipment. We are therefore asking for your support with donations, large or small to help make these adaptations so Ben can live as independently as possible.

If you’d like to donate you an do so at: https://www.youcaring.com/helpbenwhite “

Please support Ben White. You may also want to “like” his Facebook page here. Be has occasionally appeared elsewhere in this blog in the past. Here he is modelling a new whiteboard!!

Categories
Business End User piracy Regs security

Unknown Roku streaming stick on network, Virgin Media, DEAct & Spotify

roku streaming stick

Roku streaming stick

Interesting one this. A Roku streaming stick has to be plugged into your TV. It’s a bit like a Chromecast but different. One assumes that Joel knows that he hasn’t got a Roku streaming stick plugged into his TV. It must therefore be plugged into somebody’s else’s TV hanging off Joel’s network.

This does bring up the issue of wifi network security and the fact that other people may be making use of others’ broadband bandwidth. Who hasn’t had a look at their wifi settings when in a strange place to see if there are any open networks there. There often are, at least in public places.

This issue to me is further highlighted by the fact that we are coming up to the next general election. At this time 5 years ago the Digital Economy Act was rushed through just before the election. One of the many points landed on the deaf ears of government by protesting voices at the time was the very fact that it was difficult to prove who was actually doing the downloading/copyright infringement.  The rogue Roku of our introductory Tweet reinforces this. The DEAct has still not properly been enacted.

The issues that rights holders where highlighting in pushing for the Digital Economy Act have of course not gone away. I was talking yesterday to a 21 year old recent graduate about where he got his music from. He said it was all downloaded free of charge from online sources. This was despite the fact that his broadband provider Virgin Media has a block on access to specific sites associated with this activity. He said that that none of the people that he knew ie 18-25 demographic, paid for their music.

The blocking orders imposed by the courts on ISPs are not working. I did ask him about proxies and he was very familiar with the technology.  He was very familiar with proxies and had used them. However many were also blocked by ISPs but because sites such as Pirate Bay morph very quickly into similar sites and the kids know how to follow them they never have a problem accessing music.

I asked him what he thought about the fact that if nobody paid for them there would come a time where there would no longer be any record labels. His answer was that bands seem nowadays to make more out of their live shows than they do the out of selling music.

Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of the situation, it is what it is. I have a Spotify Premium account. It’s a great service.  For the 21 year old concerned £10 a month is actually quite a lot of money. Rob, the trefor.net developer, is a little older at 24. Rob has Spotify Premium. Rob also pays £6 a month for Netflix and doesn’t see why at £10 the music service is more expensive. He has a point maybe.

Now I’m not here to defend anyone’s business model, have a go any ones business model or anything else to do with business models other than to say that business models do change. Clearly the music industry is in the middle of a period of change that they’ve been struggling to come to grips with. Whether this is to do with legacy deals, royalties payable or cost base who knows.

We do hear of bands withdrawing their music from Spotify because the live streaming service doesn’t pay enough for the privilege of carrying their stuff. One wonders what proportion of Spotify’s royalties actually go to the band as opposed to the record label. I took a look at SpotifyArtists but it was either too complicated for my small brain to get around or it just wasn’t obvious.

We ain’t going to solve an industry’s problems in this blog post but I can only say that the efforts and the money spent on fighting online copyright infringement don’t seem to be working, at least based on my own local evidence.

PS I’d never heard of the Roku Streaming Stick before I came across this tweet. I’d get one and do a review except I already have a Chromecast in the port the Roku would use and the kids use it a fair bit.

Categories
Business social networking

Dear LinkedIn community manager

linkedin community manager

Dear LinkedIn community manager.

I realise that I signed up for the group (or at least I think I did – there are so many of them) but I don’t really want to be spammed with invitations to Webinars. I don’t do webinars. I have a short attention span and webinars want you for a lengthy period of time. I’d like to bet that the salient points of each and every webinar could be got across to me in one short paragraph. I’d read one short paragraph.

Dear linked in person. I don’t want to meet your “just visiting the UK expert” to get the benefit of a free consultation regarding agile QA processes. Your targeting is very poor and I’m unlikely to be in London for a quick coffee at the same time. I might be around if a few beers and a curry were on offer but only if I happened to be going to town anyway. Or maybe not.

The latter bit of LinkedIn spam, which seems to be on the rise, reminds me of emails I used to get at Timico from “new telecom practice managers” at recruitment consultancies suggesting they were in the North London area on Thursday and did I fancy meeting up for a coffee. More poor targeting considering my office was in Newark.

Then there was the foreign currency trader (foreign currency???!!!) who would be happy to come to my office to discuss my future currency hedging needs (or words to that effect – I didn’t get the lingo and he was another example of someone who had no idea of who I was or what I did.

Fortunately all the LinkedIn spam is filtered by gmail into the social tab that I hardly ever look at. Still slightly irks though as I have to look at the inbox when I fire up LinkedIn (usually when I want to spam people with my own stuff 🙂 ). I did leave a comment on LinkedIn this morning – participating in Steve Haworth’s post on Why 3 buying O2 matters. Read it if you want to see what I said.

The linkedin community manager seems to be a breed of person on the rise. trefor.net gets most of it’s social media shares as linkedin shares so the platform does seem to be getting used. It’s also true for broadbandrating.com at the moment which I guess is a reflection of the community of people in my ecosystem. I expect that to change as broadbandrating.com gains traction.

That’s all for now. Just back from Paris and need to head in to the office:)

Categories
4g End User Engineer Mobile

Mobile data bandwidth in channel tunnel

channel tunnel mobile data rate

Channel tunnel mobile data rate impressed

Over in gay Paree for a few days to settle my daughter into the next six months of her year abroad adventure. yesterday was a freezing 11 hours traipsing around prospective flatshares.

