We have moved over IPv4 and brought on IPv6. Last night’s event at the London Transport Museum turned out to be a raging success.
300 or so people queued around the Piazza at Covent Garden to get in. Many more were watching the IPv6 twitter hashtag which had 1,235,715 impressions with exposure to 250,000 people. That’s a huge reach. Thanks to @lesanto for his most professional help here.
I’m not going to try and relive the whole evening in a blog post but I will be publishing videos of the event as soon as the film comes back from Boots the Chemist (only joking – but this high quality video takes a lot of rendering).
Photos are available here thanks to @Paul_Clarke. They are worth a look – this isn’t point and shoot stuff – it is art.
I’ll be thanking all the sponsors and speakers individually but you can see who they are on the event website.
I’m sorry for those of you who couldn’t get tickets or make it to this sold out event – you missed a cracker. More anon.
We will all be familiar with bits (0/1) and bytes (8 bits). You may even know that 4 bits is a nibble or a single Hexadecimal digit which makes a byte two Hexadecimal digits. IPv4 is a 32 bit addressing system with four time three lots of decimal characters.
Where is all this going do I hear you ask? This basic first year engineering degree primer!
Well tonight’s event is about IPv6, a 128 bit addressing system which has four blocks of four Hexadecimal characters. It looks like this 2001:1A20:1006:1001::/64.
Seeing as IPv6 is going to become commonplace there is now an ongoing discussion to come up with a name for those 16bit, 2 Byte, 4 x Hex character blocks. The currently proposed batch of names are presented below for your delectation.
These are all worthy proposals in an Internet Draft (click on the link to see the contributors names) which expires/due for next edit on 6th April. None of them stick with me though I do like Chazwazza because it is a cool name not because I think it works in this instance.
The Timico engineering team has started to use the word “chomp” to represent two bytes or the 4 Hex character block in IPv6.
Chomp is clearly in the mould of bit, nibble and byte and I would be grateful if you could chew this one over with a view to supporting the idea – we are submitting it as a suggestion when the above Draft expires.
Gave a talk on the evolution of retail technology into the cloud at the Retail Business Technology Expo at Earl’s Court yesterday. It was a joint presentation with my friend Umar Bajwa, Head of IT at the Murphy Oil Corporation (Murco) in the UK.
Afterwards we walked around the exhibits and it was a real pleasure to be with someone as knowledgeable as Umar (pictured right) in the retail technology space.
A few things struck me. Talking with the exhibitors they were happy with the way the show was going. Plenty of leads which means plenty of retailers out there looking at investing for growth in their business.
Secondly was the number of exhibit stands offering booze. Engineers in the internet space like to party but they do it after hours (and into the wee small hours – not me of course who cant take the pace anymore) but retailers seem to go at it all day!!
empty beer bottles littered stands at Retail Business Technology Expo
Wine, beers and even champagne seemed to be flowing pretty freely. I did come away with a bag of pick and mix sweets for the kids.
Finally, and the real purpose of this post, was the realization that mobile technology and smartphones and tablets in particular were starting to permeate this world. It is odd that in a retail environment that is primarily interested in cutting costs as low as they can go people seem to think nothing of spending £500 on a tablet for the shop.
I asked one exhibitor what shops do about the security of these devices. “What do you do to stop them being stolen?” “We don’t” came the reply. “We just sell them another tablet when the other one gets nicked”!!
And people will steal these things. Umar Bajwa was able to relate stories of people walking into fuel retailers, leaning over the counter and stealing the card processing terminal. “They are trying to figure out how the terminals work so they can come back and steal credit card information” .
This is going to be an issue that the retail industry will have to get to grips with if smart phones and tabs are going be commonplace tools for this market. I am particularly interested in this subject – how to manage your diverse mobile estate. If anyone wants to engage in a dialogue on or offline please get in touch.
More pics from the show below including one of excellent the jazz trio from the after show champagne party – I told you they large it up in retail 🙂
I’ve been taking pictures of the new datacentre build every day I have been in the office. This is the latest – weather is a bit grotty but the forecast is bright:).
It is shooting up. After all the builders will want to get it finished and we want to get it filled.
If you click on the image on the right you get a larger version.
Introductory speech Ed Vaizey MP, Minister for Communication, Culture and the Creative Industries
IPv4 retrospective UK internet pioneer Prof Peter Kirstein UCL
IPv6 scene setting Simon McCalla, IT Director, Nominet
IPv6 Panel Debate “Should industry worry about IPv6?”
Adrian Kennard, MD AAISP, Andy Davidson, VP EMEA Hurricane Electric, Jim Reid, Director, 6UK, Cisco Technical Staff Member
Ceremonials
Local handover of final IPv4 address block from IANA to RIPE – Leo Vegoda, IANA, Nigel Titley, Chairman RIPE NCC
Celebrity star guest – we are keeping the identity of this guest quiet but this will be a great finale.
