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Business

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Business storage backup & dr

Storage needs on the up

I did some backing up last night. As well as using Google+ for photos I store them on two hard drives kept at separate locations – one at home and one in the office.

The drive at home is 500GBytes and only has a few tens of gigs of space left. The one at work is a TeraByte palm drive and has plenty of room on it.

You may have noticed a bit of a theme to posts in recent weeks/months relating to the growth in storage requirements based on people taking more and more photos. As my home drive was starting to fill up I thought I’d revisit my usage pattern (if that’s the right way of putting it).

The chart below shows the amount of storage needed for photos and videos on a year by year basis. The early years are just noise. 2007 looks like a bit of an aberration – a rush of blood/new camera/special occasion maybe.

From there on there is a definite trend appearing. Remember that we are only half way through 2012 and I haven’t had my summer holiday yet. I am using the same camera technology thisyear as last with the exception that the Galaxy S3 has the burst mode which is naturally going to generate more Bytes.

Trefor Davies' growth in storage requirements for photos and videos

Categories
broadband Business

FTTC Update – Light at the End of the Fibre (Almost)

gpo cabinet

GPO cabinet 10 in LincolnBT FTTC cabinet 10 in LincolnFibre broadband install

Looks like my FTTC cab is in situ at last – progress. I think I have found out why there is a delay to the fibre broadband install though. The old cabinet (number 10 in Lincoln) is full. There is no space to feed in any fibre tails so it is going to need a new and bigger pressed Aluminium cab fitting.

I got this from the Openreach engineer who has just been to sort something out for me. He checked the cab and indeed it was chocker.

The work involved in fitting the new one is just a couple ofGPO cabinet 10 in Lincoln - right next to a pedestrian crossing days but I guess that Openreach will have had to reapply for planning permission. To complicate matters the old cab is on the pavement right next to a school pedestrian crossing. There will be some umming and aahing in the planning department over this one.

In the first photo on the right you can see where they dug in the new duct work leading to the existing chamber on the corner – there is no way this cab would have fitted next to the existing one by the pedestrian crossing. Note of course the cab wasthe old GPO cabinet 10 in Lincoln probably there before the crossing – they used horses in them days.

The last photo is a close up of the “full” old cab. One does wonder why they didn’t apply for planning permission for the new shell at the same time as the new FTTC cab.

The planning permission bit is guess work but I’m probably not far off the money.

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Business ofcom Regs surveillance & privacy

#DEAct continues to cause problems as Parliamentary joint committee highlights concerns with cost sharing mechanisms

The Digital Economy Act, which you may recall was rushed through by the last government with inadequate consultation in the desperate dying days of its tenure continues to create a stir. This time the joint committee on Statutory Instruments has strongly criticised the Draft Online Infringement (Initial Obligations) (Sharing of Costs) Order 2012 which Ofcom is also currently consulting on.

The Order has been brought by the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) no doubt trying to clear the decks before they all shoot off to watch the London 2012 perform official duties at the olympics. In its report the joint committee says:

“This instrument is drawn to the special attention of the House on the grounds that it gives rise to issues of public policy likely to be of interest to the House and it may imperfectly achieve its policy objective“

Criticisms include:

  • Concern that the Order had been laid in the House whilst consultation was still ongoing and is not based on full information
  • Lack of detail from rights holders or a commitment that they would actually use the notification system to its fullest (what’s that all about? why would they go to so much effort to get a law passed to support their private business interest and then not use its powers?)
  • Insufficient evidence is provided to judge whether £20 “appeal fee” is the appropriate amount given that significant parts of the structure of the scheme and the appeal mechanism are still undecided.

The whole sad, sorry story continues.

PS thanks to ISPA for being around to constantly monitor this stuff. Someone has to read through and interpret the detailed legal blurb that comes out of Parliament.

Categories
Business business applications

Dell Vantage Club & Google+ instant uploader

view out of the dining room window of SoHo House club on Greek Street

Another interesting photographic weekend with the Galaxy S3. I was in Liverpool for a family party, staying at the Crowne Plaza on the Waterfront. Lots of photos – 3.3GB worth – 1,134 files. The hotel had a free option on its wifi, notionally for email & light browsing. I didn’t do any speed testing but when I got home, 150 or so of the pics had already been uploaded to Google+ using the free wifi and instant uploader.

This has to be the way to do it. You find your pics automatically backed up without thinking, as long as you chose the “wifi only” setting on the phone. The rest of the pics were taken off the phone before they had a chance to upload – I’ll have to adjust my “transfer policy” to give them time to upload.

me with me dear old MamThe inset photo is of me and me dear old Mam on Friday night at a private Davies dinner in the hotel. The header photo is the view from the private room at the SoHo House club on Greek Street in London Town. I was there for a Dell Vantage Club event where the topic of conversation was BYOD. I have to say I am becoming increasingly impressed with these Dell events. Dell is restricting the Vantage Club to 350 CIO/CTO types and it is a great forum for networking with others in the industry. I even bumped into a Timico customer there – great stuff.

PS I’m going to also have to start a policy of filtering the photos I keep on the laptop and offloading the rest to an external hard drive where they will provably never again see the light of day.

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agricultural Business

The Lincolnshire pea crop – feeding the nation

3 pea viners in action with attendant tractor and hopper in fields near Manton in Lincolnshire If you’ve ever grown peas at home you will know how wonderful freshly picked peas from the garden can be. The only problem is that they need to be planted in industrial quantities to get a decent crop. In my own experience a single home grown crop only lasts one meal. Rubbish eh?

So when Christopher Day (@themanorhousebb) invited me to see the Lincolnshire pea harvest in action boy did I get excited:). On a dank drizzly Sunday we turned off the A15 and drove down a track looking for pea viners.

The Green Pea Company Ltd had 3 machines working fields  near Hibbaldstow in Lincolnshire where the harvest is in full swing – keeping the nation fed. Where would our fish and chips be without peas? This is vital work.

There was a mobile workshop in the corner of the field and we stopped there to talk to the vining team. Once it has begun the pea harvest continues 24 hours a day for two months. Teams work 12 hour day/night shifts on a 2 week rotation. After donning a fluorescent safety jacket I got a ride with Glen.

The cabs are not as high tech as the Quadtrac but that is quite possibly a personal choice of the owner of the kit. All the driver has to do is steer though. Everything else is automated. Harvesting rate, weight in the tank – all controlled by computer.

Pea pods are “bashed” by metal tines under the viner and are effectively sucked into the belly of the machine where the casings are mechanically removed and the peas “popped” into one of two storage tanks. When the peas are offloaded to an external tractor-towed hopper they start with the most recently filled tank so that the “older” peas remain near the top when taken to processing. That hopper is taken to a bigger lorry which transports the peas back to the factory, in this case near Hull.

The viners are pricey – at £300k a pop they re even more expensive than the Quadtrac. With three of them on a job plus the other kit we are looking at a million pounds worth of cash driving around the field. They are also not as wide because the whole vehicle needs to be able to travel on the public highway without having to unbolt the front mechanism so they can’t process as much acreage as a Quadtrac. The average speed depends on many factors – weight of peas on the vine, ground conditions and instructions from the Birds Eye factory on how much tonnage they need at any given point in time. A typical average over the whole season is around a hectare per hour per machine.

Peas must have been a luxury item in the “old days”. No machines then, just men with scythes and teams of workers picking the pods off the vine. Expensive to harvest plus in my mind likely to have more losses due to the imprecise nature of the scything.

Today each machine weighs 27 tons and can carry 2 tonnes of peas. That’s heavy man. If you happen to find yourself stuck behind a convoy of viners consider yourself unlucky. They travel at 25kmh. With a convoy of 3 viners, a tractor towing a hopper, water and diesel trailers together with outrider vehicles overtaking is going to be a problem but hey… what price peas?

The teams work to specific instructions from Birds Eye who also send testers1 into fields beforehand to test the peas for quality & readiness to pick. Birds Eye even tell them how much weight of peas to store in the tank before tipping into the hopper.

All so that I can enjoy my steak and chips (and fish and burger and sausage and chicken and veggieburger etc etc 🙂 )peas peas glorious peas - click to see more peas :)

The Green Pea Company harvests thousands of tonnes of peas in a season using 15 viners. I went away with two carrier bags full as a memento of my time there. Thanks to farmer Christopher Day, The Green Pea company, Birds Eye and finally to Glen for letting me drive around the field in the viner with him.

They are big boys toys – quadtracks and viners. The question is where do I go from here?

1A lot of testing goes on in the farming business. The two photos below show Christopher Day’s soil samples and testing kit. The days of the bumpkin farmer with a long piece of straw between his teeth and a straw hat are gone. The complexity of the business is such that you need qualifications and certificates to grow stuff these days.
soil samples on shelves - simplesa farmer's basic soil testing kit

Categories
Business fun stuff

Annual watersports & BBQ evening another splashing success

hands up - is this team well balanced?

They're smiling now but can you spot the design flaws on this raft? The demise of team Foxy - click to see the view of the whole debacleLast week we had the annual Timico watersports evening at the Activities Away lake on Lincoln bypass. As usual a great time was had by all. I’m going to let the pictures do the talking other than to say our team won by a country mile nautical league. This was mainly thanks to the raft building prowess of Ian P Christian but also of course great teamwork.

The Hodge team works together to build a great raftwe win - what a fantastic raft! The first couple of pics are of Foxy’s team – travelling hopefully but failing to make the grade. Stay away from the high seas guys.

The second two pics are of the totally victorious Hodges’ team. We could have carried on to the Caribbean (man). Hoist the pirate flag. Splice the mainbrace.

dive dive diveI’ll finish off with a pic of couple of the lads diving into the water. Thanks to Carl Wright who stayed dry to take these photos but also got to ride in the boat:). You can see more of them on Google+.

Categories
agricultural Business social networking

Hreodburna – a Twittersphere tour with farmer Christopher Day – some images not for those with weak constitutions

The Red Lion Inn in Redbourne Lincolnshire has a fire stationI met Christopher Day on Twitter. I’ve no idea when.The wooden cross on the green in Redbourne People follow you. You follow people. You start to connect. Connect often enough you begin to notice and engage with them which is what I’ve done with Christopher. His Twitter name is @themanorhousebb.

I’ve met him a couple of times before today, once at LincUpLive and then again at LincsTweetMeet. During some online conversation I mentioned that my favourite vegetable is the pea.  Christopher grows peas and he invited me to see some pea picking in action.

Hreodburna, which in Old English means reedy burn, is as you may know, the historical name for  Redbourne in Lincolnshire. Redbourne is your idyllic English village and was to me only previously known for its pub.  The Red Lion is a wonderful  17th Century coaching Inn and a stopping off point for LincolnThe old Hadley, Simpkin and Lott fire engine in redbourne RFC on the way back from away matches in the North of the county.

The car park of the Red Lion on this occasion was the place that I had arranged to meet Christopher to go and see some vining action.

What I would never have noticed in my rugby playing days was the fact that attached to the Red Lion is a fire station containing an original horse drawn fire engine (click on the header photo for a better view of the fire station). Made in 1831The paddock at the Red Lion Inn in Redbourne Lincolnshire used to hold the horse that pulled the fire engine by Hadley, Simpkin and Lott of London the engine is manually operated with bars on either side that were raised and lowered to pump water.

The sign in the fire station window informs the enquiring mind:  “The rural disturbances of 1830-1 provoked at least 28 cases of Arson in Lincolnshire. The owner of the Redbourne Estate, the Duke of St Albans certainly owned an engine by 1834 and it is reasonable to presume that this is the same engine, bought to protect his property. There was no county fire service in Lincolnshire until 1948.”fishing in Lincolnshire

The horse for the fire engine lived in a paddock at the back of the Inn and the first job the firemen  had before attending an incident was to catch it.

Things have moved on from those days. We moved on to see the pea harvest which is going to be the subject of another post. In the meantime Christopher was kind enough to show me around his farm which includes some carp fishing lakes. I offer here some photos of one of the lakes – a hugely relaxing place to spend a day. Note the bait set up. Click on the thumbnail photo for a close up shot of somebait (maggots) do not click if you have a medical condition of the bait – not for the faint of heart.

Alternatively watch the short video (18 years and over only). Amazing where you can get using Twitter isn’t it?

Categories
Archived Business

Nottinghamshire & Derbyshire Chamber of Commerce Best Business Innovation Awards Finalist

Life is great. This morning my in-tray told me we have been selected as finalists in the Nottinghamshire & Derbyshire Chamber of Commerce Best Business Awards  Innovation category.

I don’t have to tell you, astute reader, this is an exceptional achievement with the added benefit of if we win we go through to the “Nationals” in London in November.

The entry was based on our Mobile Access Management (MAM) solution which you should all by now know is a fantastic mobile data broadband backup solution.

Chambers of Commerce are obviously good places to get exposure for a business selling to business. They do need to know that Timico operates internationally and so a further tier of “International Awards” would be eminently suitable. I’m thinking the Bahamas in January or February –  I wouldn’t want to miss the run up to Christmas in the UK.

If we win I’ll let you know. If we don’t it will almost certainly slip by unnoticed:)

Categories
broadband Business

B4RN is a hero at ISPAs 2012

B4RN broadband -Barry Forde and Chris Conder at ISPAs

B4RN Broadband is award winner

B4RN broadband has just been announced as winner of the Internet Hero at the Internet Service Providers Association annual Awards bash. They were pretty clear winners in the vote that involved all of the ISPA council (moi included).

I’m not going to dwell on the other candidates or on the Internet villain. It is quite fair that the attention is all focussed on B4RN. B4RN has featured on the blog before. It is literally a ground breaking project.

B4RN is aiming to light up 1,500 or so properties across the 8 parish areas in the Lancashire/Cumbria borders at a cost £1.86M. That’s roughly over £1,200 per home/business. They are doing it with a combination of hard cash raised from investors and potential customers and “effort”. The “effort” is payment in kind – much of the total cost of the project is down to civil engineering works – digging the trenches in which the fibre is laid.

The 1,500 properties will need over 256km of fibre – that’s roughly £1,200 per property connected and just over £7 per metre. A very significant chunk of the cost of the project is going to be paid for in kind so the overall cost per property/per metre will come down from this. B4RN has enough cash to initially light up the core of the network – that’s 40,000 km through 8 parishes.

If you take a look at the Openreach website you can see their regulated tariff. For laying fibre the costs range between £25 a metre and £140 a metre.  Believe me this is not a “have a go at BT” post. BT has to gear for scale and is not used to having to gear for low cost.

These numbers suggest there is a clear need for competition in the local loop/Openreach space. The Openreach position will be that the market isn’t big enough for two players.

The people that got B4RN going are real heroes. The biggest problem that the UK has is that there aren’t enough of these heroes to go around. It’s not just guts you need it’s know how and it’s not just know how locally on the ground. It’s know how right the way up through the ranks of the civil service and up to government ministerial level.

BT will be whispering in the minister’s ear “do you really want to take the risk with critical national infrastructure by letting just anyone get involved”. That’s what’s happened with the BDUK rollout of funding for rural NGA broadband – we are left with BT and possibly Fujitsu though only in a few regions (that’s my understanding anyway).

I don’t have the right answers here. Hopefully B4RN’s winning of the ISPA Internet Hero award will give someone food for thought.
imagePhoto – Barry Forde and Chris Conder of B4RN proudly show off their award.

Categories
broadband Business

Planning issues holding up really important FTTC connection.

fibre broadband planning issues

Fibre broadband planning issues hold up my install

I realise that most of you aren’t the least bit interested in my own ambitions to get fibre broadband. From the number of comments I get on the subject most people are more concerned with when they will get it themselves. Fair enough. Thought I’d share my own fibre broadband planning story.

I was due to be connected by the end of March 2012. Then it slipped to end of June.  The end of June is this coming Saturday. My cabinet, which is only a hundred metres or so from my house, looks decidedly lonely. It wants a friend.

I am often asked if I can find out what is happening with someone’s particular cab. It’s doable but not worth the effort in most cases. Openreach would get so many enquiries they would never get any work done.

In my case I have made an exception (only because someone offered to do the work for me) and asked what is happening. Will I wake up later this week to the sound of pneumatic drills and the sigh of white Openreach vans hugging the kerb near my house? Only in my dreams, and therefore by definition before I wake up:).

It looks like my cab is being held up in the planning permission process. Sigh. If I get any more info I’ll let you know because whether you are interested or not I will want to get it off my chest.

Note added at some point in the future. Check out the progress with this update. It’s now been in for a couple of years and has been a rocky ride though I wouldn’t be without. It has revolutionised internet usage in our house.

So long and thanks for all the fibre broadband.

Ciao amigos…

Categories
Business competitions

4 years and 1 month

For reasons I won’t bore you with I decided I needed to find out when I first started this blog. I was flabbergasted (really) to find out that it was 19th May 2008 and since then I’ve written 1,323 posts!

The first post was unimaginatively called “Hello World“. I’m slightly dismayed not to have realised this last month – we could have had a nice birthday party. Cakes and all. I must make a point of remembering the 5th birthday next year.

Lot’s has changed since then, not the least of which was being told by someone that their favourite posts were about my cake baking competitions at Timico. We haven’t had one in a while!

I realise trefor.net is still a lightweight compared to some of the blogs out there but hey! You do what you can you know 🙂

That’s all folks…

Categories
Archived Business

We got quality

Check this out. We just got awarded our ISO9001 certification.ISO 9001 certification for Timico Hooray. This year we will also be adding to the existing ISO27001 certification in the Timico Technology Group.

This game is a continuous process of improvement and as the company gets bigger the importance of sticking to quality processes and procedures becomes ever more important.

For some in the business this is a champagne moment – it is the culmination of a lot of hard work. For me it represents one of those moments of quiet satisfaction – another milestone on the road to the top 🙂

Bit more on this here.

Categories
broadband Business

Cumbrian Broadband Hiccups – Will the Rest of the Country Catch a Cold? #BDUK #digitalbritain

B4RN broadband BT rural broadband reinvestment B4RN business model broadband vision

Cumbrian broadband – BDUK

Cumbria is the region leading the charge in the implementation of superfast broadband to rural areas using government funding via BDUK.

Cumbria has just rejected the bids made by BT and Fujitsu and asked them to retwrite the proposals. Neither bid apparently met the criteria laid down by the Cumbrian authorities.

This should be noted with concern by other Local Authorities around the country, all of whom are trying to get to grips with how to spend the government money in their own areas. The reason for the concern is that the model for how much the rollout should cost, and therefore the amount of money apportioned to each area was developed by BDUK using a subcontractor.

If this model turns out to be wrong then we could be facing the “Cumbrian” situation in every county. Delays and shortfalls in meeting targets are bad news all round.

The BBC coverage on the Cumbrian broadband situation is here.

You should also follow Ian Grant’s coverage here – he is very close to this stuff.

Categories
4g Business mobile connectivity social networking

#lincstweetmeet – McDonalds, doubledecker busses and the blistering pace of 4G

#lincstweetmeet live from the Showroom, Lincoln - click to see people :)Had a very enjoyable time at #lincstweetmeet yesterday. I gave a talk to an audience of just short of 100 social media fans on the effect that 4G will have on their tweeting, blogging and general online networking. Interesting to note that I recognised many of the twitter names from the badges as people I follow. It’s still very difficult to correlate an online persona with a real one though unless you have met them a few times.

Click on the header photo to see the actual audience. It was nice to meet them 🙂

If you want to understand the context of the post title click here.

Categories
Business Cloud internet

Rolls Royce visit Timico NOC as model example – well impressed

Rolls Royce visit to the Timico NOCIt’s hugely satisfying to get contacted by people out of the blue to be asked if they can come and visit your Network Operations Centre because they have heard that it is a great reference  model.

This was the case with engineering giant Rolls Royce who are building their own NOC and wanted to come and visit ours to give them some ideas. Ten of them turned up for a look around and I am pleased to report they went away mightily impressed. If anyone else out there wants a tour just drop me a line. We are proud of our NOC and the staff that operate it are a great bunch. I am always delighted to show them off to visitors.

PS they didn’t realise they were going to be photographed – it’s a security measure 🙂

Categories
4g Business mobile connectivity Net

Global Telecoms Business Innovations Awards

ballroom at the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel for the Global Telecoms Business Innovation AwardsHad a great night at the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel. I was there as a guest of BT Wholesale for the annual Global Telecoms Business Innovations Awards. My hosts won an award for their work with mobile network operator Everything Everywhere in rolling out 4G infrastructure that allowed the sharing of backhaul connectivity. Basically you can now have multiple VLANs terminating at different nodes. In the Cornwall project the BT POP was in Bristol and EE in London (I might be wrong with the specifics here – lemonade has a funny way of playing tricks with my memory but you get the gist).

The video below is of Chet Patel, MD of Markets at BT Wholesale and David Salam of Everything Everywhere picking up the awards which I’m sure will find a treasured spot in their respective HQ receptions 🙂

It’s a serious power networking evening and well worth going if you get an invite. BT won another award with Genband, the company that  Timico partners with for our VoIP infrastructure.

My sincere thanks go to Dave Axam at BT for being such a welcoming host. I’ll be writing up the 4G aspects of the Cornwall project sometime soon. 4G was used to provide internet connectivity for some of the more inaccessible parts of the county.

28/9/13 update – comparison of O2, EE and Vodafone 4G networks in London

Categories
Apps Business internet Regs

Communications Bill – is it going to look at the right subject matter?

Having mentioned the comms bill in my last post I now find that the expected Green Paper is not now going to be published. Instead over the coming months five seminars will inform the communications review.

The seminars will look at:

  • The Consumer Perspective
  • Competition in the Content Market
  • Maximising the value of spectrum to support growth and innovation
  • Driving investment and growth in the UK’s TV content industries  
  • Supporting growth in the radio (audio) sector

“The UK’s communications sector is one of the strongest in the world” said Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. “We must ensure the sector can grow by being at the forefront of new developments in the industry. It is essential that we set the right conditions for the industry to enable businesses to grasp the opportunities created by new technology.”

Communications Minister Ed Vaizey added “The communications industry is a key part of our economy. Through these seminars, we will look in detail at how best to drive investment and competition. We want to shape the Communications Bill so that we have the right framework to secure our place as Europe’s tech hub.”

Much of the blurb up until now is lifted straight from the DCMS website. I can’t argue with any of it though some of it seems to me to be very much born out of subject matter that government can get its brain around.

For example content providers, ie TV companies in the main, have been asking for a level playing field – the clues lie in the bullet points provided to us as a guide on what is likely to be discussed in the Seminar – how important is exclusivity in supporting investment and innovation, how much choice do consumers have and how open is the market to new entrants?

The bit about spectrum is also an easy one to grasp. Although there are legal minefields to tread at the end of the day it seems about making best use of the spectrum available.

This is all fair enough but I do find myself asking how much innovation and growth this is really promoting? It’s all about extensions to old business models.

I humbly suggest that what we really want is to create an environment that supports innovation in the new world we want to be encouraging the next Google or Microsoft to start up in the UK. We do see some signs of progress. The reintroduction of EIS Tax relief for entrepreneurial investors and the effort to create an emphasis on computer programming in schools spring to mind.

I think though that we need to think a lot bigger than we are doing. How about a 10 year moratorium on capital gains tax for new technology startup investment? I bet that would result in many Californian based VC companies moving to the UK.  How about government loans or matched funding for high risk high tech projects. How about creating an immigration environment that would encourage talent to want to come to the UK instead of Silicon Valley?

Perhaps I’m being naïve in thinking that “communications” extends beyond programming content and next gen mobile. Everything I do these days involves communications in some form or other.

The government wants the private sector to haul in the slack created by cuts in the public sector. It needs to come up with creative and innovative solutions to stimulate this. It also needs a level of understanding in government of issues relating to technology and the internet. Many of the noises that we have been hearing are counter-innovative and have been about constraining how we can use technology and not the opposite.  C’mon guys. Move it on.

Categories
Business internet Regs

New council members needed for ISPA – AGM 12th July

The ISPA AGM is coming up on Thursday 12th July 2012 at 16:30pm at 1 Castle Lane, London, SW1E 6DR.  If you or anyone you know is interested in standing for election on the Council this is your chance. Membership of the council is a really good way to meet people in the industry and to get to understand all the issues facing us.

The mix of organisations represented includes BT, O2, C&W, Timico, Zen Internet, LINX and Vispa. In my mind we have some gaps – maybe someone from Google or Facebook or both could get involved. We are talking internet services here – not just straight connectivity.

The rate of pace of change in our industry is growing fast. There are threats from over regulation that we need to keep on top of – the forthcoming Comms Bill for example. Being on the Council of ISPA puts you right at the centre of the debate and gives you a chance to influence decisions that could be very important to the future of your business.

Anyone interested in a Council role should contact [email protected] or phone Michaela Zemanova on 020 3397 3304. You can tell ’em I sent you if you like:)

Otherwise I hope to see you at the AGM.

All the best.

Categories
broadband Business

Ubiquitous FTTP Broadband Business Case Crowd Source

BT says there is no business case for the rollout of ubiquitous Fibre to the Premises (FTTP broadband). I believe it.

The government says there is a business case for HS2 rail link between London and Birmingham (and beyond1). I probably believe it. After all according to Justine Greening, the Transport Secretary,  “HS2 will deliver four pounds of benefit for every additional pound spent compared to a new conventional-speed line, as well as driving regeneration, creating jobs and providing our country with the infrastructure we need to compete in the 21st century.” It must be true.

It will also no doubt save the Irish economy as gangs of ‘Navigationals’ return to the English countryside to “earn a bob” but that is another story.

I’m not aware that anyone has put much effort into a business case for ubiquitous FTTP broadband. I can see why BT wouldn’t bother. The amount we (the nation) are willing to pay for our broadband won’t make it compute. This isn’t BT’s business case to assemble. It belongs to UK PLC.

What we have ended up with is

Continue reading “Ubiquitous FTTP Broadband Business Case Crowd Source”
Categories
Business datacentre

What do students and CEOs have in common?

One of the data halls at the new Timico data centre in Newark

Students from Lincoln University Computer Science dept visit the Timico datacentre in Newark I’m a fairly egalitarian sort of guy. CEOs from Nottinghamshire District Councils visit the new Timico data centre in NewarkIf someone says to me they have heard we built a new data centre and “can they come and see it please” I go all misty eyed and rearrange my diary to fit in. Whoever they are.

In the case of this post it is two hugely differing groups of people. The lot on the left threw away their ties after their ALevels as symbols of repression imposed on them by a controlling Establishment. They are first and second year students from the Lincoln University Computer Science Department. I was pleased to find out that among their courses they study are networking and virtualisation (plus the c-word).

The extremely respectable bunch on the right are clearly well practiced in smiling for the camera (Galaxy S2). They are the collected CEOs of all the District Councils in Nottinghamshire for whom we got out the good biscuits.

I enjoyed meeting both sets of visitors and have to say to the students that I’m sorry they didn’t get any biscuits but there weren’t enough packets to go round:). Thanks go to Timico’s Ian P Christian for the tour on both occasions.

Categories
Business Regs surveillance & privacy

Legislation encourages tidal wave of new ISPA members – life jackets at the ready

It’s a funny old world. A judge orders ISPs to cut off access to Pirate Bay and visitor numbers to the site increase by 12 million. A government says it wants to increase the amount of regulation on the internet and the membership of the trade association shoots up.

The membership of ISPA normally hovers just under the 200 mark. The nature of our industry is that companies are bought out or merge with others to get scale. So in any given year the we get perhaps 10 or 15 new members but 10 or 15 disappear off the UK internet map and on the whole the number stays the same – ish.

Things are changing. The threat to the  industry stemming from potentially onerous new regulations placed upon service providers, such as the upcoming Communications Bill Green Paper, has prompted six new service providers to join ISPA in the space of one month. This is a veritable tidal wave in the scheme of things.

ISPs are

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Business online safety

I could never be a politician – The Queen hath spoken

I could never be a politician. The Queen’s Speech today included a Lords Reform Bill, Draft Communications Data Bill, Banking Reform Bill, Energy Bill, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill, Children and Families Bill, Pensions and Public Service Pensions Bill, Crime and Courts Bill, Croatia Accession Bill, Electoral Registration and Administration Bill, Defamation Bill, European Union (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision) Bill, Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill, Justice and Security Bill,  Small Donations Bill together with Draft Draft Care and Support, Local Audit and Water Bills and Carry Over Bills on Civil Aviation, Financial Services,  Finance (No. 4), Local Government Finance and Trusts (Capital and Income).

I’ve listed them in one long string for effect. I guess I must be interested in the outcomes of some of them as they affect me – comms data for one. It has to take a very particular sort of person to want to become a politician. We pay politicians to sort this stuff out but do have to keep an eye on them because as we all know they can get a bit out of control.

The Communications Data Bill which caused such a lot of fuss a few weeks ago when it was leaked to the Sunday Times that it would include surveillance seems to not be getting any attention in the media today with things like Lords Reform hitting the headlines.

This must be remedied. We must rally the troops, man the battlements. In fact I think Shakespeare foresaw all this as you will see from this early version of another monarch’s speech:

Scene 1. France. Before Harfleur (Life of King Henry 5th)

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the web up with our English censorship.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest browsing in the privacy of his own home:

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Archived Business datacentre

Advertorial for Timico Managed Service Provider Partner Programme

Timico Manged Service Provider partners get a tour of the Newark datacentre facilitiesI realise that most of you reading this blog think that life at an ISP is exciting. We seem to only do fun things you say? Pigeon versus broadband racing, major industry parties at the London Transport Museum to celebrate the end of the IPv4 address space, Charity world record attempts, 4G testing on double decker busses in London, cake baking competitions, Christmas parties, offsite seminars in 5 star country houses etc etc etc.

You would of course be completely right. What you don’t necessarily see is all the nitty gritty hard work that goes on back stage that keeps the show on the road.

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Business internet

Search engine stats – the winner and losers (although you already knew this)

Just happened to notice which search engine is being used to access this blog today. Percentage numbers are Google 94.02%, Yahoo 2.99%, Bing 2.72% and Ask .27%.

In the UK the regulator has been forcing BT to lose market share due to its significant market power.  I wonder why it doesn’t do the same thing for search.

That’s all…

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Business dns internet peering

Nominet non-executive board elections – vote Seb Lahtinen

Seb Lahtinen is very active in the UK internet scene andSebastien Lahtinen is standing for re-election as a non-executive director of Nominet amongst other things runs the LONAP peering exchange used by many of the country’s ISPs and hosting companies.

Seb is also a pal and is standing for re-election as non-executive director of Nominet, the UK’s Tier 1 registry for .uk domain names and safe pair of hands for what is one of our critical strategic infrastructures.

He is a serious minded individual and I’m sure makes an impactful contribution to Nominet’s board. I have already voted for him and thought I’d help out but giving him some airtime. I asked him three questions:

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Business online safety Regs

EU cookie legislation – a look at some of the implementations

EU Cookie Directive 2009/136/ec of the European ParliamentUK Cookie legislation  (DIRECTIVE 2009/136/EC) became law on May 25th 2011. This is the one where websites are meant to give you the opportunity to opt out of visiting them if they are using cookies. Cookies can be very “invasive of privacy” though in varying degrees and some potentially not at all. The law, whilst being passed with good intentions has had some unintended consequences, notably affecting some cookie functionality that is useful and likely unintrusive.

I imagine that most of us with a website use Google Analytics. We all like to look at our traffic levels – well I do anyway. There has been some confusion as to exactly what is being required of website owners – rumours for example that sites only using Google Analytics cookies would not be made to comply as GA was “beneficial and not intrusive”.

You may or may not know that I am on the Information Commissioner’s Office Technology Reference Panel. This is an expert body of representatives from stakeholder groups in information and technology related industry sectors.

The ICO, which is the industry regulator, has given the UK a year to implement the cookie directive. This year is up at the end of this month and naturally there has been press comment and a flurry of businesses making adjustments to their websites in an attempt at compliance.

One year on exactly what will the ICO do re enforcing the law

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Business olympics

Ticket very much not master

ticketmaster or ticket not very much master - that is the questionI tried to buy Olympic football tickets this morning.powered (though not very well) by ticketmaster I want  to take one of my kids because he is a big fan. You know how it works.

I went onto the ticketing website at 5.30am to sign in and make sure all was well in preparation for 11am when the tickets went on sale. All was not well. When looking at my “confirmed tickets” I got the screen shown inset on the right. “We are currently experiencing high demand and the page you have requested is temporarily unavailable”. Unavailable my foot – at 5.30am!

On previous occasions the message has said that the info is not available “whilst seat allocation is taking place”. This was the message for the last few weeks. Gimme a break. How can it take so long to allocate seating using an electronic system. It can almost certainly be done at the flick of a switch.

Back to today.  Just before 11am I signed in

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Business events

Facebook events and doorlists

carnival time at the Davies'We had an A List party at our house on Saturday night.Hard men manning the door - street urchin hovering in background hoping to catch sight of some A-Listers The full monty – marquee in the grounds, caterers, fully manned bar and state of the art entertainment system etc etc. We even had security – nothing too in your face except at the initial checkpoint on the door. All very polite.  Although the men at the door were hard bastards they were fully trained hard bastards in dinner suits, all very discrete but you know they were there. You felt safe.

Your name, as is customary with these events, had to be on the official guest list, all pre-approved. Nobody got in who wasn’t meant to get in although the queue at one point ran down the drive and all the way round the corner.

And now we get to the point of this post which is that all of this was organised on Facebook. The attendee list was kept on an iPad by one of the doormen and everyone was checked off as they came in through the door. It must only be a matter of time until Facebook moves in on Eventbrite’s space.

Much of this party was organised online – lights, music playlist (iTunes), flooring, giant buzzer game (no idea what you call it really but the buzzer went off very loudly if the hand held thingy touched the wire). The music ran off an iPod and the DJ used a turntable / mixer app on his iPhone.

The only manual bits were the cake order from the bakers up the road, the food and booze from a large multinational retailer (could even have ordered that online for home delivery but part of the fun is going there and choosing) and the sound system which was borrowed from a mate (many thanks to Jeremy Dawkins of Next Event for this). I did also call the very excellent 18th Bailgate Scouts to ask to borrow their marquee though that too could have been done via email.

Other than handing out the cash & vetting the proposals there wasn’t much for me to do. I now have an adult daughter who will I’m sure repay me many times over by occasionally remembering her old man when she flies the coop and makes her own way in the big wide world. I will if nothing else be able to keep in touch with her on Facebook 🙂

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Business ofcom piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Ofcom update on Digital Economy Act implementation timescales – slipped to Q1 2014 #DEAct

It seems a long time ago now, the passing of the Digital Economy Act. It’s easy to remember how long because it was rushed through just before the last general election and I’m sure that global historical events such as the re-emergence of a Liberal government (only joking) are amongst the list of dates you remember exactly what you were doing when “it” happened.

The assassination of JFK and 9/11 are the other two that spring to mind although others may well have other memorable dates – outbreak of WW2 etc. Note I don’t actually remember the JFK assassination, I was too young, but it is always one of the ones quoted.

Ofcom has updated ISPA and have said that the code of practice still has to go through various stages:

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Business olympics

Timico’s Olympic preparations – a trefor.net public service announcement

All sensible network operators around the world are completing their preparations for the London 2012 Olympics at the moment. And Timico is no exception; we and our strategic partners have been planning for the Olympics for some time and have taken a number of mitigating actions.

We’ve emailed all of our customers to give a summary of the likely impacts and the steps we’re taking to minimise problems. This blog expands on that email with some more details. You can also see what some of our strategic partners are doing to maintain their network integrity during the events. http://www.trefor.net/2012/04/18/olympic-readiness-of-fixed-and-mobile-networks/

How busy is the Timico network going to be?

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