Couple of things I noticed both here and on the way over. In the Channel Tunnel I was getting LTE on my Oneplus One phone. I’m with O2 and the Oneplus doesn’t support O2 LTE spectra in the UK. The Chunnel however was a different ball game. Despite having data roaming switched off I found I was getting 16Megs down under the water. Whiled away a bit of the journey.  The rest of it was spent listening to sounds on the phone.

The next thing I noticed is that people were using their phones on the Metro in Paris. If you haven’t been the Paris Metro is just like the London Underground. It’s underground. Why can’t we have mobile connectivity on the tube. It was the same in Barcelona. People talking on their phones on the Metro.

That’s all for now. Just one thing before I go. If you are thinking of coming for a leisure break to Paris in February I’d say there were better places to go. It’s absolutely freezing here. Of course I’m here to do a job but the same advice applies

Categories
Business social networking

The value of Social Media in website Traffic Acquisition

Having just launched broadbandrating.com I am clearly interested in doing what it takes to build up traffic to the website. The more visitors it gets the more the likelihood of a click through and a commission payment.

We are right at the beginning. This morning I took a look at visitor patterns and it is clear that when broadbandrating gets a mention on social media the site gets a burst of visitors. The chart below shows the spikes when I share posts from the tweeterrific blog.

traffic spikes on broadbandrating.com

The big spike on Monday follows the release of the ISP Report for Q4 2014. It shows how you can begin to build traffic. It does help that I engage with lots of people on social media having been active on most platforms since early on in their development. Further spikes follow the publication of blog posts and their subsequent sharing on social media.

Some businesses wanting to promote their own products and services may not have been at it as long and therefore have a smaller network. It does serve as an indication of where to put your efforts.

The visitor acquisition sources for broadbandrating .com currently look like this:

broadbandrating.com visitor acquisition sources

A substantial element of acquisition via social media plus a pleasing number of direct visitors – people going straight to the site. Compare this with trefor.net, a much older site with far more visitors.

trefor.net visitor acquisition sources

The trefor.net profile will have changed over the years but it does reveal the efforts we have put in to Search Engine Optimisation. Trefor.net also has a cohort of regular readers as may be seen from the proportion of directly acquired visitors.

I’m not sure what the ideal mix is for broadbandrating.com. Certainly we will want the Referrals from other sites to grow together with those from Organic Search. However the good start it has had from Social Media activity s interesting to observe and again is a pointer to how other new websites might begin to engage.

Media exposure is a big factor in all this. On Tuesday night I was on the BBC Radio Lincolnshire Drivetime Show discussing broadbandrating.com with presenter William Wright. Not only did the realtime visitor numbers rise during the interview but his Tweeting also brought a few “favourites”, “mentions” and “follows”. Goes to show you have to have a mix of approaches.

The one aspect of the early marketing activity for this site that doesn’t yet seem to have borne much fruit is the press release. This was home grown and focussed on the output of the ISP Quarterly Report. With hindsight it might have better focussed on the fact that we major on the fact that we use Sentiment Analysis to rate ISPs rather than the results themselves. Time will tell. Had we used an external PR Agency the results might have been different although when we did use an agency during my time at Timico, quite often any national exposure came as a result of personal relationships I already had with the journalists involved. This time around an agency might definitely have helped with the targeting.

Broadbandrating is a fun and interesting project and is the first of a number that you should see emerge during 2015. I’ll report back every now and again on how our various marketing activities bear fruit.

Categories
Bad Stuff End User online safety security

I blog about nail polish – what’s wrong with your filters?

web filters block list

 

Web filters block list includes fashion blog

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559720386112552960

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559720218155835394

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559722059660795904

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559722582921207808

The point about this is that the only reason Ashleigh-Jayne found about about this is because she is a TalkTalk customer. TalkTalk’s own web filters block list had her site down as being adult only.

Now maybe parents wouldn’t want little girls (or boys) checking out nail polish and fashionable shoes. The little darlings grow up too quickly these days. However we hope this is just a mistake. Ashleigh-Jayne will almost certainly be able to contact TalkTalk and get her site taken off the black list.

However if she hadn’t been a TalkTalk broadband customer she might never have found out whether her site was on the list. Millions of people might be wrongly denied access to her site. This is a problem with the system. The blacklists are automatically produced by machines that tbh are inherently untrustworthy because they get it wrong too often.

The following link takes you to an Open Rights Group website that can test your own website to see if it is blocked

http://linkis.com/www.blocked.org.uk/TJZCq

I took a look at trefor.net and the results are in the featured image. The BT and TalkTalk results that are inconclusive don’t necessarily mean they are blocking me buy it is certainly raises an eyebrow or two.

Haven’t actually looked at Ashleigh-Jayne’s blog but I’m taking her word for it that it’s not pornographic. As far as I’m aware she is a fine upstanding member if the blogging fraternity (sorority?).

As I write I realise that I will soon need a new pair of shoes. I doubt I’ll find them on her site mind you but I should be OK. I don’t think that ja.net has the same filtering policy. I’ll leave you with a little story about dubious websites that perhaps should be blocked from viewing by children (once the parents have opted in to the filter of course).

A year or two ago I gave a talk on VoIP security at a ja.net conference. An engineer came up to me afterwards for a chat and the conversation got round to how ja.net would have coped had they had to implement the Digital Economy Act and monitored its hundreds of thousands of users for their downloading habits.

The guy told me a story of how they had one been alerted to a really high bandwidth usage coming out of one room in a hall of residence. They went on an investigative visit and found that the female occupant of the room had moved in with a pal. The room had been painted purple and now had a pole in the middle of it surrounded by 4 webcams. Four enterprising female undergraduates had been paying for their university education by doing some professional internet pole dancing.

Now will that get me on a web filters block list?

Categories
fun stuff

Facebook down – oh

I note facebook is down. I checked it on twitter. Twitter is alive with the news. Suddenly occurred to me that it doesn’t matter.

