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Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com
I have just decided that someone needs to invent the email “like” button. When someone sends you an email saying, for example, “that was a great blog post Tref” it is a real waste of everyone’s time and effort to reply saying “thanks very much”.
Really what we need is a means of communicating back a thumbs up or a like without the original sender having to open the email just to read the word “thanks”.
Simple.
To the staff of Timico
Last night we won two categories at the Newark Business Awards: “Excellence in Business” and “Business of the Year”. You couldn’t all come, if for no other reason than there wouldn’t have been room for anyone else if you had. You will though be comforted to know that we had a great night on your behalf and drank the place out of champagne1.
I was quite surprised at how excited I got as they came to announcing the results of our first category – Excellence in Business. Probably not quite the same level of agitation as it would have been had we been up for an Oscar but exciting nevertheless.
This excitement was partly adrenalin from knowing that if we won I would have to get up and say a few words2. It was also the realisation that this was quite an important award to win. You might say this was “only little old Newark” but you would be way off the mark.
Newark and its surrounding districts is where we live and work and many of the people in the audience last night were our friends, customers and partners in business. The recognition that winning this award in our home town brings us is far more important for Timico than winning some national gong. It puts us on the radar locally and as we grow our company it will make it easier for us to attract good quality staff which of course will in turn help us to attract good quality customers. Wins all round.
Being recognised in this way should also attract more local customers our way because local firms want to deal with local people. We shouldn’t underestimate the amount of pride that our community has in our success in business. To be able to point at shiny new buildings/data centres at a time when other areas are struggling to find opportunities for investment and growth lifts everyone.
Then of course for us as individuals it is nice to find people saying “oh you work for Timico do you?” rather than “Timico who?”.
So I have to tell you all that I am pleased to work for Timico and I am pleased to be working with you. We have exciting times ahead. Hard work perhaps but this is a world full of opportunity and I’m sure that the recognition that we received last night will be a real help to us in moving the business forward.
Tref
PS thanks very much to the hard work of the folk at the Newark Advertiser for the tremendous organisation. It went really smoothly.
1 not the night of overindulgence this might sound – they only had the one bottle in stock! 🙂
2 for those who know me ok ok I realise that “few” probably understates it 🙂
Here it is, the one you have all been waiting for. After a lengthier than usual shoot and an intensive post-shoot production period (correct me if I have my movie industry technical jargon slightly wrong) at last at online movie theatres near your desk/settee/mobile device I am pleased to announce the global launch of The Timico Videowall – The Movie”.
None of this “launch in the USA followed by a phased release in other markets” this movie is instantly available to everyone on the planet. Bring your own ice creams, beer and popcorn 1. Link here for those who don’t do flash.
.
1 Small print. The makers of this movie cannot accept responsibility for accidents happening whilst watching. In particular, for North American readers, any perceived inducement to indulge in high fat, high salt foodstuffs or beverages containing alcohol is purely for artistic effect. Readers are encouraged to consult a qualified medical practitioner before blindly following the advice. Readers under the legal age for any of these activities according to the laws of their country of residence should refrain from participating. As far as we are aware this movie contains no foul language, violence or scenes of nudity that may cause offence to those of a more sensitive disposition. No advertisements are carried on this blog but it’s author cannot be held responsible for any attempt to sell you anything whilst watching the video on YouTube. Having said that if anyone wants to send money out of appreciation of the high quality production values associated with this oeuvre please contact me – details here. This movie was made without a grant from anyone and was funded entirely by private investment. Enjoy!
If you have ever stood in PC World and wondered whether to 
go for the the 4Gigs of RAM with 1Terabyte hard drive or the 6 Gigs which is a little bit more expensive then cop this baby.
Personally I opted for the 96Gig of RAM with dual 10 Terabyte hard drive (expandable) and dual 6 core Xeon processors. You get my drift?
We have ten of these in two chasses of 5 just to get going. Note the Cisco UCS B200 blade server does come with two onboard hard drives but the discerning host will of course ignore these if he is at all interested in MTBF. Everything else on the board is solid state.
The next picture is of the chassis front and back.
Front view just has the one blade in it at the time the picture was taken.
You can see the four power supplies (N+2) in a line below the blade (circled on the larger photo – click to see). The last two photos are the rear of the chassis fully populated with fans – cool I thought ( 🙂 ) and the schematic that is printed on top of each blade – it will interest someone.
