Author: Trefor Davies

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

Categories
broadband Business

BT in the News for Throttling Broadband

BT has made the headlines again for throttling all peer to peer traffic. www.samknows.com has just produced a report on the subject.

People perhaps don’t realise that P2P isn’t just used for downloading (often illegal) media from the internet. P2P is often the most efficient way of moving large amounts of data from one location to another and as such is an essential business tool. Timico doesn’t throttle any of it’s traffic.

This suggests to me that the UK is moving more to a two tier ISP market. Tiers are usually based on the size of an ISP – the big ones are Tier 1, medium sized are Tier 2 etc.  I would suggest that in future the Tier  classification should be based on the quality of the customer experience. Tier 1 = good, Tier 2 = not so good.

I’ll leave you to decide which one BT fits into but I would have to say that Timico would certainly fit into the former.

Categories
End User mobile connectivity

This post was created using a Nokia E71

Chez Davies, around 7.45pm August 7th.

The photo is of the Davies’ back garden and was taken at around 7.45 PM on August 7th using the Nokia E71. I had to go to my PC to help upload the photo itself – it uploaded to the website ok but at a certain point of the proceedings I kept losing the link to the website. I’m not sure whether this is specific to the WiFi connection. I have found that the WiFi on the E Series isn’t as robust as it might be although I do like the phones in general.

Note the grass needs cutting!

Categories
End User internet security

Alphabet attacks

Following my last post which was on security I was sat in the Timico NOC today and interestingly watched a SPAM attack in progress.

It was an alphabet attack. This is one where someone’s email server is compromised and used to send out SPAM by rotating through the alphabet for email addresses (eg [email protected] – the SPAM algorithm works its way through every combination of alphabetical variants. In this case it was targetting Italian .it addresses.

Our network monitoring picked it up and we immediately blacklisted/shut down access to that Exchange mail server. We also contacted the customer to let him know and so that he could take remedial action and remove the offending SPAM.

Apart from being interesting to watch it in action, a bit like standing on the edge of a battlefield watching the fighting, it again highlighted the need to have secure passwords. In this case we tried accessing the offending server and were able to log on using a simple admin/password combination of credentials.

When I started this blog I didn’t think that security would become such a mainstream subject but I was wrong

Categories
Business datacentre security

It’s all about Security, Security, Security

I enjoy this business so much because of the wonderful diversity it provides me in terms of issues, problems and successes. The latest is the fact that the firewall at our corporate headquarters has been the subject of a number of attacks by some unfriendly person.

These attempts to break into corporate networks happen millions of times daily around the world, which is why businesses need to be on top of their security strategy. What interested me here was the fact that this was the same attack coming from a number of different places around the world.

The sources were in China, the USA, Poland, Australia and a couple of other countries whose names escape me. The same common username and password combinations were used each time from each different source (lesson here – never use “admin” and “password”) .

Of course the same individual or organisation is almost certainly involved in all of them. That person will have systematically hacked into a certain type of server whose operating system and security patches has not been kept up to date. It is likely a company server hosted at a datacentre somewhere.

Our course of action, if the attack persists, is to look up the owner of the IP address from which the attack is coming and ring the business up to let them know they have a problem. In the case of the Chinese source we send them an email – only because they will almost certainly be in bed. 🙂 Usually this sorts the problem out and indeed the recent spate of attempted break ins has abated. No doubt there will be more.

We know what to do in these cases but it is a lot to ask of a business that is not and ISP or doesn’t have a highly skilled IT department, which is why it very often makes sense to outsource your security management.

Categories
Business internet

Finding out more about social networking

The more I play with websites such as Facebook the more I find out. Initially I couldn’t see the sensible use of Twitter. The selling pitch to me was that it provided someone who was sat in a closed meeting with the ability to send messages that could be broacast to the outside world from their mobile phone. I didn’t really get this.

Now i have found out that I can use Twitter in conjunction with Facebook. When I send a SMS to Twitter it not only posts the message on Twitter but also as a status change on Facebook. For me it is easier to do it this way than to use the Facebook mobile upload.