Party time
Over 300 guests have signed up but thanks to the generosity of the sponsors we can still accommodate a few more. Drop me a line if you want to come and I will get your tickets sorted. Otherwise if you know the registration password you can do it yourselves at www.bringonipv6.com.
Cloud Equipment Market Will Grow From $110Bn in 2009 to $217Bn in 2014.
2009, according to a Cisco sponsored report by Forrester Research Inc, saw a significant uplift of sales of equipment into the cloud services sector despite the global recession. Figures show significantly greater growth in equipment sales that support next generation managed services as opposed to traditional Customer Premises Equipment.
2009 market growth
Their forecast for this market is that sales will grow from $110Bn in 2009 to $217Bn in 2014, a CAGR of 15%. It is all very exciting, I guess, unless that is you are stuck selling on premises equipment in which case you probably need to start thinking of career alternatives.
This information came from the Cisco Managed services seminar at the Tower of London last week. What struck me was the huge number of elements that make up the big cloud services picture. I counted 62 different technology areas that Cisco claim make up the whole market. These include areas such as Computing as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service. The range is mind boggling.
This isn’t something that an ISP can undertake on a broad scale, at least not during the initial development stages of this market. You have to cherry pick your offerings.
Forrester have segmented the market into Unified Comms, Metro Ethernet, Security, Managed VPN (MPLS I assume) and Data Center . This may help. Timico plays in all these market segments to greater or lesser degrees which is somewhat reassuring.
In my mind you have to ignore the buzzwords and get on with satisfying what your customers need. In many cases customers will already have a good idea but there will be many more looking for guidance.
The case for Virtualization, which is a big part of the infrastructure play when it comes to talking about managed services and the cloud, is very strong.
I looked at one specific example of a company that had 217 machines/servers occupying 9 racks. On average each server has 500GB of storage (an assumption on my part but a reasonable one) but a memory utilisation of only 30 – 40%. That’s a usage of only 43TB out of a total available of 108TB (plenty of rounding here).
If this server estate could be distilled onto a robust Storage Area Network that represents a huge potential cost saving, just taking disk space into consideration. More memory is saved because these systems typically recognise which operating systems are being used by the Virtual Machines and do not replicate multiple instances of such software.
What’s more aggregated processing power = better individual VM performance. In other words the processor capacity available to any single machine is far greater than it previously had access to on a single server. This inevitably results in performance efficiencies. The bandwidth story is the same. An individual stand alone server is likely to be served by a maximum of 1Gbps whereas a VM will probably get 10Gbps.
The example I looked at will result in 217 VMs on single 8U blade centre with a capacity 32 servers though we won’t need all 32 for this specific customer.
As Cisco has suggested the market is undergoing a big change right now. One that requires significant investment in infrastructure. I suspect that many familiar names will fail to make it through. It will be interesting to see who emerges into the clear skies beyond the cloud 🙂
Charts are courtesy of Cisco with Data from Forrester Research Inc.
At the Cisco Manged Services Seminar yesterday at the Tower of London Chris Lewis, GVP International Telecoms and Networking, IDC introduced the concept of the domestic CIO. This was new to me (ok I’m probably behind the times) but it certainly struck a chord.
There are so many aspects of life in the office that are now present at home. In the Davies household we have 8 active SIMs supporting 5 smartphones, an iPad, a dongle and a battered old Nokia that my wife uses (her decision). Some of these SIMS are pay as you go and some are contract. We have a mix of Vodafone, O2 and Orange. This isn’t necessarily an efficient way of working. If this was a business scenario we would harmonize onto a single network and group bundle. We would also have managed backups of the directories.
7 out of the 8 mobile devices also support wifi as do the 2 laptops, 4 desktop PCs and the XBox. In an ideal world we would have a home password management system, changing the password on a regular basis.
When it comes to passwords we use them for online banking, shopping with M&S, eBay, Tesco online, EastCoast trains, Superbreak, Lastminute.com, iTunes, Travelodge. We also have passwords for Twitter, Facebook, gmail, telegraph online, guardian.co.uk and I’m sure many other portals I’ve forgotten about and some I’ve never heard of. How do we keep track of them all?
I operate a calendar that synchronizes on my phone, iPad and laptop. My wife uses a paper calendar on the kitchen wall that doesn’t synch with mine other than via an ad hoc manual process known in the Davies household as “diarising”. This does sometime lead to clashes – “OMG who’s going to pick so and so up from the friend’s party” or “we can’t already be going out because we have just been invited somewhere else for dinner”. Plenty of room for improvement here.