At 10am this morning, 28th November 2011 we officially took delivery
of a datacentre. Not quite the same impact as the ceremony that ended the first world war (10th hour of the 28th day doesn’t sound quite the same as 11th hour of the 11th day) but hey…
I’m not even sure there was a physical ceremony. If there was I wasn’t there but the new build is certainly buzzing with engineers doing their stuff.
Progress is going to be rapid now with the official launch/opening ceremony due on Wednesday 18th January. The box on the right is one of the EMC SANs I showed being delivered on Friday.
The initial environment will have Juniper in the core network with VMware running over Cisco Nexus and EMC. I’ll post more detail on this as we get nearer launch though if you urgently want to know more drop me a line at [email protected].
When a man in a white van turns up at your place offering you a good deal on a Storage Area Network what do you do? In our case we were expecting him to turn up though I suspect he had no idea what was in the boxes.
I wouldn’t normally bother writing about this but the delivery caused a flurry of excitement amongst the engineers in the office that I felt compelled to do so.
Also quite a few people at the LINX75 meeting mentioned they were following the progress of the data centre build so now that it is getting to the technically interesting bit it seems reasonable to post stuff as it happens.
I’ll put up some more photos when the kit is unboxed. Oh and also it won’t be long before I’ll be saying “Psst wanna buy some storage/virtualisation/hosting/colo etc etc”.
If you are interested in knowing more or want to use some of these services drop me a line at [email protected].
All the best.
Some more photographic action from the new data centre – we get the keys next week and today we have been in doing some preparation.
Firstly we installed a small server with some basic utilities to get us up and running when the meaty kit arrives on Monday.
Then we made a cup of tea – the first in the new kitchen – yay.
OK question for you. How many engineers does it take to install a switch? Click on the photo of Will to find out.
Last but not least ever wondered what a 10Gig fibre connection looks like? Well prepare to be disappointed – see below.
The EU Court of Justice has ruled that it is illegal to block copyright infringing file downloading on the basis of the freedom to conduct business, the right to protection of personal data and the freedom to receive or impart information.
This concludes a long running (2007) Scarlet-SABAM court case in which Scarlet, a Belgian ISP was ordered by a national court to implement technical measures to block all P2P traffic that infringes rights held by the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers (SABAM). The ruling also supplements a previous legal opinion on the subject by a EU High Court Judge that was not in itself binding in law.
This is a major milestone in the online Intellectual Property/Copyright saga and must surely bring into question the recent Newsbin2 judgement in which BT was required by a court to block access to the website that promotes the unlawful distribution of copyrighted material.
Proponents of internet blocking have already recently been acknowledging that in itself web-filtering is not a silver bullet. This is a softening of their previous hard line though it hasn’t stopped them seeking to implement filtering as “Newsbin2” shows. With today’s judgement from the European Court of Justice will this finally stop Rights Holders attempting to do this?
It will be interesting to see what happens next…
PS I am not against the ownership of Intellectual Property but this whole subject needs approaching in a fair and proportionate manner.
There isn’t much to this post other than I like the title. It came from one of the many junk emails I get daily – 12 today in that category. I must stop leaving my business cards at trade shows – I never win the iPad anyway.
This particular title isn’t very catchy which is why it stood out. Usually it’s all about “deploying this”, “helping staff with that” and sometimes it has to do with “the other” though the spam filter usually catches that kind of email. In fact they are very rarely catchy titles.
I am gradually unsubscribing from these mailing lists though it’s probably a battle I will never win.
Anyway I figured it would be a good idea to run a competition for the least catchy junk email competition – real or imaginary. Sometimes I get a huge response to these competitions and sometimes nothing. Doesn’t stop me coming back for m0re though 🙂
As usual please leave your entries as comments. Kudos but no mug to anyone guessing the name of the sender of the email in the post title.
Three years or so ago someone placed an order with BT. Uhuh! But this was no ordinary order. The order read something like this:
Juicy eh? If you were a BT salesman taking that Olympics broadband order you would be planning your retirement. Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. This is what BT is providing for the 2012 London Olympic Games and the order was probably taken by CEO Ian Livingston himself1 .
There are other interesting numbers to dwell on.
2012 is expected to be a big year for growth in broadband Internet use in the UK. We have the Olympics, para Olympics, the Queens Diamond Jubilee, Wimbledon and the West Indies, Aussies and South Africa over on cricket tour (if I was them I’d be avoiding this country next summer but hey…). Oh and let’s not forget the European football championships from 8th June til 1st July. England qualified I believe?! 🙂
There is more sport but by far the biggest Internet traffic news item for 2012 is that Netflix is coming to the UK. For the uninitiated, Netflix is a movie screening service in the USA that accounts for something like a quarter of all Internet traffic in that country.
