Category: Business

Business

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Business ecommerce

Quid Pro Quo – lead generation

It took me some time to work out a strategy on how to handle sales cold calls. As CTO I get a lot of recruitment consultants and people trying to sell network equipment and services.

The problem is compounded by Timico coming 4th in the Sunday Times Techtrack 100. The fact that my email address and phone numbers are published on our website also increases the inbound traffic.

I do sympathise with sales people trying to drum up new business in the current economic environment. My approach is now to take the call or answer the email but in exchange for the contact details of the person at their company who is responsible for the purchasing of communications services. Every employee at Timico is a sales person, regardless of their title or job description :-).

Categories
Business internet

Child Internet Safety

Dr Tanya Byron was at the Parliament and Internet conference yesterday. I was very impressed with her. Her report on child internet safety was published earlier this year and resulted in the setting up of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety already commented on in this blog.

The work that needs doing in this field has only just started really.

At an educational conference earlier this year at which she presented her report a senior educationalist in the audience asked here where he could get hold of a copy. After telling him it was on a website she was asked if she could send him a hard copy as “he didn’t do websites”!

It brings into sharp relief the size of the mountain to be climbed.

Categories
Business internet ofcom

UK Parliament and Internet Conference

Had a very interesting day today at Westminster at the 3rd Annual Parliamentary Internet Conference. The event was very well attended with standing room only for much of the time.

There were a number of headline speakers including Ed Richards, CEO of Ofcom and Francesco Caio, author of the report on Next Generation Access. I have commented on the latter in previous posts but this was the first time I have seen Ed Richards in action. His predecessor in the job, Stephen Carter, couldn’t get there on account of his being created a peer today.

Richards was very personable and cited a few facts that I use myself in talks – we obviously read the same stuff. He made one quip regarding what you would have found had you “Googled” iPod 5 years ago. The answer was nothing. “myspace” took you to an Australian home improvement store.

I guess his point was that things moved very quickly in the internet space and the proliferation of matters “internet” brought with it a snowballing set of responsibilities for Ofcom. He didn’t offer any advice as to what we should be Googling now to see the success stories five years down the line.

Categories
Business voip

Fast moving times – fast moving installations

Timico completed a 25 seat installation for a VoIP customer on Saturday 11th October. The whole process of finding the customer, taking the order and completing the contract happened with lightning speed.

The reason for the haste was that the customer was moving into new offices and had left it late to get their communications sorted. The old phone system was completely unserviceable. There was not enough time to order ISDN lines for the new office and to buy a new PBX.

The solution was to install internet connectivity and to go for a hosted VoIP solution. Timico received the order on 1st October and proceeded to order analog lines and an SDSL connection which were then expedited in order to be available the weekend of the move.

An engineer installed the network and handsets on Saturday. The customer moved in on Monday (this morning) and is now up and running. The whole job took 7 working days from initial order to completion. That’s impressive for what was effectively a greenfield site. I guess had Timico not been the service provider for the analogue lines, the SDSL and the VoIP this would have been a lot harder to achieve.

Categories
Business internet ofcom

Ofcom And Behavioural Marketing

If you are a tecchie you will already know about Phorm and already have formed your own views. If you are not the whole storm may have passed you by. That Phorm storm however is still a blowin’ strong.

Phorm is a system that allows an ISP to monitor the internet browsing behaviour of its customers and to thereafter provide targeted advertising based on your surfing history. The pitch from an ISP to its customers is that it will make advertising, which is going to happen anyway, more relevant and that noone could possibly object to this. The ISP benefits from enhanced click through revenues.

The objection from some consumers is that it invades privacy. It opens the door to potential problems. For example one member of the family secretly looks at pornography whilst everyone else is out of the house. Phorm recognises this and starts pushing adverts for pornography to that computer which is also being used by the kids during the day. Not good.

In principle the government is saying it is not illegal provided consumers are informed as to what they are signing up for and privacy is respected. In actual fact during early trials of the system in 2006 and 2007 by BT customers were allegedly not informed of what was happening and this is potentially being seen as illegal by the EC.

BT seems to have actually started using Phorm in a new trial under a service banner called Webwise. It is based on an opt-in policy but no mention is made, naturally, of the controversy surrounding the technology.