Then there’s the IT support, “the internet isn’t working”, “yes it is I’m on it”, “why isn’t my document printing”, “we have run out of ink”, “can I have your credit card number please dad” !!!
Chris Lewis was right. I need a Domestic CIO. I don’t want to do it. Interested parties should apply in line through the usual channels. Hours 24x7x365 (no you can’t have Christmas Day off – that is one of the busiest days of the year for a Domestic CIO). Salary on application.
PS the Tower of London is a great day out for the family. Have your PA coordinate a trip there or mention it to your Domestic CIO.
I watched the news of the Japanese earthquake on iPlayer on my iPad. I watched it in bed, whilst having breakfast and then whilst in the shower (the iPad wasn’t in the actual shower cubicle). Coming out of the shower room I bumped into one of the kids who said he had been watching it his room on his PC.
On my way in I listened to it on the car radio and then the iPad 3G connection kicked and the video started in my bag in the boot (actually in the Jeep it is called a “trunk”). This was a bit disconcerting. The newsreader said that people on Japan had been standing in the streets in Tokyo watching the news streaming on their mobile handsets.
Coming into the office by 9am the video bandwidth usage on our network had doubled over the norm and I have iPlayer playing in the corner of the room. We live in a totally connected world.
Our thoughts must go out to the people affected by the Earthquake. It is unbelievably amazing to be able to watch the destruction happening in real time broadcast live from a camera in a helicopter.
In November the Prime Minister David Cameron announced an independent review of how the Intellectual Property framework supports growth and innovation. Chaired by Professor Ian Hargreaves the review will report in April 2011 with evidence due by March 4th. The Hargreaves review aims to identify barriers to growth within the regulatory framework protecting IP in the UK.
With this review in mind the Digital Economy All Party Political Group (DEAPPG) met at the House of Commons last night for a panel debate chaired by Lord Lucas. The panel was
Martin Weatherall MP (background in the Rights Holders industry)
Jeff Lynne (Coalition for the Digital Economy)
Saskia Walzel (Consumer Focus and the evening’s sponsor)
I am pleased nay thrilled to report back from last night’s ITSPA Awards that Timico received the Highly Commended Award for Best ITSP (Large Enterprise).
The ITSPA Awards were held at the top of the BT Tower (Post office Tower to those over a certain age) which is a wonderful venue and all thanks to BT for hosting.
A couple of years back Timico won the best Unified Communications Award. Last night was a particular milestone for us as we have been expanding our horizons to work with larger businesses and this Award really reflects a lot of hard work that has gone into developing our proposition for that market.
Most ITSPs in the UK plant themselves firmly in the SMB space. Timico is able to play in a bigger market because unlike many ITSPs we are a fairly substantial ISP in our own right and an established MPLS networking business brings with it many opportunities to service the voice requirements of larger customers using our Genband A2 VoIP platform. The Genband platform coincidentally also won an award last night for best VoIP infrastructure.
The winners of the Large Enterprise Category were Virgin Media Business. We’ll beat them next year 🙂
Details of other ITSPA Awards cateorgy winners can be found here.
The Google transparency report should be of interest to readers. It shows Google traffic levels to/from a given country. If you click on the link it shows that traffic out of Libya ground to a halt on Thursday evening.
I am somewhat surprised it has taken the Gadaffi regime this long to kill the traffic – assuming that is what has happened.
The first tranche of tickets has all but sold out for this event. If when you register there are no more spaces don’t worry – just get your name on the waiting list. I’ve been able to secure additional sponsorship and expect to be able to increase the number of partygoers.
The demand for tickets has been amazing and I think reflects the fact that there is a lot of interest in both celebrating the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool (the end of the internet as we know it) and wanting to see what progress is being made re IPv6 implementation.
I am also pleased to say that we have a special star guest signed up for the event. I’m keeping his/her identity a secret for the moment but it will be worth the wait 🙂
I am just waiting for confirmation of one more panelist in the IPv6 debate before publishing the final lineup.
More anon. Click on the icon in the right hand column of this blog to go to the event website.
I’ve just been preparing a talk I’m giving on behalf of the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association (ITSPA) at UC Expo in London on Tuesday. When I was asked to do this talk a few months ago I proposed the title “SMB – the forgotten majority of UC?”
The title held an element of provocation intended to attract punters to hear me speak. However when I dug in to the market numbers on the face of it this is very much the case. SMB represents roughly 15.% of the total market for Unified Communications equipment. This is despite the fact that his sector represents over 50% of the PBX market and, according to the EU, 99% of all businesses in Europe.
I guess this is down to two factors. Firstly most UC vendors provide the functionality as part of a bolt on to big PBX systems, presumably as part of their added value sell. A small business might not necessarily have the expertise or be able to afford to implement UC. A vendor may also not be able to afford the cost of selling these systems in to SMBs.