I have used the Facebook means of uploading photos from my mobile – I just send an MMS message to a Facebook address and hey presto the photo appears in my profile.

This is all technology that now looks useful for business purposes. The Twitter SMS service, if embedded in my company intranet might be a secure way of me sending out messages whilst on the move (ok I can email it but Twitter can be programmed to send the same message as an SMS to other mobiles). I could say the same thing for the photo upload. This adds to the flexibility of business communications and who knows what it will evolve to.

I don’t know if businesses will use Facebook in anger or whether they will demand closed websites that are specific to their use. This is to some extent possible with Facebook already but would I trust my secure business data to Facebook? Probably not yet. Still the ride is exciting.

Categories
Business internet security

“Stealing” domain names is just not cricket

Businesses need to be mindful of the need to manage their domain name strategy sensibly. There are any number of individuals and organisations out there ready to take advantage of the careless.

For example take a look at http://www.cricinfo.com/. Not a bad time to be visiting the site during an exciting match between England and South Africa (yes I did say exciting).

If you now visit http://www.crickinfo.com/ you will see a difference. The spelling mistake is an easy one to make for someone looking for the main cricket website in the world (wide web). A good domain name strategy would have seen cricinfo snaffle both domains.

Now visit http://www.cricinfo.co.uk/. This one you might think would certainly take you to cricinfo but it doesn’t. It is owned by someone else and until recently took people to a cricket shop completely unassociated with cricinfo.com.

This is quite a high profile example of someone not doing something right when the business was small and it didn’t matter but paying for it downstream.

There are other different examples – the famous myspace court case where the .co.uk domain name was owned by an ISP long before myspace.com existed.

It is quick and easy to check your own business’ domain name – click here if you need a domain name checker.

Good luck England.

Categories
Business video

And the winner is…

Scott Wroe shakes hands with Trefor Davies

After a fiercely fought video competition which brought in some imaginative entries I am pleased to announce that the winner is Scott Wroe from the Timico, Newark, marketing department. The winning video is well worth watching timicofinalscottwroe.

Congratulations also to Andy Twine of Twang.net who came a close second with commendations to James Vestbirk, Jo Barker, Adam Jackson, Harry Singh, Andrew Massing, Richard Wright, Jo Smith, Andrew North, Clare Morrell, Will Curtis, Dean Bruce and Katie Nicholas who all put in a good effort.

 

Categories
Business olympics

Nortel and the 2012 London Olympics

Nortel just announced that they have been chosen to provide the communications infrstructure for the London 2012 Olympics. This is quite an achievement because as well as voice it involves the provision of a wide area network that one might more normally associate with Cisco. I get the impression from Nortel that power consumption/Carbon footprint played a part here although I’m sure that in such a complex bid there were a great many decisive factors.

Their press release talks about having to support 205 sporting organisations, 20,000 media, nine million spectators and over 4 billion viewers worldwide. I’d like to have been the salesman getting commission from that lot. No doubt there will be a few tickets floating around for Nortel partners wanting to attend the track and field finals:-).

Categories
Business UC video voip

Tesco’s new VoIP telecommunications infrastructure

Tesco has just announced a new investment worth £100m over 5 years in a new next gen telecommunications platform connecting 1,800 sites over 14 countries. What the announcement doesn’t say is that it is based on Nortel technology. Specifically the multimedia collaboration features are based on the Nortel AS5200 platform. This is the same platform used by Timico for its multimedia Unified Communications based VoIP services. Tesco is using video conferencing and Instant Messaging as well as file collaboration and VoIP.

The Tesco network is big enough to justify it’s own platform. However Timico provides partitions on its Nortel platform so that smaller organisations than Tesco can benefit from the same feature set (without having to spend £100m).

This is a big milestone for the Nortel platform and an endorsement of Timico’s VoIP strategy.

Categories
Apps Business UC voip

Ribbit & BT – Unified Communications

BT has bought a company called Ribbit based in Silicon Valley, California. Why is this interesting or significant to the UK business community? Maybe it isn’t.

