Categories
broadband End User internet piracy Regs

Digital Economy Bill: I Don’t Need Broadband – I Use My Neighbour’s WiFi

Opposition to the Digital Economy Bill is building, but it has some way to go.

I was talking to some people today about what type of broadband they had.  One of them surprisingly said she didn’t have broadband. I found this astonishing.  However the truth came out when she told me she just used next door’s which was unsecured.

Whatever you think of the morals of this it is a real life pointer as to the problems of proof when it comes to accusing a broadband owner of illegal downloading.

I present here, for your delectation, the winner of the “dontdisconnectus” “Sing our Petition” competition.  The opposition to the Digital Economy Bill is building but it has some way to go yet I feel.

Categories
Business internet Regs security

report your terrorist website

The Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has launched a public reporting webpage (on the Directgov website) for terrorist-related material found on the internet.

The public can report URLs of suspected terrorist material direct to a police unit who will investigate. If the website is found to be in breach of the Terrorism Act 2006 the police will issue a Section 3 Notice to have the content modified or removed presuming it is hosted in the UK.

The type of content users may report can be found here on the Home Office website and the reporting page itself here.

As part of the fight against terrorism this must be good though I imagine it will be difficult to maintain an adequate level of publicity for the scheme so that people know where to look to report a website.

Also the savvy terrorist will use hosting provider in a country that doesn’t care or doesn’t have the same laws so unless this initiative was conducted on a global scale it will probably only have a small effect.

Categories
Business internet

Timico buys NewNet

I don’t generally use this blog as a vehicle to promote my employer, Timico. On this occasion though we have hit the news with the acquisition of Fareham based ISP NewNet.

“Uhuh” do I hear you say? Well there are a few points worth making.

Firstly there is an ongoing consolidation happening in the maturing ISP industry. We are seeing it at the top level, most recently with Carphone Warehouse’s purchase of Tiscali, and also in what might be termed as the Tier2 level in which Timico now operates.

Many companies in the mid size space have already been gobbled up by the biggies on their way to building market share: plus.net, bulldog, pipex et al spring to mind.

A void has to some extent appeared in the market for provision of quality ISP services to UK businesses. Many of those who used to do it are now part of big corporations where low cost is the most important issue, not customer service. Some have stayed independent, Zen being the obvious name that springs to mind, but their number is dwindling.

The challenge for ISPs addressing the business market is how to be able to sustain the necessary investment in infrastructure (eg MPLS, 10GigE, storage/cloud) and also to maintain the high levels of support demanded by a business customer whose internet connection has become mission critical.

Most ISPs in the UK today are still small operators whose idea of 24×7 operation is to give out the mobile number of the owner to a customer, or simply not to offer the service. This is neither scalable nor in the main satisfactory.

The Timico acquisition of NewNet makes great sense all round. Both companies have the same customer focussed culture, focussing on high levels of service. NewNet considerably extends the Timico capability in terms of co-location and hosting. Timico brings to NewNet a range of fixed line and mobile services and the combined entity is very much greater than sum of the parts.

All exciting stuff and more, I’m sure, anon.

Categories
Business internet piracy

You’re nicked son – Big Brother aka Digital Economy Bill

Not plagiarism, just admiration. A guide to illegal music downloading for the non technical.

Thanks to boggits for the lead.

Categories
Business engineering internet ofcom piracy Regs

Digital Economy Bill – printer accused of illegal downloads

The cogs of Government continue to grind. I know many of you yawn at some of these regulatory posts but man cannot live on network diagrams alone. The 5th day of the Digital Economy Bill House of Lords Committee stage was held yesterday.

No non-Government amendments made it through but a number of important concessions were made.

Clause 11 in particular concerns “Obligations to limit internet access”. The brakes are being put on this in that no order to cut off someone’s internet access could be made until 12 months after Ofcom has looked at this issue and come up with a Code of Practice.

It is now also proposed that it becomes a requirement, as opposed to an option, for the Secretary of State to request a report from Ofcom on the “suitability of a technical obligation”, ie whether a consumer gets cut off in a particular instance (I assume).

There will also be full appeals process which could be heard by a tribunal before any technical measure is imposed. It will still lead to a pretty messy situation downstream even if it delays the day of reckoning.

Note this is still not backed up by any sign of copyright licensing reform that will make it easier to download music in a legal manner.

There is a lot more to read about but you can do that yourselves here – if you have a few hours to spare and don’t mind finishing up with a headache. Despite all the glamour and the luxury expense fuelled living  🙂 a lot of what MPs do is deadly boring and is reported in such technical legalese as to make it often undecipherable to the “man on the street”.

It is worth noting something else. ISPs regularly receive “abuse” reports from Rights Holders. These letters informing an ISP of supposed illegal downloading activity from one of their customers’ IP Addresses

At last week’s UKNetwork Operators Forum (UKNOF) meeting a representative of Janet, the UK Education network, said that of the ‘abuse’ reports they received last year, 10% turned out to be for the IP addresses of printers, 15% were address space that wasn’t actually being used and 50% only had a 0 second interval for the time that material was being offered for download.

