Holiday broadband browsing traffic, nice and fluid.
Thought you might be interested to see the traffic patterns for holiday broadband browsing habits. Bear in mind that Timico is a primarily B2B ISP so when offices are closed or almost empty it is reasonable to think that internet usage will drop off. This is quite possibly the converse of the situation for a consumer ISP. All those workers sat at home with nothing better to do than gorge on chocolates, drink beer and watch iPlayer.
You can see quite clearly how the Bank Holiday broadband browsing traffic resembles that of a weekend. Christmas Eve also show a dramatic ramp-down. Not surprising really. It is a dream driving into the office on these days with no cars on the road. Someone has to keep the internet going 🙂 .
If you have managed to keep a job in 2009 it has probably not been a bad year for you. For consumers, fuel apart, costs have by and large come down as vendors compete more aggressively in the tough market conditions. In the UK we haven’t started paying for it yet. If you have been out of work in 2009 I guess it will have been a different story.
At work Timico continued to grow both in sales and profitability. It hasn’t been easy but the year end looks as if it will be significantly up on last year.
Highlights in the year include decommissioning our last 155Mbps ATM connections to BT, followed later in the year by our 622Mbps pipes. They have been replaced by resilient Gigabit Ethernet Hostlinks.
We also set up our new Network Operations Centre in Newark and saw the successful move of the NetOps team up to Nottinghamshire from Ipswich.
One of the big success stories of the year is the growth in the high bandwidth leased line business. Uncontended (ie dedicated connectivity) leased lines are becoming more affordable and companies are increasing offloading (at least some) corporate resources into the ”cloud”. We have similarly seen a growth in our MPLS estate with some customers signing up for hundreds of connected sites.
2009 also saw some major technology introductions. ADSL2+ was introduced early in the year. The technology is capable of “up to 24Mbps” though we only quote 16Mbps to our customers – most users will not get the max performance and I think it is better to manage expectations in this way rather than have unhappy customers.
Timico was the second ISP in the country to sell Ethernet in the First Mile and have also been participants in the BT Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) trials, the early stage of the much promoted £1.5Bn investment in Next Generation Access technology.
“Digital Britain” was also a much used “buzzword” during the year. It is easy for me to criticise and I realise it is a lot harder when you are making the actual decisions but I am afraid that we will look back and decide that the present Government did not do a good job on this one. The first 4 months of 2010 are going to be very important with laws being passed or not passed that will potentially adversely affect every internet user in the UK.
Don’t get me wrong though. 2010 is going to be an exciting year with lots happening. More tomorrow.
Channel 4 and Talk Talk have joined Project Canvas, the BBC’s set top box standardisation effort that already includes the BBC, ITV, BT, Five.
The end goal is to connect the internet to your TV and allow programmes to be streamed over your broadband connection. The BBC press announcement doesn’t go into schedules but it does talk about offering services that include:
Linear TV (eg Freeview, Freesat) with HD and storage (pause, rewind, record)
Video-on-demand services (eg BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 40D)
Other internet-based content or services (eg Flickr, Amazon, NHS Direct)
My only point in regurgitating this BBC news is that the time is not so very far away when consumers will have to start factoring the cost of all this downloading. What is perceived to be a free TV programme is effectively going to become Pay As You Go and the cost of an hour’s watching will be something known to all. I can see kids being given an allocation by their parents just in the same way that they have pre paid mobile phones.
As a footnote my kids have been trying to persuade me to buy them a new 42″ flatscreen LCD TV for the “den”. I’ve beaten off the assault by saying that we don’t actually have a source of HD video other than their own laptops and PCs. Even this line of defence looks as if it will only be shortlived.
Those of you in the UK watching the Christmas Number 1 music chart battle between the X Factor winner Joe McElderry and Rage Against The Machine may or may not have realised they were watching the power of the internet in action.
Hundreds of thousands of people signed up to various Facebook Groups supporting Rage Against The Machine and have been hugely proactive in getting people to buy their song to keep the X Factor out of the top slot. My son Tom for example was regularly posting on the subject. There were active strategy decisions going on to discuss optimum methods of hitting number 1. How many times to buy the song from where? This is teenagers spending their (parents’ hard earned) pocket money.