However there is a chance that in the UK we will see the effects of this acquisition in the next year or two. Ribbit provides the hooks to make voice calls from different applications. In itself this isn’t anything special – Timico could do the same thing using it’s Nortel 5200 platform given the time and inclination.

Ribbit has tried to make it easy for 3rd party developers to do so and as a company whose sole reason for existence seems to have been to do this then one must assume that they would be doing a good job of it.

I think my one observation relates to what BT expects to do with the platform. It seems to me that Ribbit is set up as an applicaton for a wide community. I suspect BT might just use it to develop their own embedded voice applications. This to me would be a lost opportunity. Here BT has the chance to position itself at the centre of a Web2.0/VoIP2.0 world in the UK but it needs to keep Ribbit open to all to do so.

In the world of voice, at least in business voice and Unified Communications, it is also important to keep the activity and platform UK centred when selling to UK parties. This is why I believe that a Webex service with a voice platform based in the USA will never have a huge market reach in the UK. The same applies for the apparent efforts of Microsoft with hosted OCS.

Timico is based in the UK, offers UK services and telephone numbers, and I believe will be going head to head with Microsoft and Cisco in this space. Of course in other areas we will be partnering them. Interesting times…

Categories
broadband End User

Magnolia Paint, Croquet, and Broadband Internet

I was on a rare Tuesday night out with Ben our Head of Network Operations and Dean, Chief Technical Architect. Ben was up from the NOC in Ipswich for a meeting so we combined business with pleasure and had an evening discussing technical strategies and roadmaps for The Timico Group.

The output will reveal itself in due course but the nature of such evenings, spent in Tequila’s Mexican Cantina in Lincoln, is that the conversation lead to other subjects.

On this occasion it was magnolia paint. Dean said it was a completely boring subject and that there was nothing really to talk about. An earlier career spent in RAF accommodation had coloured his judgement on the subject.

My take was that magnolia paint is in itself a complex subject with many facets. After all you can get gloss magnolia, matt magnolia, emulsion, satin, small pots, large pots, industrial sized pots etc etc. It is also quite possible that there are many different shades of magnolia.

The point is that there are probably experts in magnolia paint who can advise the mere mortals and colour blind amongst us as to which tin of magnolia we need.

Now compare magnolia paint with your internet connection. You have probably taken both for granted but in reality a broadband internet connection is a complex animal. What sort do you go for? Is the free one that comes with a phone line the one for you or do you actually pay good cash for something different? Is there a difference? How do you decide?

Let me tell you even if you think you know what you are talking about it is not easy. It’s like the first time I had my own business and needed to choose a mobile phone tariff. There were so many on offer I basically had to take a pin and stick it in the pricelist and hope that that one was the right one for me. Someone had always made the choice for me before.

Not every business has the luxury of employing staff to specifically choose on your behalf. In fact most businesses don’t. They need to team up with someone who can advise them and who they can trust.

The fact is I leave the choice of magnolia paint to an expert, in this case my wife. My wife knows nothing about internet connections so in that case she asks me.

PS, Ben and Dean also wanted me to write on the subject of croquet. There are around 3,500 members of the Croquet Association spread amongst approximately 165 clubs. The Association was founded in 1897 so it is still taking a little while to take off! If you want to know more go to http://www.croquet.org.uk/. They are looking for support.

For internet connections go to http://www.timico.co.uk/. They want your business.

Categories
End User internet

.UK domain snippet

Interesting fact that came out at the nominet meeting today was that they have almost 7 million .uk domain names under management. These are being added to at the rate of 137,000 new registrations a month, offset by the fact that only 70% of domains are renewed when they expire.

Categories
Business security voip

Disaster recovery in action – Timico style

It’s not very often I get excited about an ISDN line going down. This is what happened today at Timico Headquarters in Newark. Apparently becausewe are currently going through normal summer weather (that’s normal hot not normal British wet) the BT telephone exchange in Newark began to overheat. The BT response to this was to switch off some kit includiong our ISDN lines. Uhuh.