By this token, and I admit only in this anecdotal case, 75% of the supposed illegal activity would never pass scrutiny. This suggests that it is going to be very difficult for anyone to determine the validity of such an assertion by a Rights Holder, be they a judge, ISP or anyone else. There is no way an ISP would want to get involved with this without someone picking up the costs and being fully indemnified.

Categories
End User social networking

Facebook – the golf club of the internet

How is Facebook a business tool?  It is interesting to understand how people use it at work especially considering that businesses do get concerned about staff wasting time.  I have in the past defriended someone because they seemed to do nothing but talk about their car whilst working from home.

A quick snapshot this morning of status updates by my friends show:

MD of a wireless networking company
someone I used to play rugby with
VoIP Technical Authority from one of the worlds leading communications electronics manufacturer
international product manager for cellular handset manufacturer
renowned ISP consultant
university PhD student
international tech journalist
UK Member of Parliament
international cricket website
rugby playing prison warder
gateway presales engineer
MD of international telco startup
product manager for mobile network
global voip and social networking guru
owner of a social media startup
networking engineer
rural broadband activist

It doesn’t matter what the nature of the conversation is between my Facebook friends. It is rarely to do with specific business issues.  The point is it is just a hugely productive tool because it builds up an ecosystem of contacts that makes it easy for me to talk business with them another time, and not on Facebook. It is the internet version of a round of golf.

Categories
Engineer internet UC voip

VoIP QoS monitoring stuff

VoIP QoS should not be an issue if the network is managed correctly.  This means the LAN, the WAN link and the core network of the service provider.

If the WAN link is an ADSL then it can be susceptible to congestion at the exchange though in my experience this very rarely happens, even at times of extreme network usage such as the Olympics or last summer’s cricket. Problems here typically stem from underprovisioning of bandwidth.  An Internet Telephony Service Provider should also be operating an uncongested core network and a properly designed LAN should never give problems.

Problems do still occur but if you have the right tools these should be straightforward to detect and sort out.  One of the ways we manage our network is by using probes embedded at key point in the network.

The diagram below shows the output of one such probe earlier this morning.  We are looking at connection downtime, lost packets or packets arriving in the wrong order, jitter and latency or delay. It can be seen that latency is almost the only measurable effect.  All the other numbers are too low to count. Even the worst case latency figure seen here of around 46ms is not going to be noticed by the human ear and most of the calls are below 20ms.

This is a very useful tool for IT managers having to run multiple services over a multi-site Wide Area Network and allows them to spot problems before anyone notices and starts to complain.

VoIP QoS network monitoring screenshot

Categories
Cloud End User internet

tref moves into the cloud

Stop right there! Before you go any further I know what you are going to say. “I’ve always had my head in the cloud”.

But no 🙂 . What I mean is that we are just moving trefor.net into the cloud. More specifically onto a Xen based virtual server on a resilient hardware cluster. I might say this is to cope with the increasing load imposed by the growing number of visitors but this isn’t totally true, or not at least the main driver.

As much as anything you have to practice what you preach and on this occasion this is what I am doing. Thanks to Ian P. Christian (Pookey) for his help with this.

I can see clearly now the cloud has come…

trefor.net moves into the cloud

Categories
broadband Business internet

Line Up Here for FTTC

It slipped my mind when talking about FTTC last week that should anyone be interested in taking this service when we roll it out please let me know.  My phone number and email address can be found here. Otherwise mail to [email protected]

Categories
End User internet

the.pope sets out on internet marketing campaign

The Pope has been in the news over the weekend telling his team that they need to get blogging to better engage with the faithful.

He is a bit late out of the blocks here. I just took a quick look on Facebook and found that someone had already set up a group entitled “The Pope” with a princely 975 members. There are also quite a few already claiming to be the Pope on the Social Networking website.

I then took a look at Twitter.  Same story here.  I checked out  thepope but his tweets were protected.  This didn’t sound quite right and in anycase he said he lived in Spain and only had 57 followers so either His Holiness hasn’t pushed the button on the viral marketing campaign yet or this wasn’t him.

thepope.com is registered to someone with a Las Vegas address.  This didn’t sound right either and a quick look at that website  revealed that it was jam packed with religious organisations there on a pay per click basis. Seems to me he could fix this by getting is own Top Level Domain – .pope.  He has the right contacts. 

He could then have www.the.pope which could provide click through services for his flock without their having to pay.  Obviously visitors would be able to make donations in order to contribute towards the cost of running the server – just click on the plate…

I was beginning to despair until I found pope2you.net which to my relief seems to be a genuine “Pope” website.

Now if I was the Pope I wouldn’t worry too much about the stuttering nature of what might be termed as the Vatican’s latest marketing campaign.  He can hark back to the days when all Moses had was a couple of stone tablets with which to spread the news. 

It did eventually take off, using viral marketing, a range of direct broadcast mechanisms and a fair old dose of Government intervention/regulation. That was despite the corruption to Moses’ original hard drive. 