Secondly when I looked into some old market research into the use of individual components of UC, (Instant Messaging, presence, Unifed Messaging, collaboration , conferencing etc) the benefits of these functions when used by a business were expressed in time savings and moreover the bigger the business the greater the compound benefit.
So by and large UC remains the domain of big business.
There is no real reason why this should be the case. Many of the features mentioned above are openly available as low or zero cost somewhere on the internet. Some even have an element of integration, which is how UC is sold to bigger companies. Skype for example has integrated voice, video, IM and an element of conferencing. There are very few service providers that provide a true UC experience on a hosted basis (Timico is one). An experience that matches the functionality of expensive systems bought by large enterprises.
In fact ITSPA dropped the UC category from its Awards because Timico was the only service provider entering in that category (bit of a shame 🙂 ). Timico today does a lot of business with companies with between 250 and 500 staff but when we started selling VoIP we were firmly in the game of selling mainly to small business. As small business owners become more internet savvy I think their responsiveness towards the use of technologies such as Instant Messaging is changing. This has been recognised by the likes of Cisco who have been introducing new products into this space, albeit at the upper end of the spectrum.
Because UC market share statistics are gathered largely from traditional voice equipment vendors I doubt that the true level of penetration of UC features into the SMB market is known. The fact is that due to the cost of selling to SMBs UC services for this market will have to be cloud based and not based on a piece of kit in the corner of the office. I would expect that over the next few years, as SMBs grow comfortable with outsourcing services into the cloud, we should see a change in the penetration of UC into this market which will redress the balance of market segmentation to be more along the lines of the PBX market. This has to be a large opportunity.
There was a lot of talk this morning about Ofcom ‘s research announcement that
“Average download speeds remain less than half of ‘up to’ speeds advertised by some Internet Service Providers (ISPs), particularly for broadband delivered via a phone line. “
Ofcom is recommending that if speeds are used in broadband advertising they should be based on a Typical Speeds Range (TSR), so consumers have a clearer idea of what speeds to expect.
The stock response from ISPs is that every line is different and by announcing an “up to “ speed they cover all the bases and customers are appraised of the actual expected speed of their line before they sign up.
This is an interesting one. I work for an ISP but I am also a consumer. I see no reason why ISPs should not be able to give greater prominence to typical speeds rather than the “best you can possible expect”. We should being straight and honest with our customers – not hyping things up and raising expectations that can’t be met (you can tell I’m not a marketing person here 🙂 ).
ISPS have made some concession to the fact that if a technology (eg ADSL2+) can theoretically do 24Mbps most people are not going to get that speed. A 24Meg line is therefore often described as an “up to 20Meg” line (not universally as the Ofcom data in the table inset shows). My “up to 20Meg line only does 11Meg. It is disappointing but I understand the game. Not everybody does, though you do wonder whether most people care.
Most people do care about the quality of their experience though and in the absence of any other suitable metric typical speeds are a good enough representation of this.
The survey results do make interesting reading. Firstly the Virgin results which are based on cable modem technology and not ADSL are consistently better – their typical numbers are consistently close to the “up to” numbers. That’s a technology thing.
If you look at the ADSL providers with similar technologies I’m not sure that there is much to differentiate them. The thing that is holding back these ISPs from quoting typical speeds is that these speeds would be significantly slower than those of Virgin. Not good for a marketing director’s pulse.
I sympathize with these ISPs but at the end of the day my consumer head still thinks it would be right to quote the typical speeds and not the “up to”. Or at least both sets of numbers.
I can’t see this happening voluntarily. It would only take one ISP to break ranks for all the others to have to follow.
All I can say is bring on Fibre ToThe Premises where 100Meg will be 100Meg, give or take a wavelength. I really hope that my home town of Lincoln skips Fibre to the Cabinet and goes straight to FTTP.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to blow your own trumpet on occasion and I am please to say that this time I can use the full register of that particular instrument. Timico has been shortlisted for best Internet Telephony Service Provider in both SME (Small and Medium sized Enterprise) and Large Enterprise categories at the annual ITSPA Awards.
This is very pleasing as it fairly reflects the evolving nature of our business. A large percentage of our customers, as business demographics might suggest, are indeed SMBs. SMBs have represented the heartland of the hosted VoIP industry during its formative years.
Large Enterprises have traditionally opted for big PABX solutions, quite possible hosted. As Timico has grown we have won more and more business from the Enterprise sector and have found that this is an area of the market very willing to embrace hosted VoIP but also to mix and match premises based PBX and hosted using SIP trunks as the unifying factor.
The biggest influencing factors here have been a combination of the maturing technology and the reduced cost of bandwidth across Wide Area Networks.