However fear not dear customer. When you called in you probably didn’t notice because our Disaster Recovery plan kicked in and the ISDN numbers were diverted to VoIP ensuring continuity of service. Hooray!

It is not true to say that this was seamless. It did take us a few minutes to realise that the lines were down and then switch over but the time lost was minimal.

The outage happened at around 14.20 and normal service was resumed at just before 17.00 hours, presumably because the sun had gone over the yardarm and the BT engineers wanted to get away for a cooling thirst-quencher.

Categories
Business dns voip

Nominet ENUM launch

It isn’t often you go to a meeting which launches a new industry. This is essentially what happened at the Radisson SAS Hotel in London today as Nominet launched their ENUM registration service.

The presentations gave a basic training in ENUM for those who needed it and then offered an open forum for discussion as to how the market would be developed.

For those that don’t know, ENUM is a means for VoIP users to connect with other VoIP users without having to pay for calls, assuming that you have the IP bandwidth. It assumes that calls are going to become free and that service providers will have to find other ways to make money. The more registered ENUM subscribers the morecalls will be free.

The reality is that it will still take a long time to happen. VoIP to VoIP interoperability is a long way from being straightforward and the service will rely on using the internet for connectivity with all the quality issues that that entails. VoIP providers such as Timico typically use high quality private IP network connections as opposed to the internet for their call traffic. This is important for businesses.

The near term pitch is the ability to connect multiple islands of VoIP such as multi site businesses (retail, police, NHS etc). VoIP providers can however do this today. Nominet rightly responds to this saying that this is not currently being done with standard scalable solutions such as ENUM. They are right but the solutions in use today exist and work and come from reputable market leaders such as Nortel and Cisco.

Timico has been involved as a pioneer in UK ENUM from its basic beginnings when it was down to volunteer efforts. With a DTI sponsored commercial activity it may well be that ENUM will eventually start gaining ground although all the building blocks are not yet quite there. Nominet has a good team but it is still going to be a long haul. Nominet recognises this and has assumed that it will take at least five years to break even.

Its going to be interesting to see what happens. Timico will participate when it believes the market, that does not yet exist, is ready.

Categories
Business mobile connectivity UC video voip

Nortel carrier strategy

Had a really good meeting with the Nortel Carrier team on Wednesday – I’ve not really had a chance to write it up and post before now. The meeting was held to discuss their SIP/multimedia product roadmap. The Nortel Enterprise Division has been making a lot of noise in the multimedia/Unified Comms space (SCS500 – I’ll write a piece on it soon) but I had been afraid that the Carrier side had sold its soul to Microsoft.

This turns out not to be the case. The Nortel AS5200 platform, which is the SIP platform used by Timico, has been adopted by a number of major Tier 1 operators and is benefiting from what seems to be a large amount of attention and investment. This to me is a very sensible thing for Nortel to do as the 5200 represents a leading edge platform for them – one which is streets ahead of any competition in the hosted VoIP/Unified Comms space.

Timico has been selling services on the back of the 5200 for 2 – 3 years. We are talking hosted VoIP, video, IM, presence, collaboration – perfect for small offices and homeworkers. The Nortel developments look to be adding more PBX type features that fill in some holes in the 5200’s repertoire. Whats more it seems to me that this switch is moving in the direction of becoming Nortel’s main carrier play. After all the CS2k, which gives Nortel its huge lead in the market, is a platform designed to emulate legacy services but in a much cheaper way than its DMS 100 TDM swich.

What’s more, new features such as federated presence, FMC, links to external directories and better support for SIP Trunks will keep Nortel at the forefront of the business communications space and allow tight integration with its Enterprise products – something that we haven’t seen before.

This is reinforced by the movement of Enterprise staff to the Carrier to aid the process.

Lastly but by no means least Nortel is moving the 5200 to Linux which will have a huge impact on the cost of rolling out and supporting 5200 based services and which I whole heartedly welcome.

I look forward to growing our Nortel relationship.

 

Categories
broadband End User

Sports Bar

This isn’t really a technology post. I have just had dinner in a hotel sports bar somewhere near the M25 outside London.