Of course this is a fairly frivolous and trivial use of the internet. A bit of fun. It did strike me though that there were other far more deserving causes that could hugely benefit. Global warming for example. The world’s politicians appear to have been letting their voters down at the Climate Change Talks in Copenahagen, regardless of what spin we might be getting from them after the event.
I even thought about starting a Facebook Group on the subject. Then it occurred to me that there might already be one so I took a look. There already is one.
These are the results of a Facebook search for “Rage Against the Machine” followed by those for “Climate Change”
You can see for yourself which is the most popular.
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1 476,980 fans
rage against the machine – RATM 466,612 fans
Rage Against The Xfactor 326 fans
YES…Jedward has gone!-lets get rage against the machine no.1 😀 326,991 members
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1 – BACKUP GROUP 176,737 members
Rage Against The Machine 49,165 members
Slow Climate Change 55,599 members
COP15 – Climate Change – JOIN AND INVITE ALL 49,826 members
Climate Change 1,634 members
Climate Change 407 fans
The biggest challenge I think is how to get the Facebook Generation tuned into issues such as climate change so that they can make politicians sit up and listen.
PS I didn’t buy either of the singles myself. I imagine we have enough copies around hte house now though for me to legitimately have one if I chose to 🙂
When Santa has finished for the day (night) he goes in for some well deserved relaxation. In this case Timico was pleased to be able to offer him a massage. We had a team of therapists, masseuses and beauticians in yesterday to give the staff a bit of a Christmas treat and luckily for Santa it happened on the same day as his visit. It’s a tough old game.
Nortel yesterday announced that Verizon had implemented the first commercially available 100Gbps network on a 893km link between Paris and Frankfurt.
There are several significant (or at least I think they are interesting) points to be made regarding this milestone.
First of all Nortel is clearly a leader in Optical technology, as it is in a number of its other areas of business. 100Gbps has been discussed at the last few meetings of the London Internet Exchange (LINX) but largely in terms of the fact that 100Gbps equipment has only been achieving 40Gbps, an interim step.
It is a crying shame that the mismanagement of the business during the earlier parts of the decade resulted in the Chapter 11 situation we now see today and the break up of the business. From Timico’s perspective this is at least focussing minds at Nortel and we have seen a significant improvement in responsiveness and keeness to get things done. Good I suppose.
The 10Gbps standard was ratified in 2002 and, doing a quick trawl the first network rollouts seem to be around 2005 – this is the case at LINX who tend to be up there amongst the leaders. Truth be told it was probably earlier than this.
The 100Gbps standard has not yet been ratified so there are clearly commercial pressures and advantages to running with the technology for a commercial operator to push ahead with it. Historically this has been 4x the cost for 10x the throughput. So it is clear that the cost of bandwidth is going to continue on a downward trend the more people use it, which they are doing.
This is an interesting wave for ISPs and network operators (surfers) to be riding. We have to be nimble atop the big rollers making sure that we keep our network costs down quickly enough to match the competitive pricing pressures of the market place.
At Leicester Tigers’ Welford Road rugby ground on Thursday Timico launched “Meet Me Now”, a brand new Web Collaboration and video conferencing service with Presence and IM.
I missed it due to ITSPA prize awarding duties at the House of Commons. I also had to miss out on a long planned trip to watch the annual Oxford v Cambridge varsity match at Twickenham which was also on the same day. You might say that this was very poor diary management!
I’m told that all events went really well. I can vouch for the ITSPA one of course because I was there. Timico was a finalist in two categories (SMB and Enterprise).
Anyway this is not the point of this blog post. We have been reviewing the year at Timico HQ today. The business has grown. Considering the market conditions in 2009 and that the interim results of some of our competitors show shrinkage this has to be taken as extremely positive news.
Next year is I believe going to be another tough one for business. We ain’t though this recession yet. This means that customers are still going to be looking for cost savings and productivity improvements. More so probably.
In 2009 Timico very much saw a trend towards home/distributed working. This, for example, saw one hosted VoIP customer shut their office and set their six employees working from home. There was no disruption to their comms as a result – they were on hosted VoIP.
Clearly for 2010 a product that makes it easier for people to work from home makes a lot of sense. Enter “Meet Me Now”.