At LINX75 today the launch was a particular subject of discussion
Meet Andrew, a butch kinda guy. He likes shooting 
and has been known to jump out of planes “just for fun”.
Andrew is clearly a happy go lucky bloke and nothing excites him more than getting ready for a night out at the weekend. This weekend is a big one. It’s Children in Need.
Andrew really likes to sit in front of the TV watching all the celebrities doing their bit to empty your pockets and raise cash for a worthy cause.
Andrew though is no couch potato and today has got off his butt to raise some cash himself. In fact as you can see from the pics he has gone more than the extra mile.
Andrew has gone and had his nails done.
It took a whip round to do it. It’s funny how the whole company responded to the challenge opportunity. The £145.18 was raised in no time at all.
As you might imagine it took Andrew some getting used to,
especially the drying bit. There was some serious wrist action going as you can see from the photos and no small amount of puff.
Anyway he got there in the end and has been strutting round the office proudly showing off his nails to everyone generous enough to have donated.
The lad has promised to keep the varnish on for the whole weekend so that his mates down the Rose and Crown on Saturday night can take a butchers. Perhaps they will buy him a pint – he deserves it. They should at least add to the donations already made.
The last photo is in stark contrast with that of the header where he is trying to look tough.
In it he is obviously a happy chappy and has already worked out the best position to hold his arm to display his nails to best effect.
Well done Andrew, proud to be your workmate.
Well done also to Kirsty Watt, the ingenious instigator behind the important fund raising initiative. She is evidently a talented 
artist 🙂
Meet Andrew North – modern man and all round good egg.
I am often asked for updates on the progess of the new Timico data centre in 
Newark. This is most easily done in pictorial fashion.
It’s nearly done. We are moving kit in. No desks yet but there is now a steady stream of engineers popping over, doing stuff.
We have a reception desk. More like Tardis console without the bit in the middle going up and down. Obviously the reception area is still work in progress but first impressions are important and it aint looking bad.
Some of these photos have been chosen exclusively for their artistic qualities. The patch panel below for example is worthy of the Tate Modern though quality of the photography probably leaves a little to be desired – I’m not a trained photographer you know.
The photo of the cold aisle is a development on the last one I did which didn’t have the enclosures and attracted comments about inefficiency. This one shows the door at one end and you can just about make out the fact that the aisle has a roof on it.
Two more pics to go. This first one is a bit of the coffee machine in the 
first floor kitchen. It reminds me of the Graham Green novel “Our Man in Havana” who was supposed to be sending back photos of secret Cuban missile parts (or simlar) but which in reality were components of a vacuum cleaner. If you look at it from the right angle it could be a missile part (or a vacuum cleaner) 🙂 .
I will say the NOC engineers are going to have to look out for caffeine overdoses because this dispenses the real mcoy in volumes and free of charge. There is also a tap for boiling water – no more frustrating queues 
in the kitchen waiting for the kettle.
And finally a picture of me holding a bunch of cables. I’m not going to give you any clues about the cables because are goingto be plugged into something uber impressive and you will have to wait for that.
Oh and there is one more I forgot – no data centre is complete without it’s Dyson blade dryers and here they are in high speed action 🙂
There you go – a data centre update 🙂
If anyone knows a good pre sales engineer from a hosting/data centre background then I’d be grateful if you could put them in touch.
Skill sets are vmware, virtual desktops, Citrix, hosting – that kind of stuff. The job comes with lots of perks including being featured on this blog (probably) and if they can get in quick enough they can come to the trefor.net xmas bash which is sold out and therefore a really hot ticket 🙂
Ta
PS a Timico mug goes to the person with a successful referral. Now there’s an incentive…
Fibre networking company Geo today withdrew from BDUK’s Broadband Framework and from future NGA procurements. Rather than simply regurgitating Geo’s Press Release on the subject you can read it yourselves here. In summary though Geo is saying that BT has this market stitched up.
I have to say I feel sorry for UK citizens living in “the final third”. You can’t blame BT – they are just looking after the interests of their shareholders. I think you can blame the Government which is taking the easy route. Admittedly foremost in the mind of the Government will be cash, or lack of it and the need to be seen to be spending it wisely. BT appears to have done a good lobbying1 job in persuading the establishment that sticking with BT is in everyone best interest.
