Category: Business

Business

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broadband Business

21CN trials successfully completed

Yesterday I signed off our ADSL2+ service for production. As one of a small number of ISPs selected by BT for the trials we have been careful not to rush too quickly into using the 21CN network. As it was new we felt it was important to make sure that the customer experience matched our own business quality requirements.

After a few hundred trial connections we have been getting more of a feel for the actual performance capabilities of the network.

ADSL2+ is marketed by some ISPs as a 24Mbps technology but in fact it is unlikely that customers will achieve such high connection speeds as the actual speed achieved is very dependent on the customer’s distance from the exchange and the quality of their line. Because of this, we are promoting our offering as an “up to 16Mbps” service. As with existing ADSL connections, users experience a range of speeds. The highest we have seen so far is 19Mbps so there is a chance that people could get a faster connection than advertised.

Transparency for business customers is very important, as is responsive and professional support. I am extremely proud of the technical service levels which we provide free of charge to customers. Timico operates exclusively in the UK with its own in-house staff, rather than outsourcing customer support functions to UK or overseas contractors.

Categories
Business internet

Swine flu already affecting ISP industry in UK

I was looking forward to writing today’s blog post because I had a meeting lined up with Stephen Carter, UK Government  Minister for Communications.  It was, I’m sure, going to provide me with rich pickings with which to fuel the blog.

Unfortunately this was cancelled at the last minute because the Minister was called into an “urgent cross-Government meeting” to discuss the impending swine flu pandemic.

The meeting was between several members of the ISPA council and Stephen Carter and was arranged for us to put forward an industry view on the Digital Britain Report. These meeting take a long time to organise and with the limited amount of time left now before the Report is due to be completed we will probably have to provide an input in writing.

Strikes me we have enough problems with viruses in this in this industry without introducing another one to slow up our networks:-)

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Business ofcom Regs

Ofcom 0870 statement

Ofcom has just published a statement regarding the charges that Communications Providers apply for calls to 0870 numbers.  This has been in the pipeline and in the news off and on for what seems like a couple of years and is in response to complaints that the public did not know that 0870 numbers were more expensive to call than 01,02,03 geographic numbers.

This will mean that calling the TV Licensing Authority to tell them you don’t have a TV should no longer cost as much as the license fee (depending in all fairness on how long you are on hold but the concept is a good one).

Reality is that businesses build in the revenue shares they get from using 0870 numbers into their business model.  The enforced reduction in pricing will undoubtedly bring “transparency”, as Ofcom likes to call it, into the game but industry will still need to recover the costs, notionally by charging more elsewhere.

The new Ofcom rules come into force on 1st August. The statement can be read here.

Categories
Business mobile connectivity

Blackberry service experiencing technical difficulties

Hot off the press is an alert from RIM saying their Blackberry service BIS/BES is experiencing difficulties.  According to RIM this means that

Customers may not receive new service books
Connect clients and BB enabled devices that require a new PIN may be unable to receive the pin
customers may experience delays in receiving messages and may get an ‘x’ when sending
customers may be unable to register their device i.e. Register Now
customers may not be able to roam in another location
customers may not be able to use internet browsing
Enterprise customers may be unable to connect to the BB network
customers may not be able to access their internet mailbox, integrate their account or view email attachments.

This is a fairly rare occurrence – unofficial poll around the office suggests once a year – but when it does happen it affects a lot of people. The alternative is to use your own push email but in my experience that is actually less reliable.

All I can say is that businesses need to work with providers that offer support at times like this.  There is nothing worse than having a service that doesn’t work and then being kept in the dark as to why this is happening.

For those who don’t already know BIS = Blackberry Internet Service, BES = Blackberry Enterprise Service.

Categories
Business internet security

Home Secretary announcement on Communications Data

Big in the news yesterday was Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith’s announcement that the Government will not be creating a central facility to store details of our telephone and email communications.  It even made prime time BBC TV News. Instead the Government will pursue a strategy of getting individual Communications Providers to store their own customers’ information.

I wasn’t going to comment on this because there was so much press coverage, much of which included answering statements infrom the industry trade body ISPA which I had already had a hand in. It is however worth restating some of the points.

Firstly I am, as an individual, nervous about having all this information situated in a single central database.  It is a near certainty that at some time all of it will be compromised, either by negligence or by criminal activity. 

Secondly I think the Government is misguided if it believes that it will be able to excercise any sort of control over what happens on the internet.  Technology is changing so quickly that any system implemented by Government is going to be expensive whatever its purpose (monitoring/intercept, preventing P2P illegal downloads, preventing access to illegal websites, location tracking etc etc -) and would very quickly be out of date.  The costs of maintaining it would be a significant line item in any budget statement.

Moreover, based on track record, you can bet your bottom dollar that the time taken to implement any such a system(s) would be so long that it would probably have to be reinvented several times during its development and eventually end up in Regents Park Zoo in the White Elephant enclosure. 

PS I can see an idea for the next sci fi movie blockbuster here. It’s a cops and robbers story in cyberspace. Hollywood producers queue here 🙂

Categories
broadband Business internet ofcom

interview with Sebastien Lahtinen of thinkbroadband.com

Hard as it may be to believe ADSL has been around in the UK for 10 years or so. In this time we have seen big changes in the industry. Market penetration has reached 58% of households (Ofcom 2008 review) and we are onto our third generation of technology.

Sebastien Lahtinen is known to many as the driving force behind thinkbroadband.com and before that ADSLguide.org.uk. As such he has been at the heart of the UK broadband industry as both an observer and participant since its beginnings.

TD Seb, tell us a bit about how you got into the broadband industry and what inspired you to originally found ADSLguide.org.uk

SL Back in the late nineties I was looking to get onto a cable broadband service but my cable operator Nynex (which became C&W, then NTL and now Virgin Media) wasn’t offering the service in my area. I then heard about this ‘ADSL’ technology and that Demon Internet was running trials in some areas. Whilst I couldn’t get onto a trial myself, John Hunt, a good friend of mine who started the site up with me was able to do so.

I felt that that there was a need for somewhere impartial for users to go, to find out about this new emerging technology. Of course these days, the providers have perfected their support and provisioning systems so our role has slightly changed. We now have to serve a far wider, less technical, user base.

TD ADSLguide.org.uk morphed into thinkbroadband.com. This was mainly because adsl was no longer the only driving technology in this space. Has this made a difference to how the website is perceived/used.

SL There are still people that consider us as an ‘ADSL’ site but we’re working hard to cover other broadband technologies including cable and mobile broadband. Our staff obviously understand the development and background of ADSL technology far better, but we are trying to build relationships with non-ADSL providers so we can offer users the best advice no matter what technology they want to use.

TD What makes thinkbroadband different to all the other comparison sites that now exist?

SL We don’t regard our site as a ‘comparison’ site in that we set it up to provide users with information about broadband generally, not just as a way comparing service providers. You can see this by comparing our front page which is more about news than trying to get you to switch service provider. Obviously, the ability to find a suitable supplier is part of what we do, but it’s by no means the primary role of the site.

The majority of the broadband sites out there (with ourselves and ISPreview.co.uk being obvious exceptions), were set up when service providers started offering commission for websites which referred a customer to them. In fact, this is the business model on which they operate. Some of them even compare insurance, credit cards, etc. as well.

Obviously, we have costs too and we need to ensure we can pay for those big servers that run the speed tests and to employ staff who can help to improve our site, but the major difference between us and most other sites, is we set the site up for the community, rather than as a business, and most of us are still doing this part time alongside full time jobs which pay our salaries.

TD The site has become very popular and this must put strain on your infrastructure. How did you manage the growth?

SL Around the same sort of time in early summer of 2000, I co-founded a hosting business with Jeremy Ainsworth who also got involved in ADSLguide. In fact, our very first server dedicated to serving ADSLguide was a spare box Jeremy had available which we put into Telehouse. We kept throwing more resources at it as it grew.

Our forums too gained their own momentum and we started seeing load issues when Pipex users took over the forums following some heated discussions about their service. David Rickards of Pipex was kind enough to donate a new server to us which helped us grow the forums to the next phase.

We started providing speed tests, and much more and our infrastructure had to grow with that. This is still very important to us to ensure we can deliver the fastest and most reliable speed test services.

TD Since that time what are the milestones that stick in your mind that measure the development of broadband in the UK

SL I think the first key milestone was when BT introduced the ‘wires only’ install which meant you didn’t have to use the ‘Alcatel frog’ (or ‘stingray’ as some people call it) with drivers that didn’t always work and the setup fee dropped from £150 to £50 making the service more universally affordable.

The second milestone I believe was BT’s “Broadband Britain” campaign which encouraged communities to get involved in raising broadband take-up and getting virtually all the exchanged enabled.

The third was the introduction of rate-adaptive ADSL and what we now know as the ‘up to 8 meg’ services. Since then, many other providers have started pushing the speed boundaries with LLU and especially recently Virgin Media on its 50 meg service too.

I believe the next challenge will be bringing those who are currently outside of broadband coverage into the digital world.

TD We are now seeing the Government talking about Universal Service Obligation concerning the provision of 2Mbps broadband to all homes. Do you believe this is practical?

SL We do believe that a USO is absolutely necessary and that the level at which it is set should be reviewed regularly. Our current concern is more for those who cannot get any broadband service, than those who are stuck on say 1Mbps services, as this is a far more fundamental problem that needs to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. I could probably survive on a 1Mbps connection, but I can’t imagine living ‘without broadband’ at all.

We also have some doubts as to whether it is possible to simplify a USO as just “2Mbps downstream” service.  There are factors such as upstream speed, latency, jitter, etc. that could for example prevent access to next generation telephony service over the Internet which have the potential to revolutionise how we communicate. These don’t make as interesting a sound bite but they are still important.

TD As the internet becomes more important to our every day lives the Government is increasingly seen as becoming involved with decisions that affect the direction of the industry. Do you see this as good or bad and is it inevitable? What are your thoughts on the Digital Britain Report?

SL The Government has an important role in ensuring a regulatory environment which both fosters innovation and diversity of supply, but also protects those who may not have the resources or skills to protect themselves. However, it is important, that in achieving the latter, it does not stifle the former.

The Internet has developed in an environment with very minimal regulation and low barriers to entry, and it is these unique circumstances that have allowed it to develop so quickly. The Internet feeds on the concept of rapid innovation and improvement. One day you launch a brilliant new service; the next, your competitor has outdone you. It’s a bit like a car manufacturer being able to release a new updated model every week.

The way we think and use information since the evolution of the web has changed. We now combine information from different sources in new ways. This is only possible if those with an idea have the means and willingness to execute it. It does however mean re-thinking the way intellectual property rights are protected, both to preserve the incentive for those who work hard to benefit from their efforts, but also to allow for people to take advantage of new technologies without being criminalised.

In my view, the role of the Government is to encourage good practice and getting directly involved only where it is absolutely necessary to protect the interests of the country and its economy. So far, the UK Government has taken a ‘light touch’ approach which has helped us become a key capital at the heart of the Internet.

I suspect that Government will become more involved in the discussion about the future of the Internet as it is so fundamentally linked to the success of the country and the Digital Britain report is evidence of this. We also have to accept that there is a role for an entity to represent the interests of the minority who are unable to use the Internet for whatever reason. It is no longer sufficient for us to cover 99.9%; The Internet should be for everyone.

TD We now hear of talk of 1Gbps fibre to the home in Japan which doesn’t even appear on the long range radar here in the UK. How do you think the UK will fare in the international competitive stakes when it comes to internet technology.

SL The UK has a habit of comparing itself to other countries and being very negative about its position. The fact is, there is very little content on the Internet which can truly benefit from a 100Mbps let alone a 1Gbps connection today. Quite simply, the core Internet infrastructure can’t  cope with delivery this level of service on any scale at a price that most of us would be willing to pay.

I do however have concerns that we aren’t looking at a national fibre network more seriously. Whilst I accept that the needs of the next few years will be met by new ways to push more out of copper (both in ADSL and cable variants) and hybrid fibre-coax/copper solutions, sooner or later end-to-end fibre optic cabling will be needed and it is likely that this will require Government support by way of easing regulation or co-ordinating the efforts of communications providers to build an efficient and competitive network.

The reason fibre makes sense is because information travels along it at the speed of light so its capacity to deliver next generation services is far greater. The fibre optic cabling used to deliver 100Mbps or 1Gbps a decade ago is used to push multiple links of 10Gbps each today and 100Gbps in the not too distant future. It is a technology that is more future-proof than copper.

TD Finally would you care to make any predictions regarding the internet in the UK over the next year or two?

SL I think we will start seeing more new developments receiving next generation broadband services at up to 100Mbps in cities as the costs of linking these back to the data centres (the buildings where the ‘core’ of the Internet is based) is falling.

I also believe that the the much talked about convergence of technologies will start happening, initially with TV-on-demand services being delivered over the Internet to your set-top-box. Eventually (probably a few years later), I think Internet-connected fridges are likely to become more common.

TD Thanks very much for your time Seb.

Categories
Business internet UC

The forecast for Unified Communications is cloudy

Oracle has been in the news recently with the acquisition of Sun. One of the prizes that comes with this purchase is Open Office. This probably would have fitted in very well with Oracle’s Network Computer play of ten or more years ago – I remember visiting Oracle at the time to try and design in some networking components.

Lack of cheap high speed connectivity is what brought Oracle’s efforts to a halt in the 1990s. Today the environment is completely different. Today, however, I don’t see Oracle playing in the space. Instead the spotlight is on Google and what can be seen under the bright lights, understandably, bears no resemblance to what was there in Oracle’s day.

All the components are there: cheap connectivity which is getting faster and cheaper all the time, a massive cloud computing infrastructure that would have been unimaginable ten years ago and a whole bundle of applications that are easy to use and can be accessed from multiple platforms.

Google is poised to be a massive player in the Unified Communications market, at least in the consumer space and downstream probably for small business as well.

There are already many reasons why people use Google’s online facilities. Google mail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Docs and Google Talk and of course Google the search engine.

When I log onto my iGoogle home page I can already access many features that would traditionally have been the domain of a business based Unified Communications service. From my Google Mail account I can send Instant Messages and have video conversations. I realise there are other services available where this can be done but none have the same potential for integration with other cloud based applications (Microsoft will probably disagree with me here).

Now add mobility. Despite being a clunky initial design, sales of the G1 phone have just hit the 1 million units mark and are forecast by British based analyst Informa Telecoms and Media to overtake the iPhone by 2012. And it is still early days for Android, the open sourced mobile operating system used by Google.

HTC has announced a new Android based smartphone that will support Google Mail, Google Talk, GoogleMaps, and synchronises with Google calendar and contact list. Word also has it that Samsung is also looking to introduce three models later this year. The initial clunkiness will soon be long forgotten.

All this points to more and more users using Google Unified Communications services. This doesn’t mean to say I am tolling the death knell of other UC services. I am not. Business has needs that go beyond what Google offers as a basic service.

Better office tools aka Microsoft Office, integration with other business services such as Customer Relationship Management tools operation behind secure company firewalls etc etc. These services are however becoming increasingly virtualized and hosted in the cloud, just like Google does and like Oracle wanted to do way back when I fitted into a smaller waist trousers.

As far as Unified Communications goes I can see clearly now and the future is in the cloud.

Categories
Business ofcom voip

Update on 999 location information for VoIP

Ofcom is waiting to see what the forthcoming amendments to the European Universal Services Directive look like before deciding what to do about VoIP location information.  There has been some pressure to make VoIP providers provide the ability to record location information based on the IP address of the caller.

This, whilst technically doable, is very complex and likely to be hugely expensive. What’s more most VoIP providers are not ISPs and therefore do not have access to an ISP’s core network and customer database to be able to facilitate this.  Those ISPs providing services to customers wanting to run VoIP therefore have no incentive to spend the cash.

More on this in due course but probably not until towards the end of the year.

Categories
Business ofcom Regs

Regulators at odds with EU over number porting

EU Commissioner for Communications Vivian Reding has been in the news recently threatening to sue the UK over its stance on behavioural advertising. Her name came up again yesterday at my meeting with Ofcom during a discussion on Number Porting.

The coordinated effort to create a Number Porting system for fixed and mobile numbers ground to a halt last year following a law suit by Vodafone.

In the meantime there is activity going on behind the scenes at the regulators to try and rekindle the movement. Viviane Reding, I understand, is particularly keen to sort out the mobile market.

She apparently wants consumers to be able to walk into mobile retail stores and port their numbers on the spot. Do I hear some clapping coming from the back row?  The problem is that this is at odds with National Governments’ attempts at consumer protection.

Government doesn’t want to let operators and their agents push people into changing suppliers without giving them a cooling off period to reconsider their ways. Quite laudible actually.

I think we are going to have a fun time with Viviane Reding over the next year or two.

Categories
broadband Business internet

Advance notice of thinkbroadband interview

On Monday I will be posting an interview with Sebastien Lahtinen.  Seb is founder and CEO of thinkbroadband.com and has been commenting on broadband since its first introduction ten years ago. Look out for it because it should be an interesting read.

Categories
Business ofcom voip

Ofcom will point to huge VoIP growth in 2009 market review

What is the difference between VoIP and Voice over Broadband? In last year’s Review of the Communications Market in the UK Ofcom specified VoIP as largely PC to PC based services and VoB as a service that looked like a traditional phone line.

The regulator did this because it wanted to characterize the space and understand whether the likes of BT continues to wield Significant Market Power in a fixed line market that is rapidly being replaced by VoIP technology. Fair enough.

The biggest problem was that the market research wasn’t adequately specified and the results suggested that the VoIP market in the UK was going backwards. This is patently rubbish and helps nobody, especially when trying to justify capital expenditure budgets.

In all fairness to Ofcom they recognize that they got their specs wrong and are now keen to remedy this. Yesterday they suggested a get together with ITSPA next month to thrash out ways of better assessing the market size. In the first instance a direct survey of all ITSPA members should cover a large percentage of the numbers.

The next report should therefore suggest a huge, recession busting increase in the number of VoIP users. This is because in the first instance the market will have grown significantly but also the numbers will be compared with an artificially reduced figure the last time round.

In fact it is understandable that the VoIP market should grow in these uncertain economic times. One of the selling points of the technology is cost saving, whether that is by a direct reduction in costs or an improvement in productivity.

What is also interesting is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between a service that is overtly not a traditional phone look alike service and one that is. Skype, for example, sells itself as an IP application and therefore claims to be beyond the law when it comes to having to support 999 access to the emergency services. However Skype can now be used from a handset which looks and feels like a normal phone.

How Ofcom determine which camp Skype fits into will be interesting to see.

Categories
Business ofcom voip

Meeting between ITSPA and Ofcom

Had a very interesting and constructive meeting with Chris Rowsell of Ofcom yesterday.  We covered 999 access for VoIP, the Ofcom Communications Market Review and Number Portability. A couple of posts will follow this morning.

Categories
Business voip

Newark Telephone Exchange Loss of Service

The Newark telephone exchange suffered an outage today and quite a number of analog lines and ADSLs were down as a result. Fortunately Timico has a network strategy that incorporates multiple types of connectivity specifically to provide resilience when outages like this happen.

It did prompt me to check out how often BT has problems at an exchange and I found that in the last seven days there were nineteen major service outages. Anywhere  technology is involved is bound to lead to things going wrong.  If you extrapolate the last week’s outages to a whole year then you get a figure of nine hundred and eighty eight which says that approximately one in six of the UK’s telephone exchanges has a problem in any given year.

Whilst this is not a definitive number in my mind it is good enough to tell me that a business needs to have a disaster recovery/contingency plan to cater for network outages.  We mustr be unlucky in Newark because last summer we had another outage.  That time our ISDN lines were down for the afternoon.  Allegedly some equipment was switched off to prevent the exchange from over heating on a hot day!

Categories
Apps Business mobile apps

Oracle to buy Sun

It sounds a bit sci fi really doesn’t it?  “Oracle to buy Sun”.  This is today’s big news in the IT industry.  Big in that it involves $7.4 Billion in cash.  Also big in that it brings together two heavy hitting names  in a marriage that I believe will create a single company where the sum will indeed be greater than the parts. 

As someone who has been part of three successful company acquisitions in recent years, although not quite on the same scale as Oracle, I can identify with their CEO Larry Ellison 🙂

If you are in the IT industry you will understand the dynamics that the combination of the components of Oracle and Sun will bring to the party. Oracle will now own a complete stack, right up from physical hardware through operating systems, programming languages and applications. Its products will become more competitive as these components become optimised to work with each other.

Looking at it on a personal level Timico uses a range of products from both vendors. Oracle databases power our VoIP platform together with Sun hardware. Our storage product, KeVault, uses Sun’s Java language. Sun’s mysql database powers half the ISP industry (the other half uses postgresql).

Hopefully the acquisition will not constrain the feature development of products such as mysql. Certainly Oracle will see Java as a prize and I can’t imagine Larry Ellison would sideline “Open Office” considering his long standing “rivalry” with Bill Gates.  We do live in interesting times.

Categories
Business internet

dephormation #phorm

I was doing some site maintenance on this blog this morning and came across a widget that prevents phorm from detecting that users have visited this website.

The authors have a website https://www.dephormation.org.uk/ which provides the most comprehensive source of information on the subject of phorm I have seen.  It contains quotes and videos from pretty high profile people including  Tim Berners Lee and a letter from Communications Minister, Stephen Carter.  It’s definately worth a look.

It also has lots of stuff to download – I’m not endorsing it and haven’t tested any of it –  just pointing out it is there.

Categories
Business internet mobile connectivity ofcom voip

Ofcom advice on use of mobiles abroad

Picked this up on my travels.  It’s a YouTube video posted by Ofcom giving advice on how to minimise your phone bills whilst abroad. You might wonder why, as a mobile service provider, I am pointing you towards a site that will help you to cut your mobile bills.

Actually the philosophy at Timico is that our relationship with customers is a long term one and is based on mutual trust.  This includes making sure that the customer gets the best value out of the services we provide.  Ad over – enjoy the video.

PS if anyone does want advice on cutting communications costs whilst travelling abroad please do get in touch.  Our customers also use their VoIP accounts from their hotel rooms which makes calling home cheap and allows them to keep in touch with their business (spouses permitting).

PPS it is good to see Ofcom embracing this modern internet/YouTube thing .

Categories
Business internet

Digital Britain Summit

At this morning’s Digital Britain Summit in London BT Chief Executive Ian Livingstone argued that there is not enough demand for fibre to the home to justify the cost of rolling it out universally.  He is quoted as saying “Of course a Ferrari is faster than a Ford, but most people are happy with a Ford.”

It has to be said that this is in huge contrast to his predecessor Ben Verwaayen who took the bold move of investing in a countrywide rollout of ADSL despite the apparent lack of a business case for it. The upshot of that move is the highly competitive broadband market we have today.

Of  course, in Ian Livingstone’s defence, the costs are likely to be somewhat different for a fibre network roll out that that of ADSL.  However it is highly blinkered to have made that statement.  The applications and the uses will come.  When they built the M25 around London the need for additional lanes was not anticipated but the traffic came…

I think the Government needs to bit the bullet here and make the investment in fibre to areas of the country that don’t otherwise fit with BT/NTL’s ROI requirements.  They should make this network available to all on a wholesale basis.  It will assist with the economic recovery and provide the country with a serious, strategic capability in next generation technology.

What’s more, whilst the Digital Britain report talks about a Universal Service Obligation of 2Mbps to every household in the UK I think this is very shortsighted.  We should be thinking of 1Gbps.

As a footnote to this post I’d like to comment on the very short notice (only 2 – 3 days) provided to attendees for today’s meeting. I’m not a naturally suspicious bloke but I wonder whether there was a hidden reason for this.

My thanks to Chris Williams from The Register for the article about this

Categories
Business ofcom voip

EU report indicates UK is 22nd out of 26th in VoIP penetration!

According to the EU the UK is woefully behind the leaders in Europe in the adoption of managed VoIP with only a 1% penetration rate in terms of minutes. In contrast, Holland has 32% penetration , and France and Romania 27.34% and 24% respectively. The average penetration across the EU is 8.33%.

Managed VoIP is defined as PSTN replacement over managed IP networks and does not seem to include hosted Unified Communications services such as offered by the likes of Timico, pure play VoIP providers or P2P services such as Skype.

Click on the chart a couple of times to enlarge – the font is very small.

UK is 22nd in EU VoIP penetration table

One might conclude from this that VoIP is healthy in some countries but not in others and the UK performance in particular being woeful. In fact what the above chart tells me is that VoIP usage has certainly boomed in the aforementioned countries but also that the methodology for measuring in the UK at least is inadequate.

The EU data is for December 2007. Ofcom, with who I have a meeting on this subject next Thursday, is presumably the source of the UK numbers and they are missing a trick here.

The UK numbers, as far as I can see, are based on a survey that asked consumers whether they used VoIP or not. Many people will be unaware as to the fact that their telephone service is actually VoIP. BT Homehub for example is VoIP but not sold as such and this service is known to carry billions of minutes a month, although BT has not published specifics.

So good news in some countries which presumably will have got even better since the Dec07 datapoint and some work to be done in others. I will report back after my Ofcom meeting next week.

Categories
Business internet ofcom

EU threatens to sue UK over Phorm

EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding has issued a statement threatening to sue the UK over their stance concerning behavioural advertising and Phorm.  I covered this last October – Ofcom was saying it was OK for ISPs to use Phorm provided they were transparent about it despite the fact that the EU was saying it was illegal.

In the UK the use of Phorm is being driven by BT, other ISPs having stepped back, afraid of the negative publicity. The reality is that the whole industry would jump at the opportunity to make more money out of advertising, at least the consumer ISPs who have the volume subscriber bases.

Although there are huge privacy issues involved I think the momentum is beginning to gather to the extent that the use of behavioural advertising is bound to grow.  Facebook, for example, must already use this form of database mining because when I visit Facebook, as I am wont to do,  I often see adverts for golf and guitar related subjects – those being two of my stated interests.  Google is also talking about selling advertising based on a given user’s recorded web searching habits.

The UK Government has two months to respond.  The EU press release can be read here.

Categories
Business internet security

European Commission forecasts 193 Billion Euro cost of cyber attacks on networks

I note that the as cyber attacks on networks become more sophisticated the EC has forecast a 10% – 20% probability that telecoms networks will suffer a major breakdown within the next 10 years.  They have also estimated a potential global cost of 193 billion Euros as a consequence of such a breakdown.

To mitigate against such a scenario the EC is establishing a Public-Private Partnership for Resilience which “will help businesses share information with public authorities to ensure that adequate and consistent levels of preventive detection, emergency and recovery measures are in place in all Member states”.

I’m all in favour of this kind of thing though somewhat sceptical about its likely efficacy.  Industry is more likely in my mind to sort out its own shop through the likes of the IETF and LINX et al.

That said I do think that Government is goingto have to become far more deeply involved than it is in the internet space.  We are seeing it starting to happen and the Digital Britain Report (final report due out in early May which is light speed as far as Government is concerned) is part of this. 

It is easy to see that the potential cost of telecom network disruption could be huge.  I don’t know what the likely cost of last week’s BT fibre break in London is going to be but  just the costs of managing customer complaints would have been significant let alone the costs of the disruption to traffic. 

I missed out on a few news items to comment on last week due to being on holiday.  It’s good to be back though 🙂 .

Categories
Archived Business

Green shoots of recovery

We have had a real winter this year.  The weather has been authentic and the world is in an economic crisis.  This week I spotted some green shoots.  Picture below – see it as it happens on www.trefor.net.

new growth forecast
new growth forecast
Categories
Business engineering

Cisco on acquisition trail

I see that Cisco is notionally on the acquisition trail which doesn’t come as a surprise.  It is a good time to be cash rich.

It wouldn’t surprise me either to find out that Cisco has been sniffing around the Nortel Carrier Division.  It would be a great fit.  I don’t think it will be too long before we find out.

We haven’t really seen consolidation happen on the big scale in the tech world yet this turndown.  Timico has picked up some ADSL customers from defunct ISPs and may yet pick up a business or two.

Tiscali has been trying to be “consolidated” for a while now but is struggling to make it happen!  It should only be a matter of time one way or another.

Categories
Business mobile connectivity

Manx Telecom or sometimes you just have to have fun

I’m on holiday this week but in the interest of keeping the momentum going on the blog it is worth posting some relevant collateral. You will have to scroll down to the bottom to get the association with technology.

The video below was taken on Saturday at the breakwater in Peel in the Isle of Man – very stormy but also quite exciting.

 

The next day it was calm during which time the “stills” were taken.

Peel Harbour - traditionally home of the herring fleet
Peel Harbour - traditionally home of the herring fleet

 

lifeboat at the quayside by the castle in Peel.
lifeboat at the quayside by the castle in Peel.

 

still waters after the storm
still waters after the storm

 

So where is the link with IP technology?  Actually the Isle of Man was the original test bed for the 3G network.  I grew up here and I recall on one visit home making one of the first commercial 3G calls to Mitel in Canada, my then employer.  A long time ago now.

3G wasn’t IP at the time of course.  My belated thanks to Richard Fletcher of Manx Telecom for that call.

Categories
Business internet

#G20 summit security kept crowds away

The G20 summit has been all the news this week.  I had planned to go to a Networking Brainstorming Breakfast co hosted by my friend @JeffPulver,  @PaulWalsh and Lauren Feldman.

I was concerned that the level of security surrounding  the G20 would be prohibitive for travelling to London but I went anyway and to my surprise there was no one in town!  No traffic, no queue for the taxi, no problem:-).

This was my first time at an event organised by Paul Walsh and I was pleasantly surprised.  85 or so people turned up with an impressive roster of CVs from the new media and communications community. 

Now here are some interesting stats:

all of the attendees were on twitter – no surprise there
45 of the attendees had their own blog  (I even met some who read this blog which was quite pleasing)
40 of them were either founders or CXO of businesses
Ireland and the USA was represented as well as the UK

A significant number of people present, a third maybe, were in the media and pr game with a slightly lower count from the communications/telecom world.

I met some interesting people including @dailytwitter, @jobsworth, @stevekennedyuk, www.patphelan.net, Andy Evans of NetCommunities and others.

I can’t tell you where the new world of communications technology is taking us but I can tell you that there is a lot going on in London in this space right now.  It is like the VoIP industry was back in the late 1990s.  Many newbies,  many of whom will fall by the wayside but some exciting new businesses will come out of it.

Categories
Business engineering

Timico Introduces Intelligent Ceiling Tiles at Ipswich NOC

Innovation is in the blood of every engineer at Timico . 

When I told the netops team that one day Timico will be a global organisation and the Network Operations Centre will have to operate a “follow the sun” timetable they went away to think about it. 

Turns out they were all very happy working in the UK and the prospect of moving to new Timico NOCs in California, Hawaii and the Maldives held no attraction.

The outcome was the intelligent ceiling tile. This (pat pending) idea allows engineers to replicate conditions in these sunny locations by chosing the weather for display on the ceiling above their desks. They normally chose a sunny cloudless day, in line with the follow the sun support policy.

Sometimes clouds get added, just for a bit of variation, with the occasional hot air balloon floating gently by. You can even have seagulls, without of course the droppings which can be a problem in the outside world.

Turns out this has benefits not anticipated in advance. Because the ceiling is always sunny, staff don’t notice when the heating has been switched off – even in the middle of winter. This has saved Timico thousands in heating bills.

The Timico NOC now also has the most highly qualified set of engineers of any company in the world. As well as the weather the ceiling tiles can display text such as crib notes for professional development courses.

After only one week at the NOC a graduate engineer is guaranteed to pass a Cisco CCNA exam. The CCIE only takes 6 weeks. The developer, Ian Christian, received his PhD during during the pre-rollout testing phase of the project.

All good reasons to work for Timico 🙂 .

Categories
Business internet

Russian Billionaire Pays For BT Exchange To Be Moved

Russian oil magnate Vladimir Lotsadoshski has paid BT an undisclosed sum to move the Mornington Crescent telephone exchange closer to his home.

The London based billionaire was getting fed up with the speed of his broadband connection. BT had told him it was down to the distance of his house from the exchange. Having just spent £100m on his new pad overlooking Regents Park he decided it would be easier to move the exchange rather than move house.

The Mornington Crescent exchange has been moved to a derelict plot of land near Camden Market. Lotsadoshski is reported as being extremely pleased with the speeds he is now getting on his ADSL line and is now able to watch Russian soaps online in full screen mode.

Unfortunately the move has resulted in a barrage of complaints from other BT customers who are now further from the new exchange than they had been before and whose ADSL speeds have dramatically slowed down.

Apparently BT has made so much money on the deal that it could afford to lose a few customers and the BT stock price rose 10% this morning with the news. The old BT exhange has been turned into a luxury hotel.

Categories
Business security

Docklands security – further note

The G20 Summit is of course taking place at the Excel Exhibition Centre in the Docklands.  The big day is Thursday when the leaders are all there.  They are expecting demonstrations around Canary Wharf and Custom House, Prince Regent and Royal Victoria DLR stations will be shut (and possibly Bank).

The recommendation is not to go anywhere near there this week if you can help it.

Categories
Business datacentre security

Security Tightened at London Datacentres for G20 Summit

Security is already pretty tight at our London datacentres.  This coming week will see security stepped up further as the G20 Summit takes place in town.  I’m not going to go into any details but at least BT are less likely to have any 21CN line cards stolen next week.

I’ve also had a number of meetings rescheduled from next week due to “security concerns”

Categories
Business internet

Tiscali heavily criticised on BBC

Tiscali featured on the BBC’s Watchdog consumer programme tonight.  A number of unhappy people were heard venting their fury about the company’s service levels.  I suspect that if they focussed more on their most important asset, their customers, they wouldn’t also be in the news because of their financial woes.  It takes a huge amount of effort to win new customers.  Businesses neglect them at their peril.

This is one reason why businesses in particular need to make sure they have a business oriented, responsive,  service provider.  Tiscali is aimed at a low cost market.  At the end of the day you get what you pay for (or not as was the case on Watchdog!)

Categories
Business internet security

Conficker worm update

I hadn’t realised but the Conficker worm is programmed to go live on April 1st.  This malware has already been the source of problems for IT managers but nobody knows what it is really destined to be used for.

Currently it accesses 250 ip addresses from which it can take instructions.  On April 1st this is due to rise to 50,000 which makes managing any attack a lot harder.  The nature of the attack to come is still unknown.

The good news, and the point of this post, is to update readers on the fact that over the weekend industry security specialists have finally identified how to “fingerprint” Conficker.  This means that simple security scanners can be used to detect whether it is on your PC. 

Previously it has involved length full virus scans on computers.  A process that when multiplied by the number of PCs in an organisation could have been impossibly long and consumed huge amount of IT support effort.

Because April 1st is so close the recommendation is that you check with your security vendor to see whether they have an update and to implement that update asap.  Don’t take any risks.