Meet Me Now is a multimedia Meet Me Voice Video and Web Collaboration service. It can be used in stand alone mode or for customers using the Timico VoIP For Business service it can also be integrated with your existing voice communications.
Our (home working) sales force has been playing with Meet Me Now for some months and using the service the channel team in particular can sit at home churning through 8 or 10 online Business Partner meetings in a day. It is hugely productive and in fact has encouraged a high number of channel partners to take up the product from day 1. They have already seen the power.
There’s also been a lot of talk about “The Cloud” in 2009. For ease of support reasons home worker solutions are largely going to be “cloudy” if that is the right adjective and certainly this is the case for Meet Me Now.
The official ITSPA Awards test results make for very interesting reading. All entrants for the Best ITSP, consumer and SMB categories had their services independently tested by Epitiro.
There were 16 entrants for these two categories. On average Epitiro made 400 calls per company and then took over 50,000 technical measurements. Calls were all made over the same broadband connection.
All bar one company tested reached the ITU-T P.862 PESQ MOS Quality rating in excess of 4.0 thus meeting the ITU-T P.800 subjective rating of ‘Excellent’. The one that didn’t met the subjective rating of “Good”.
Consumer VoIP MOS downstream average = 4.3
Consumer VoIP MOS upstream average = 4.25
Business ITSP (SMEs) MOS downstream average = 4.25
Business ITSP (SMEs) MOS upstream average = 4.25
There is no real reason why there should be a difference between consumer and business downstream MOS.
Packet Loss was very minimal. Only three companies experienced any packet loss (minimal – 1.3% was the highest loss)
Call set up times were in general on a par to the PSTN standard of 2.5 seconds and better than mobiles.. The customer would experience no difference.
These are great results and are a serious independent endorsement of VoIP as a mainstream communications technology that can replace traditional PSTN services.
PS MOS = Mean Opinion Score and represents perceived quality of a telephone call.
The youth of today doesn’t know how to put an LP on a record deck. That isn’t entirely fair. It is pretty obvious that you take the vinyl disc out of its sleeve and slot it over the little nipple in the middle of the deck.
The only thing is on my old “music centre” in the attic you have to select tape, CD, phono or tuner and to someone who just downloads from iTunes it isn’t altogether clear that phono means record player.
I also had to show him how to press “start” to get start the deck revolving and move the arm over.
My 12 year old needed to write a review on a jazz record for his homework and Duke Ellington fitted the bill perfectly. Problem is it was on 12 inch LP and in the attic. I sometime retire to the attic on a Sunday afternoon with my pal Terry and a few beers to play with the train set and listen to some of the 250 albums and hundreds of singles that live up there.
Just for the record 12inches = 30cms and LP = Long Playing record. Happy days.
In Canada the recording industry has allegedly been witholding payments to musicians for use of copyrighted material and is the subject of a class action (BakerSOC ) that could cost them up to $6Bn.
The problem goes back decades and appears to be the result of a longstanding practice of the recording industry in Canada, described in the lawsuit as “exploit now, pay later if at all.”
It involves the use of works that are often included in compilation CDs (ie. the top dance tracks of 2009) or live recordings. The record labels create, press, distribute, and sell the CDs, but do not obtain the necessary copyright licences.
The defendants in the case are Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association.
The CRIA members were hit with the lawsuit in October 2008, after artists decided to turn to the courts following decades of frustration with the rampant infringement.
It would be interesting to see if the same practice was going on in the UK. If it was it would make a mockery of the attempts of the Music Industry here to drive through the Digital Economy Bill which seeks to cut off the internet connections of people involved in copyright infringement (or “illegal music downloading”).
There’s a lot more detail on the Canadian case in Michael Geist’s blog here.
UKCCIS was launched last year by the Government following the Byron Report and to an excited fanfare. Today sees the first UKCCIS annual summit and on the BBC news this morning is the announcement that lessons in using the internet safely are set to become a compulsory part of the curriculum for primary school children in England from 2011.
There’s nothing on the UKCCIS website as yet but I’m sure it will emerge during the day. We should watch these proceedings carefully because this committee represents an important step in the evolution of how our society copes with the move away from the streets and onto the internet.