 

Initially I couldn’t get near the bar because the one barman was snowed under with customers attending a function that had closed the restaurant. I didn’t mind that because I don’t like being seen as a sad git reading a book on my own in the restaurant. I prefer to sit at the bar with a beer and a burger and then go back to my room to work/sleep/watch TV. I did mind it taking ages to get served with my glass of shandy (yes).

 

On this occasion the bar eventually emptied of function goers only to reveal the lonely individuals normally seen in the restaurant but this time sat on their own at tables in the sports bar.

 

It does get worse. The four screens in the sports bar all displayed the same round of some boring darts competition. Probably the world championships J.  I seem to recall that at the age of eighteen I was interested in darts. I’m 46 now and no longer interested in darts.

 

Back in the room I’m writing my board report. Can’t send it though. The Wifi signal although present is too weak. I have to go back to the bar to get a strong enough signal. It will have to wait until morning. I could do it through my Nokia E71 (more on that later) but the GSM signal is also pretty crappy.

 

There you go. It was a technology post after all – sent from reception in the hotel.

Categories
broadband Business

Leased Line Business on the Up

Despite the advent of faster (ish) broadband the demand for leased lines is on the up. At least that is a trend we are seeing at Timico. This is evidenced by the statistic that in one day last week we received 32 (that’s thirty two) requests to quote for a leased line from our existing customer base.

You might argue that 32 quotes from a base of ten thousand or so businesses is not much but I’m telling you it is. That is the annualised equivalent of 8,320 leased lines in one working year, assuming no one takes a holiday but doesn’t work weekends.

Now we don’t get that number of RFQs every day, it would be great if we did. Also this is a recent statistic so they will not yet all have turned into orders although I’m sure that a significant proportion will do so.

It does point to a growing demand though. Businesses’ need for stable higher bandwidth is on the up as they have more and more internet (or at least Internet Protocol running on private networks) based communications that they rely on. With the best will in the world broadband (ADSL) is not going to give the same degree of reilability as a leased line, but there again it is significantly cheaper.

One huge opportunity for TImico is the massive installed base of BT leased lines. I read somewhere recently that this amounted to around 118,000 installations. Most of these leased lines will likely be 2Mbps connections that have been installed for donkeys years and are now well out of contract.

You can bet your bottom dollar that BT will not have mentioned that IP bandwidth costs have plummeted in the same timeframe. The chances are the typical BT leased line customer is still paying the same for the service that he or she was five years ago. This represents a serious opportunity for fast growing outfits like Timico.

If anyone out there needs advice on their leased line needs just drop me  line or leave a comment and I’ll sort out an independant assessment.

Categories
Business mobile connectivity

Another angle on tromboning

Tromboning is the method used by some operators providing access to mobile services in the UK. It is cheaper to route the calls via the USA and back into the UK than to do it directly to a mobile. The downside is longer call set up times and sometimes poorer call quality.

I have just invented a new type of tromboning. My friend Terry has an American daughter. She is over on holiday (vacation) and he got her a pay as you go SIM from Orange (Orange). There was as usual a bewildering choice of tariffs. He settled on one that charged 20p per minute for any UK network including landlines and only 6p for calls to the USA.

If she needs picking up from town she calls he mum (mom) in Oklahoma and mum calls dad in Lincoln (England) using Skype (insecure consumer VoIP). Even if she used her landline service it would still be cheaper than a call to a UK network from her UK pay as you go mobile.

Categories
Apps Business security

Access control meets www – and it’s not what you think

When I began this blog I intended to cover subjects that I felt would be of general interest to users of business communications services in the UK – Timico customers generally. I didn’t think that this would for one moment include the topic of door entry systems. It does.

Some time ago we began a relationship with a company called Paxton Access. This was because we needed a security system for our new purpose built Headquarters building in Newark (Notts – not New Joisey for the benefit of international readers). Since then we have started installing it as part of an integrated package for customers.

Door locks have moved on a long way. This system comes with a Software Development Kit. I’m not suggesting that this is something particularly useful for general business customers who won’t know one end of a SDK from the other. However the rich engineering talent we have at Timico has been able to put it to good use.

We now have an intranet page that provides access to the door entry system. One click on the web interface and the door can be opened. Is this a security risk? We don’t think so. Access to the web page is controlled via Active Directory authentication and is tied down to specific individuals. This can apply to any door at any of the Timico UK locations and can be tied in with camera visuals so that the person allowing entry can see who they are letting in.

The same door can be opened by anyone holding a registered keyfob or, using the intercom, via any telephone handset on the Newark Nortel PBX. This functionality could be extended to opening by sms pin number from registered mobile handsets, or via command line interface from non Windows PCs as is the case in our Ipswich NOC where the engineers have the traditional geek’s abhorrence of all things Microsoft.  

There is more. This system can be used to set the alarm and turn off all the lights when the last person leaves the building. This is serious use of web technology for mundane but important business needs. 

Categories
Business engineering

NOC TLA

I spent the day at the Timico Network Operations Centre in Ipswich yesterday. It’s a great working environment with lots going on.

It isn’t somewhere that would suit all. You need to understand engineering speak to derive any benefit from the visit. Words of more than four letters are a rarity.

BGP, MPLS, TCP/IP, OSPF, Cisco, xDSL, Perl, L2TP, Linux, MySQL, SNMP, PHP, Exim, Apache, Debian, Bind.

If anyone reading can translate the above please get in touch because we are looking for more geeks engineers.

If you don’t understand what I am saying this is not for you. Please continue to the next post:-).

Categories
broadband video voip

The Bunk Inn

In my travels around the Timico empire I try to avoid staying in hotels. When I visit Twang in Newbury I stay at The Bunk Inn in Curridge. Home from home, good beer, good food and friendly staff.

The downside of the Bunk is that to make a mobile phone call you have to walk to the end of the road – the coverage is non existent. I know that in the past I have pitched this as a good point but when you want to stay in touch with home it is a different matter. There is a phone in the room but over the years I have had this ingrained feeling that in room phones = expensive hotel bills. In my globe trotting days the hotel phone bill would usually be bigger than the cost of the room. 

In the Bunk Inn this is not a problem because it provides internet access. Calling home is just a matter of firing up my PC and clicking on my Timico VoIP client. I can even have a video call.

Short and sweet – the blog entry not the phone call which was long and sweet.

Categories
broadband Business

BT Superfast Broadband

Just heard on the BBC news that BT has announced that it will be investing in a superfast broadband network/fibre rollout. It won’t have universal coverage but up to a million homes should be able to get fibre to the home. The rollout is expected to be complete by 2012 (subject no doubt to the usual BT schedule slippages)

You will recall that in a recent post I forecast that according to the trend in internet traffic growth we would need 96Mbps by 2012. Interestingly this is what the BT announcement gives.

Note unusually I heard it on the Beeb but it hasn’t appeared in any of the usual online rags yet. 

Categories
Apps Business UC voip

Calliflower

Well I have been bowled over by an application that I saw today for the first time on Facebook. I was responding to an invite of an old friend Carl Ford to attend an online conference call on Alec Saunders’ Squawkbox. The subject was “deploying globally, regulated locally”.

Regulatory stuff isn’t really what turns me on but the exciting bit was the Calliflower application that was being used to host the call. This an online conferencing app that can be buried in facebook. You use the web interface to see who is online, their pictures and put your hand up when you want to say something.

The great thing was that you could also use your facebook interface to send IMs to people on the call and to write wall posts in real time.

This is a great example of what is coming along in the web2.0/voip2.0 world. The application wasn’t perfect. You either called in using Truphone or Skype or used a paid for number in the USA or France. However as an example of what can be done it was brilliant.

Immediately after the call I set up my own call (in seconds) and had a play with it with a colleague Dean Bruce. You could even press a record button and download the conference to your pc when it had all ended.

Now I’m not quite sure yet how this is going to be monetised and there are quite a few missing features compared with some commercial “Meet Me” and collaboration services such as those provided by Cisco/Webex and Nortel. Integration with your company systems, video and collaboration to name but a few.

However Dean and I walked away from the office in quite a state of excitement. It must have been because I was going home for my tea :-).  Check it out on http://apps.facebook.com/calliflower/.

If you aren’t in facebook go to http://www.calliflower.com/Index.html.

Categories
Business hosting

CoLocation rack support

Companies with their own colocated racks might want to consider getting their set up audited, particularly if the rack has been managed by a third party.

Timico engineers went to Docklands yesterday to perform such an audit for a customer. Their rack was intended to be set up with a fully resilient server architecture. In fact, although, there were two redundant switches in the rack the ethernet connections from each server were connected into the same switch. Each switch had a single power supply. It is easy to see that a problem with a single power feed could have resulted in a total outage for this customer.

Our audit report will include the proposal that the equipment should be distributed across two locations to provide a genuine level of resiliency. Of course Timico could provide this.

Categories
broadband Business

ISPA

I am please to be able to tell you that yesterday I was elected to the council of the UK’s Internet Service Providers’ Association at their Annual General Meeting. You might ask why do I bother when I am already on the Council of ITSPA (Internet Telephony Service Providers Association).

Well I’ll tell you. There is so much change happening in the internet world that it is important to keep in touch with what is going on, both in the VoIP and ISP fields. As a growing player in this market Timico has a lot to say and to contribute to the debate. It is an opportunuity to influence and lead.

The AGM, which was held at the Liberal Club in Westminster, was followed by a reception which must have had in attendance in excess of 200 individuals all involved in the provision of internet services in the UK. These are not all just straight bandwidth providers. They include content providers, equipment providers, end user organisations and analysts. The event was a great forum to meet people and discuss what is going on in the industry.

I look forward to being able to provide ISP insights in future blog posts from a position near to the action.

Categories
Business engineering

BT Wholesale Showcase at the Cabinet War Rooms

Went to the BT Wholesale Showcase at the Cabinet War Rooms in London yesterday afternoon. For those of you who don’t know this is the bunker where Winston Churchill and his government held court during times of danger in World War 2.

 

The room where the showcase was held was lined with a wall of original power control equipment. This mainly consisted of dials and levers and was a huge contrast to the technology in everyday use today. What is more astounding is the fact that I was born only 16 years after they stopped using the rooms. We have seen more technological progress in my one relatively short lifetime (so far) than in the rest of history. When I was growing up it was said that 95% of the physicists that ever lived were still alive.

 

As for the BT event it was somewhat crowded but it was good to see that they have an active programme to engage with their wholesale customers. It was also a great opportunity to network with industry peers. BT seems also to have a very competent and professional Sales Director in Karen Murray. It is often difficult to get things moving with an organisation the size of BT but they are responding to competition and saying the right things in the wholesale space.

Categories
Business events UC voip

The ITSPA AGM and Summer Reception

The annual ITSPA bash went ahead yesterday. Numbers were down a little, I suspect because of the encroachment of the holiday period. However once the formal proceedings were over we had a great set of panel debates and a talk from VoIPWatch blogger Andy Abramson.

 

I was down to moderate the Unified Communications panel. However due to illness I was stitched up with moderating the SME panel as well. This worked out ok because I was in two minds in the first place which one to go for. Timico’s sweet spot is SME but the sexy market leading stuff is Unified Comms (for the SME market in Timico’s caseJ ).

 

Interestingly of the fifty or so attendees the four panellists (Steve Mackenzie of ICU Global, Andy Abramson, Andrew Penn of Siemens Enterprise, Tony Cocks of Microsoft) and myself represented 5/6 of the organisations in the room involved with UC. I therefore invited Mark Owen of Nortel up to the stage to fill a spare chair and take part in the debate.

 

The fact that there were no other ITSPA members claiming to offer UC services is interesting. They are either offering straight dial tone products as is the case with the likes of Tesco and Orange Home (they may disagree with me) or are in the PBX replacement business.

 

There is an argument that says that the business market doesn’t want UC. However my take on this is that demand for UC is just about to take off as environmental and financial pressures come to the fore.