It is interesting, however, to consider that facebook must have a massively reliable platform but still has problems.  It goes to show that you can never achieve 5 nines reliability.

Twitter told me that the problems started at 5 past 6 this morning . It is now nearly 7 o’clock. 5nines is only something like 5 minutes of downtime a year. It’s a good job that facebook isn’t mission critical.

On this occasion twitter is serving as an alternative platform for communication. Its different but its does serve a purpose. Twitter and facebook are the two sites i turn to first thing in the morning. Facebook tells me an unimportant gossip about what my friends have been doing. Twitter tells me what’s going on in the world,  in this case facebook not working. Although that’s stating the bleeding obvious, it is useful to know the other people have the same problem. Nobody wants to be alone!

Dictated from the comfort of my bed whilst listening to radio 4. No mention of facebook on the news funnily enough.

Update 7. 19. It’s made the radio 4 news with rory cellan-jones. Apparently its back up now speculation is that it was a cyber attack.

Categories
broadband End User

ISP report places Sky at top of rankings for Q4 2014

isp report

broadbandrating.com ISP report

Couldn’t help noticing that broadbandrating.com have published their quarterly ISP report.

Highlights include:

Sky was rated top provider for Q4 2014

Plusnet recovered from  a number of service outages in Q3 to rise  to second place in the overall ratings

BT showed a big improvement in customer support levels with average call waiting times over Q4 dropping from 15 mins to just over 6.

The report also shows a sustained social media campaign in the run up to Christmas took TalkTalk to the top of the Sentiment rankings with EE showing how a piece of good news (launch of TV service) influences the way people feel in a positive way.

Check it out yur. Some interesting graphs to look at in the isp report, one of which is the featured image for this post.

For those who didn’t already know broadbandrating.com is a brand recently introduced by trefor.net as part of our foray into the world of affiliate marketing. There is much dosh to be made in this game although you do have to be quite high in the search engine rankings to get your hands on it.

I first thought of adding such functionality to trefor.net but decided not to sully this site (too much) with the notionally crass commercialism that is the affiliate market.

broadbandrating.com does have some differentiators. We use Sentiment Analysis to rank ISPs – those getting it in the neck most on Twitter get lower rankings. We also use what is known as Customer Support ratings whereby we call up the ISPs every day to see how long it takes them to answer the phone. These result are quite revealing. You can have a play with the different charts for sentiment analysts here and customer support here.

When we first started, BT were often taking an eyewatering 15 minutes to answer the phone. Since then this has improved dramatically (see featured image) and chatting to a senior BT exec last week I’m told it reflects a conscious effort on their part to improve things. Fair play.

The next ISP report will be for Q1 2015 and is due in April.

More anon…

Categories
End User security surveillance & privacy

Pretty graphic reaction to ISP porn blocking

encryption adult content filter snoopers charter revisited TalkTalk Router Security Flaw ashley madison

Thought I’d slip this one in – adult content filter eh 😉

adult content filter

I don’t know John Harvey but he seems a fairly forthright kind of guy. From Yorkshire maybe.

It’s not so much that you are telling your ISP anything when you opt out of the adult filter, or whatever it’s called. We doubt that any human intervention is involved in the process. It’s the likelihood that the information that you don’t wish adult sites to be blocked is leaked or hacked. That’s the issue.

If the information isn’t there is can’t be hacked. If this was an opt in that would sort it, aside from the fact that these filters aren’t renowned for their accuracy.

As an aside I assume that this site will henceforth be blocked by these filters. Probably already is. Parents don’t want their kids to know that they go to parties like trefbash or the pissup in a brewery. The blog was once blocked by the Timico firewall as “social media” sites were frowned upon by whoever set the policy in place (not me – I used to spend all my time on social media – I had a different set of permissions:).

The question is would Twitter be blocked. There’s a lot of graphic language on Twitter. I once unfollowed someone because of his non stop use of swear words. Not my kind of thing. Would be interesting to hear from anyone who has adult content filtering in place to see whether Twitter was visible or not.

Looking on the positive side, if you have opted out of the adult content filter, and are therefore “down on the list” you can always say it’s because you wanted to read posts on trefor.net;)

Effin read it first on trefor.net. wtf!

Read this highly popular and relevant post on the consequences of allowing government to monitor our online habits here.

Categories
Engineer engineering internet

Live blogging from UKNOF30

uknof30

It’s hotting up here at UKNOF30 in Bishopsgate. We are deep the heart of the City of London and the place smells of money. Witness the scene that meets you as you walk into the local Tesco express: a large display of champagne – see the featured image. Times are clearly not hard around here.

Anyway I’m going to serve you with the occasional ad hoc snippet live from the meeting. We’ve had the intros from Keith and now it’s Tim Rossiter from Sky talking about their new core network.

Categories
Engineer

What’s a network card?

It’s interesting how people that don’t work in the technology business just have no idea about a lot of the buzzwords we use. It takes years of experience to get to grips with some of the acronyms. In fact my very first

I was writing something yesterday (keep your eyes out on Monday) and dropped CLI into the text. One of the developers in the office proof read what I had written and asked what CLI meant.

Well I told him and resolved to modify the text to mention Caller Line Identification. It felt I was really dumbing down but actually most people don’t have a clue what most tech acronyms mean.

Line card, CLI, VOIP, even ADSL. Most people will call ADSL traditional broadband as opposed to fibre broadband. People do call a router a router although they have no idea what a router does. It’s what the ISP calls the box they send their customers.

Tech has to be dumbed down big time for people to even come close to understanding it. This is evident from the fact that when someone complained that the use of the words fibre broadband to describe FTTC was misleading as the term gave people the impression that it was fibre all the way to the house whereas we all know it isn’t.

It was either Ofcom or the ASA (another acronym) who threw it out saying that it didn’t matter that fibre broadband was part copper because people just associated it with a certain speed of broadband.