Yesterday a meeting was held between Ofcom and various representatives of Government and the ISP industry to discuss the subject. Present were most of the major consumer ISPs, BERR and Phorm itself. The Government doesn’t really want to get involved here and wants industry to draw up it’s own voluntary Code of Practice. “Helpfully” it has also provided an example of such a Code.

Industry, I sense, is steeling itself for another bout of legislation. It doesn’t really want to get further embroiled in red tape/codes of practice and certainly the ISPA has not begun working on one.

This certainly is an interesting industry. As a member of the ISPA Council I need to look at the subject from the perspective of the ISP membership.  Consumer ISPs will be interested in whether they can upside their margins during tough times, and who can blame them. As a director of a Business to Business ISP I have no interest in Phorm. We provide uncomplicated quality connectivity to our customers without the additional unwanted addons (plenty of wanted addons though 🙂 ). As a consumer I might or might not like the idea of Phorm.

I’ll keep you posted.

Categories
Business UC voip

Nortel Launches BCM450 Today

Timico sells a lot of Nortel BCM systems. The BCM is Nortel’s telephony/Unified Communications solution for the Small and Medium sized business market and has so far come in three main flavours – 50, 200 and 400. The biggest runner of these for us is the BCM50 which we sell mainly into businesses with between 10 and 20 users per site. The 200 supports 90 users and the 400 196. The BCM50 has a more up to date firmware load than the 200 and the 400 making it a generally more attractive product.

Today Nortel releases the BCM450. The new system supports up to 300 users and has a similar firmware load to the BCM50. The attractions of the platform include a meet me conf bridge and support for the new 1200 series handsets.

This is good news all round. It means that Nortel should be increasingly more competitive in the “M” sector of the SMB market.

Categories
Business mobile connectivity voip

Parliament And Internet Conference

I will be speaking at the Parliament and Internet Conference in London on 16th October. Specifically I am on a panel debating issues surrounding mobile voip.

There are a few issues to debate:

  • restrictions on usage imposed by handsets manufacturers
  • restrictions on use placed by the mobile networks
  • voip numbering in the mobile space

to name but three. The opportunities in this area are going to be immense once some of the constraints are removed so it should be an interesting session.

The conference has been arranged by the All Parliamentary Communications Group. It starts at 9am in Portcullis House and I am onstage at 2.30.

Categories
Business internet

The Web2.0 Theatre Royal Experiment

Experiment is probably the wrong word to describe it but last Friday I mentioned that a Save Lincoln Theatre Royal group had been created on Facebook. After the first day it had 609 members. Two days later it has 1175 members. I think I’ll graph it this week.

A business would bite your hand off to get that kind of publicity/exposure. Lets hope it helps the theatre.

Categories
Business security

Nice Holiday Snaps!

One of our engineers just bought a 512MB SD memory card off someone on eBay. At £2 it was a good enough deal (don’t know how much he paid for postage). On it were the vendor’s holiday snaps!

In this case it didn’t matter but this is just another example of how lapses in security might have unfortunate consequences.

By the way I’m told there were no interesting photos – in case you were wondering 🙂 .

Categories
Business internet

The Power Of Web2.0

Yesterday it was announced that the Theatre Royal in Lincoln would close because the local council had decided to withdraw its funding. Times are hard and people have to prioritise, clearly.

Today on Facebook there is a “Save Lincoln Theatre Royal” group with 609 members only one day after it was started. Remember the population of Lincoln is around 85,000. This is going to be a good group to follow – to see how Web2.0 and viral marketing has its place in today’s society. Having looked at the membership (and joined the group) it looks so far as if the membership is comprised of us younger generation. Up the revolution.

I will report on progress but in the meantime please lend the your support and sign up. When I was younger than today I trod the boards in a couple of two week runs at this theatre,

Categories
Business UC voip

Real Life Example Of Geographic Integration Using VoIP

Timico is a classic case study of a business that has expanded by both organic growth and acquisition.

When the company began, 4 very short years ago, almost the first thing it did was buy a Nortel BCM telephony system. On the way up it bought KeConnect which has an Asterisk Open Source PBX and Twang.net which is a user and reseller of Avaya IP Office systems. At the same time the Timico mobile workforce uses hosted VoIP clients based on the Nortel AS5200 Unified Communications platform. Quite a mishmash of telephony solutions.