It will be worth seeing how other players hoping for a slice of this market progress. This seems a good time to revisit the idea of splitting Openreach away from BT and turning it into a mutual, owned by the ISP industry.
That’s all.
1 This is in stark contrast to some situations such as the Digital Economy Act where BT did a very poor lobbying job and is now paying the price.
It’s dark out (hence the somewhat cryptic title) and I can see the lights on in other buildings in the business park. In fact I can see lights pretty much all the way on my drive home. That’s 18 miles through Lincolnshire countryside. There is something not right about that.
I quite like the dark nights though even if they do make you think it is going home time around 4pm and then you find out there is an hour and a half still to go.
The dark nights make the living room seem nice and cosy, especially with a fire lit in the grate which I might do tonight. Who needs central heating?!
Tonight I’m picking a couple of the kids up from orchestra rehearsals on my way home. It makes me feel good
Hello Tref,
My name is Scott Wakefield. I am a broadband enthusiast and I live in Brocton, Stafford. I have recently come along your website to understand that you have connections with BT, and potentially other companies. Brocton is somewhat a rural area and as you would expect, BT do not care for our community. After ruthless complaining and many letters, emails and phone calls, neither BT, Virgin Media, Stafford Borough Council, Staffordshire County Council, the ISPA or Ofcom will do anything about it.
My area receives on average between 0.05Mbps – 0.17Kbps (50Kbps – 170Kbps) which is staggeringly slow. When I called up Virgin Media (whom is my current ISP as I switched from BT since a BT engineer thought I was being capped), I was guaranteed that I would receive “the slowest would be of 0.5 and the maximum would be 2.4Mbps”
We, the world, are still finding our feet on the internet, or more accurately the world wide web. The www is a great place to be and at the same time full of pitfalls and nasties. Much like real, physical life really. I taught my kids not to take sweeties from strangers – that applies on or offline. In recent years I’ve added “don’t click on links you aren’t sure of” and probably a few other words of advice specific to tinterweb.
That’s a piece of wisdom relating to the www that had he but known it shows Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in action. Survival of the fittest and all that.
It isn’t just the consumer that is still trying to understand the landscape of the www. Government is, business is, as I said we all are.
The good folks at .uk registry Nominet are also trying to understand where they fit into all this. Nominet has come under scrutiny in recent years over its corporate governance.
2012 or as the BBC puts it “Summer of Sports on Steroids” 1 is going to be another milestone year for the ISP industry with the UK playing host to the Olympic games and another record anticipated for internet traffic levels. On Wednesday at the ISPA conference we had Jane Weedon, Controller of Business Development at the BBC talking about their preparations for the games.
The coverage in 2012 is going to be comprehensive with pretty much 100% of the sport available to watch as it happens – up to 27 simultaneous channels at the peak towards the end of the second week. This will have grown from perhaps 15-20% of coverage at the Sydney games 35% in Athens and 65% in Beijing (click on the header photo for graphic illustration).
The peak traffic during the South Africa Football World Cup hit 450Gbps with everyone going online to watch the England
v Slovenia match. For perspective this year so far iPlayer traffic has peaked at
220Gbps.
So look out ISPs.
The forecasting of traffic levels for these games is in reality going to be very difficult. On the higher demand side the games are on home territory and will appeal to a wider demographic than the Football World Cup. To counter this device proliferation may lead to the streaming being distributed over a wider range of media – 3G mobiles and tablets, public WiFi zones, offices providing big TV screens and the fact that many folk may well take the two weeks of the games off on holiday.
Medals success for Team GB is also going to be an influencing factor.
The Beeb has gone into significant detail in estimating demand on a session by session basis and has come up with a forecast of 10 x the traffic levels for London as they saw in Beijing. That’s 1Terabits a second 2 at the peak in streams averaging 1Mbps.
That’s enough Olympic bits for the moment but there is so much interest in this subject looking ahead I’m going to be looking out for more Olympic stories to share.
1 Steroids is perhaps an unfortunate word to use in this context
2 Nobody is going to hold them to this forecast but it certainly gives us all an indication of what to expect
126 people registered for the ISPA conference at 1 New Change, St Paul’s today. A broad representation of the ISP industry. Most of them were there for my session entitled “Making the UK the best place in Europe for broadband by 2015”.
The discussion was wide ranging including statements such as:
It will be 2025 before the UK has a competitive fibre network
The government shouldn’t be spending any money on subsidising rural broadband
The government should spend more money on subsidising rural broadband
The uk should do its best by 2015 (?!)