We don’t all agree with this of course but there again most of us, and most readers of this blog, probably understand all the tech terms to the extent that I often don’t bother explaining things. I just say “google it”.

Anyway in answer to the question what’s a network card? It’s usually a physical interface and a MAC function. Simples really…

Categories
Business Mobile

Telco musical chairs with O2 as the prize.

When the music stops…

So the latest, as far as I can gather, is as follows:

BT are buying EE and not O2

Sky and TalkTalk are now interested in buying O2 with a rumour that so are Liberty Global (Virgin). Hutchinson (3) were also rumoured a couple of days ago to be interested.

Vodafone are interested in buying Liberty Global

Either the Voda/Virgin talks are not going well or Virge are playing games in an effort to push the price up.

Whatever happens when the music stops it looks like O2 are toast. Doesn’t make sense to me for O2 to be bought by another mobile operator so I’d say the Hutchinson thing is a non-starter unless they are daft enough to be the high bidder by a significant margin.

I’m an O2 customer btw. Innerestin.

 

Categories
End User online safety

Sky asking customers to tell them if they want to access adult content

Sky adult content filtering to be left on as standard unless asked otherwise

It was in the news yesterday. Sky is phasing in the inclusion of an enabled Sky adult content filtering as standard unless specifically requested not to. I was told by Lyssa Mcgowan herself. Well on her blog.

This is going to be an  interesting one to watch. I’m not going to rabbit on about how it should be the other way around – that families should opt in. I’m just going to see how long it takes for someone to hack in to the Sky database and publish the list of clients that have opted out. Just to show they can. Someone will take on the challenge.

It’s the same issue as why we shouldn’t be thinking about saving internet browsing data. Someone will leave it on a bus or it will get hacked and published on a server somewhere around the world.

Name and shame I say. Who wants to look at filthy pornography anyway. Bring back the high necked collar and floor length dresses. They had it right in Queen Victoria’s day. They also used to hide kids away in the nursery with their nannies. It’s no different today except now Sky provide the parental services by proxy.

The knock on effects of this type of decision will reverberate around the world. At least around the world’s browser manufacturers (does one manufacture a browser?). Sky customers that have opted out and who for reasons of privacy want to use incognito windows will now see a new message:

“Going incognito doesn’t hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider or the websites that you visit. ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE A SKY BROADBAND CUSTOMER WINK WINK”

Interestingly Sky come out very well in our BROADBANDRating rankings. Getting the product mix right continues to be a difficult exercise but I’m not so sure they have it right with this one. There hasn’t been much adverse customer reaction on Twitter, as yet. Just people noting that filters are automatically on. Time will tell.

Fnar fnar.

Later – found a fair few negative tweets on this subject after all. Sample below:

https://twitter.com/kentindell/status/557654044232409088

https://twitter.com/misterjorgensen/status/557843887004606465

https://twitter.com/calh15/status/557656535485411328

https://twitter.com/Chagr1n/status/557590528188235777

https://twitter.com/AlisonW/status/557602200500047873

Categories
broadband End User

Are ISP incentives to new customers going to be counter-productive and drive broadband churn?

broadband churn Broadband Technology Pipe

Offers to new customers could drive broadband churn

The broadband market is massively competitive. This is a good thing. As in many markets ISPs offer incentives for new customers to sign up. In the B2B world these incentives are frequently given to resellers rather than the end customer. However in the consumer marketplace where everything is automated and done online new customers often get a bung to join.

These highly visible offers often rub up existing customers the wrong way. They feel unloved, regardless of whether they received such an offer themselves way back when. It is also very noticeable that customers will complain about the slightest additional cost and when they have a service interruption look for compensation. I some cases, where their monthly broadband bill is already miniscule, for example TalkTalk’s standard monthly cost for their LLU ADSL product is £3.50 plus line rental, any compensation received is likely to be very token indeed.

So when a customer, such as Shaun Hamilton in our example tweet above wants to upgrade his existing service but finds that he can’t get a particularly good deal because such deals are only available to new subscribers it is easy to see how he may be tempted to up sticks and leave.

Regardless of the fact that all ISPs sting leaving customers with an admin fee , typically around £30, it is possible to make big savings in the first year of a new service. As well as attractive (free even) monthly rates in the first year up front incentives can often be over £100 in terms of cashback or a shopping voucher.

If you are going for a high end TV package the savings can occasionally exceed £300 in the first year, if you catch the offer at the right time.

One wonders what effect this has on churn. Apart from the occasional sporting package most of the ISPs offer similar TV packages, at least those that do TV, so it’s not as if the big consumer players have that much in the way of exclusive content.  Sport seems to be the one exception here and although Sky Sports is available via most ISPs BT have been building up some exclusivity with their rugby coverage.

It’s a difficult equation to manage. All ISPs assume a certain level of customer churn. One wonders whether churn generated by over-gilding the lilly for new customers might get out of hand. At least they can control this as they can just reduce their attractiveness to newbies.

It’s a difficult marketplace. You can check out the latest deals over at BROADBANDRating.

Categories
Bad Stuff Business ecommerce Engineer internet online safety Regs security surveillance & privacy

A quick guide to problems that will arise if we implement further internet surveillance measures

encryption adult content filter snoopers charter revisited TalkTalk Router Security Flaw ashley madison

Snoopers Charter revisited

The aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders has lead to goverment and opposition calling for more internet surveillance. Here are a few points for your consideration.