In years gone by the business would have probably had to factor in CAPEX to harmonise the phone systems around its various locations around a single vendor in order to be able to adequately connect the sites. Even then the connectivity would have been expensive.

This has all changed with the advent of the VoIP SIP Trunk. Using SIP Trunks all Timico sites can talk to each other over a low cost IP connection. What’s more salesmen on the move are able to demonstrate the technology from a customer’s premises using a local wifi connection. 

Just as impressive, Cisco and KeConnect resellers showcasing the Cisco SPA9000 iPBX with the travelling demo kit, are able to connect in to the office technical support using SIP. The same applies in respect of the Nortel SCS500 Unified Communications system, Samsung IP telephony systems and Cisco Call Manager Express and a variety of other manufacturers’ systems.

The point of this name dropping is to highlight that it is a great example of what SIP technology was intended to achieve – seamless connectivity using open standards. Timico’s site to site telephony costs are now tending to very low or zero. I can’t say that SIP interoperability has achieved universal ubiquitous status yet but it is getting there.

 

Categories
Business fun stuff

Must read items

I like this blog to be populated mainly with original material from the Trefor Davies world. Sometimes you just have to link to another source to give credit for magnificent reporting. The two links below are both from the Register.

This first one reveals that the management at Thus have inadvertently compared the Cable and Wireless acquisition of their company with the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster.

The second appeared a while ago and was a beautiful piece of prose designed to be read by afficionados of the Technology Section of the Sunday Sport – I assume there is one.

Long live the free press.

Categories
Business internet

Marvellous Monitoring Mashup

I just love this business. There is so much exciting stuff happening all the time.

Today I walked past one of our engineers’ desk and caught a glimpse of a Google Earth screenshot and being nosey I stopped to look. He wasn’t planning his holidays. He was editing a customer’s network monitoring package to embed it in Google Earth.

In short the customer will as his network monitoring screen see a map showing all his office locations in Google Earth. Each location will allow you to drill down and display the data being presented by his network monitoring service. This is likely to be everyday stuff such as bandwidth usage across a broadband connection or leased line but it could provide the Network Manager with immediate warnings when a problem is about to happen.

For example if a site connection fails a pop up could immediately appear on the screen as well as the usual email/sms alert.

In a Network Operations environment where large screens are the order of the day one might envisage a touch screen where staff can drill into the detail of a problem simply by standing in front of the Google Earth map and pointing. 

monitoring embedded into Google Earth

The possibilities here are mind blowing. You could store the location data of support engineers for an at a glance decision as to who to send to fix a problem. You could provide near to real time weather (3 minutes is I think the current delay for cloud and rain radar data) information that might be relevant if the engineer is going to an outside installation.

You might store the location information for the nearest restaurant or hotel in case the engineer needs an overnight stay, perhaps even link to a reservation system (table for 1, 7.30pm medium rare steak and chips please).

My thanks to David Ward who deserves a specific mention here for this work. One might say “doesn’t this tie you in to Google”. I say hey – if this is what you can do with it so what.

Categories
Business ofcom voip

999 Update From Ofcom

A customer of one of ITSPA’s members complained to Ofcom recently. He was unhappy about having to provide his address for the use by the Emergency Services in the event that he ever had to dial 999. His position was that the reason he had a VoIP service was that he was able to use it from many locations. Providing information regarding one location was therefore pointless (he said).

The Ofcom reply said:

“Ofcom’s view on this is that location information should be provided to the emergency services in cases where the service is being used at a predominantly fixed location. As such, nomadic users will not have their address provided to the emergency services.”

This is a useful clarification by Ofcom. VoIP users with an inbound number are in any case flagged as such if they dial 999. The operator knows to ask for confirmation of location.

The problem lies with silent calls or calls to 999 that are immediately terminated upon answer. There could be a totally innocent reason for this. For example my 4 year old son once dialled 999 by repeatedly hitting the randomly selected number 9 on our home phone. I received a callback and rebuke from the operator for letting the little dear waste their time.

However there may of course be reasons why the call was terminated that are of genuine concern. Granny consumed in the flames, attacker putting the phone down forcibly or caller collapsing on top of the phone spring to mind. You can use your own imagination here.