So my message to His Holiness might be stick with it but perhaps think about changing your PR Agency.

Categories
End User internet

Halo3, VoIP and the kids

My two youngest  kids are just playing Halo3 on the X-Box against two of their friends – also brothers. They are talking to the other kids through headsets – the younger lads in one team and the older siblings in another.  Using VoIP over the internet!

I understand there is some echo on the voice (by the tone of the conversation) but they are plotting strategy.

I’m just flabbergasted by this.  I know I knew this was doable but when you see it in action it is amazing.

Doesn’t stop their mum coming in and sending them upstairs to get into their pyjamas though.  Some things never change!

Categories
broadband End User internet

The National High Speed Broadband Lottery

I make no apologies for the nerdy nature of this post. It is basically a list of telephone exchanges and the approximate date by when they will be enabled for high speed broadband Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC). No guarantees – planning permission etc.

Despite being “just a list” make no mistake it is a thing of beauty. Apart from there being poetry in the names it represents a big change for many of the people living within reach of cabinets hanging off these exchanges. It means that these lucky, lucky people will be downloading multiple HD video streams at 3.5Mbps each etc etc etc rather than grinding away on their existing ADSL which, if it is running at the national average speed, could be doing somewhere between 3 and 5Mbps.

When I say lucky I do mean it is a bit of a lottery because to get FTTC you have to be living in a densely populated area – so maybe not so lucky if that isn’t your thing.  Life is a bit of a trade off.

Sorry to my country dwelling friends who would give anything to get the national average ADSL speeds and happily settle for ordinary video quality instead of HD. For the moment they  have to stick to admiring the poetry, until the balance of trade-offs shifts.

“update 18th March – I now keep an up to date list of exchange availability on the trefor.net fttp page here.

FTTC Exchange rollout plan:

Phase1 – trial sites and thus available now
Muswell Hill,
Whitchurch,
Glasgow Halfway

Phase2 – End Jan 2010
Calder Valley
Cardiff
Dean
Glasgow Western
Halifax
Leagrave
Pudsey
Taffswell
Thamesmead
Bury
Didsbury
Enfield
Heaton Moor
Luton
Chelmsford
Chingford
Failsworth
Hemel Hempstead
Tottenham
Watford
Woolwich
Caerphilly
Basingstoke
Canonbury
Belfast Balmoral
Edmonton
Oldham
Rusholme

Phase 3 – End April 2010
Glossop
Waltham Cross
Billericay
Hoddesdon
Woodford
Lea Valley
Hainault
Loughton
Berkhamsted
Stanford-Le-Hope
Elstree
Brentwood
Slade Green
Barnet
New Southgate
Hornchurch
Eltham
Sidcup
Stamford Hill
Ingrebourne
Ponders End
Greenwich
Barking
Stalybridge
Prestwich
Denton
Urmston
Chorlton
Cheetham
Wilmslow
Swinton
Walkden
Moss Side
Manchester East
Hyde
Ashton Under Lyme
Altrincham
Edinburgh Corstorphine
Glasgow Giffnock
Edinburgh Craiglochart
Glasgow Bridgeton
Dartford
Penarth
Barry
Pontefract
Shipley
Castleford
Low Moor
Headingley
Armley
Hinckley
Chester le Steet
Hetten le Hole
East Herrington
Durham
Bristol North
Bristol West
Downend
Tettenhall
Leamore
Fallings Park
Nuneaton
Walsall
Great Barr
Northern
Wednesbury
Lisburn

Phase 4 – End July 2010
ALBERT DOCK
WANSTEAD
MILE END
PARSONS GREEN
SKYPORT
GREENFORD
BICESTER
NEWPORT PAGNELL
AYLESBURY
DIDCOT
HARPENDEN
MAIDENHEAD
CROWTHORNE
WOKINGHAM
EARLEY
LANGLEY
CAVERSHAM
READING SOUTH
HENLEY ON THAMES
SOLIHULL
EARLSDON
KENILWORTH
TAMWORTH
WARWICK
ORTONS
STONEYGATE
COALVILLE
WILLASTON
LLANISHEN
LLANEDEYRN
HEDNESFORD
TOOTHILL
BLUNSDON
CHIPPENHAM
WORLE
PORTISHEAD
LOCKSHEATH
CHANDLERS FORD
FAIR OAK
ANDOVER
EASTLEIGH
BRAMHALL
CONGLETON
LOFTHOUSE GATE
GUISELEY
BEAUCHIEF
RANMOOR
PENICUIK
DALGETY BAY
DUNFERMLINE
LIVINGSTON STATION
GLASGOW NEWTON MEARN
BOTHWELL
BRAINTREE
MERTON PARK
PUTNEY
WIMBLEDON
SUTTON CHEAM
MITCHAM
BRIGHTON HOVE
SITTINGBOURNE
PORTSMOUTH CENTRAL

Categories
broadband Business Regs

Broadband Enabling Technology (BET) Not High in Popularity Stakes, Could Upset the Digital Britain 2mbps Cart

BT today appealed to its partner community for more trialists for their BET service.  Currently in pilot phase,  Broadband Enabling Technology (or BET) uses SHDSL to offer a broadband connection speed of up to 1 Mbps over a distance of 12 Kms from the local phone exchange. By using another line and bonding them together the speed can be effectively doubled up to 2 Mbps.