  1. Storing this data will inevitably result in it being hacked, left on a train/taxi on a laptop/memory stick and details of a government minister affair with another MP being made public. Example here (29 Jan 2015)
  2. The overhead associated with having to gather and store the data in a secure way will be proportionally huge compared to the size of the business and to the number of customers for smaller ISPs. This will result in the government deciding not to force these businesses to store the information and settle just for the biggest 7 ISPs aka the Digital Economy Act. The consequence will be that potential terrorists will just use these smaller ISPs for their internet services leaving a big hole in the “surveillance net”
  3. The resources required to make this happen will be huge. The French government already knew about the Charlie Hebdo killers. They just lacked the feet on the street to keep tabs on them. Diverting staff to managing the data gathering project will mean even fewer feet on the street or divert cash from adding more feet.
  4. The technical challenges with managing sender and receiver data for email clients is not small due to the hundreds of different clients out there with non standard formats.
  5. Most email is in any case encrypted these days and is run on platforms that are not necessarily owned by UK businesses. The difficulties associated with extracting these data will not be small (if not impossible). Ditto social media platforms.
  6. Forcing these platforms to provide a back door into the encrypted data (assuming it will be doable) will erode trust in areas of the economy that also rely on such encryption such as banking and ecommerce.
  7. Businesses will move away from the UK. It will be the start of the rot and leave us with a reputation akin to China et all when it comes to “surveillance society”.
  8. Terrorists will move deeper into darknets and continue to kill innocent people.
  9. On balance I’d spend the money on more feet on the street.

The rush to call for the snooper’s charter to be implemented would result in a bad law that will not have had adequate scrutiny. My wife and one of the kids were in the audience during last night’s BBC Question Time filmed in Lincoln’s Drill Hall. I watched despite it being well after my bedtime.

None of the panellists or the audience really had a grasp on the issues which reflects its highly complex nature. It’s very easy for MPs to support this type of legislation. Most right minded people will agree that it’s a good thing to stop terrorism. It’s just that they don’t understand the implications.

Check out other snoopers charter type posts here.

Categories
Engineer peering

@lonap AGM 2014 cc @SteveGlen @prt2m

You will all be aware that society publications such as OK Magazine, Allright, Hello and Hiya major on publishing photos of as many people as they can to guarantee that someone buys them. They at least get as many sales as people in the pics.

Well we’re a bit like that at trefor.net, the Xmas bash being an example. This is not always the case though. Sometimes we go for sheer artistic merit.

On this occasion the background for said art is the Court Room 7 St Andrew Street and the venue of the Lonap AGM 2014. In 2015. St Andrew Street is so called after the church of that name and the Court Room looked as if it might be the vestry or simlar. Very nice room it was.

I only have two pictures for you. One is of Warwicknet’s  Steve Glendinning praying. Those of you who know Steve will attest that he is a very spiritual man. Steve, Steve, Steve, praying isn’t going to stop that network problem 🙂 Note the LONAP phone chargers and biros on the tables. No expense spared us.

Steve Glendinning at prayer

The second photo is simply surreal. Paul Thornton is sat in a highly meditative pixiesque position in the fireplace. What goes Paul? Course I might have suggested he sat there – for the art and the subsequent publicity:) (fwiw).

paul thorntonIf you want to know what goes on at a LONAP AGM and the subsequent social why not sign up. It’s a terrific organisation to be part of with serious engineering and business benefits for your own company.

Categories
End User gadgets

Of mice and, well mice

wireless mice on display at Maplin

The wireless mouse conundrum

I haven’t bought a mouse for donkeys years. In fact I’m not sure I’ve ever bought a mouse. There has always been one around to use. This weekend I found it convenient to buy a mouse. I’ve been borrowing one of the kids’ and he has understandably periodically been nicking it back.

In order to purchase a mouse I went to MiceRUs otherwise known as Maplin in Lincoln. Maplin is a shop you can happily browse in for hours before buying what you originally went in for. Niche cable fittings sit comfortably next to remote controlled helicopters, disco sound gear, electric heaters and a plethora of other useful and essential gadgets and paraphernalia of modern living.

Eventually I found my way to the mice section of the shop. I wasn’t expecting there to be a mice section. I thought it would be a couple of plastic boxes on a shel next to other PC accessories. Nope. Mice had their own section. There were roughly twenty different products on shale at prices ranging from a tenner to fifty quid.

This is a problem. How on earth do you chose from such a range of devices all of which essentially do the same thing. Moreover they were all wireless mice. I’d thought that the choice would be wired versus wireless and maybe a couple of colour options. Nope. It was all wireless. Yes colour options but no wired. I didn’t really mind the absence of a wired mouse. Hey we all have to move on. My problem was how on earth do you choose.

I flagged down a passing expert member of staff who was able to offer advice. They major on staff training at Maplin. “You have to choose one that feel right in your hand” he said. Only problem is they are all contained in the rigid plastic wrapping that requires a combination of  uber sharp chisel and a pneumatic drill to open.

Staring at the display for another minute or so I ended up buying a red one. Not the cheapest one, at £15 but I figured I didn’t want to be seen as a cheapskate. Anyway I got home, dug out my set of chisels and am now the proud possessor of a new cordless mouse. It works.

The photo below is of the wireless mouse in situ next to the Chromebook. Enjoy:)

cordless mouse

Categories
broadband Business

TalkTalk get 75k Tesco broadband customers plus 5 million clubcard points

Tesco TalkTalk

TalkTalk buys Tesco Blinkbox & broadband for £5m cash

I’ve been watching the consumer broadband market as part of the development of the broadbandrating.com site. In this space size really is everything. Every day we perform sentiment analysis on the Twitter activity of all the ISPs we monitor – BT, Sky, Virgin, TalkTalk, Plusnet and EE.

It’s very noticeable that the levels of activity (ok complaints mostly) fall into three tiers. BT, Sky and Virgin get roughly the same number of tweets every day. Likewise Plusnet and TalkTalk at maybe a quarter of the above. Then EE typically get very few mentions.

Virgin and Sky get lots of complaints about TV problems. BT gets it in the neck I suspect because of Openreach. TalkTalk and Plusnet I assume “do well” out of not having as many TV customers (none in the case of Plusnet).