Because of this Timico will at least record the main company address of their VoIP users even though we know that a great many of our customers are nomadic users.

Categories
Business voip

Recession = opportunity

You have to have been in a coma to have not noticed all the noise in the media regarding the banking crisis and looming recession. There is an element in me that thinks it is all over my head, not being a banker with million pound bonuses to lose.

Clearly though it is affecting business confidence and a prudent manager will nurse his cash through this period of uncertainty. What the forward thinking manager will also do is to look at how he runs parts of his business to see where the use of technology can provide real savings.

One such area has to be in the use of VoIP to connect the different sites of a business. This effectively eliminates internal telephony charges and likely reduces the line costs because some existing ISDN or analogue lines can be dispensed with.

The technology to do this, known as SIP Trunking, is now pretty mainstream and most PBX vendors provide SIP interfaces to allow the interconnect. Old PBXs are not precluded from this efficiency measure with the use of media gateways.

This is one area of our business that has already been snowballing and I expect to see it grow further with the increased levels of economic uncertainties.

Categories
Business internet

UK Council For Child Internet Safety

The UK Council For Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) was launched today at the Science Museum in London. This initiative is supported by the Prime Minister to whom the council will report directly.

The council is made up from a number of government departments and in the words of the Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) brings together a wide range of experts from industry, education, law enforcement and children’s charities.

The clear aim is to make internet a safer place for children. Timico is participating via the ISP Association. One of my fellow ISPA Council members is on the Exec Board of UKCCIS. You might ask why a B2B ISP might concern itself with child safety? The answer, simply, is that Timico has several thousand homeworking customers that use its ADSL connections.

It behoves us all to understand whether there are working practices that can be implemented that makes the world safer. I cannot believe that there is a single homeworker out there who would want their ADSL connection to be the conduit by which their children’s safety is compromised.

Moreover more and more large organisations now use Timico homeworker solutions. It is important that they understand that they are working with a partner they can trust to support their obligations for corporate responsibility.

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Business fun stuff

4th Fastest Growing Technology Company

It’s not often that reading the Sunday Times gives me a thrill. It did today because I came across the Techtrack 100 supplement and discovered that Timico is now rated as the fourth fastest growing business in the table.

Last year we ranked tenth which we felt was quite an achievement. This year I had forgotten all about it so the surprise is doubly pleasant.

This is an exciting time to be around in the communications industry. Lots happening. Lots of change. Companies have to be nimble to succeed and I think Timico is fortunate to have people with the talent to make things happen.

Watch this space!

Categories
Business internet

Staggercast

Shakespeare used to introduce a few hundred new words in each of his plays, many of which were never heard of again, odsbodkins!

It’s the same these days in the technology business. Staggercast is the means whereby subscribers can preregister their interest in a TV programme. This programme is then downloaded in advance ready for local delivery at the published time.  This allows content delivery over an IP network but avoids the over use of a connection at peak times of day.

This was one of the options being discussed by Simon Orme, BT’s new GM for Content Delivery. In London today Orme presented the Consult21 meeting with an overview of the BT trial plans for multicast using PTA. Notionally this will allow ISPs to deliver TV over DSL at much more economic rates.

Don’t get too excited though. This is very much experimental engineering work with no immediate plans to productise. The idea is that an ISP would be able to add premium rate TV as a bundled product. It would also provide a low cost delivery vehicle for small regional TV channels as the focus of the established media moves to national and global content. 

What is clear is that this is one of the early steps BT is taking in preparing itself for the business case challenge that is Fibre To The Home.

The BT FTTH trials were also discussed. They seem to have gone well with the 50 BT employees given 100Mbps internet access and ordered to stay at home all day and play online games. Gaming is one of the few current uses of internet technology that benefits from really high speed access. The faster you are on the draw the better.

Whether Staggercast enters the Oxford English Dictionary remains to be seen. What is clear is that both in the fiercely competitive field of online gaming and in the international competitive broadband stakes he who has the fastest connection will be the winner.

Categories
Business internet

Timico Goes Live With 21CN

Following on from my last post on BT’s IP Stream Connect slip I am pleased to be able to tell the world that Timico has taken delivery of its own 21CN Hostlink connection. The Hostlink is a resilient 1Gbps Ethernet link to BT’s 21CN network and allows Timico to connect ADSL2+ tails for customers using the BT Wholesale Broadband Managed Connect (WBMC) service. ADSL2+ is the latest generation of broadband offering up to 24Mbps performance.