The Awards are at the BT Tower next Monday evening and are usually a great opportunity to network. Good luck to all the other finalists 🙂
Ofcom is currently consulting on changes to EU law applicable to Communications Providers that in theory will force providers to port numbers within 24 hours of being asked.
Sounds great but fixed line providers have been chucked a get out clause that adds that a subscriber line has to be ‘ready for service’ before being appropriate to port.
This means business as usual for the likes of BT whose archaic manual porting system requires a complete overhaul anjd which often leaves business custoemrs in the lurch.
Coincidentally the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association, ITSPA has recently commissioned an independent report outlining the options for the UK Communications industry in respect of number porting. It isn’t just a technical issue. There are contractual bottlenecks as well with each CP having to independently negotiate separate porting contracts with every other CP.
I will share the output when I get is sometime in March. In the meantime Ofcom seems content to let sleeping dogs lie and accept that as long as the letter of the EU law is met, (but not the spirit) then that is all fine and handy. This might make Ofcom’s life easier but is a disservice to UK business that has to put up with lengthy delays with porting their telephone numbers.
Details of the Ofcom consultation, scheduled to last 6 weeks, are available here. Interestingly CPs are also required to offered disabled access to Emergency Services via sms text service. I will need to investigate this further but if applicable to ITSPS this is certainly something very new for them to get to grips with.
The new laws have to be in place by 25th May 2011.
You have to be particularly interested in a topic to read Hansard, the report of parliamentary proceedings. Twitter has made it a lot easier, albeit hit and miss – you typically have to catch the tweet in the stream as it happens.
This week Ed Vaizey gave some answers to questions put by ISPA Internet Hero Tom Watson MP. Specifically Mr Vaizey said that the impact assessment on the DEAct suggested that the additional costs that would have to be applied to consumers broadband lines would have a relatively small but permanent effect of reducing demand for broadband connection by between 10,000-40,000. All assuming that the ISPs would pass on the full costs to their customers.
There are a few observations to make here.
Firstly the obvious one is that this goes against another government policy of trying to promote digital inclusion. Might the government now want to subsidise 10,000 – 40,000 broadband connections to offset the fact that they will not now be able to afford broadband. I wonder whether Martha Lane Fox, the government’s own Digital Inclusion Champion has any comments to make here?
The second point concerns the numbers used in the Impact Assessment itself. There is very little confidence within the ISP industry that the government got this right.
The Impact Assessment assumes that the total annual cost to all ISPs is between £30m and £50m. TalkTalk and BT have been suggesting that the annualized costs to their companies along are considerably higher than the total assumed for the whole industry.
The Impact Assessment clearly needs reviewing. Broadband expansion has been largely down to big cost reductions by ISPs in a very competitive market place. There is a clear relationship between broadband penetration and cost of the service. It has long since got to the point where consumer ISPs especially have had to expand their value proposition away from pure internet access because in itself this service had become unprofitable.
It would not surprise me to see a new Impact Assessment based on real costs showing a massively higher number of people that would be excluded from the broadband market.
I guess we will have to wait until after the Judicial Review to see what happens. In the meantime, c’mon Martha get your boxing gloves on. There is a fight going on here.
Link to Hansard – includes some other DEAct related questions from Tom Watson.
We are marking the end of the internet as we know it with a celebratory event on the evening of 22nd March at the Highly Prestigious London Transport Museum in Covent Garden.
This gig isn’t just to bury IPv4 though. It is also a serious look at where the world is at with the roll out of IPv6.
If you are a techie in the internet community, a tech journalist or just as importantly an IT manager/CTO/CIO who might want to understand the relevance of IPv4 exhaustion to your business then you need to be here.
We have a nice little retrospective look at the history of the Internet in the UK by early Pioneer and colleague of Vint Cerf, Prof Peter Kirstein.
Also on stage will be speakers discussing the actual state of IPv6 rollout, the practicalities of implementation and the problems yet to be overcome.
Then we will be peering into a crystal ball and taking a look at the future of the internet and the www!
Finally there will be a ceremonial bit of fun whereby IANA will do a re-run of the handover of the last block of IPv4 addresses to RIPE.
Bring your camera. You will want to remember this one
18.30 – 21.30 Tuesday March 22nd (ceremonials commence 19.00hrs)
Agenda:
A brief history of the internet and the www by internet pioneer Prof Peter Kirstein.
What next? Is the world ready for IPv6? What are the problems?
The future of the internet!
Ceremonial repeat of formal handing over of the last IPv4 blocks by IANA representative to RIPE representative.
Party Time!
Cost:
This is a free event but entry is by invitation only.
Registration (click here to go to the event site) for “bringonipv6” requires a password as attendance at the event is invitation only. The password is freely available from industry sources or will have already been mailed to you. If we have missed you out you can contact Trefor Davies at [email protected] with your details.