EE very much stand out as the smallest ISP by subscriber numbers in this cohort. At 750k subscribers last time I looked they lag behind everyone else who are in the several millions (note we don’t get to see any separately published data for Plusnet who are part of BT).

EE do get a ton of complaints on Twitter but they mostly concern mobile services – unsurprising considering EE are the biggest mobile operator in the UK.

Where is this conversation going?  It seems clear to me that this is evidence of the chances of success in the consumer broadband market being very much down to scale and also the ability to offer a full suite of services – triple play, quad play – call it what you like. This is why EE introduced a TV service. We can’t believe it’s doing that well or we’d see more talk about it on Twitter.

It’s also why TalkTalk have gone and bought the Tesco Blinkbox service. TalkTalk want to be up there with BT, Sky and Virgin getting more complaints about their TV services (not really but you get my drift – they want to be talked about because that will mean more people are buying their services).

It’s clearly also why Tesco have given up on broadband. If EE with 750k subs are hardly getting any exposure, other than what they pay for, then Tesco with 75k customers stand no chance. You might ask why they even bothered with the Blinkbox service in the first place. Tesco are up against the big boys in the broadband game and now it’s game over.

Outside the big ISPs mentioned here there are a number of other smaller operators that sell to consumers. These guys very much sell on service and quality of their product and tend not to have a TV play. There could well continue to be a place for them (I’m not mentioning any names although I wonder how long the Post Office will stick at it) but the market is increasingly going to be driven by bundles that include TV and very soon mobile.

I’ll finish with the vision of TalkTalk CEO Dido Harding turning up at a Tesco checkout with 75k broadband subscribers and the Blinkbox business in her shopping trolley. She hands over £5m cash and presents her Tesco Clubcard. That should get her 5 million Clubcard points. Had she been able to pay with her Tesco Clubcard Master card the could have doubled the points. Unfortunately Tesco only let you have a credit limit of around £7k or so that must have discounted that possibility:).

Categories
Business ecommerce End User mobile apps

Online life – more trust being placed in mobile devices & airbnb

airbnb mobile app

In which I book a flat in Paris using airbnb

Had a really good online experience last night. The Davies’ are off to Paris for Easter to celebrate our daughter’s 21st birthday (I know I know I don’t look old enough). She will already be there so transport and accommodation for the remaining five of us ain’t cheap and takes a bit of shopping around. I booked Eurostar and then looked for accommodation for 5 people

The daughter will have a flat in Paris by then and the small army of mates she has invited over will be laying claim to that space. A hotel can get expensive. An apartment was the answer.

I ended up on www.airbnb.co.uk for the first time. I’m not into renting a room in someone’s house whilst they are there but airbnb also do whole house rentals. I booked 2 flats. One for the week that we go over at the beginning of Feb to do some flat hunting, open a bank account and get an NI number. The second for the family for Easter weekend (bear with me).

I found a nice 3 bedroom place in Montmartre but needed clarification as to what constituted a “bedroom”. You see some places where a curtain down the middle of the room turns that room into a 2 bedroom flat and one of the beds is an airbed. I’m after quality.

I sent a question to the owner and retired upstairs. In bed an sms came in with the answer. 3 proper bedrooms with proper beds. Sorted. I was going to leave the booking until the morning but noticed a red button on my phone inviting me to confirm and pay for the reservation there and then.

Clicking on the button took me to the Play Store, downloaded the airbnb app and let me finish off the transaction. Totally seamless. A serious joy to use.

This ranks with Uber as one of my recent “discoveries” of highly useful and functional mobile applications. I also now manage my bank account from my mobile.

The point is that up until fairly recently I wouldn’t have touched financial transactions with a bargepole when using my mobile. I didn’t consider it a secure enough device. Now I’m spending thousands of pounds at the click of a button.

What’s changed. First of all the bank made a point of stressing that it would cover any losses incurred as a result of use of the phone app. That was good enough for me. That also removed the barriers for me to use the phone for other financial transactions.In fact these days I am far less reticent about storing my credit card details with online retailers than I used to be.

My phone really is becoming my global personal management device. I do everything through it. I also use 2 Chromebooks. One in the office and one at home. I used to think that the phone would one day replace a PC. All it would take would be a screen and a dock next to the keyboard – see my CES 2012 non report which mentions this.

Reality is that is what I already have. The Chromebook, which is a considerably cheaper device than my phone, is effectively that keyboard and docking device in one. That’s because nothing of real value is stored locally on either my phone or my Chromebook. It’s all in the cloud.

If push came to shove I could do without my Chromebook, as long as I had my phone. This actually sits quite nicely with my CES 2015 post earlier this week. In that post I discussed the fact that we never see revolutionary new products at such trade shows. However  mature products can eventually look revolutionary when you look back and compare them with their functionality at launch. I used the iPhone as an example.

Now I look at the whole concept of the mobile device and see that it really has become the stand out revolutionary gadget that makes a huge difference. I’m not sure that the current “wearable” revolution/fad is going to have the same legs. Unless wearable devices are just the evolution of the mobile phone form factor and we have a cheap and perhaps disposable User Interface device to replace what we now call a handset.

I can envisage walking in to a room and using a display in that room in order to see the emails/IM/video coming in on my by now tiny handset that sits in my watch or on my keyring. We already have the prototype of such displays with the TV and the Chromecast.

I  have regular hangouts with my daughter who currently lives in Toledo (she gets around). I see no reason why these hangouts shouldn’t happen on the TV, voice-controlled. We are almost there. Slap low cost displays around the house and you could do the same thing in any room. The only thing missing is the camera on top of the display. Mere detail.

This all came about from finding that airbnb was a joy to use. Life really is now all about the mobile device and the cloud1.

I’m digressing a bit but the one surprising change in the market is the reduced dominance of the mobile service providers. Telecoms services are rapidly homogenising into a single service set with fixed line broadband perhaps being the leading play. Mobile/cellular connectivity is just something you use when nowhere near a wifi connection (that’s the way it’s going even if it isn’t quite there yet.  It’s certainly true where home use is concerned).