Timico is as I understand it one of only a handful of ISPs in the UK currently with a 21CN hostlink utilising BT’s WBMC product.

If anyone reading wants to try out the service drop me a line at Timico. A list of enabled exchanges is available here.

Onwards and upwards.

PS it would be completely disingenuous of me to let you go away believing that you will get 24Mbps performance out of this service. It all depends on how far you are from the exchange. A typical ADSL Max connection does 5Mbps whilst the specification is up to 8Mbps. The chart below should give you some idea of likely performance.

Categories
Business internet

BT Slips IP Stream Connect By Over a Year

BT made public yesterday the fact that its IP Stream Connect product would not now be available until Q2 09. That’s fiscal Q2. ie September 09.  This is a huge slip considering that last November the industry was being told not to order any more ATM based central pipes and to expect to have migrated all their 20CN IP Stream traffic over to a 21CN Hostlink connection.

For the uninitiated IP Stream is the technology used by BT for most of their ADSL connections. The connections to the BT ADSL network from Timico and other ISPs use ATM. The relevance for ISPs that are BT customers, and that’s most of the ISPs in the UK, is that they will have to keep ordering old style ATM pipes.

The issue here is that these connections are expensive to install and had minimum contract terms of 12 months. This could be crippling as ISPs typically depreciate the capital spend on a BT Central over 5 years. Also they could be ordering a pipe that they might only need for three months whilst they waited for IP Stream Connect to go live whilst being tied in to a 12 month contract.

Using 21CN hostlinks offer a multitude of benefits, not least of which are improved quality and customer experience.

Fortunately BT has  responded to the stinging criticism of the ISP community, me included, and come up with more favourable contract terms.

Whilst large consumer ISPs have been heavily cricised for their not totally transparent bandwidth capping and throttling polices these are the practical results of dropping their prices to unsustainable levels. In other words you get what you pay for. It is already difficult enough for the industry to keep its prices low in the face of increased usage from applications such as iPlayer and YouTube without being burdened with more costs.

Hopefully we will now have weathered this BT induced storm.

Categories
Business internet

The Caio Report – Next Generation Access

The Caio report is in the press at the moment. Commissioned by The UK Government’s Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR – neither full name nor acronym really roll off the tongue do they?) the report looks into whether government investment or intervention is required to keep UK plc competitive in the internet access stakes.

The question was posed in the light of fibre rollouts in other countries. The conclusions, simplistically, recognising that the report itself is 100 pages of bedtime reading, told us that due to the health UK competitive market no, Government intervention is not required. Although it might be if industry doesn’t get a wiggle on.

I went to a presentation of the report on Friday at the BT Centre, Newgate in London. The room was full of financiers, network operators and vendors all interested in a piece of the action. Exciting though the prospect of fibre to the home may be, with its resultant lightning speed internet connectivity, what was clear was that nobody in the audience could come up with a business case that would justify the £29Bn bill.

BT is testing the water with a £1.5Bn investment that notionally will reach around 10 million homes. This of course, if successful, will only lead to a problem for BERR in the future. Why should BT have to invest in reaching the other umpteen million homes that are not cost effective to reach/Why should those living in the countryside be disadvantaged.

Virgin already has a fibre network that provides partial coverage. There doesn’t seem to be any money in the pot to extend this based on anecdotal evidence that new housing estates are not getting fibre even though the general area is covered by Virgin.  Virgin is though, I have to say, a business that seems to be fast getting its act together where connectivity is concerned. Amazingly having assimilated £12Bn worth of network by acquisition and merger the company allegedly did not know where it’s connections lay. When the fibre was first put in, speed and low cost were the primary focus of attention. Not the keeping of records. This is changing and the Virgin (NTL/Telewest to business users) are now looking as if they might be a highly competitive player in the fast growing fibre connectivity game.

The mobile network operators are also likely to play a role. After all the vast majority of the costs associated with FTTH are in the digging up of the roads rather than in the network electronics. Someone in the audience quoted a figure of £100 per metre for ducting compared with two pence per metre for the fibre.