My son Tom, who is now at Warwick University, has a schoolfriend Leo who has been diagnosed with Leukaemia. The interview below was put together by Tom who visited Leo at home over the weekend.
Tom is interested in a career in Radio and fits in a couple of days a week at Mercia Sound in Coventry as well as having a show on RaW, the university radio station.
This week the guys at RaW are having a fund raising drive for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research. I say drive and mean that literaly – they are driving around 59 student radio stations in England with Tom spending 5 minutes on air at each location to appeal for donations.
Details can be found here. Justgiving page is here and tom’s website is here. Please donate whatever you can. You can also follow him on twitter at @radiotomdavies.
I realise that this post is slightly off topic for trefor.net but hey…
At the tender age of 49 I still call my mum for a chat and ask her advice on things. Usually regarding how to cook Welsh Cakes etc. Well I note today that mumsnet, the “by parents for parents” family site seems to have withdrawn its support for the “Claire Perry porn blocking” campaign.
I can’t add much to the Malcolm Hutty post over at LINX on this subject. He also supplies some useful links.
Whilst I am not denigrating Mrs Perry’s desire to protect children mumsnet has displayed some realistic common sense and now understands the issues associated with web blocking.
The original campaign page at mumsnet is no longer available but it was still visible in the Google cache. Click on the header to see more.
The twitterstream was full of references to the new iPlayer App for iPad and Android this morning so I naturally dived in and downloaded. I have to say the experience is top quality on both. The colours are great and the TV is very watchable on both size screens.
What really came into my mind though was not the fact that I now had a new app on my devices but the fact that this was yet another driver for bandwidth use and also the question of the TV license.
The chart on the right is Cisco’s growth forecast for internet bandwidth use – a 4x growth between 2009 and 2014. Much of this as you can see is driven by video. The Y axis legend is in ExaBytes/Month!
A one of the World’s best content provider the BBC really is one of the drivers of this (Ok YouTube et al are also contributors) and making iPlayer easier to access on more and more devices adds to the proliferation. Of course this also adds to the pressures on ISP networks and fuels the NetNeutrality debate butthat is not for this post. Grown up ISPs will manage their way through.
The debate about the TV License fee is however another issue. The BBC has said that it is not going after non license payers watching using iPlayer online:
“Well, the number of homes that currently have no television licence, but that do have broadband subscription is currently estimated to be infinitesimally small. The chances are if you want to watch BBC TV programmes via catch-up over the web, you are also watching some BBC programmes at other times, live or time-shifted, via a TV set, and will already have a TV licence. ”
This situation will possibly change quite quickly over the next few years.
You only need a license if you are watching live TV which the BBC is now promoting using the iPlayer App. My question is whether the BBC is able to identify online users? The chances are they will only have an IP address to go at which is going to raise the same issues as we currently see with the Digital Economy Act and the RightsHolder industries (of which the BBC is a member). Unless that is the BBC has some spyware embedded in its iPlayer App that somehow records data on who is using it – via iTunes username perhaps?!
The other notweworthy point is that apps like this are also fuelling the demand for newer faster smart phones. The iPlayer App for Android needs a fast processor to run Flash. It will inevitably evolve towards more and more HD content which will use more and more bandwdth and need faster and faster processors etc etc etc.
We do live in interesting times. BBC statement on iPlayer here. BBC position on TV License for online streaming here. Header photo (click to see more) is of iPlayer App running on both iPad and HTC Desire HD (Android).
ACS Law hit notoriety for bullying broadband users into paying a fine in lieu of being taken to court for alleged “online copyright infringement”. Victims had no idea what their rights were and apparently frequently paid up rather than going through the expensive courts process.
It was reported yesterday that ACS Law had ceased trading – in order to avoid the potenial fines likely to arise out of the court action. Today they were apparently represented in court by a new barrister.
Reports from the court via twitter stream state:
ACS Law has not been allowed to discontinue 27 cases it tried to drop last month.
The judge today said letters to alleged filesharers “materially overstates the untested merits” of proving MediaCAT copyright infringement.
Also Judge: “Media CAT and #ACSLaw have very real interest in avoiding public scrutiny ” because of revenue from from “wholesale letter writing”
Today is Safer Internet Day. This year’s topic is ”It’s more than a game, it’s your life” and the aim of the initiative is to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children. The website reports some interesting statistics:
Gamers spend on average 8 hours weekly playing online.
Young people sleep 2 to 3 hours less per night than 10 years ago.
In January 2010, 18 million accounts were registered on Second Life.
Facebook reports more than 500 million active users.
Users spend 700 billion minutes on Facebook each month.
13 million players of World of Warcraft (WoW), the world’s largest MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game).