It’s a tough old game, telecoms. For years telcos have been fighting against the race to the bottom. Who can provide he cheapest services. To counter this they have tried to introduce added value services. TV is the only successful such service that people are willing to pay for.

The telcos problem is that for a service to be a winner, such as airbnb and Uber it has to be independent of the telco. These revenue streams are denied to them.

Back to the science fiction of now almost the only thing that is really stopping me reducing my reliance on the old fashioned keyboard UI is the fact that an open office isn’t the right place to hold a conversation with your display. I also don’t want to spend my whole day talking to a computer. Furthermore voice recognition tech will really need to do something about ending sentences. On my droid I have to say “period”. Who on earth calls a full stop a period???

Mere detail…

1 yes yes ok I know life is really all about happiness and wellbeing etc with a dose of number 42 thrown in for good measure:)

Categories
Business H/W

Oh God it’s CES again

ces las vegas

Hey anyone going to CES Las Vegas?

The list of exhibitors at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas extends to 125 pages with 27 companies named on the front page. That’s a lot of exhibitors.

You wonder who goes. Most media organisations with a tech section send someone. It’s probably mostly journalists plus exhibitors looking at each others’ stands if my experience of trade shows is anything to go by. The official blurb says 150,000 = 160,000 visitors and over 3,600 stands. That’s around 40 visitors per stand. Some exhibitors will send more people than that (I am a cynical so and so aren’t I:)).

People like to talk about CES because it’s something to talk about rather than because of anything really newsworthy that comes out of it. It’s the self perpetuating hype. I can’t recall hearing of any significant new development that has been announced at the show.

TVs with a few more pixels. Slightly different shaped phones. More watches that can do a bit more than the previous watch. I read a GigaOm article this morning that majored on the fact that Lenovo had reintroduced its little nipple style trackball button/feature. There was nothing wrong with the article. It was just another piece in the rush to find new things to say to us in our 24×7 connected world.

Reality is that although marketing departments would not agree with me nothing ground breaking is introduced at these shows . Ground breaking rarely involve a step function. Something that wasn’t there yesterday but is today.

The iPhone and the iPad blazed a trail. However their early functionality was nothing like it is today. If today’s iPhone (6?) was introduced as the first model then that would be ground breaking. In fact Apple would have 100% market share. The iPhone can only be seen to be revolutionary by looking back at what has been achieved years after its first release.

CES is an expensive game. Lets say the average spend per stand was $50,000. Lots will be less than that but the big guys could easily hit seven figures and the costings have to include travel, accommodation and, this being Vegas, entertainment. That would make the total cost of showing up at CES to be $180 million.  I don’t think I’m far off. CES quote their net exhibitor space as being 2 million square feet and their undiscounted cost is $42 per square foot. That’s $82 million just for the floor space. I suspect my $180 million is on the low side.

While we’re on the numbers game lets assume that none of the 150,000 attendees actually work for exhibitors and that the journalists pay their own costs which isn’t necessarily the case as vendors often pay for journos to come as a way of getting their attention for a while. The average cost of being in Las Vegas for a week is probably $2,000 – $3,000 a head. So you can add between $300m and $450m to the economy of the show making it a half a billion turnover event all things considered. Gosh. And that’s excluding the cost of the gambling.

For the exhibitors it’s all one big gamble. It’s the old adage about only half the advertising spend being effective but you wish you knew which half. It’s the VP marketing being seen to do the right thing. I doubt that thy can measure the return on the investment at the show.

In our early days at Timico we used to look back to see how much business would arise from our investment in trade shows to inform next year’s spending decisions. Eventually we gave up and realised that much of the point of being at a trade show is for punters to see that you are in the game.

It’s a difficult one for start ups because for the spend to have any effect you have to repeat the activity on a continuous basis. Ok for established businesses with deep(ish) pockets but not so easy if you are pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The one positive reason for being at a trade show is that you do get a concentration of people in one spot to get your message across. However with 3,599 others competing for the same webspace you do have to question whether it is money well spent.

If anything is worth looking at the market will reveal it. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook will spread the word. My friends will tell me. I’m more likely to buy something that way than to find out from CES that a life changing curved phone sits better in my hand.

I can’t see it changing though. Fear will win through. Fear of anonymity, failure. Fear that someone else’s announcement of a slightly modified TV or mobile phone will get more airtime than yours. Much of the money spent at CES will be wasted. Half of it if the old adage is anything to go by but I suspect more. Still I’m sure there are a few good shows to go and see. I note that Britney Spears, Elton John, Enrique Iglesias, Justin Timberlake, Rod Stewart, Styx and Santana are all playing Vegas this month. I wonder if you can still get tickets…

PS it isn’t just CES. Mobile World Congress is the same.

Categories
broadband Business Mobile

BT branding strategy with EE?

BTOpenreach engineering visit Install ofcom strategic review

Will BT keep the EE brand?

Picked up this little gem from Twitter. It’s a good question because it opens up a discussion regarding BT’s strategy post acquisition. Assuming it all goes through.

https://twitter.com/FMLDNCAPO/status/544618159349956608

When BT bought Plusnet it was convenient to keep the brands separate. Plusnet became BT’s “value” brand although it is interesting no note that one might consider some aspects of their service delivery, such as UK call centres, to be premium (BT broadband call centres are in India).

EE brand image is very much consumer value oriented and at least on the broadband side is a direct competitor to Plusnet.  Plusnet doesn’t have TV in its bundle (ok you can buy BT Sport if you also happen to be a Sky TV customer) but you get the impression that the EE TV offering is very much a last gasp blimey we need TV or we ain’t in business pitch.

BT is buying EE for its mobile base and not for any other reason. BT is also a major infrastructure provider to EE through BT Wholesale which supplies thousands of Ethernet circuits to EE cell sites so there will be efficiencies there.