There has been a concern that during its first year of operation progress has been very slow and dominated more by the desire of Government to be seen to get quick PR wins rather than achieving anything of substance. This would be a huge shame as this is important work.
The Second Reading of the Digital Economy Bill was held yesterday in the House of Lords. All sections of the Bill were considered, although the main focus was on clauses 4-17 that address copyright infringement. A brief summary is provided below:
Lord Mandelson presented the Bill, outlining the two initial obligations on ISPs and explaining the rationale behind the reserve power to impose technical sanctions. He described the clauses as proportionate. Former Cabinet Minister Lord Fowler, responding on behalf of the Conservatives, described the step-by-step process outlined in the Bill as ‘correct’, subject to RHs taking action to make their products legally accessible.
On behalf of the Lib Dems, Lord Razzall welcomed the Bill. He did, however, cite a number of sections that the Lib Dems were unhappy with. He requested that clause 6.5(b), which provides for retrospective penalties, be removed. He also questioned the lack of details on the apportioning of costs and the inclusion of clause 17. He further underlined the need to honour the principles of natural justice.
Support for the Bill was voiced by Lord Birt, Lord Puttnam, Baroness Morris (all of whom declared rightsholder interests in this area) and Baroness Howe.
Baroness Miller voiced strong opposition to a number of clauses in the Bill. She suggested that the Bill would protect the old model of content distribution rather than encourage new models. She also criticised the decision to make one industry pay for the protection of another and questioned clause 15, which outlines the role of the Secretary of State in defining the level of cost recovery. The Baroness further asked the Government about the effect that increased encryption, which the Bill could cause, would have on the work of law enforcement and cited the threat that the Bill posed to open wif-fi connections.
Conservative peer Lord Lucas voiced a number of strong arguments against the Bill. He first questioned the motivation for legislation, explaining that this was protecting music companies rather than artists, and lamented the inability of music companies to offer legal alternatives. He also suggested that it should be compulsory for rightsholders to pursue legal action through the notification system, called for due process for consumers and requested that the Conservative front bench vote against clause 17.
Lord Whitty also outlined his opposition to the proposals, questioning the suggested cost to the rightsholder industry, the potential of the user to breach users’ human rights and the lack of focus on education and alternative models of content distribution.
Lib Dem Culture Media and Sport Spokesperson Lord Clement-Jones expressed concerns around the power that the Bill granted to the Secretary of State. Conservative Shadow Culture Media and Sport Minister Lord Howard agreed that there would have to be close scrutiny of clause 11 to understand the power being given to the Secretary of State.
At this stage of the game it is difficult to tell how this Digital Economy Bill will pan out because it seems to be getting some degree of qualifed support from all parties at the Second Reading stage.
The debate in full is available here. I understand that the Committee Stage of the Bill will begin on January 6th. Also I am indebted to the ISPA Secretariat for this input which is mostly a plagiarism of their report. It is a full time job keeping an eye on this stuff.
I love it when our ISDN line develops a fault, as it seems to do once a year with the month chosen at random. It’s happened to day. The reason I love it of course is we also have SIP trunks coming into the office so normal service doesn’t have to be resumed – it doesn’t stop in the first place. Hooray for ISDN faults 🙂 (hooray for SIP trunks).
I don’t have access to the numbers but it would be interesting to see the BT Openreach figures for exchange line faults. As reported last week the equipment is getting fairly mature.
We did our first FTTC broadband 10Mbps uplink trial installation yesterday in Muswell Hill in North London. The customer is very happy with the performance. It will take 10 days to bed down but I’ll take a look after then and report back on speeds.
The installation itself, once the Openreach modem has been put in, is simplicity itself and takes only five minutes. We are using the Thomson Gateway TG789vn kit in our trials and have to say are very impressed with what you can get in a small piece of plastic these days.
I’ll be looking at productising some homeworker services using our VoIP platform, based potentially on the Thomson range. We have been very impressed with their responsiveness as a supplier.
I was doing some interviewing this afternoon and one candidate came up with “error 30” – a great Tech Support Ticketing error resolution code that is used at one company he had worked at.