BT is testing this technology at the following exchanges:
Badsey, Worcestershire
Dingwall, Scotland
Horsham, West Sussex
Inverness Culloden, Scotland
Leyland, Lancashire
Llanfyllin, Powys
Ponteland, Northumberland
Twyford, Berkshire
Wigton, Cumbria
Wymondham, Norfolk

So far there have been around 40 installations which isn’t much across 10 exchanges (cf 1,750 FTTC on 3 exchanges). I’m not sure why there have not been more takers – whilst it is targeted at less densely populated rural areas there must be more people in those areas wanting to get on the internet. The plan is, in theory, to roll out a further 200 exchanges but I don’t think it is a done deal yet with the decision to go to production not yet being taken.

BET has aroused some emotion amongst rural dwellers looking for equality with city slickers in the broadband stakes.  They complain that an up to 2Mbps service (as mooted by the Government’s Digital Britain Review) doesn’t really cut it.  I guess the pressure is going to be on BT to make sure that this service does enter production regardless of uptake. Interesting though.

Timico is not a BET trialist but if you need help with getting on the trials by all means drop me a line and I will point you in the right direction.

Categories
broadband Business

BT Launches Fibre to the Cabinet Broadband (FTTC)

Today BT launched Fibre to the Cabinet broadband (FTTC).  The trials as reported in trefor.net were conducted during the later half of 2009. By the completion of the trial phase BT had finished 1,750 installations over three exchanges: Glasgow Half Way, Muswell Hill and Whitchurch, with a fairly high success rate considering this was a trial.  Well done to Lee Martin and the team at BT Wholesale for their work here.

The overall results, we hear, are a ringing endorsement of the technology. The average speed seen is around 25Mbps with the range being between 17Mbps and 39Mbps. Our trialists ran at around the average.

BT is now launching four flavours – two consumer and two business, the latter having the faster 10Mbps uplink. Timico will also be launching the product though we are waiting until there is a little more coverage.

Post trial there are 32 exchanges (2,000 cabinets) enabled in Q1. By May there should be 103 exchanges and a further 63 planned for adding by September. In terms of premises passed there will be 500k by the spring, 1.5 million by the summer and 4 million by the end of 2010.

There are a number of other developments coming down the jungle path of the connectivity world   ADSL2+ Annex M is about to start trialing at BT Wholesale. Annexe M offers the opportunity to trade some downstream speed in exchange for more upstream. We don’t yet have pricing or an indication of the speed improvements though this is not going to be dramatic – a few hundred kbps.

This product does overlap with FTTC but should, when released, be immediately available in all ADSL2+ enabled exchanges. The ADSL2+ rollout will cover 55% of homes by March 2010, and 75% by March 2011. The lag between ADSL2+ and FTTC means there will be quite some time before FTTC is a viable mass alternative.

You might ask what difference does a few hundred kbps make but if a business is looking to use SIP trunks this might mean the difference between making VoIP viable or not.

The one other development being discussed is true QoS over the 21CN network. BT has however been talking about this for a year and a half and whilst Q3 is mooted as a possible launch date don’t hold your breath.

By the way all this came out of the BT Wholesale ISP Forum that is periodically held at the Post Office Tower in London.  A great venue and a great chance for the industry to discuss all things internetty.

Categories
broadband Business

BT Announces Business Grade Service Level Assurance for Broadband

For those who are interested in this kind of thing BT has announced that it will be introducing a higher grade of Service Level Assurance for broadband than the current Enhanced Care product.

Enhanced care offers a 24 x 7 service that includes a 3 hour response and 20 hours time to fix.

New in Q3 (September ish) will be “Business Care” product that offers 24 x 7 cover with 7 hours to fix – essentially same day. This is good progress as businesses are becoming increasingly dependant on their broadband lines and downtime = loss of cash. Note no guarantees are on offer here.

It is all subject to confirmation but it is progress.

Categories
Engineer internet

IPv4 exhaustion date is Sept 5th 2011

I note that the number of available IPv4 addresses has dropped below the 10% mark. This is displayed on the counter on the right hand column of this blog but it took a link to the Number Resource Org on Facebook to alert me to the fact.

This year should see an intensification of efforts to move to the full support of IPv6. The Sept 5th 2011 date for exhaustion of the IPv4 pool is not very far away now. In reality there will still be stocks of addresses held “in private hands” so that date doesn’t see the unprepared fall off a cliff but it is a clear pressure point.

I should make it publicly known now that I’m planning a party for this date.  Anyone wanting to come along should get their name in early as I anticipate huge demand 🙂 .

Categories
End User internet piracy Regs

The difficulties of licensing music for legal download

In the middle, as we are, of the birthing process of the Digital Economy Bill it is interesting to see how laborious this can be (and I have 4 kids!).

