Category: Business

Business

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broadband Business

BT Announces Business Grade Service Level Assurance for Broadband

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

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

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

It is all subject to confirmation but it is progress.

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Business internet piracy Regs

Lady Gaga and the Digital Economy Bill goo goo.

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

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

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

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broadband Business Regs

BIS Launches Consultation on How to Spend Money

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

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

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

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

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Business piracy Regs

European Commission wants single regulatory framework for music copyright

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

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

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

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

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Business fun stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Business voip

Date set for end of Nortel era

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

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

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

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Business internet ofcom piracy

Bono sums don’t add up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Business internet ofcom piracy

Bono sums don't add up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Business internet

predictions for the second decade

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION STATISTICS

internetusers

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

The top websites according to Alexa.com are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Business internet Regs

Review of 2009

If you have managed to keep a job in 2009 it has probably not been a bad year for you. For consumers, fuel apart, costs have by and large come down as vendors compete more aggressively in the tough market conditions. In the UK we haven’t started paying for it yet. If you have been out of work in 2009 I guess it will have been a different story.

At work Timico continued to grow both in sales and profitability. It hasn’t been easy but the year end looks as if it will be significantly up on last year.

Highlights in the year include decommissioning our last 155Mbps ATM connections to BT, followed later in the year by our 622Mbps pipes. They have been replaced by resilient Gigabit Ethernet Hostlinks.

We also set up our new Network Operations Centre in Newark and saw the successful move of the NetOps team up to Nottinghamshire from Ipswich.

One of the big success stories of the year is the growth in the high bandwidth leased line business. Uncontended (ie dedicated connectivity) leased lines are becoming more affordable and companies are increasing offloading (at least some) corporate resources into the ”cloud”. We have similarly seen a growth in our MPLS estate with some customers signing up for hundreds of connected sites.

2009 also saw some major technology introductions. ADSL2+ was introduced early in the year. The technology is capable of “up to 24Mbps” though we only quote 16Mbps to our customers – most users will not get the max performance and I think it is better to manage expectations in this way rather than have unhappy customers.

Timico was the second ISP in the country to sell Ethernet in the First Mile and have also been participants in the BT Fibre To The Cabinet  (FTTC) trials, the early stage of the much promoted £1.5Bn investment in Next Generation Access technology.

“Digital Britain” was also a much used “buzzword” during the year. It is easy for me to criticise and I realise it is a lot harder when you are making the actual decisions but I am afraid that we will look back and decide that the present Government did not do a good job on this one. The first 4 months of 2010 are going to be very important with laws being passed or not passed that will potentially adversely affect every internet user in the UK.

Don’t get me wrong though. 2010 is going to be an exciting year with lots happening. More tomorrow.

Categories
Business internet media video

BBC piles the pressure on ISPs with internet TV

Channel 4 and Talk Talk have joined Project  Canvas, the BBC’s set top box standardisation effort that already includes the BBC, ITV, BT, Five.

The end goal is to connect the internet to your TV and allow programmes to be streamed over your broadband connection.  The BBC press announcement doesn’t go into schedules but it does talk about offering services that include:

Linear TV (eg Freeview, Freesat) with HD and storage (pause, rewind, record)
Video-on-demand services (eg BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 40D)
Other internet-based content or services (eg Flickr, Amazon, NHS Direct)

My only point in regurgitating this BBC news is that the time is not so very far away when consumers will have to start factoring the cost of all this downloading.  What is perceived to be a free TV programme is effectively going to become Pay As You Go and the cost of an hour’s watching will be something known to all. I can see kids being given an allocation by their parents just in the same way that they have pre paid mobile phones.

As a footnote my kids have been trying to persuade me to buy them a new 42″ flatscreen LCD TV for the “den”.  I’ve beaten off the assault by saying that we don’t actually have a source of HD video other than their own laptops and PCs.  Even this line of defence looks as if it will only be shortlived.

More TV related stuff:

Sony 4K Ultra HD TV

TV detector vans – the truth

Boring TV & better things to do.

Categories
Business fun stuff

What Santa does after a hard day’s present delivering!

Post present delivery massage for Santa
Post present delivery massage for Santa

When Santa has finished for the day (night) he goes in for some well deserved relaxation. In this case Timico was pleased to be able to offer him a massage. We had a team of therapists, masseuses and beauticians in yesterday to give the staff a bit of a Christmas treat and luckily for Santa it happened on the same day as his visit. It’s a tough old game.