Error 30 is down to the entity 30cms from the PC screen. Basically if you don’t understand you are probably part of the problem 🙂 . I thought it was good enough to write down. I got back to the NOC and related this to the team and got a few others thrown my way:
PEBKAC – Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
I’m pleased to tell the world that Timico has been shortlisted as a finalist in the ITSPA Awards again this year. Last year we won the Unified Comms category.
This year we don’t have that category but we are down to the last few in both the Best Business ITSP (SME) and Best Business ITSP (Enterprise) slots. The awards are being presented at the House of Commons on Thursday 10th December.
Last year it was actually a great evening. Parliament itself provides an exciting backdrop for the event which attracts a high number of attendees. Afterwards many of us adjourned to the nearest hostelry to celebrate. I had to carry the award around with me which made me paranoind about losing it. I felt a little like that FA Cup team way back when they went out to celebrate and took the cup with them and dented it in the process.
Our ITSPA trophy now rests in pride of place in our reception in Newark, hopefully to be joined by others – wish us luck.
ITSPA Awards Finalist Best ITSP (Enterprise) logoITSPA Finalist Best Business ITSP (SME) logo
Timesonline Labs blog published some interesting market research in November suggesting that revenues that musicians receive from non record label sources is on the rise. The increases seem to more than compensate for the decrease in their incomes from record label contracts.
Record label revenues though are shown to be hugely in decline which says a lot about why they are making such a fuss over Music Piracy. I don’t think anyone should criticise the labels for their efforts. However in considering the Digital Economy Bill Government should take a 60,000 foot view and recognise that business models are changing and the old record label way might well have to change with the times.
Bob Dylan foresaw this in “The Times They Are A Changing” -you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changing. I think the labels are just swimming in the wrong direction.
Lucky Sir Michael Rake enjoys exclusive Hambleden broadband service.
Lovely piece reported by the BBC today, where British Telecom (BT) has admitted its chairman is the only person with broadband service in the village of Hambleden on the Oxfordshire-Buckinghamshire border.
BT said Sir Michael Rake’s broadband service connection was part of a trial of new technology. The village, they say, is too far from the exchange for a standard ADSL service.
The article doesn’t go into which technology was being trialled, but here’s a thought: BT could set up Sir Michael’s home as a POP and run tails from there. That way everyone in the village could get broadband service connectivity, and all would be happy. Sorted.
Spent this morning at the BT (Post Office) Tower in London being briefed about the plans for migration of old 20CN voice circuits to 21CN.
The BT Pathfinder Project has been running in two telephone exchanges in Cardiff since July 2008. Pathfinder is the test bed for running traditional voice services over BT’s 21CN network.
The current project has seen 75,000 POTS (Plain Old Telephony Service) circuits moved from their old Digital Local Exchange (DLE) connections to 21CN Multi Service Access Nodes (MSANs). The process isn’t straightforward.
In the first instance BT has had to conduct large scale testing (£150m worth) on hundreds of different bits of customer premises equipment that connect to phone lines – phone systems, alarm systems etc.
Kit that doesn’t work on MSANs has to be identified so that customer lines that have this kit plugged in at the other end do not get migrated to 21CN. The rule of thumb is apparently that 10% of exchange lines will not be migrated to 21CN because of it.
The trial has been slow going. The pace is being stepped up with a further 275,000 lines planned for migration between June 2010 and January 2011. This will give BT the experience of switching over whole telephone exchanges in one go.
The next step will then be to extend the trial to the migration of ISDN circuits as well as POTS in the Thamesmead and Redditch areas. There are no timescales for this at the moment.
Why so slow you ask? Due to economic circumstances BT has taken a strategic decision to delay the full implementation of 21CN until 2020! I guess I can understand this especially when you consider that the migration will offer no perceived benefit to the customer. A phone line on 21CN will look identical to one on 20CN.
The delay in spending the money on the rollout does come with risks. What BT doesn’t know is when the current estate of SystemX and AXE10 exchanges will start becoming unreliable. Electronic equipment follows what is known as the bathtub curve of reliability. If a bit of kit is going to fail it does so either early on in its deployment or after a very long time in use.
The carrier is watching its reliability statistics on a month by month basis to check for signs of the network climbing the sides of the bath again.