 

Key takes from the day?

 

Some big SIP trunk deals happening –  one company was spending £50k a month on call traffic with one ITSP.

 

Microsoft is launching a hosted version of OCS and is looking to locate one of its servers in Ireland. This is a direct service being launched by Microsoft. Not a partner play. Obviously the concern is that Microsoft’s marketing dollars can heavily influence their market share here. However after some debate the team came to the conclusion that this is an opportunity. Microsoft will make the market but a substantial number of customers will not want to deal with the big behemoth.

 

Also when it comes to selling communications to the SME market, which is a substantial chunk of the opportunity in the hosted space, customers like the direct touch. They need the confidence of knowing that they can trust their supplier and know who to call when they have a problem. Accessing support via an anonymous call centre won’t work for everyone. 

Categories
Business voip

Webinar on Linksys LVS2.0

The Linksys LVS2.0 is a voice system (ie PBX) for small offices. It’s pretty amazing how compact and low cost these systems have become. This one is being sold through KeConnect channels into the small business market.  Timico subsidiary KeConnect has partnered with Linksys to jointly offer a solution to their combined channels which number between 1,500 and 2,000 resellers specializing in the small business market.

Linksys will provide the system and KeConnect the communications. KeConnect was the first company to offer support for SIP Trunks for the Linksys product in the UK.

For the uninitiated a SIP Trunk is effectively a telephone line that runs over an IP connection such as ADSL. The beauty of a SIP Trunk is that you can run multiple calls/lines over a single broadband connection. The underlying analogue line can of course only support one call at a time.

A SIP Trunk can be used for both inbound and outbound calls. The LVS2.0 allows the use of both traditional analogue lines and SIP Trunks thereby giving small businesses a level of resiliency in their communications that they haven’t seen before.

Linksys is of course a Cisco brand and the LVS2.0 represents part of Cisco’s push into the SMB market. The Timico Group also supports Nortel and Avaya PBXs and has its own hosted Unified Communications service that is ideal for distributed offices and remote workers.

The Webinar takes place on Monday 14th July at 3pm via Webex. Anyone interested in attending should leave a comment and I’ll send them the login and access details. I won’t publish the comment.

In my bit of the Webinar I’ll be talking about best practice for SIP Trunks.

For more information on the LVS2.0 click here.

For more information on KeConnect click here.

 

Categories
broadband Business ofcom

Ofcom Eases Up on Returns on Investment for Next Generation Broadband

broadband churn Broadband Technology Pipe

In my post “Who pays for next generation broadband” I mentioned that BT were complaining that the regulatory environment in the UK positively discouraged investment in a high speed broadband network (read fibre) because it did not allow a return on investment commensurate with the risks involved.

Well Ofcom head Ed Richards seems to have made an about turn on this in a speech he made to the “Intellect Conference 2008” on 3rd July.

I’ve pasted an extract here:

“Our position is clear. Ofcom favours a regulatory environment for the next generation of networks and access that both allows and encourages operators to make risky investments, to innovate for the benefit of consumers and, if the risks pay off, for the benefit of their shareholders too.

We are very clear that if operators are going to make investments in new infrastructure, investment that is inherently more risky than developing the existing infrastructure, then they need to know that the regulatory framework will allow them to make and keep a rate of return that is commensurate with the risks they are taking.”

I can’t imagine that anyone will be unhappy about this though we still have to see someone stepping up to the plate with the requisite investment. UK PLC does need to be looking beyond 21CN for the IP connectivity that will allow the true exploitation of the promise of the internet.

Categories
Business competitions video

Video competition

Following on from a post I made in June regarding Polycom putting over a hundred videos on YouTube I have started exploring this myself.

The video at end of this post is my first post on YouTube (timicocto) where I have uploaded details of a video competition that we are running at Timico in July. The hope is that we will get some good material to post on the company website.

Ultimately we will be looking at broadcasting live and this is a step towards that goal.

I’ll report back on how it went when it is all over and done. Sorry – the competition is open to company employees only.