The case is, interestingly, different depending on the country you are in. For example in the USA the cable provider is typically also the content provider and experience shows that punters are willing to stump up more ARPU to justify the investment. This is not the case in the UK and indeed BT research suggests that only 20% of its broadband users would be willing to pay more for the speed that fibre would bring. Not at least, I suspect, until someone comes up with applications or content that will need the increased bandwidth.

In a sense the “highly competitive UK market” has shot itself in the foot by reducing revenues per user to a level that makes it difficult to fund new investment.

It seems to me that an element of government intervention is almost inevitable, even if it is only to unencumber industry of the red tape associated with large scale capital projects such as this. Leaving it to free market forces ain’t going to work or is going to result in a two tier internet society – the haves and have nots. 

In leaving the meeting I decided that I would have to invest both in the killer application that would drive the speed requirement (teleporting springs to mind) and in a company called Trefor Davies Fibre Layers in order to maximise my takings from NGA. My pick and shovel await.

 

Categories
Business scams security

Top Ten Security Risks For Business

These are the risks as seen by Timico engineers in their travels around our customer base together with a few of my own real world observations.

This list is not authoritative but it should be insightful and if you are the owner or IT manager of a small or medium sized business then you could do worse than read it. Some of the points, such as updating your virus scanner, might appear to be obvious but believe me they represent real world scenarios.

 

1.       Poor wireless network setup

 

Do you really want someone sat outside your office using your wireless network and gaining access to your internal servers?

 

A business needs to set up WPA-PSK or WPA-RADIUS.  WEP is simply not good enough, and by attacking a connected WEP client the key can be broken within minutes by a novice.

 

When WEP keys are broken all traffic on the air can be decrypted, so plaintext authentication to web servers without HTTPS is visible.  Even  more alarming, is that an attacker can then create their own access point which looks exactly the same as the customers access point, and  then tell a client to reconnect.  Then any number of man-in-the-middle attacks can be done, including intercepting HTTPS traffic to an online banking site for instance.  Users tend to ignore invalid certificate warnings.

 

2.       Default passwords left on devices (switches and routers)

 

Even my kids know that “admin” and “password” are the logons to try first if you don’t know or have forgotten a username and password. So do the crooks.

 

3.       No security patches applied to external facing servers

 

These security patches are issued because businesses have had experience of servers being hacked by unfriendly agents.

 

4.       No web or e-mail filtering (content, anti-virus, phishing, and spam)

 

I was in a queue at the support desk at PC World. In front of me someone was complaining that their PC had ground to a halt. They had so many viruses on it a complete OS reload was required. They had not been using anti-virus software.

 

Also my wife has anti virus/spam on her PC. Her SPAM is filtered into a separate folder and when I looked recently there were 8,500 SPAM emails in this folder (8 weeks worth!). Her personal email doesn’t go through the Timico Mailsafe service so all mail is delivered and she relies on the PC based anti-SPAM solution to protect her. Many small businesses in particular complain about the amount of SPAM being delivered. If they don’t  have a local filter then this SPAM is going to appear in their inbox. SPAM filtering is therefore a massive productivity tool. It stops you having to delete the unwanted mails yourself.

 

5.       Anti-virus not updating.

 

You probably haven’t updated your subscription.

 

6.       Upset employees causing damage

 

Whilst there isn’t much you can do about this you can take steps to mitigate against potential problems – access lists for key network elements and password changes when someone leaves the business.

 

7.       Laptop being stolen with no disk encryption

 

Witness the high profile cases there have been in the UK this year: loss of social security data of millions of people, bank account personal details, national security/military  related information. Big potatoes compared to your own company data but do you really want lose a laptop with all your customer contact details on it.

 

8.       Poor firewall rules setup

 

If you don’t tie down your firewall to allow your very specific traffic i/o requirements then it can be easy for your network to be compromised without you knowing anything about it. Note it is a good idea to have firewalls on workstations configured to reduce risk of data theft in the event of a network breach.  Regular security auditing is also a good idea if the resources are available. Servers should have firewalls configured to prevent external access to non-public services such as remote desktop or ssh.  A secure VPN connection to the internal network should be established first by remote workers before using such services.

 

9.       Poor VPN security

 

Old clients using out of date protocols and short and easy to guess passwords are typical issues here. The use of security tokens is recommended for authenticating to privileged networks remotely.