One of the gripes the ISP industry has (regular visitors to trefor.net will have become familiar with a few of them) is the fact that when it comes to copyright protection and the move to kill off illegal downloads there is too much stick and not enough carrot.

The big concern is that the Bill as proposed helps to compensate the music industry for losses incurred to an outdated business model and therefore removes the incentive for rights owners to embrace new business models.

ISPs are extremely frustrated by the difficulties in securing the licensing that is needed to offer consumers legal alternatives to illegal downloading. It has always been our view that a voluntary or legislative commitment to enforcement should only be introduced on the condition that rights-holders also commit to significant licensing reform.

Moreover there is a particular concern that some rights-holders are purposefully resisting reform of the licensing framework because they view legal models of online content distribution as a threat to their own existing revenue.

Lets take a look at some of the difficulties. These are some examples compiled by the Internet Services Provider Association as part of an as yet unpublished paper. There is some brain work involved here though I have tried to simplify it, largely so that I can understand the problems myself.

Existing problems
Taking a fully licensed music service to market is lengthy and onerous. Even if all the rights owners offered easy ways to access their catalogues, the complex contractual obligations wrapped around Intellectual Property rights in the reproduction, performance, and ‘making available’ of both musical works and sound recordings means that there is no guarantee of ending up with a fully licensed service.

Consumer expectations for online music are sky high. Given that many of them share a significant volume of unlawful music over P2P networks consumers are used to being able to download any track. Gaps in the available legal alternatives caused by licensing problems are not well looked upon and legal music services that attempt to offer incomplete catalogues are viewed as uncompetitive when compared with unlawful file-sharing.

Direct licensing or withholding
There are also additional obstacles to efficient music licensing which add cost and risk to the emerging digital entertainment industry.

Rather than using collective or wholesale clearing houses most music rights owning parties insist on licensing the use of their catalogues directly.

This means that direct licensing multiplies cost and difficulty for the licensee and allows each licensor the ability to set terms and rates that could critically damage the viability of a service. Licensors can also choose to withhold the catalogue required to offer a compelling customer proposition.

Ensuring that licensors negotiate through a collective or wholesale clearing house would assist licensees in securing the licenses that are required to offer a service that is attractive to consumers.

Territoriality
Rights-holders are currently able to limit the operations of music services to specific countries which enables them to introduce price discrimination from country to country. Also a single piece of music may well have different owners in different countries which adds cost and complexity to the initial rights negotiations and to the ongoing payment systems.

Advances
The larger rights owners usually demand advance payments and deal and delivery fees. These can be many times the expected royalty payments for the use of the music during the term of the agreement. This introduces a financing risk as well as adding a start-up cost to launching a new service. Often these will be staged as quarterly payments, with the threat of catalogue withdrawal or even insolvency proceedings should they not be met.

These advances are likely to be prohibitive to a provider launching a service. Advances also reduce transparency to other music stakeholders as they break the relationship between sales and royalty payments.

Short-term deals
Many deals have a one-year term with no obligation on the rights holder to renew. This will in almost all cases be considerably shorter than the planning horizon for a large operator and makes a business case more of an act of faith rather than a serious basis to roll out services. It also makes it difficult for a service provider to guarantee that it will be able to fulfil contracts with its own customers.

For example if half way through a one year contract with a consumer a service provider has a certain catalogue withdrawn from its own deal with the rights-holder then that SP is going to be unable to fulfil its own obligations. It could also turn a profitable service into a loss making entity completely outside the control of the service provider if the rights holder decides to jack up the cost.

Minima
Rights owners use contractual minimum payments in order to inflate their revenues over and above the value of the music that is actually sold by a service. In some cases this is relatively benign, such as setting a minimum wholesale price per track and taking the greater of that or a percentage of retail price.

It can, however, be used to set a price per subscriber that is higher than the licensor’s pro-rata revenue share or it can be set across an entire service so that the rights-holder receives a fixed percentage even when their pro-rata share drops. The effect of this is to compel the licensee to pay out over 100% of the royalty pool, eating into margins or operating costs.

Customer proposition approval
Rather than set wholesale pricing and allow operators to develop compelling services, music rights owners seek control over most aspects of the consumer offering and look to insert conditions in contracts that require any changes to be agreed in advance. This would seem to be an anti-competitive measure and detrimental to the creation of alternative models of distribution.

Arbitrary conditions
Rights holders can sometimes put pressure on music services to accept arbitrary conditions, such as using a preferred provider for some aspect of the service, or committing to a guaranteed placement for priority releases. Some other arbitrary conditions might include action against piracy either as a pre-condition of licensing or a commitment included in a contract. It might also include access to a large amount of consumer behaviour data including data that does not relate to the music included in the contract.

All this, and I’m sure the experts can probably dig out more examples, adds up to an extremely difficult environment for the creation of legal music download services.

Categories
End User internet

VoIP comes to Mongol Rally

Somewhat a digression from my normal postings but a worthwhile one.  Timico VoIP operations engineer Wayne Mills-Kidals is taking part in the 2010 Mongol Rally.