Note part of his outfit visible on the chair.

Categories
Business fun stuff

What Santa does after a hard day's present delivering!

Post present delivery massage for Santa
Post present delivery massage for Santa

When Santa has finished for the day (night) he goes in for some well deserved relaxation. In this case Timico was pleased to be able to offer him a massage. We had a team of therapists, masseuses and beauticians in yesterday to give the staff a bit of a Christmas treat and luckily for Santa it happened on the same day as his visit. It’s a tough old game.

Note part of his outfit visible on the chair.

Categories
Business fun stuff

Santa pays a visit

Santa made it to Timico early this year – some vids below include him meeting some of the staff – they have all been good boys and girls in 2009.

Santa visits the sales floor

Santa visits the Network Operations team

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Business Cloud internet UC

2010 is “Year of the Home Worker”

At Leicester Tigers’ Welford Road rugby ground on Thursday Timico launched “Meet Me Now”, a brand new Web Collaboration and video conferencing service with Presence and IM.

I missed it due to ITSPA prize awarding duties at the House of Commons. I also had to miss out on a long planned trip to watch the annual Oxford v Cambridge varsity match at Twickenham which was also on the same day. You might say that this was very poor diary management!

I’m told that all events went really well. I can vouch for the ITSPA one of course because I was there. Timico was a finalist in two categories (SMB and Enterprise).

Anyway this is not the point of this blog post. We have been reviewing the year at Timico HQ today. The business has grown. Considering the market conditions in 2009 and that the interim results of some of our competitors show shrinkage this has to be taken as extremely positive news.

Next year is I believe going to be another tough one for business. We ain’t though this recession yet. This means that customers are still going to be looking for cost savings and productivity improvements. More so probably.

In 2009 Timico very much saw a trend towards home/distributed working. This, for example, saw one hosted VoIP customer shut their office and set their six employees working from home. There was no disruption to their comms as a result – they were on hosted VoIP.

Clearly for 2010 a product that makes it easier for people to work from home makes a lot of sense. Enter “Meet Me Now”.

Meet Me Now is a multimedia Meet Me Voice Video and Web Collaboration service. It can be used in stand alone mode or for customers using the Timico VoIP For Business service it can also be integrated with your existing voice communications.

Our (home working) sales force has been playing with Meet Me Now for some months and using the service the channel team in particular can sit at home churning through 8 or 10 online Business Partner meetings in a day. It is hugely productive and in fact has encouraged a high number of channel partners to take up the product from day 1. They have already seen the power.

There’s also been a lot of talk about “The Cloud” in 2009. For ease of support reasons home worker solutions are largely going to be “cloudy” if that is the right adjective and certainly this is the case for Meet Me Now.

Quite exciting really. Semi sales pitch over.

Categories
Business piracy Regs

Canadian Recording Industry sued for $6Bn in musician class-action lawsuit for copyright infringement

In Canada the recording industry has allegedly been witholding payments to musicians for use of copyrighted material and is the subject of a class action (BakerSOC ) that could cost them up to $6Bn.

The problem goes back decades and appears to be the result of a longstanding practice of the recording industry in Canada, described in the lawsuit as “exploit now, pay later if at all.”

It involves the use of works that are often included in compilation CDs (ie. the top dance tracks of 2009) or live recordings. The record labels create, press, distribute, and sell the CDs, but do not obtain the necessary copyright licences.

The defendants in the case are Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

The CRIA members were hit with the lawsuit in October 2008, after artists decided to turn to the courts following decades of frustration with the rampant infringement.

It would be interesting to see if the same practice was going on in the UK. If it was it would make a mockery of the attempts of the Music Industry here to drive through the Digital Economy Bill which seeks to cut off the internet connections of people involved in copyright infringement (or “illegal music downloading”).

There’s a lot more detail on the Canadian case in Michael Geist’s blog here.

Categories
Business online safety

UKCCIS Summit today

UKCCIS was launched last year by the Government following the Byron Report and to an excited fanfare. Today sees the first UKCCIS annual summit and on the BBC news this morning is the announcement that lessons in using the internet safely are set to become a compulsory part of the curriculum for primary school children in England from 2011.

There’s nothing on the UKCCIS website as yet but I’m sure it will emerge during the day. We should watch these proceedings carefully because this committee represents an important step in the evolution of how our society copes with the move away from the streets and onto the internet.

There has been a concern that during its first year of operation progress has been very slow and dominated more by the desire of Government to be seen to get quick PR wins rather than achieving anything of substance.  This would be a huge shame as this is important work.

Lets see what the day brings.

Categories
Business piracy Regs

Digital Economy Bill Second Reading

The Second Reading of the Digital Economy Bill was held yesterday in the House of Lords. All sections of the Bill were considered, although the main focus was on clauses 4-17 that address copyright infringement. A brief summary is provided below:

  • Lord Mandelson presented the Bill, outlining the two initial obligations on ISPs and explaining the rationale behind the reserve power to impose technical sanctions. He described the clauses as proportionate. Former Cabinet Minister Lord Fowler, responding on behalf of the Conservatives, described the step-by-step process outlined in the Bill as ‘correct’, subject to RHs taking action to make their products legally accessible.
  • On behalf of the Lib Dems, Lord Razzall welcomed the Bill. He did, however, cite a number of sections that the Lib Dems were unhappy with. He requested that clause 6.5(b), which provides for retrospective penalties, be removed. He also questioned the lack of details on the apportioning of costs and the inclusion of clause 17.  He further underlined the need to honour the principles of natural justice.
  • Support for the Bill was voiced by Lord Birt, Lord Puttnam, Baroness Morris (all of whom declared rightsholder interests in this area) and Baroness Howe.
  • Baroness Miller voiced strong opposition to a number of clauses in the Bill. She suggested that the Bill would protect the old model of content distribution rather than encourage new models. She also criticised the decision to make one industry pay for the protection of another and questioned clause 15, which outlines the role of the Secretary of State in defining the level of cost recovery. The Baroness further asked the Government about the effect that increased encryption, which the Bill could cause, would have on the work of law enforcement and cited the threat that the Bill posed to open wif-fi connections.
  • Conservative peer Lord Lucas voiced a number of strong arguments against the Bill. He first questioned the motivation for legislation, explaining that this was protecting music companies rather than artists, and lamented the inability of music companies to offer legal alternatives. He also suggested that it should be compulsory for rightsholders to pursue legal action through the notification system, called for due process for consumers and requested that the Conservative front bench vote against clause 17.
  • Lord Whitty also outlined his opposition to the proposals, questioning the suggested cost to the rightsholder industry, the potential of the user to breach users’ human rights and the lack of focus on education and alternative models of content distribution.
  • Lib Dem Culture Media and Sport Spokesperson Lord Clement-Jones expressed concerns around the power that the Bill granted to the Secretary of State. Conservative Shadow Culture Media and Sport Minister Lord Howard agreed that there would have to be close scrutiny of clause 11 to understand the power being given to the Secretary of State.

At this stage of the game it is difficult to tell how this Digital Economy Bill will pan out because it seems to be getting some degree of qualifed support from all parties at the Second Reading stage.

The debate in full is available here. I understand that the Committee Stage of the Bill will begin on January 6th.  Also I am indebted to the ISPA Secretariat for this input which is mostly a plagiarism of their report.  It is a full time job keeping an eye on this stuff.

Categories
Business voip

ISDN problem & what to do about it

I love it when our ISDN line develops a fault, as it seems to do once a year with the month chosen at random. It’s happened to day. The reason I love it of course is we also have SIP trunks coming into the office so normal service doesn’t have to be resumed – it doesn’t stop in the first place. Hooray for ISDN faults 🙂  (hooray for SIP trunks).

I don’t have access to the numbers but it would be interesting to see the BT Openreach figures for exchange line faults. As reported last week the equipment is getting fairly mature.

Categories
Business voip

ISDN problem & what to do about it

I love it when our ISDN line develops a fault, as it seems to do once a year with the month chosen at random. It’s happened to day. The reason I love it of course is we also have SIP trunks coming into the office so normal service doesn’t have to be resumed – it doesn’t stop in the first place. Hooray for ISDN faults 🙂  (hooray for SIP trunks).

I don’t have access to the numbers but it would be interesting to see the BT Openreach figures for exchange line faults. As reported last week the equipment is getting fairly mature.

Categories
Business voip

Timico is double ITSPA Awards Finalist

I’m pleased to tell the world that Timico has been shortlisted as a finalist in the ITSPA Awards again this year.  Last year we won the Unified Comms category. 

This year we don’t have that category but we are down to the last few in both the Best Business ITSP (SME) and Best Business ITSP (Enterprise) slots.  The awards are being presented at the House of Commons on Thursday 10th December.

Last year it was actually a great evening.  Parliament itself provides an exciting backdrop for the event which attracts a high number of attendees. Afterwards many of us adjourned to the nearest hostelry to celebrate.  I had to carry the award around with me which made me paranoind about losing it.  I felt a little like that FA Cup team way back when they went out to celebrate and took the cup with them and dented it in the process.

Our ITSPA trophy now rests in pride of place in our reception in Newark, hopefully to be joined by others – wish us luck.

ITSPA Awards Finalist Best ITSP (Enterprise) logo
ITSPA Awards Finalist Best ITSP (Enterprise) logo
ITSPA Finalist Best Business ITSP (SME) logo
ITSPA Finalist Best Business ITSP (SME) logo

Categories
Business piracy

Timesonline market research shows music artists revenues on the up.

Timesonline Labs blog published some interesting market research in November suggesting that revenues that musicians receive from non record label sources is on the rise.  The increases seem to more than compensate for the decrease in their incomes from record label contracts.

Record label revenues though are shown to be hugely in decline which says a lot about why they are making such a fuss over Music Piracy. I don’t think anyone should criticise the labels for their efforts.  However in considering the Digital Economy Bill Government should take a 60,000 foot view and recognise that business models are changing and the old record label way might well have to change with the times.

Bob Dylan foresaw this in “The Times They Are A Changing” -you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changing.  I think the labels are just swimming in the wrong direction.

Link to the Timesonline article here.

Thanks to boggits for the link.

Categories
Business voip

Project Pathfinder – 21CN voice by 2020

Spent this morning at the BT (Post Office) Tower in London being briefed about the plans for migration of old 20CN voice circuits to 21CN.

The BT Pathfinder Project has been running in two telephone exchanges in Cardiff since July 2008. Pathfinder is the test bed for running traditional voice services over BT’s 21CN network.

The current project has seen 75,000 POTS (Plain Old Telephony Service) circuits moved from their old Digital Local Exchange (DLE) connections to 21CN Multi Service Access Nodes (MSANs). The process isn’t straightforward.

In the first instance BT has had to conduct large scale testing (£150m worth) on hundreds of different bits of customer premises equipment that connect to phone lines – phone systems, alarm systems etc. 

Kit that doesn’t work on MSANs has to be identified so that customer lines that have this kit plugged in at the other end do not get migrated to 21CN. The rule of thumb is apparently that 10% of exchange lines will not be migrated to 21CN because of it.

The trial has been slow going.  The pace is being stepped up with a further 275,000 lines planned for migration between June 2010 and January 2011. This will give BT the experience of switching over whole telephone exchanges in one go.

The next step will then be to extend the trial to the migration of ISDN circuits as well as POTS in the Thamesmead and Redditch areas. There are no timescales for this at the moment.

Why so slow you ask? Due to economic circumstances BT has taken a strategic decision to delay the full implementation of 21CN until 2020! I guess I can understand this especially when you consider that the migration will offer no perceived benefit to the customer.  A phone line on 21CN will look identical to one on 20CN.

The delay in spending the money on the rollout does come with risks.  What BT doesn’t know is when the current estate of SystemX and AXE10 exchanges will start becoming unreliable.  Electronic equipment follows what is known as the bathtub curve of reliability. If a bit of kit is going to fail it does so either early on in its deployment or after a very long time in use.

The carrier is watching its reliability statistics on a month by month basis to check for signs of the network climbing the sides of the bath again.

If this starts to happen then BT can rush through a programme of exchange migrations – hence the Pathfinder Project. There is a scenario where specific exchanges could be moved over to 21CN in order to provide spares for the rest of the 20CN network.

In the meantime we will be getting in touch with customers in the Cardiff area to let them know what’s coming and to check out their equipment compatibility.

Readers should not get the wrong idea about 21CN.  There are plenty of services that are based on it – ADSL2+, FTTC,FTTP, EFM, metro Ethernet to name but a few – you will have to Google the acronyms if you don’t know what they stand for. The mobile networks are also apparently using the 21CN infrastructure for backhaul to the tune of £750m a year.

Because I know you’re interested the photo below is of a   JT47 Transfer Connection Point (TCP) Shoe used to make bulk migrations to 21CN voice easier in the exchange 🙂 .

JT47 Transfer Connection Point (TCP) Shoe
JT47 Transfer Connection Point (TCP) Shoe
Categories
Business piracy

Dan Bull – Dear Mandy [an open letter to Lord Mandelson]

Sometimes music is intended to be pirated. Check out the YouTube video by Dan Bull.

The people speak out.

Categories
Archived Business internet

Timico makes top 25 fastest growing tech companies in Europe

As the title says Timico has been recognised as one of the 25 fastest growing technology companies in Europe. Wahey.

This is according to Deloitte who base their calculations on five years compound annual growth (5,055% in our case). This nicely complements our 7th place in their UK rankings and the third appearance on the trot in the upper echelons of the Sunday Times Microsoft Techtrack 100.

Categories
Business internet

The market for IPVPN

I note that three carriers have launched a wholesale IPVPN proposition. BT, Cable and Wireless and Opal have all opened up for business into the reseller channel. This really does reflect the growing opportunity in this space brought on by lower cost IP connectivity and greater use of internet/cloud based services.

Timico has been offering such MPLS based services for almost five years.  We call them Private Wide Area Networks (PWANs). This year the number of Ethernet leased lines we will have installed for customers looks like being 50% as many as we did in the first five years and next year the way things are going I expect the estate to double.

When we started to offer PWANs in the market there were very few ISPs doing it.  This was partly because the vast majority of ISPs had low bandwidth 34Mbps central pipes that did not support L2TP, a practical necessity for the provision of MPLS PWANs.  Many still don’t have the technical knowhow even if they have the right connectivity and it is quite common for small ISPs to resell another’s IPVPN and claim it as their own.

This announcement from these 3 carriers effectively creates a dividing line between the haves and the have nots. Those who can build their own networks and those that just resell others’.  None of these “builders” has the reach to provide a network that is exclusively their own.  They all buy tails from BT Openreach for the many locations in the UK outside their own network footprints.

Our own approach is not to offer wholesale connectivity.  We want to build up the Timico brand in the  business end user community. We do operate our own MPLS network though and I see this as being of strategic importance in building the successful  Communications Service Provider for the business market of the future.

Categories
Business internet piracy

Alliance Against IP Theft meets MPs

The Alliance Against IP Theft held a meeting yesterday at Westminster Hall in The House of Commons.  Present were 5 speakers from the creative industries – from Fulham FC, Universal Music, a freelance writer and journalist, a publisher from Random House and a construction manager at a film studio – and a panel of MPs including Tom Watson, John Whittingdale, Kerry McCarthy, Lord Corbett and Steven Pound. The meeting was chaired by Janet Anderson who leads the All Party IP Group.

Each speaker gave a talk on how piracy was having a negative impact on things like investing in new talent.  The MPs then asked a series of questions.

Most vocal was Tom Watson who argued that to give the Secretary of State unrestricted power to make rulings on copyright in the future was actually a potential problem for rights holders – MPs would be concerned that a Bill was trying to give powers to the Secretary of State without parliamentary oversight.

Mr Watson also questioned the figures that rights holders produced that suggested that every unlawful download was a lost sale. The panel agreed with him when he said that the creative industries had never been in a healthier state in terms of popularity, despite filesharing.

Lord Corbett gave an indication of how the Bill will progress through the Lords – it will receive its Second Reading next Wednesday December 2nd and is likely to leave the Lords and enter the Commons by the end of January. With a two week half term break in February, it was suggested that as Parliament is rumoured to be dissolved at the end of March for the general election, there was a good chance that the Bill will run out of time.

This is clearly an important phase where lobbying for and against this Bill is going on.  It is the first time I have been involved at such close quarters in something so important – one that is generating high emotion from both sides. The strange reality is that I doubt that there is a single person who is against the proposed regulation on P2P filesharing who actually supports the illegal activity.  It is just that they don’t think this regulation is the right way to go about it.

Also I’m not a particularly political person but it does strike me that we should now just get on with a General Election because we are now entering a silly season where there is a danger that Laws will be rushed in without properly being thought through. Of course I know politics doesn’t work like that…

Categories
Business Regs surveillance & privacy

Petition Number 10 against P2P legislation

I don’t always agree with Andrew Heaney of Talk Talk but on this occasion he is spot on.  He has distributed a link to a petition at Number 10 Downing Street which reads as follows:

‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to abolish the proposed law that will see alleged illegal filesharers disconnected from their broadband connections, without a fair trial.’

The link to the petition is to be found here. I’ve already signed up. There are currently 15,939 signatures but this is early days. Make your voice heard.

PS Less than 1 hour later it is up to 16,991 signatures.

PPS 18.10 hrs up to 20,934 signatures

Categories
Business internet piracy Regs

P2P regulation in Digital Economy Bill ain’t going to work

Now that the Digital Economy Bill has been published we can comment on its specifics. and in particular on the aspects relating to what the Government describes as “Online infringement of copyright” or illegal filesharing/Music Piracy in every day language.  It doesn’t just pertain to music, it includes movies and software as well – many of the abuse notices received by Timico in respect of naughty customers are concerned with the latter.

First of all the proposed Bill grants Lord Mandelson far too much control.  The Secretary of State will have the power to make specific recommendations on costs and impose an obligations on ISPs to use technical sanctions. The uninitiated should read this as “telling ISPs how much they will be allowed to charge rights holders for the implementation of the requirements of the Bill.  Technical sanctions = cutting off broadband connections.

In the first instance the industry thinks these responsibilites should be given to an independant body.  Also the idea that ISPs should share some of the cost burden is contrary to the Government’s own legislation – the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) (RIPA) – which considers it appropriate for ISPs to be reimbursed for costs incurred when assisting in serious criminal investigations,  such as terrorism or kidnap.

What the Government is saying here that it believes that it is ok to recover costs for assistance with the pursuit of serious criminals but not for costs incurred pursuing an alleged civil infringement on behalf of a commercial interest. A scenario that normally burdens the party with the commercial interest with the cost.

ISPs are happy to help and indeed are not in favour of copyright infringement but think it is grossly unfair that they have to pay to police it.

Secondly the suspension of users’ accounts as a potential sanction is wholly disproportionate and is in direct opposition to the objectives outlined in Digital Britain to increase online participation. It seems that this will enable the suspension of users’ accounts without a ruling from a judge. This is potentially in defiance of the forthcoming EU Telecoms Package that guarantees users’ rights to a presumption of innocence until proved guilty.

The Government seems to be blind to the fact that serious copyright infringers can easily evade detection by employing encrypted P2P (for example).

Instead of wielding a big stick Government should be asking rightsholders to reform the licensing framework so that legal content can be distributed online to consumers in a way that they are clearly demanding. Currently the online copyright law is a mess spread across many countries and legislatures and the costs to industry of getting it sorted are huge. 

The Government is trying to push this Bill through quickly but it isn’t going to stop the problem. Lift up your heads and raise your voices all!

Categories
Business internet piracy Regs

P2P regulation in Digital Economy Bill ain't going to work

Now that the Digital Economy Bill has been published we can comment on its specifics. and in particular on the aspects relating to what the Government describes as “Online infringement of copyright” or illegal filesharing/Music Piracy in every day language.  It doesn’t just pertain to music, it includes movies and software as well – many of the abuse notices received by Timico in respect of naughty customers are concerned with the latter.

First of all the proposed Bill grants Lord Mandelson far too much control.  The Secretary of State will have the power to make specific recommendations on costs and impose an obligations on ISPs to use technical sanctions. The uninitiated should read this as “telling ISPs how much they will be allowed to charge rights holders for the implementation of the requirements of the Bill.  Technical sanctions = cutting off broadband connections.

In the first instance the industry thinks these responsibilites should be given to an independant body.  Also the idea that ISPs should share some of the cost burden is contrary to the Government’s own legislation – the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) (RIPA) – which considers it appropriate for ISPs to be reimbursed for costs incurred when assisting in serious criminal investigations,  such as terrorism or kidnap.

What the Government is saying here that it believes that it is ok to recover costs for assistance with the pursuit of serious criminals but not for costs incurred pursuing an alleged civil infringement on behalf of a commercial interest. A scenario that normally burdens the party with the commercial interest with the cost.

ISPs are happy to help and indeed are not in favour of copyright infringement but think it is grossly unfair that they have to pay to police it.

Secondly the suspension of users’ accounts as a potential sanction is wholly disproportionate and is in direct opposition to the objectives outlined in Digital Britain to increase online participation. It seems that this will enable the suspension of users’ accounts without a ruling from a judge. This is potentially in defiance of the forthcoming EU Telecoms Package that guarantees users’ rights to a presumption of innocence until proved guilty.

The Government seems to be blind to the fact that serious copyright infringers can easily evade detection by employing encrypted P2P (for example).

Instead of wielding a big stick Government should be asking rightsholders to reform the licensing framework so that legal content can be distributed online to consumers in a way that they are clearly demanding. Currently the online copyright law is a mess spread across many countries and legislatures and the costs to industry of getting it sorted are huge. 

The Government is trying to push this Bill through quickly but it isn’t going to stop the problem. Lift up your heads and raise your voices all!