MMORPGs generated $1.5 billion in subscription revenues worldwide in 2008, forecast to reach $2.5 billion by 2012.
Up to 250,000 players are simultaneously online on WoW.
Transactions and sales of virtual goods in virtual worlds were estimated at $18 billion in 2009.
Its is amazing but I can identify with many of these bullet points. My kids spend far more than 8 hours online playing MMORPGs (it is a truly great acronym). All my kids are on Facebook even though two of them are below the recommended age limit. I vet their friends lists and have the logon details of the youngest who is not allowed to post photos. All his spare cash goes on online games – and we are talking £40 a pop here which is truly irritating as a parent (thats about fifteen pints of beer in real money! 🙂 ).
Parents need to jointly develop a survival strategy here. It only takes one to let the side down and let their kids have free rein to spoil it for the lot of us.
Note in connection with Safer Internet Day, Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, published the results of two complementary surveys that indicate that only 21% of UK individuals who live in a household with dependent children use parental control filtering software. This is higher than the EU average of 14% but considerable lower than the results of the EU Kids Online survey that was published a couple of weeks ago and reported that 54% of UK parents (28% across the EU) use parental controls or other means of blocking or filtering some types of websites.
The UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) has published a “Good practice guidance for the moderation of interactive services for children” which you might want to take a look at.
Publicising Safer Internet Use is very important and I suggest more needs to be done to educate parents on what they might be able to do to help themselves. This is particularly important in the light of the fact that politicians are constantly trying to take control of the internet “for our own good“.
PS one fact that coaught my attention in the EU report was that in the EU2 in 2010, almost one third of individuals (31%) who used the internet in the 12 months prior to the survey reported that they caught a virus or other computer infection resulting in loss of information or time during this period.
PPS thanks to ISPA for drawing my attention to these data.
And finally – I have to say were are entering a truly great era for acronyms – MMORPG!!!!!
I am quite excited to be able to announce that we have begun the building of a new 18,000 sq ft, three storey facility at our Newark Corporate HQ. This will house a datacentre with up to 150 4KW racks on the ground floor.
The first floor is designed as a Network Operations Centre and will provide us with a great 24×7 monitoring facility, screens galore and mirrored glass – the works. The initial build is costing £5m but we are planning a further £2m spend over the next three years, mainly on increasing the capacity of our virtualisation platform and Storage Area Network.
The Newark site already has diverse fibre connections but we will be adding a further link to Manchester to increase our route options out of the UK.
This facility will allow us to offer customers we host in London Docklands an alternative DR option in the midlands. The bigger play though will be virtualisation and the private cloud. We have been offering bespoke virtualisation services for three years or so but this will represent a big step up. Look out for announcements on this later in the year.
The header photo (click to see all of it) is of me and Construction Manager Gary Davies of Lindum Construction doing the ceremonials for the “groundbreaking”. The pic below is me actually doing some digging – I went out and bought a new spade especially 🙂
The words Hague cyber warfare Treaty appeared fleetingly in my twitter stream this morning.
This really intrigued me. It brought visions of uniformed generals sat around a table at the United Nations signing fancy bits of paper. Over their shoulders were clouds filled with botnet armies – millions of compromised computers waiting for the command to strike, glaring ferociously at their opposite numbers.
There is a wonderful wealth of information out there on cyber warfare and security. For example according to Lt. Gen. William T. Lord, the US Air Force chief information officer, cyberattackers have shifted their tactics from trying to breach firewalls to penetrating applications and said the service has serious application vulnerabilities. “We have over 19,000 (information technology) applications in the Air Force,” he said, noting that Electronic Systems Center’s IT Center of Excellence at Maxwell Air Force Base-Gunter Annex, Ala., examined about 200 of them. “All of them had over 50 vulnerabilities.”
The incredible pace of introduction of new technologies is a serious problem to the military which likes to take years to develop and test anything it buys. It used to be that the army would be first to get advanced technologies that would one day filter down to peaceful applications. These days it is the other way round. The army must presumably end up using applications that have had little or no security testing but are considered worth the risk (I’m not speaking from personal knowledge or experience here).
The United Nations has in fact been giving this some due consideration – it would be negligent of them not to, fair play. Last week the UN published a document updating its position re disarmament and cyber warfare was covered in pages 12 – 20 (out of 42).
In the document the UN discusses possible solutions:
The security of confidential as well as less significant information and networks
A. Security updates should be applied to all systems
B. A comprehensive disaster recovery planning should take place, which includes provisions
for extended outages.