 

10.       Poor or no password policy

 

For example, users never having to change their password. It is a pain in the neck to have to change a password regularly, especially when people today have many accounts that are password protected.  However changing important passwords on a regular basis is an essential security mechanism. Also who do you trust with your passwords?

 

Categories
Business UC voip

ITSPA Autumn Dinner

A very enjoyable evening was spent at a restaurant in Westminster last night as ITSPA held its Autumn dinner. Yours truly was asked to chair the after dinner debate of which, unfortunately, I can tell you nothing because it was held under Chatham House rules – what goes on tour stays on tour 🙂 .

What I can tell you is that the Sponsor of the evening, Telecoms Consultancy Illume now quotes the market for business hosted VoIP seats to be around 300,000 subscribers. Illume conducts a quarterly survey of the ITSP community to come up with their figures.

Interestingly VoIP players have seen the need to move away from selling VoIP as cheap telephony and are now looking at different added value angles such as Disaster Recovery and also the productivity benefits brought about by Unified Communications.

The ITSPA dinners are open to both members and non members and are not only a great networking opportunity but a wonderful source of information. If you want to know more about forthcoming events visit the ITSPA website or its Facebook Group or just drop me a line.

Categories
Business ofcom Regs

New Number Porting Process Thrown Into Disarray

The big news that came out yesterday was about Vodafone’s appeal against the new number porting process. I recently did a post on Portco, the new company being set up to manage an improved number porting process for the UK.

It’s a good job I didn’t give a specific date for the formation of this company because the whole activity is now being called to question. Vodafone successfully appealed against the Ofcom decision to mandate Portco on the basis that it was based on flawed judgement. If you want to read the whole judgement (and I don’t) you can find it here.

Ofcom now has to reconsider its whole approach to number porting. One has to feel sorry for the people involved in putting the whole Portco programme together. They have been hard at it since hte beginning of the year and now do not know whether their labours have been in vain. A meeting is apparently being held on the subject on the 24th September after which I assume we will know more. 

Categories
Business internet

Lincoln City Centre WiFi Project

I am quite excited to see that my hometown, Lincoln, is looking at a city centre WiFi project sponsored by the Lincoln Business Improvement Group. It is early days but this does seem to me an exciting opportunity to track at first hand the progress and success of the project.

There are a host of issues relating to this type of project. Who pays not being the least of them. In the USA some large scale Municipal WiFi network projects have failed because of the financials.

Timico has first hand experience of rolling out WiFi with its KeZone network. More as it happens…

Categories
Business internet

Suicide and the Internet

The Ministry of Justice has been reviewing the law on assisting suicide. The idea has been primarily to bring it up to date (from its 1961 incarnation) with language that people can understand. The government has particularly been looking at internet issues relating to this.

The report concluded that no new laws needed to be put in place that would affect the ISP industry. ISPs already take down websites when they are notified that they contain illegal material. We are also free to restrict access to harmful or distasteful material in line with our acceptable use policies. Simplifying the law will undoubtedly help us to do this.

Categories
Archived Business

Technology Talk for Oakham School

I was asked to do a short talk on technology for the pupils of Oakham School. It presented some challenges – how to cram the subject into ten minutes or so. I decided that the best and most efficient way to do it was to make use of web technology to deliver the talk.

This short video is the result. I am sorry if you have heard some of it before. Otherwise enjoy.

 

Categories
Business internet net neutrality

The complex world in which we live

I have sometimes observed at how complex the world of technology is and how difficult it is for small businesses to know whether they are making the right choices technically. 

As a provider of practically every type of communications service you can think of (satellite is the one I think we have never provided although I’m sure that some one from Timico will now correct me) we not only have to juggle with the technology and the commercial complexities thereof but also with the regulatory minefields that are liberally scattered in our way. 

As a good citizen I am actually happy to be seen to properly negotiate these minefields. My first Internet Service Providers’ Association meeting this morning  brought it home in no uncertain terms the need to have friends that can help you through.

ISPA is or has had recently to deal with subjects ranging from 

  • whether ISPs are being fair to consumers in how they advertise their broadband speeds
  • is the use of a “fair use” policy fair when your literature majors on “unlimited” broadband
  • