Category: Business

Business

Categories
broadband Business

Connectivity conversation in the Isle of Man

phonebox Manx Telecom broadband

Manx Telecom broadband

Was chatting about broadband to a neighbour of my Mam and Dad in the pub near their house this weekend. He has to ration the use of the internet between his kids who all want it for different applications at the same time – Xbox Live, iPlayer etc. Unfortunately Manx Telecom still operates ADSL2+ and his connection isn’t fast enough to run the whole family’s internet needs simultaneously.

This unfortunately is what a monopoly does for you. We are lucky in the UK that we have Virgin. Virgin is what will have driven BT to invest in FTTX. Nothing else. What other motivator would it have had. In a monopolistic situation if I were the incumbent I’d be squeezing my assets for all their worth. Manx Telecom is a private company and I guess is doing just that.

Footnote 7//7/2014 Last time I was home in Peel in the Isle of Man I had a very mixed experience with mam and dad’s wifi. I have to say that the tech support lady was top notch. She patiently waited whilst I went through the motions of testing the router, upgrading to the most recent firmware (ours was yonks out of date) etc.

In the end we concluded that mam and dad needed a new router. Next time I’m over I’ll pop into the Manx Telecom shop and pick one up. Timico did offer to send one but mam and dad are knocking on a bit. the last thing they need is to find themselves trying to call Manx Telecom for support only to find that they have an unsupported router.

Look out for some holiday posts from the Isle of Man this August. It’s my favourite place to go on holiday. Innit:)

Finally on a totally different note Manx Telecom were used as a test bed for 3G by O2 way back in the day.

Categories
Archived Business

What’s in an award? Timico is 3x finalist in ISPAs

Earlier this year I spent an appreciable chunk of my life filling out awards entries. Three of them were for the ISPAs. Google it. These awards entries have pretty strict entry criteria and very fixed number of words that you are allowed to use. Not nearly enough space to adequately cover how great you are at what you do.

However you have to put yourself in the position of the judges, whoever they are. They don’t want to have to plough through several editions of War and Peace (Tolstoy) when they are giving of their time free and gratis. So it takes ages to condense War and Peace into 500 words or whatever the number was (war was waged, someone won).

Anyway the upshot is that of the three categories entered by Timico we made it to the shortlist for all three: Managed Service Innovation, Customer Service and VoIP, as I recall. Yay.

This is great news because we are up against a lot of other great companies with great services (what a great novel War and Peace was). Great.

Companies enter these awards because if you win it means you have bragging rights and can show off to customers and prospects and hopefully turn the prospects into new customers. I think you know what I’m talking about. So I’m reasonably chuffed to make it to all three shortlists.

Details here. Wish us luck on the 11th July. If you’re going come and say hello.

Ciao.

Categories
Business internet travel

Rubbish connectivity on train

Sat on the train and can’t get anything done. Some bloke behind me talking very loudly on his phone. Keeps ringing up to try to invite “CEO”s to a dinner in a month or so. He is a former CEO apparently. None of the people he is trying to reach are in and he only gets their PAs. Very distracting.  I could move seats I suppose but the train is fairly full and I can’t be bothered.

Also the internet connectivity on this train is totally rubbish. The WiFi is like sludge and the cellular connection no better.

Usually I like to use train time to get stuff done. Rant over.

On the plus side it is a beautiful spring day and Mervyn King has told us all not to worry and that everything is going to be ok with the economy. He has nothing to lose of course but I am inclined to believe him.

I spoke with a customer this morning who said that things had started to move forward at their end. I think he is right. Having been to ISPA and ITSPA council meetings recently I note that membership is on the up and businesses in the new industries are growing. You do wonder how much of the recent recession is down to the negative hype of the media.

Anyway I’m not going to solve it all. I’m just going to wait until I get a signal and upload this post.

Ciao…

Categories
broadband Business

Home Broadband Data Usage Growth

home broadband data usage

Every now and again I dip into our network  management portal for a skeet and today came across my home broadband usage data. It makes for quite interesting reading. Christmas showed a whopping 250GB of data usage which was a bit of a local maximum (to coin an old ALevel mathematics phrase). We had a house full of offspring home from University with time on their hands.

The trend is clear. As I recall I had the FTTC line installed in the July August time frame which may account for the data starting to shoot up a bit more round that time.

That’s all. Graph below:

FTTC home data usage Davies house

Categories
Business Cloud datacentre

cool customer – hosting.co.uk

It’s quite nice to to talk about successful customer wins. I love the fact that we have big names like Honda, The Savoy Hotel, St John Ambulance, Murco, Travis Perkins and Informa on board.

These days as commerce moves onto the web the name of the company becomes more and more important because you have to be looking at optimum SEO performance.

So when a new customer comes along with a name like hosting.co.uk it is easy to get excited. It’s easy to guess what hosting.co.uk does. What’s more Google likes it. Search for “hosting” on Google and hosting.co.uk comes up on the front page. This is despite it being a new entrant to the market and up against established players like Rackspace, Godaddy et al.

I’ve met the guys at hosting.co.uk and they are real pros. It is a pleasure to host their equipment and I’d like to think that the fact that a business such as theirs has chosen the Timico datacentre is an endorsement of our own product. Check out their services. I think you will be impressed.

That’s all.

Categories
Business fun stuff

STOP Press – how do you manage your FX exposure?

It’s Friday afternoon so I thought I’d show you an email I just received (name deleted to protect the naive and ill prepared):

Good afternoon Trefor

I’ve been directed towards you and I hope you don’t mind me initiating contact with you via this email.

My name is xxx and work for GPSFX as a Treasury and Risk management consultant. My expertise is helping companies develop tailored hedging solutions that have delivered considerable savings and improved management of their FX footprint.

Our expertise is viewing foreign exchange as a form of risk management, looking at exposures at a currency and entity level through: Balance Sheet Hedging, intercompany netting, bank balance reporting, cash flow forecasting and payment processing.

I think it would be beneficial to have an introductory meeting with your company next month.

I’m available on the 13th June after 1pm, can we meet at 2.15pm.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards

xxx

I looked them up and they do appear to be a genuine business and the guy has a public LinkedIn profile. So it being Friday and me feeling a bit mischievous I’ve told him that the Exec Committee meeting I am at that day should be over by 2.15 if he wants to swing by and buy me a coffee.

His problem is that he is based in Twickenham and I am in Newark, Nottinghamshire. Not only has he not done is research properly re whether I am interested in Foreign Exchange (obv not) but there is no way he can get from Twickenham to Newark in 1hr 15minutes. He will find out soon enough if he replies asking for my address.

STOP Press – he has just asked me whether I’d like a latte or a coffee and do I manage our FX and what is our yearly exposure?

This breaking news story may play out before I finish writing this post and get back to some real work.

Otherwise I’ll keep you posted in the comment stream if there is anything further to report.

Ciao

Categories
Apps Business media video

Google+ Hangout live stream broadcasts – wowsers

You will have been staying with your auntie on another planet if you are a regular visitor to this blog and not have noticed that I’m having a book launch on May8th (see here for details). I’ve been spamming my social media channels about it (sorry to those followers that remain 🙂 ) and I’m expecting a packed house.

Recognising that most people in the world won’t be able to come as all flights and hotels will be full (etc) together with the fact that the Morning Star will only take 100 people at a push I thought I’d stream the gig live online.

Up until recently I had intended to do this using babuser.com, that being the only streaming facility I’ve used. However I was pointed in the direction of Google+ Hangout Live Stream broadcasts and boy oh boy is that a cool service.

Your Google+ account is linked to your YouTube account and at the click of a button your hangout is streamed live both in your Google+ stream and YouTube. What’s more you can embed the stream in your own website and Google records the broadcast for reuse afterwards. You can thereafter chose to make it public or private.

The beauty of this is the level of engagement you can achieve on the various social media sites – comments/discussions and shares can abound. I looked at it for my book launch but clearly this is something that businesses can use that takes a Webex style presentation session to a more powerful and public level.

You can watch my efforts in the video embedded below. It is only me playing about and the fact that I had two laptops open side by side means lots of echoey feedback. The lighting isn’t great either so the audio and the quality of the video is something you need to work on.

The nice thing about the Google setup is that you can invite several friends to participate using their phones and at anytime select their video feed to be the main one in the broadcast. You have the basic setup for a professional studio or outside broadcast, albeit a simple one. The only shame is that the Android app doesn’t have the buttons for setting up the broadcast from a handset. You seem to need to use the desktop version.

I’m going to need a volunteer or two for next Wednesday and will be testing this on site over the Bank Holiday weekend. Lemme know if you want to hook up in a hangout. I’m [email protected]. Ciao baby.

Categories
broadband Business

The Importance of Broadband

fishing in Lincolnshire

Important of broadband

Just came across this nifty little video clip I did recently what at the OnLincolnshire broadband conference. I’m wearing my new jacket & talking about the importance of broadband 🙂

Categories
Business UC voip

SIP trunks Ferraris and motorbikes

FerrariI’m at Convergence Summit North. I have to say I think I prefer it to Convergence Summit South for what it’s worth. It’s in Manchester and I’ve also decided I like Manchester, again for what it’s worth. Travel and tourism piece over:)

I tend to think long and hard about whether to visit a trade show these days. In our industry the stands all tend to have the same products and the same pitch. It’s difficult to make yourself stand out from the crowd.

Tref sat in FerrariThe good thing about this one in Manchester is that it is small enough to be intimate and friendly and because I’ve been in the business a while it’s full of people I know. It is therefore a good place to find stuff out, if I can put it like that.

At this show the organisers, Comms Business magazine, had invested in an audience reaction system. Questions were put up on the screen and you pressed the relevant button on your “clicker” to submit your answer and the aggregated answers for the whole audience were displayed.

We had a bit of fun with this but one specific question stood out for me. That was “Is your company recruiting right now?” 29% of the audience said no they weren’t but a staggering 65% said they were recruiting and a further 5% said they had plans to1. That’s 70% of business in the communications market taking on new staff.

Ferrari engineThat has to be a good thing. Where is the recession we keep hearing about? It is an extremely tough market out there  but in the technology game there is always opportunity because technology is always changing.

On the technology front you will be interested to hear that only 10% of the audience (of IT and voice reseller types) had deployed Microsoft Lync with voice although a larger 29% had deployed Lync without voice. It’s very difficult to see how well Microsoft are doing in the voice game because all their Enterprise licenses are shipped with Lync so they always quote a very high number of deployments. It’s relevant because the theory goes that Microsoft is after the PBX market and their model doesn’t involve much if any revenue for traditional PBX resellers.

We also heard that although the market for hosted VoIP slowed down last year the SIP trunk sector continues to shoot up with a 25% growth in the second half of 2012. Over half the audience were selling SIP trunks and half said they were selling more SIP than ISDN which I believe may well be the case at Timico now. Those that don’t sell SIP need to take a hard look in the mirror. There is going to come a time where ISDN isn’t around.

tref sat on motorbikeNote in bandying these acronyms around I’m assuming that you know what I’m talking about. I’m not about to give a tutorial on what they all mean.

The inset photos are all of me playing with the different attractions that companies were using to get people to their stands. I have to say I don’t think I’ll be buying a Ferrari anyday soon. There is no room in them and the seat won’t go down low enough for me to be able to see out properly. I wouldn’t mind a motorbike. I like the image. I’m obviously a natural – look no hands. Unfortunately I think they’re far too dangerous:)

As a little footnote I was there with our wholesale subsidiary NewNet who are a great bunch of guys and I think picked up some nice leads from the show.

I’m doing two round tables on 4G at 12.30 and 1.30 if anyone wants to come along.

1 OK I know it doesn’t add up to 100% but don’t nitpick.

Categories
Business voip

Dinner debate on future of VoIP – Manchester

I’m in Manchester on Monday night hosting a dinner for our wholesale subsidiary Newnet. I have room for a couple more resellers who may be attending the Convergence Summit North event the next day. If you fancy coming along it’s in a nice restaurant natch and should be an informative debate. I don’t have a theme other than what’s going on in the Comms world and where’s it all going/threats/opportunities etc

It’s a 6 – 7 ish meet for drinks  at the Manchester Restaurant Bar & Grill and sit down at 7.30. Lemme know if you want to come. No freeloading competitors, just good honest hardworking resellers please 🙂

Categories
Business spam

Spam

pirate_flag_thumbI like to occasionally click on the unsubscribe link on unsolicited emails, ie spam. It makes me feel better even though I know it isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference to the amount of crap that comes through to my inbox. Sometimes I block the user and sometimes I even respond to them telling them to go away.

I’ve done it on a number of occasions with recruitment firm ComputerFutures who send me no end of rubbish. Including one “consultant” who said he was going to be in North London and would I like to meet for a coffee. I said it was a bit far to come from Newark. I’ve tried unsubscribing from their list as well as individually asking their people to take me off the list but to no avail. The last time was this week when I threatened the sender that if I got another email from his company I would ask all my friends in the industry to blacklist their IP addresses. Probably not hugely ethical but so far I haven’t had another peep from them!

Today  I was merrily blocking and unsubscribing when  I got a  mail from Amanda at Sheffield Chamber of Commerce and Industry. It wasn’t addressed to me personally, ie none of the old familiar Hi Trefor, hope things are well. It was just  “Good morning”. No name (no pack drill either fwiw and whatever one of those is).

Amanda was offering me a “free taster session for her 1 Day Telephone Prospecting Masterclass”. This seemed particularly not well targeted, me being a CTO and all.

I replied to her asking where she got my email address from and got a reply saying she “captured data from a search which includes Companies House, Dunn & Brad Street etc”. There really is no hope for us all. These mailing lists get recompiled from scratch on a dynamic basis. As soon as you unsubscribe from one someone else goes ahead and puts together another and there is no way you can stop it.

I’m pretty sure the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce are a good bunch of people and Amanda is just doing her job but it is a shame there is no way for people to have better targeting. It almost makes Google, Facebook et al seem like good guys. Like it or not at least I am sometimes interested in they chuck my way because as often as not it’s based on my search history.

Amanda does need to adopt some best practices mind you. She offered no unsubscribe link for example. I told her this in a reply and copied one of our sales guys in so that he could give her a call and sell her something. Seemed like the right thing to do. If she becomes a customer I’ll delete this post. Can’t have people writing stuff like this about our customers now can we?

Ciao baby!

Categories
Business Cloud datacentre

Timico launches Virtual Datacentre #DCrevolution

icetankGreat Launch event for Timico’s Virtual Datacentre last night at the Ice Tank in Covent Garden. There is a lot to say about this but I’m somewhat strapped for time today so I thought in the meantime I’d just share this video of the barmen setting up their cocktails before the guests arrived. You know it makes sense.

There is quite a lot going on generally at the moment including tension building up with the Snooper’s Charter (I refuse to call it by it’s real name, partly because I can never remember it and also partly because people are more likely to know what I’m talking about when I call it the snooper’s charter) in the run up to the Queen’s Speech.

I leave you with an invitation to click on the header photo. It’s the modern day equivalent of the whole school photo where one kid runs around the back and appears in the shot twice. On this occasion we have used the panaorama feature on the Samsung Galaxy S3 to create a very artistic effect:)

Thanks to all who came along to make the evening a great success and to Suzie Hodges for the camera shot:)

Ciao

Categories
Business ecommerce

High street shop closures

I was walking past a shop on Steep Hill in Lincoln on Friday night and noticed that it was closing down. It’s happening all over the place. I have a friend who has closed the doors on his tailoring business as he couldn’t afford the rent and rates. This seems to be a trend.

I don’t know the story behind the shop in the photo but it is interesting to note that the business is continuing on the www where it won’t have the same overheads. A sign of the times. The shape of things to come. The harsh reality of the present.

high street shop closure

Categories
Business fun stuff

It’s in the book

the phonebookphonebookGot home last night to find a brand new phonebook on the doorstep. Fair took me by surprise as I didn’t realise they still did them.

What struck me was the size of it. Tiny. Thinner than my index finger. I wondered whether this was because they didn’t have every Lincoln number in it but they must have because mine was there which scientifically proves everyone’s number is there. Presumably fewer businesses are advertising in it these days.

When Anne and I first bought a house together she sorted out the phone line. It was before we got married and when she filled out the entry for the telephone directory she quite naturally used her own name. This caused problems because nobody could find our number. They all expected it to be under my name – HT Davies. Even the H used to cause problems – many people don’t know that Tref is my middle name. We changed the entry the following year1.

In those days people actually used to use the phone book. The phrase “it’s in the book” was quite common. That was before people had their own mobile phones and before the internet. Nowadays not only do people rarely use the home phone line but the concept of looking up someone’s telephone number “in the book” is redundant.

If I need to call someone I will already have their mobile number in my mobile directory. If I don’t have that number then I will likely ask someone to text me so that I know where they are or I’ll drop them a line on Facebook or Twitter.

That’s all.

PS Some of you may think the photo would have been better positioned upright in portrait mode because you keep tilting your head to try and read it. It’s like that because this blog likes to push the boundaries and sometimes that is uncomfortable for people. Also the header pic is slightly out of focus – that’s either artistic or it’s because I couldn’t get it to focus that close up on the phone – you decide 🙂

1 that’s the last concession she ever had to make – I know who the boss is in our house 🙂

Categories
Business mobile connectivity phones

year on year blog stats show huge growth in mobile users

Interesting to see how readership of this blog has changed year on year.

In March 12012 only 12% of visits came from mobile devices. By March 2013 the figure was 35.5%. The number of visitors to the blog has also grown by 88% year on year (March 2012 – March 20131) so the actual real terms increase in readers accessing trefor.net via a mobile device has increased by 458%.

I note that in 2012 the iPad was the most popular device followed by the iPhone and the SGS2. In 2013 this has changed to iPhone/iPad/SGS3 though there are so many variants of Samsung phones in use that if you add them all up the numbers for Android are roughly the same as for iOS.

There were very few visits from the Nokia Lumia series and none from the Blackberry Z10.

1 year on year for the full year numbers to the end of March have grown from 110k to 220k visits fwiw. It is only a small property as blogs go.

Categories
Business Cloud xaas

Which cloud services do you use for work?

April is normally associated with rain so I’m having a bit of a cloudy1 month. Other than the services we host ourselves in our own private cloud Timico uses three main external cloud based services: ServiceNow, Salesforce.com and OneSource. I guess we also access tools on remote portals for BT Wholesale and Openreach which could at a push be categorised as “cloud” based services. I also personally use Eventbrite when I organise industry bashes such as the trefor.net Xmas party and my industry dinner debates.

Trefor.net also uses the whole suite of Google services and in order of level of use I also have Microsoft/Skydrive and Dropbox accounts. I also have an Apple ID but it doesn’t get used much.

I tend to mix work and play – I only have one laptop which gets used for both.

What I am interested in though is how you, dear reader, use the cloud for work. Are you on Google Apps or Office365? What other cloud services do you use and what is your experience of using them. Do you have problems with outages? How do you get around these problems?

Have you taken the plunge and gone totally cloud based? What size of business are you? My impressions are that it is easy for small businesses to go into the cloud and for very large companies the business case is compelling but not so easy for those in the middle. Is this right? Does the global nature of the cloud give you a problem in your line of business?

Answers either on a postcard stating point of view or by leaving a comment.

atb

Tref

1 Of course it’s not meant to be bloomin’ freezing but I’m sorry I have no control over that – if any of you do then for goodness sake get on and sort it 🙂

Categories
broadband Business

Ethernet over FTTC Broadband

I learnt all I needed to know about Ethernet over FTTC broadband from this supercool infographic over at Timico. Supercool infographics are all the rage these days and this one is right up there – our graphic designer John Heritage is the master of his trade and boy do the product managers know their stuff.

Ethernet over FTTC is over twice as fast as EFM, almost half the cost and half the lead time to install. Now that’s what I call a deal.

Affordable uncontended bandwidth for the business that wants to get into in the cloud. Available now to 36% of UK businesses (1.1m premises), 54% by March 2014 and from all good Timico outlets near you. You know it makes sense.

T’s & C’s apply:
Ethernet over FTTC requires a new telephone line to be provided without any other service enabled on the line. Charges for this are not included as part of the Ethernet over FTTC product. 13 working day lead time does not include the time to install a new telephone line. Bandwidth is dependent on line conditions and distance from cabinet. Price differences calculated by the difference in price quoted for a 5Mbps Etherent over FTTC and EFM service based on a 12 month contract. Sources www.btwholesale.com and www.openreach.com. I should be in advertising. I used font size 4 for a laugh here. I’ve been thinking about doing a spoof advert for some time since listening to an ad on the radio whilst driving along – there seem to be more T’s and C’s than actual advert. In this case there isn’t anything contentious but I thought I’d do the really small font for a laugh anyway. If you’ve magnified this small print so that it is large enough so see you can check out the infographic again here.

Ciao

Categories
broadband Business

Reliable broadband…Just How Important is It? – #godigital2013

reliable broadband

Importance of reliable broadband – video interview

Pinched this off YouTube – it’s a quickfire interview I did at the onlincolnshire #godigital2013 conference

I’m talking about how mission critical reliable broadband is these days and how you plan for problems.

You know it makes sense…

PS In the vid I’m wearing my new sports jacket – Harris Tweed. As the winter continues it vicious bite it makes a lorra lorra sense

Categories
4g Business ofcom

EE by gum – 4G hits the fells

EE 4G availability in CumbriaTwitter informs me that EE has launched its 4G broadband service in Cumbria. Great. Their press release tells us that their coverage extends over nearly 100 square miles and over 2,000 residents, many of whom are homeworkers.

A quick scan shows that this news is all over tinterweb. For some reason no one other than B4RN sends me press releases so I don’t have a blog post already written about this one :). Not that that is a big deal – most of the stuff out there just regurgitates the press release which ain’t particularly imaginative or value add.

What would be interesting to see is the business case put together within EE for the service. Prices apparently start from £15.99 a month and presumably scale up based on bandwidth consumption. Assuming the take up was in line with the national uptake for broadband (74% in Q1 2011 according to Ofcom) and bearing in mind the lack of competition then that would give EE 1,480 * £16 = £23,680 a month or just shy of £300k a year revenues. I would guess they will be able to make money out of that. I’d also expect users signing up for this service to buy other EE services so I should think the overall revenues will be quite a bit higher.

Out of interest I went into EE’s availability checker it told me that the service wasn’t available in Cumbria yet! I don’t live there anyway!! If I did live in Cumbria I would buy the service and find out what this internet thing is all about.

That’s all…

Categories
broadband Business Cloud ofcom

How the cloud is changing old business practices

broadband cloud services

an original picture of a cloud

Broadband cloud services make their mark at Olnincolnshire conference

Gave a talk this time last week at the The Onlincolnshire Digital Conference (#godigital2013) chatting about what sort of online or broadband cloud services our customers start to use after they have FTTC installed. I was not the only one. Rob Wilmot of BCS Agency (some of you will remember him as founder of Freeserve) and Stephen Parry of LloydParry told us about the cloud services they used in running their businesses.

Something that Stephen said really stuck in my mind. He uses a SAAS product called FreshBooks for his accounting, invoicing and expense management. What’s more he uses it on the move and recounted a story of a visit to a client in Frankfurt. After having lunch with the client Stephen photographed the receipt and loaded it into his expenses folder using the FreshBooks iPhone app.

After finishing his day’s consultancy and heading back to the airport he invoiced the customer from his iPhone, including the cost of the lunch (no such thing as a free one). One assumes that the customer pays electronically by bank transfer. Wham bang job done.

This is the future.

Continue reading “How the cloud is changing old business practices”
Categories
Business fun stuff

The long tail

southern syringe servicesYou have to love life. If you don’t love life you need to do something about it. One of the reasons you should love life is its diversity. I was walking to Kings Cross Station this morning and passed a lorry with “Southern Syringe Services” emblazoned across its side.

My first thought was “wow what a cool name”. I was compelled to take the photo. Neil Armstrong was with me and marvelled at “the long tail of business”.

Timico has roughly 20,000 customers. Some are big household names but most you will never have heard of: golf clubs, plumbers, cocktail bars, manufacturers of oscillators etc etc.  This is the long tail. There are lots of ways of making money out there. You don’t have to do anything fancy or exotic.

I don’t know if Southern Syringe Services are a customer, probably not. It’s a big big market out there. Very big and very diverse. I note that they don’t appear to have a website which should represent an opportunity for someone but there again they were acquired by Bunzl in 2006 so maybe they are still thinking of what to do with the brand. Also their market is pretty niche so I guess they already know all their customers.

Anyway you know where to go if you ever need any syringe services.

Categories
Business Cloud google

Google Docs is down – long live Google Docs?

google docs is downGoogle Docs is down. This is not good news for people who rely solely on the cloud for their services. I wonder what the likes of the Telegraph.co.uk do in these circumstances. They have deadlines to meet. Presumably their actual newspaper publishing is independent of Google  Docs. Be interested in understanding people’s strategy for coping.

Btw those opeing lines sound very dramatic – Google Docs is down – almost like “the king is dead” but different. I heard about it at approx 14.20 today. Lets see how long the outage is. I doubt I’ll be looking when it comes back up but if anyone notices could they please let me know.

Ta

atb, Tref

Categories
broadband Business

BT only game in rural town

B4RN rural broadband virgin media expansion

Rural broadband providers drop out of BDUK competition leaving BT only game in village.

I hear that Fujitsu has withdrawn from the race for the BDUK funding. It always seemed strange to me that Fujitsu would be chasing the contracts in the first place. Someone like Virgin maybe companies with an established network and pedigree in the UK.

Its a shame for rural areas that Virgin didn’t see any economic sense in pursuing the farming market.

Unfortunately we are heading back to a BT monopoly for many areas of the country. The shame is that this doesn’t make it efficient for me and you, the taxpayer that is handing their cash to BT to “service” rural communities. There is no incentive for BT to cut costs.

Continue reading “BT only game in rural town”
Categories
Archived Business

Job vacancies

Ton of job vacancies up on the board at Timico including an Applications Support Apprenticeship, 3rd line Network Eng, Linux Sys Admin, Biz Dev and Telesales.

Take a skeet here if you are interested. Tell your friends. Encourage and cajole them into sending in their CV. Only good people should apply:)

Categories
broadband Business Net

The BT engineering visit lottery – get yer tickets ere

broadband engineering lottery

Broadband engineering visit lottery results in 3 cancelled appointments.

BT has some great engineers on the ground. I witnessed one in action recently when he did some troubleshooting on my line and found a corroded pair of wires creating noise. The knock on effect was a modulated line with slower speeds. It was fixed. Great.

On Thursday Mrs Davies called me whilst I was in London to say “the internet isn’t working”. Now I love her a lot but whenever she says the internet isn’t working it is working and usually it is down to user error with whichever gadget she happens to be playing with. Either that or Microsoft software.

On this occasion I got home and found that indeed “the internet wasn’t working”! A quick skeet showed me that the VDSL modem was kaput. A technical term for “knackered” – from the same school as vorchsprung dorch technik (or however they spell it). It’s kind of ok because we all have mobile connectivity in our house. Frustrating for my wife who has grown used to “lightning” speed connectivity. Lots of “” in this post btw.

The upshot of it is largely that the kids couldn’t play Xbox live games and she who must be obeyed could not catch up with the Hairy Bikers on the iPad in the kitchen. Not the end of the world I’d say but certainly noticeable from a family feedback perspective.

My parting shot on the way in on Friday was “Not to worry” and “I’ll get someone out with a new modem”.

Continue reading “The BT engineering visit lottery – get yer tickets ere”
Categories
Business obsolescence UC

Voicemail is for the dead – discuss

I had a meeting with some guys yesterday afternoon to discuss their use of Microsoft Lync in different businesses. More of that anon but one thing that stuck in my mind was a quote by Paul Hardy of Informa:

“Voicemail is for the dead”

He is right. Why use voicemail then you have so many other direct means of communication. My daughter hates voicemail because it means she has to call up to retrieve it. We have been trained never to leave her voicemails. Instead I usually resort to sending an sms or more likely an IM on Facebook. She usually then replies with her availability. I do find it funny that I have to schedule telephone calls with my daughter buy hey, we all have busy lives:)

We don’t let our customer care teams at Timico have voicemail – customers need to speak to someone, not a mailbox.

As I write I have remembered I need to change my own mobile voicemail from the “vacation alert” it currently has. I am no longer on holiday you see 🙂 . Might think about switching it off…

Whaddaya think?

Categories
Business engineering

Cisco London Partner Forum, apprentices, graduates, growth and investment

Sat with a lot of grey suits at the Cisco London Partner Forum. @richorob is speaking. Cisco always have lots of interesting stats to talk about. They are a rich source of data about the high tech world we live in and make a living out of. You can look on their website for specific stuff, I’m not writing about it here.

What did interest me was the audience response to a couple of questions.

@richorob asked how many in the audience were expecting their businesses to grow this year. My gut feel is that only maybe 25% of people raised their hands. Extending this to 10% or more growth quite a few with their hands up dropped them. I’d say that less than 10% of the audience were expecting double digit sales growth. My hand stayed up btw.

Interesting. Times are clearly hard out there even in a market sector that has always been high growth driven by technological change.

Later he asked how many companies took on apprentices or graduates in their business. The response was astonishing. Maybe 10 or 15 hands went up out of at least 200 people in the room. The businesses in the room are all in the high tech game. They may well be sales orientated but in this world a highly skilled and highly educated workforce is absolutely essential. The quality of the person that you put in front of your customers is the difference between sinking and making that 10% progress. The stream is fast moving.

I’m not just talking about sales people. Our most recent apprentices have been in our reception team and in the IT department and graduate recruits get trained around different departments before deciding on the type of job they would like, except perhaps for the developers who prefer to go into a dark room with other geeks and do their stuff” :).

Times may well be hard out there but that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything about it. That’ll do for now – I need to listen to the talks.

Categories
Business spam

Does this person come from the double glazing industry?

Hello
Enterprise Management 360 along with Gartner and IDC will be distributing a comprehensive research on Building bridges with real-time Optimized Data Center Infrastructure Management with key content from Emerson, a leading infrastructure Management Industry

You have been selected out of 100 executives you will also have a No Obligation opportunity to speak with an industry expert to discuss any questions or possible solutions that can help your organisation to maximise your Infrastructure Management.

Please do email me if you have any questions.
Regards,
xxx

Like most of you I get more than my fair share of “legitimate” junk email. I occasionally spend a few minutes unsubscribing from lists but I know it is a futile task. My name is out there. I am a marked man.

It is usually easy to spot true spam should it make it past the trap. This one however is one of the legitimate junk mails that looks like genuine spam.

The text has been lifted verbatim including grammatical errors. How can a business hope to win customers if this is how it speaks to prospects. No name – just Hello. No Obligation opportunity to speak with an industry expert! No unsubscribe link. I wonder how they chose my name out of the 100 executives. Must have been a chance in a million hundred.

I allude to the double glazing industry in the title but I suspect I am being most unfair to the hard working folk in that market sector. I don’t even know why I bothered to write this post but it tickled my fancy and it has given me a break from writing some really interesting stuff on SIP trunks. I have remove the links to protect the innocent.

PS for a No Obligation opportunity to talk about SIP trunks go to the Timico business website – there is a chat line there. Tell em I sent ya 🙂

Categories
Archived Business

Timico has made it to the finals of the ITSPAs again yay

Timico is ITSPAs  finalist in Best Business ITSP (Corporate) category. I am of course uber excited. This is the Award we won at last year’s ITSPAs. I recall our product manager Gemma being worried that having been given the expensive piece of crystal to look after for the evening  she might lose it in the mist (not a typo for midst) of the celebrations. Good bit of news to have on your first day back off holiday innit?

Awards night is at the House of Commons Members Dining Room on 6th March hosted by MP Julian Huppert. If we win I’ll tell you about it:) If you’re going come and say hello.

ciao

Next up Timico SMB team bakeoff

Categories
Archived Business

Land ho – overseas customers spotted

Timico engineers wave goodbye to Blighty as they depart from Liverpool DocksWhat do the following countries have in common?

France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Poland, USA, Mexico, Hungary, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Liverpool.

They are all places where we have customers. During our monthly Exec meeting yesterday a Singapore customer was discussed which made me think of totting up all the other places we have installations.

It’s quite a cool list and quite took me by surprise. We are a business with global reach. Most of them represent locations of overseas offices of UK based organisations that we supply services to – broadband, SIP, MPLS connectivity, phone systems, that kind of thing.

I slipped in Liverpool for a laugh. That’s not overseas. It’s on Merseyside – top left on the map for you Southerners. It’s where our engineers depart from when sailing to see these customers. Big port etc.

Strikes me it’s about time a certain CTO made a tour of duty to visit all these locations, just to make sure everything is ok 🙂

Inset photo is of a bunch of Timico engineers gazing wistfully back at the shoreline of Liverpool as they depart Blighty on a trip over the water.