This is a race from the UK to Mongolia and takes him through Europe, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Kyrgystan, Russia, and no doubt a few more countries until he finally arrives at Ulan Batar four weeks (hopefully) later.

He doesn’t go until the summer but is looking for sponsors – the purpose of the trip is to raise money for the Christina Noble Children’s foundation. Anyone interested can check him out on his by-jimny website.

waynesmallAs an aside Wayne was born with a network connection in his mouth instead of a silver spoon.  We will be able to follow his progress online – more anon.

Categories
End User internet

Haiti domain names still function despite connectivity problems

Interesting to see  that the .HT top level domain continues to function despite the devastation to the country’s telecommunications infrastructure.  This is because .HT has six name servers, 4 of which are outside the country.  The one in Port Au Prince, for example, is not currently working but all those overseas are.

If you are currently sat on a hillside in Haiti this isn’t likely to be much comfort.  However work is underway to provide a route to the outside world via neighbouring Dominican Republic.  Once this is in place then .HT based communications will then be able to restart within the country and it is to a certain extent an example of the resilience of the design of the internet.

Categories
Business internet piracy Regs

Lady Gaga and the Digital Economy Bill goo goo.

The Digital Economy Bill will have its third reading in the Lords next week. Thus far each clause has been debated at each reading. It isn’t possible to forecast when it will finish in the Lords – a Bill can have up to 8 readings.

So we don’t have a proper handle on the schedule yet. What is highly likely is that it will be rushed through the Commons with a firm Government Whip. Under normal conditions this would be expected to be a shoe in but it will be interesting to see how many of Labour MPs leaving the House after this election break ranks.

At yesterday’s ISPA Legal Forum the subject of copyright law and the Digital Economy Bill was discussed. The Music Industry claims that legal methods of downloading music are being promoted. It is worth noting that at the event music site 7digital stated that in order to be able to sell some music online (eg Lady Gaga was quoted) they had to negotiate 40 different licensing contracts. Talk about getting bogged down in the goo. This is not consistent with “making it easier”.

Categories
broadband Business Regs

BIS Launches Consultation on How to Spend Money

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills launched a consultation on Thursday on the best way to invest the £1 billion being brought in by the 50p broadband levy. Check it out here.

I did get a bit excited the other day when I read somewhere that Gordon Brown had announced more money to support NGA Broadband rollout.  Upon investigation I realised that it was the money already on the table. A bit of a disappointment but not really a surprise!

What people mustn’t forget that when we say a £billion we mean a £billion over 7 years. They missed a trick here.  Gordon could have announced £2billion over 14 years or 3£billion over 14 years and upped the fifty pence tax to a pound, phased in in seven years time (and so on).

Flippancy notwithstanding it behoves all stakeholders to read the consultation document and respond as appropriate to serve their best interests.

Categories
Business piracy Regs

European Commission wants single regulatory framework for music copyright

As part of the whole Digital Economy Bill/Digital Britain debate one of the complaints being levelled at the music industry is that it makes it too expensive and difficult to make music legally available online at an economic price. 

Part of this is the fact that every country has different copyright licensing laws and channels such as Yahoo, AOL et al find it difficult to negotiate a satisfactory arrangement that would allow them to operate on their international cross border scale. 

The EU has now come off the fence and decided it needsto do something about it and if the Commission gets its way, national collecting societies that manage the rights of online content will have to integrate their systems. Hooray and about time.

You can check out theEurActiv.com piece on the subject here and a more detailed discussion document dating from October 09 here. What I can’t see is any timescale around this so I suspect I might be getting excited a bit prematurely but lets see how it goes.

Categories
Business fun stuff

telecoms sector says impact of recession is worse this time than in 2001

It was said that during the last recession over 1 million people left the communications industry. I know one person, for example, that decided to run his own Post Office branch. I don’t have any stories this time round – I’m too busy. However the results of a survey I just read from Cobalt Corporate Finance suggests that the industry thinks it is worse this time round.

Of over 100 UK mid-market businesses in the Technology, Media and Telecoms industries questioned, over 50% indicated that the impact of the recession has been worse than the 2000/2001 downturn. This compared to 35% in 2008 survey and 15% in 2007.

The good news is that in 2010 employment levels are expected to increase at 45% of companies surveyed. Only 20% expect a decrease compared to over 50% this time last year. Positive sales growth in 2010 is forecast by over 70% of respondents although the optimism of last year’s survey may have been misplaced (nearly 60% forecasting growth in 2009).

I think that if you have come through last year unscathed you are in a good position to take advantage of opportunities in 2010.  Having said that, experience has shown that it always takes longer than you think so a strategy that involves taking on more staff must be executed with great care.

PS I have no idea if the Post Office branch is still open.  He could have picked a slightly safer alternative career in my mind!

Categories
Business voip

Date set for end of Nortel era

Nortel has set February 25th as the date for the auction of CVAS, the jewel in its crown. The acronym stands for Carrier VoIP Applications Solutions and is basically the world leading Nortel carrier division.

The current bid in from GENBAND is a low US$282 million.  This however is just a starter with the end point expected to be much higher by the end of the bidding process. There are apparently 6 or 7 runners with three of them being serious.

This will either be the end of the beginning, beginning of the end or some other combination of beginnings and ends that will bring the bankruptcy process to a close. I’m not sure what happens to the Nortel brand name – Avaya seem to be continuing to use it in conjunction with the Enterprise PBX division they bought in a similar auction process. What I do hope is that the name CVAS is immediately dispensed with.  Presumably the name was the last act of someone who has subsequently left the company.

Categories
End User internet UC

Weather what weather?

I love this weather.  I’m a big kid really. I want it to snow so much that I get stuck in the house and can’t make it into the office. This isn’t just me talking.  I bet that most people in the UK are saying it right now.  Some of them will be stuck at home and those poor unfortunates, like me, will actually have made it in and are busy making cups of tea, talking to customers, running the internet (delete as appropriate).

Staying at home of course doesn’t mean that the world of commerce has to grind to a halt. I was quite thrilled as I wandered around the Timico sales floor talking about colours (this is topical – if you don’t know I’m not telling you) when one of the team mentioned that they had had a customer cancel a visit on them but had replaced it with a Meet Me Now web conference session.  What’s more they had pretty much closed an MPLS network opportunity during the call.

2010 – memorable for the best winter in (some people’s) living memory and the expansion of the VoIP online web collaboration market.

PS if you call me you won’t know whether I am at home or in the office anyway – 16 x 7 x 330.  Stack those snowballs up ready!

Categories
End User social networking

Facebook now defacto site concerning school closures

Following this morning’s post regarding the use of Facebook to announce school closures due to bad weather a huge proportion of the UK’s scholastic community has taken my advice.

There is now a group on Facebook called “Its far too dangerouse for colleges and schools to be open on the 6/1/2010 “, currently with 31,795 fans, and it can only have been created today!  Of course the poor spelling in the name this group is clear evidence that the schools need to stay open tomorrow – even longer than normal perhaps.  They can all huddle together in the English teacher’s form room and larn 🙂

Good luck to them – anyone for a snowball fight?

Categories
End User video

Kodak and YouTube are burning up your bandwidth

Since I got my KodakZi8 in mid November I’ve been videoing – not a surprise. The statistics however are startling. In that time I have recorded around 13.3GB of HD video – all of which resides on my hard drive.

I have also uploaded 26 of these videos to YouTube with a modest 616 total views. I’m not sure what the average size of video is but a rough guesstimate is 1 minute and 100MB. This suggests that my videos on YouTube account for around 61GB of data download in around siz weeks (and 2.6GB of my own upload bandwidth). Let’s assume everyone has a YouTube account and is like me. In this case everyone will be downloading this amount of data. Ok I know they are not all doing it at this time but it certainly points to the future.

As a sanity check I looked at my own ADSL usage in December – 67GB!

Video is going to change the rules when it comes to growth in use of the internet.

Categories
End User social networking

Facebook is the latest tool for announcing school closures

Friend Lindsey Annison commented today on Facebook that both her kids’ schools were shut today due to heavy snow. Their websites , however, had fallen over and were not accessible to view the announcements. 

It didn’t stop the kids finding out though as the news spread like wildfire on Facebook and via SMS. Seems to me that every school should have a Facebook Group controlled by the staff even if it is just an intranet/forum. It would grow content far more quickly than a traditional school website (if there is such a thing) that depends on the good offices of an enthusiastic member of staff to maintain and update.

Last year my wife, who is a supply teacher, struggled for an hour through the snow to a school only to receive a text message announcing its closure just as she got there! She doesn’t use Facebook though :-).

Readers living outside the UK will perhaps struggle to understand these problems – this country grinds to a halt the minute the first snowflake hits the pavement. Two snowflakes almost constitutes a snowstorm and kids all over get ready to build snowmen.   Most schools in Lincolnshire are open today, much to the extreme disappointment of the Davies clan.

Categories
Business internet ofcom piracy

Bono sums don’t add up.

The BBC reports today that singer Bono is claiming that the revenues lost by the music industry due to illegal downloading mirrors the growth in profits of the Internet industry.

This didn’t sound quite right to me but I doubt that anyone has any real data. It did prompt me to see if I could have a stab at sizing both industries myself from my limited sources of information.

Firstly in last year’s Ofcom communications market report the total number of ADSL tails is quoted as being 17.3 million connections at an average cost of £10.71 a month.  This works out at just over £2.2Bn revenues in 2008.  I realise that there will be other revenues that add to the total ISP take but ADSL will be the biggest portion of the whole. Also I have no doubt that the music industry would quote the total communications market size as the number to compare.

Now look at the available data on the music industry in the UK posted recently in the Times which suggests that turnover in 2008 was, wait for it, just over £2.2Bn.

Whatever the right numbers it clearly suggests that Bono’s claim is just the hype that most people will hopefully see through, or at least MPS about to decide on the Digital Economy Bill.  We are at an important juncture in process of the DEB and it is important that the ISP industry gets its own message across as clearly and successfully as the music industry seems to be doing.  I haven’t been monitoring the relative amounts of press coverage each side has been getting.

ofcom1Finally the chart, taken from last year’s Ofcom market report shows how the media and telecoms industries have been performing relative to the stock market. It suggests to me that the media industry, again assuming the metric is the right one, is not doing so badly, relatively speaking.

I’m quite happy to be corrected with any of the numbers here but we do need to try and get a correct persective on the whole situation.

Categories
Business internet

predictions for the second decade

In 1978 at school the computer studies class had to send punch cards off to Manchester University for their computer to process. It was one of the few in the world! There was no internet or any electronic means of sending the data. The output of the computer programs were returned as thick wodges of paper printout – by snail mail of course. The programs themselves were probably running simple arithmetic problems.

Between 1980 and 1983 I studied Electronic Engineering at University. We used DEC PDP machines – more than one class online brought it to a halt, especially when half of them were running programs with infinite loops. No internet.

In 1990 the first website was created at CERN. I worked for Marconi. We had no internet though around this time I got my first email mailbox. It was at our Long Island subsidiary and I considered myself to be super cool.

Circa 1996 I remember taking Tom, my oldest child, then five, into the office and showing him “the internet”. So for me the internet arrived sometime in the early to mid nineties and I was probably a relatively early adopter thanks to my employer.

Earlier this year Domain Name Industry Brief published by VeriSign Inc suggested that by the first quarter 2009 there were as many as 183 million domain names. By the end of the second quarter 2009 it was estimated that the World Wide Web contained at least 25.21 billion pages on over 109.5 million websites.

Wikipedia shows the following spam statistics with the caveat that the numbers are unreliable:
• 1978 – An e-mail spam advertising a DEC product presentation is sent by Gary Thuerk to 600 addresses, which was all the users of that time’s ARPANET, though software limitations meant only slightly more than half of the intended recipients actually received it
• 2002 – 2.4 billion per day
• 2004 – 11 billion per day
• 2005 – (June) 30 billion per day
• 2006 – (June) 55 billion per day
• 2007 – (February) 90 billion per day
• 2007 – (June) 100 billion per day
Bill Gates is said to receive 4 million emails a year, mostly spam.

WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION STATISTICS

internetusers

Source: Table data obtained from www.internetworldstats.com.

The top websites according to Alexa.com are:

  1. google.com  (Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages. The company’s focus is developing search technology.)
  2. facebook.com (A social utility that connects people, to keep up with friends, upload photos, share links and videos)
  3. yahoo.com (Personalized content and search options. Chatrooms, free e-mail, clubs, and pager)
  4. youtube.com (YouTube is a way to get your videos to the people who matter to you. Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide!)
  5. live.com (Search engine from Microsoft)
  6. wikipedia.org (An online collaborative encyclopedia)
  7. blogger.com (Free, automated weblog publishing tool that sends updates to a site via FTP)
  8. baidu.com (Music search engine and free MP3 & video streaming for all kind of topics)
  9. msn.com (Dialup access and content provider)
  10. Yahoo!カテゴリ (Yahoo Japan)
  11. trefor.net (World’s leading communications blog (only joking 🙂 )

I am a regular user of Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube. I am clearly not entirely with it because I’ve never heard of baidu.com!

Facebook publishes its user stats online. You should check them out. They have 350 million active users half of whom log on every  day. With only 25% of the world with internet access there is still a long way to grow for the likes of Facebook and that’s before they have saturated their existing Serviceable Available Market.

I use email. I have three email addresses – timico, trefor.net and google. I am however increasingly using other means of communications – Instant Messaging is the norm between teams at work. When you send someone an IM you generally get a real time (ish) response.  You know they are online before sending. Socially mostly I use Facebook to communicate, either by writing on someone’s wall, sending a Direct Message or via IM though the latter is hit and miss because people tend to dip in and out of Facebook and are therefore not particularly online for any length of time.  Although I have an account I am not yet a regular Google Wave user.

I use twitter as a broadcast marketing tool and not as a personal social networking tool.  For me it is not going to replace Facebook.  Also I don’t get spammed on Facebook 🙂

Almost 20% of Facebook’s active users also access the site via a mobile device. The O2 data network in London failed to cope with demand in the run up to Christmas. They are adding more capacity. They will need to because the use of the internet from mobile devices is probably going to outpace the growth in fixed internet access which in itself is racing forward (50% year on year growth in usage per user at Timico). Much of the growth in mobile network revenue is coming from data.

So where are my predictions for 2010 and beyond?  I have no idea. If bankers on exorbitant salaries can’t get it right what hope us mere mortals that drive around in N reg Peugeot 406s (other N reg cars are available though decreasingly so).  Internet usage is going to continue to grow massively and mobile internet will play an increasingly important part. Costs will come down, speeds will go up and by the end of the decade the top ten site rankings will have changed beyond all recognition. Hopefully I won’t be driving the same car!

There you go.  Let’s review this on New Years Eve 2019 and see if I was right.