The creation of an international treaty which includes:
A. A concrete definition of cyber warfare which is ratified by all signatories
B. A limitation on the usage of cyber weapons
The establishment of an annual international platform, in which experts in the computer and
cyber field from different countries may foster dialog with one another regarding the issue of
providing measures to regulate cyber warfare
Increased effort in raising awareness about the cyber warfare and the threats it poses for the
world in its entirety
Most of this, treaty apart, is obvious stuff and to be honest suggests that the UN doesn’t really know what to do about it. Does anyone? I would be hugely surprised if many government really signed up to it. After all why would a government (naming no names) want to deny itself the ability to attack Iran’s nuclear programme using bloodless electronic means?
In any case nobody would trust anyone else not to develop cyber warfare tools – it would be nigh on impossible to police. This is unfortunately in my view a battle war that is being fought but that nobody can win. I bet the proposed annual international conference would be a very interesting one to attend though maybe not as interesting as the meetings that they don’t tell us about.
Somewhat a contentious title for a post? Provocative? It is topical though with all the discussion in the media regarding the government’s review on whether web blocking really works or is cost effective (re Digital Economy Act), and also MP Claire Perry calling on ISPs to implement filtering to stop kids reaching online porn.
I just did a Goole search on “bypassing school proxy”. It came up with 847,000 results including a link to “answers.yahoo.com”. I followed one of the links and found a ton of advice on how to get around a school’s filter system. These ad-funded sites are very youth orientated. One of the posts had 198 discussion comments!
My(oft repeated) point is that blocking ain’t going to work and anyone that naively thinks that most kids will not know how to go about circumventing a block on websites, whatever their flavour, needs to spend some time in a playground.
PS the answers.yahoo.com discussion had been deleted but most of these sites do not have the integrity or the corporate image to uphold. All most of the 847,000 sites (pages) are interested in is your money.
Peter Robbins, OBE today resigned his position as Chief Executive of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). He is staying on until July to give the IWF time to find a successor.
He is quoted as saying:
“It has been an absolute honour and privilege to lead the IWF since 2002 through a period of unprecedented change. I have been exceptionally fortunate to have worked with dedicated staff and very talented Board Members over the years. I must place on record my gratitude for the exceptional support afforded me by extremely professional individuals, organisations and institutions in the UK and abroad as together we have built enduring partnerships from across the public and private sectors to enable the IWF to thrive.”
I don’t know him personally but many people have a great deal of respect for him and his work. Running the IWF is not an easy job.
A lot has been written on this blog re the IWF – you can just do a search. This post gives an overview of the job that it does. At this time I don’t know whether Peter is just retiring, has somewhere else to go to or just feels his time has run its course at the organisation.
I lost my vehicle registration certificate! I know I know it is my fault. I should look after these things a bit more. Fortunately it is quite easy to replace, as long as you can remember you vehicle registration number (obviously) and you haven’t changed your name or address.
A quick look online told me all I needed to know about how to replace it and I called the DVLA. This isn’t a complaining post really because I now have a new certificate winging its way to my home address. However the number of levlels I had to go through in the DVLA autoattendant made me wonder if it was a world record.
Having called the number I pushed numbers 1, 4, 5, 1, 1, 1. It took me 2 minutes 33 seconds to get to that last number 1 at which point I got music on hold. At 3 minutes 26 seconds (OK I realise it might have been anal to write all this stuff down but I do have a blog and it does need constant feeding 😉 ) a person came on and by 4 minutes 55 seconds I had a new registration certificate on its way and I was £25 lighter.
I wasn’t unhappy with the experience and the chap at the other end of the line couldn’t have been nicer or more helpful. I do however wonder when they are going to push all of this onto a self help web portal and let him find something more interesting to do with his life other than replacing car registration documents.
PS I am happy to open up the competition to find the longest auto-attendant tree in the world. It should be in the Guinness Book Of Records.
I missed a trick here. We are looking for a Marketing Director. This is a new post. If you are interested check it out here.
This might not be of particular interest to the normal readership of this blog (though I don’t really know their actual demographics – other than by the fact that people occasionally come up to me and tell me they particularly like my posts about cake competitions! – it is nice to meet readers:) ). It is exciting for me personally because I am sat in a business that I helped to create and am now watching that business grow up. Other appointments we have made in the last 12 months are also indicative of the maturing nature of Timico – Group Operations Director and Information Services direction to quote just two.
Anyway back to the Marketing Director it isn’t me personally doing the recruiting but if you want to know more about the company you know where to find me. You will find there is never a dull moment at Timico:)
I’m getting reports of increased levels of phishing attempts on broadband customers. People get a call from someone purporting to either work for Microsoft or on their behalf. The flavour of the calls go something like this:
“We are working on a password security breach”
“We are working with Microsoft and your ISP to increase your broadband speeds
“We have identified a problem with one of your servers and can fix it for £250”
By and large they want you to click on a link and then of course “you’ve been had”. Unfortunately as in many aspects of life on the internet the only real way to avoid being had is by being internet savvy. There is no quick fix.