So the question is would the EE brand remain? If I were BT I’d want the BT brand to be at the forefront of the market. With 24.5 million mobile subscribers EE has many more end users that BT’s fixed line services (BT annual report says 2013/14 broadband tails = 7.5m Openreach “broadband tails” 18.5m – presumably you don’t add the two together). Too much scope for confusion I’d think. BT will want one big brand, eased in over a two year window perhaps. Integration would be slightly complicated by the fact that EE are still probably in the process of integrating TMobile and Orange.

On the other hand I really know nooothiiing. Otherwise I’d be running BT and dictating this to my PA’s PA from the back of my Rolls Royce.

In answer to Fraz’ question I imagine he will still be able to source low cost broadband through some BT brand or another. If he can’t he could always take his business elsewhere.

Categories
broadband Business media Mobile

The future UK telecoms landscape

future uk telecoms landscape

Future UK telecoms landscape – UK telecoms in period of massive change.

The twittersphere is going wild following the news that BT has tabled a bid for EE. Mostly with messages like this one:


I’m not commenting on the tweet itself, just reporting. I’m also assuming that the deal will go ahead. I’m further assuming that Vodafone will buy Virgin Media, or its parent company Liberty Global. Last week a reliable source told me that Voda has already tabled a bid although I don’t think this is yet in the public eye.

So in the UK that leaves us with two giant telcos – a red one and a purpley bluey green one, a content provider (Sky) that rides on the back of the purpley bluey green network and TalkTalk (mostly purple with yellow tinges) who coincidentally have recently teamed up with O2 (blue) having ditched Voda as their mobile provider.

Word has it that these manoeuvres have been going on for a while with the protagonists delaying to see if someone else moved first in order to get around the tedious Ofcom process that will inevitably ensue. Once this concept of market consolidation has been accepted as workable it will ease the passage of the second and maybe third mergers/acquisitions.

Sky may be able ride high and operate as a content provider that all the other networks will want to work with. BT however has been after a piece of Sky’s pie and has been buying up sporting rights left, right and centre. One wonders what will happen to the Murdoch machine if it gets to the stage where it’s TV packages no longer have the best content deals.

All good stuff. Here’s an interesting one for you. In the future UK telecoms landscape Sky, TalkTalk and O2 merge… Not so stupid an idea. TalkTalk is talking about building out a UK wide fibre network. That would give us three completely separate networks and some serious basis for competition.

The future UK telecoms landscape – you heard it first on trefor.net, maybe.

Categories
Engineer food and drink fun stuff internet

#trefbash2014 – the official photos

Last Thursday night the UK internet industry got together in London for trefbash2014, the 5th Annual trefbash. This one was better than ever with Radio2’s Alex Lester putting in a personal appearance and the Adforesight photo booth being a real hit (see live picture gallery).

I’m sure there is lots more to be said but for the now I’ll just leave you with the output of the official photographer. Note the colours. Most people really entered into the spirit of the beach party theme and the only exceptions were where the shirt hadn’t been delivered in time or people had afternoon business meetings to attend

Categories
End User piracy

List of websites blocked by Virgin Media due to court orders

websites blocked by virgin media

Taken from the Virgin Media website.

Found this and thought you might be interested. List of websites blocked by Virgin Media due to court orders. No comment really.  I don’t support copyright infringement. Easy to circumvent the blocks though. I wonder how effective they are. Potentially a lot of work for the ISP for little or no return.

Date of Sealed Court Order

Identity of parties who obtained the Order

Blocked Websites

27/04/2012

Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited

The Pirate Bay

05/07/2012

Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)

Newzbin2

28/02/2013

Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited

KAT or Kickass Torrents websites

28/02/2013

Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited

H33t

28/02/2013

Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited

Fenopy

26/04/2013 and
19/07/2013

Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)

Movie2K
Download4All

01/07/2013

Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)

EZTV

16/07/2013

The Football Association Premier League Limited

First Row Sports

08/10/2013

Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited

Abmp3
BeeMp3
Bomb-Mp3
eMp3World
Filecrop
FilesTube
Mp3Juices
Mp3lemon
Mp3Riad
Mp3skull
NewAlbumReleases
Rapidlibrary

08/10/2013

Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited

1337x
BitSnoop
ExtraTorrent
Monova
TorrentCrazy
TorrentDownloads
TorrentHound
Torrentreactor
Torrentz

30/10/2013

Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)

Primewire
Vodly
Watchfreemovies

30/10/2013

Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)

YIFY-Torrents

30/10/2013

Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)

Project-Free TV (PFTV)

13/11/2013

Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)

SolarMovie
Tube+

18/02/2014

Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)

Viooz website
Megashare website
zMovie website
Watch32 website

4/11/2014

Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited

Bittorrent.am
BTDigg
Btloft
Bit Torrent Scene
Limetorrents
NowTorrents
Picktorrent
Seedpeer
Torlock
Torrentbit
Torrentdb
Torrentdownload
Torrentexpress
TorrentFunk
Torrentproject
TorrentRoom
Torrents
TorrentUs
Torrentz
Torrentzap
Vitorrent

19/11/2014

Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)

Watchseries.It
Stream TV
Watchseries-online
Cucirca
Movie25
Watchseries.to
Iwannawatch
Warez BB
Ice Films
Tehparadox
Heroturko
Scene Source
Rapid Moviez
Iwatchonline
Los Movies
Isohunt
Torrentz.pro
Torrentbutler
IP Torrents
Sumotorrent
Torrent Day
Torrenting
BitSoup
Torrent Bytes
Seventorrents
Torrents.fm
YourBittirrent
Tor Movies
Demonoid
Torrent.cd
Vertor
Rar BG

List of websites blocked by Virgin Media due to court orders. By introducing filtering functionality do you run the risk of accidentally blocking innocent websites? Quite possibly.

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