Most interestingly in a vote to finish off the session I asked the audience “who thinks the uk will have the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015?” aka the government objective.
Only one person, from BT, put their hands up (and there were at least 5 BT employees in the audience). Turning the question around as a check I asked who thought that the UK would not have the best superfast broadband network by 2015. Most hands went up.
I think the debate and the political rhetoric needs to change to reflect this.
PS the conference was held at the offices of K&LGates. They have wonderful views over St Paul’s cathedral. I have some photos but these will have to wait until I get back to my laptop. The iPad isn’t a good tool for putting photos into blogs.
“The internet is broken”. Uh? This is a common complaint a) from my wife who isn’t particularly technology savvy and b) from people whose broadband connection has gone down for whatever reason.
Yesterday this complaint, slightly tongue in cheek, came from our development engineering team. US network operator Level3 had a problem with a bug in it’s Juniper routers. This affected access to quite a few websites worldwide and is certainly likely to have hit more than a few ISPs. Word is that this was BGP related and leads to the need to reboot the Juniper kit. In fact a number of ISPs issued emergency maintenance window alerts last night so that they could upgrade to newer versions of their Junos operating system.
Most of the time you can live with a bug – design around it perhaps.I’m sure the problem will get sorted. My observations here though relate to the
No surface is too tough for superspade. Grass and soil it doesn’t even notice. This baby likes to flex its muscles by digging up tarmac. In fact it is so soft on your hands that labourers using it are often mistaken for office workers (until they ask for four sugars in their tea and give the game away).
Most people have a whinge about BT somewhere in their portfolio of anecdotes. Last week I found myself in the slightly unusual position of heaping praise on the company! Now I’m adding more positive comments!
BT Group has announced a series of innovations that on the face of it are largely aimed at reducing the cost of digging in fibre. These include:
I can almost hear the deep intakes of breath and the look of amazement on your faces as you read this. I’m not sure whether your incredulity is down to not believing that BT could innovate in this space or whether you think that these developments are not particularly significant.
Well actually whilst each of these innovations may seem trivial what they collectively do is send out a signal that BT is trying to do something about the aspect of it’s business that is often criticised as being one of the barriers to cost effective fibre broadband rollout (FTTC & FTTP) and that is the cost of digging trenches.
When the Caio Report came out in 2009 it quoted a figure of £29Bn as the cost of rolling out fibre to every home in the UK. Of this something like £24Bn was supposedly the civil engineering cost.
Looking at it simplistically you can see that halving the cost of the civil engineering effort has a massive effect on the total cost of the network roll out with, presumably, a knock-on positive effect on the business case.
I have no idea how the announcements herein will affect the overall costs for BT. Only time will tell. For now at least the messaging is right.
It’s a bit of a dank dismal day here in the shires and I have the office aircon on “heat”. Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind this weather – it reminds me of my childhood and in particular of wet Sunday afternoons spent watching the black and white cowboy film on BBC2, maybe playing a game of Monopoly and then the excitement of Songs of Praise with Harry Secombe after tea. The highlight of the day was the comedy on Radio 4 at 6.30 or 7pm.
I’m not sure why I’ve “gone nostalgic” all of a sudden especially when those Sunday afternoons were really boring and often used to lead to rows amongst us kids.
These days our kids still argue despite having an incredible range of things to do on a Sunday. After the F1 there’s the XBox and, well more Xbox. Then there’s the Xbox!
Reality is that other than the Simpsons the kids only watch TV when one of their parents decides
Funny how we get excited by little things. The other day I came into the office in the afternoon and they had started putting down the Tarmac for the carpark. Like lightning I whipped out my trusty phone Galaxy S2 and took a photo.
Today I got up from our fortnightly management meeting and hey presto, someone had painted white lines on the Tarmac. It’s very odd but somehow this makes it all look real. Note no executive parking spots. The early engineer gets the space nearest the door:)
To my knowledge this is also the first UK data centre to provide a kennel for the guard dogs. I am happy to be corrected here. This key piece of infrastructure arrives on 28th November and I’m sure there will be a photo shoot. Get down Shep!
We breed ’em hard at Timico. Inset is a photo of Timico engineer Gareth Bryan1 who during long weeks out on the road doing customer installs developed a penchant for hot food. Rather than sit in his room at the Marriot/Holiday Inn/Thistle Travelodge he would seek out the nearest curry house and experiment with his passion for Indian food. After
months of this he has built up an immunity to your everyday vindaloo.