If this starts to happen then BT can rush through a programme of exchange migrations – hence the Pathfinder Project. There is a scenario where specific exchanges could be moved over to 21CN in order to provide spares for the rest of the 20CN network.
In the meantime we will be getting in touch with customers in the Cardiff area to let them know what’s coming and to check out their equipment compatibility.
Readers should not get the wrong idea about 21CN. There are plenty of services that are based on it – ADSL2+, FTTC,FTTP, EFM, metro Ethernet to name but a few – you will have to Google the acronyms if you don’t know what they stand for. The mobile networks are also apparently using the 21CN infrastructure for backhaul to the tune of £750m a year.
Because I know you’re interested the photo below is of a JT47 Transfer Connection Point (TCP) Shoe used to make bulk migrations to 21CN voice easier in the exchange 🙂 .
As the title says Timico has been recognised as one of the 25 fastest growing technology companies in Europe. Wahey.
This is according to Deloitte who base their calculations on five years compound annual growth (5,055% in our case). This nicely complements our 7th place in their UK rankings and the third appearance on the trot in the upper echelons of the Sunday Times Microsoft Techtrack 100.
I note that three carriers have launched a wholesale IPVPN proposition. BT, Cable and Wireless and Opal have all opened up for business into the reseller channel. This really does reflect the growing opportunity in this space brought on by lower cost IP connectivity and greater use of internet/cloud based services.
Timico has been offering such MPLS based services for almost five years. We call them Private Wide Area Networks (PWANs). This year the number of Ethernet leased lines we will have installed for customers looks like being 50% as many as we did in the first five years and next year the way things are going I expect the estate to double.
When we started to offer PWANs in the market there were very few ISPs doing it. This was partly because the vast majority of ISPs had low bandwidth 34Mbps central pipes that did not support L2TP, a practical necessity for the provision of MPLS PWANs. Many still don’t have the technical knowhow even if they have the right connectivity and it is quite common for small ISPs to resell another’s IPVPN and claim it as their own.
This announcement from these 3 carriers effectively creates a dividing line between the haves and the have nots. Those who can build their own networks and those that just resell others’. None of these “builders” has the reach to provide a network that is exclusively their own. They all buy tails from BT Openreach for the many locations in the UK outside their own network footprints.
Our own approach is not to offer wholesale connectivity. We want to build up the Timico brand in the business end user community. We do operate our own MPLS network though and I see this as being of strategic importance in building the successful Communications Service Provider for the business market of the future.
As usage of the internet grows it has of course totally changed the way people interact. It seems as if I sometimes don’t see my seventeen year old, Tom for days on end but it doesn’t stop me communication with him. We just chat on Facebook.
The image this portrays is of online addicts (of which I confess I am one) buried in their PCs for hours on end ignoring everyone else in the house.
This might well be an unfortunate by product of the internet age. I do however think that this is a phase we are just going through. As technology improves it will give us more control over our lives and allow us to start living again.
This is very much likely to be the case in what might today be called a dormitory village. Most people in these places commute long distances, buy their groceries from superstores on their way home (or online) and village life becomes an impoverished cousin of its glorious social past.
In the future the internet will take away the need for these people to commute, for at least some of the time. The efficiencies that will come will give people time to physically reconnect with others in their local environment and village life will come again. Maybe the village shop and Post Office will reopen!?
In the meantime I have to clean my rose tinted spectacles, get back to my 16 hour day and someone somewhere needs to get around to putting fibre into that village.
PS Tom does occasionally update his photo on Facebook so I do keep up with what he looks like as well. Kids change so quickly don’t they? 🙂
The Alliance Against IP Theft held a meeting yesterday at Westminster Hall in The House of Commons. Present were 5 speakers from the creative industries – from Fulham FC, Universal Music, a freelance writer and journalist, a publisher from Random House and a construction manager at a film studio – and a panel of MPs including Tom Watson, John Whittingdale, Kerry McCarthy, Lord Corbett and Steven Pound. The meeting was chaired by Janet Anderson who leads the All Party IP Group.
Each speaker gave a talk on how piracy was having a negative impact on things like investing in new talent. The MPs then asked a series of questions.
Most vocal was Tom Watson who argued that to give the Secretary of State unrestricted power to make rulings on copyright in the future was actually a potential problem for rights holders – MPs would be concerned that a Bill was trying to give powers to the Secretary of State without parliamentary oversight.
Mr Watson also questioned the figures that rights holders produced that suggested that every unlawful download was a lost sale. The panel agreed with him when he said that the creative industries had never been in a healthier state in terms of popularity, despite filesharing.
Lord Corbett gave an indication of how the Bill will progress through the Lords – it will receive its Second Reading next Wednesday December 2nd and is likely to leave the Lords and enter the Commons by the end of January. With a two week half term break in February, it was suggested that as Parliament is rumoured to be dissolved at the end of March for the general election, there was a good chance that the Bill will run out of time.
This is clearly an important phase where lobbying for and against this Bill is going on. It is the first time I have been involved at such close quarters in something so important – one that is generating high emotion from both sides. The strange reality is that I doubt that there is a single person who is against the proposed regulation on P2P filesharing who actually supports the illegal activity. It is just that they don’t think this regulation is the right way to go about it.
Also I’m not a particularly political person but it does strike me that we should now just get on with a General Election because we are now entering a silly season where there is a danger that Laws will be rushed in without properly being thought through. Of course I know politics doesn’t work like that…
I don’t always agree with Andrew Heaney of Talk Talk but on this occasion he is spot on. He has distributed a link to a petition at Number 10 Downing Street which reads as follows:
‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to abolish the proposed law that will see alleged illegal filesharers disconnected from their broadband connections, without a fair trial.’
The link to the petition is to be found here. I’ve already signed up. There are currently 15,939 signatures but this is early days. Make your voice heard.
PS Less than 1 hour later it is up to 16,991 signatures.
Now that the Digital Economy Bill has been published we can comment on its specifics. and in particular on the aspects relating to what the Government describes as “Online infringement of copyright” or illegal filesharing/Music Piracy in every day language. It doesn’t just pertain to music, it includes movies and software as well – many of the abuse notices received by Timico in respect of naughty customers are concerned with the latter.
First of all the proposed Bill grants Lord Mandelson far too much control. The Secretary of State will have the power to make specific recommendations on costs and impose an obligations on ISPs to use technical sanctions. The uninitiated should read this as “telling ISPs how much they will be allowed to charge rights holders for the implementation of the requirements of the Bill. Technical sanctions = cutting off broadband connections.
In the first instance the industry thinks these responsibilites should be given to an independant body. Also the idea that ISPs should share some of the cost burden is contrary to the Government’s own legislation – the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) (RIPA) – which considers it appropriate for ISPs to be reimbursed for costs incurred when assisting in serious criminal investigations, such as terrorism or kidnap.
What the Government is saying here that it believes that it is ok to recover costs for assistance with the pursuit of serious criminals but not for costs incurred pursuing an alleged civil infringement on behalf of a commercial interest. A scenario that normally burdens the party with the commercial interest with the cost.
ISPs are happy to help and indeed are not in favour of copyright infringement but think it is grossly unfair that they have to pay to police it.
Secondly the suspension of users’ accounts as a potential sanction is wholly disproportionate and is in direct opposition to the objectives outlined in Digital Britain to increase online participation. It seems that this will enable the suspension of users’ accounts without a ruling from a judge. This is potentially in defiance of the forthcoming EU Telecoms Package that guarantees users’ rights to a presumption of innocence until proved guilty.
The Government seems to be blind to the fact that serious copyright infringers can easily evade detection by employing encrypted P2P (for example).
Instead of wielding a big stick Government should be asking rightsholders to reform the licensing framework so that legal content can be distributed online to consumers in a way that they are clearly demanding. Currently the online copyright law is a mess spread across many countries and legislatures and the costs to industry of getting it sorted are huge.
The Government is trying to push this Bill through quickly but it isn’t going to stop the problem. Lift up your heads and raise your voices all!
You can see quite clearly how the Bank Holiday broadband browsing traffic resembles that of a weekend. Christmas Eve also show a dramatic ramp-down. Not surprising really. It is a dream driving into the office on these days with no cars on the road. Someone has to keep the internet going 🙂 .