Now promoted to third line tech support and in the office a lot more he no longer has the same opportunities to indulge during the evenings and been driven to experiment with home cooking.
Gareth, who today passed his CCNA exam with flying colours (well done mate), is holding a small packet of Dried Naga Bhut Jolokia chillies grown in India and supposedly 4,000 times hotter than Tabasco sauce. In other words absolutely lethal. So lethal in fact that Diane our Health And Safety person has made him sign them into the Timico dangerous deliveries and noxious substances book2.
They smell disgusting – using asbestos protected nostrils I
The title says it all. BT has announced the schedule for the 80Meg down 20Meg up Fibre To The Cabinet product and we will be looking for trialists.
The first stage of the process involves a change to the DSLAM profile. This activity is already underway and should be completed by January. The new frequencies that allow FTTC broadband to run faster will also be programmed in to the Openreach OSS system by January to allow the line checker to work at the higher speed.
In early January there will be a limited technical trial with up to 150 existing customers followed by a wider trial with no restriction on numbers between Jan 28th and the end of March 2012. The only caveat here, apart from the usual guarantees that there are no guarantees, is that users participating in the trials must be able to get a minimum downstream speed of 15Mbit/s and a minimum upstream speed of 5Mbit/s on their existing FTTC.
Note the availability checker will only be able to show product variants of up to 40Mbps until the formal launch later in 2012. It’s certainly an exciting week for FTTC news.
Note also it is quite possible that we are entering the domain of inadequate wifi performance on individual routers. Whether yours can handle 80Megs is something to consider.
Anyway if you are interested in testing the 80/20 FTTC broadband product drop me a line on [email protected] (obviously your cabinet has to be FTTC enabled!) and I will get back to you as soon as we have more info.
If you want to find out more about FTTC check out the resources here . Commercials here.
I am currently on hold to the dentist trying to rearrange a dental appointment for one of the kids. This is with a national chain. What I really want to be able to do is go online and alter the date to an available slot earlier in the same day.
As it is I am now three minutes into the call listening to some bland violin music with occasional platitudes apologising for the delay.
The last time I took the kid there we arrived ten minutes early only to be told that we were actually forty minutes early. Whoever had written the letter for the appointment had made a mistake including calling him Miss J Davies. Harrumph. The dentist was also running late so we were in that waiting room for an hour looking at magnolia paint, posters selling toothbrushes and flicking through copies of “Country Homes”1 from 2009.
Seeing as we had all the news about BT pulling forward the FTTC exchange rollout dates this morning I thought I’d provide updated copies of the schedule. Not as much as some would like for the future ones but the info will come
Anyway here we have:
Exchanges Accepting orders now
The files download separately as XL spreadsheets. Mine goes live in March next year.
Thought you would also be interested to see a note I got from BT Wholesale last week:
We are pleased to announce that we will soon be inviting all Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) customers to a trial of the upcoming WBC FTTC 80Mbit/s downstream 20Mbit/s upstream product option.
Faster FTTC is on its way.
I love it when our engineers come up to me and say “want to see something interesting?”. Today one of our top VoIP engineers showed me the ProTalk IP (SIP) antivandal door entry unit. This is a rock solid door entry system controlled by SIP video phone.
Pressing the button initiates a sip call to the number / call group of your choice, sets up a video call upon being answered
and allows the operator to open the door remotely by keying in a prearranged number. The system will in theory work with any SIP video phone – we have tested it with the SNOM 8xx series and a number of soft clients.
It should even work on mobile SIP clients – any SIP phone that can generate a DTMF tone. At Timico it is being tested as part of the security for the new data centre but it is easy to imagine it being used in many application areas.
I could even envisage using it at home – kids forget their key and you not in the house? They push the button and you answer on your smart phone and let them in.
ProTalk is a product of ProVu communications in Huddersfield. They are good lads and worth taking a look at.
Isn’t technology marvelous!
It’s fast moving this new web based world of ours. Some of it is faster moving than others. This morning I woke up to the news (in the twitter stream – thanks to @ruskin147) that BT was looking to pull forward the rollout plans for “superfast” broadband. To do this the company is taking on an additional 520 engineers and bringing forward £300m of spend.
Competition is great. Clearly Virgin, with its 100Mbps service, is forcing the pace here. BT is saying that by 2014 it will be serving two thirds of the population with download speeds of 70 – 100Mbps.
I realise that I have occasionally been known to be a critic of those responsible for our national broadband infrastructure. On this occasion I’m going to hold back and say to BT: Well done. This is a good decision. Keep it coming.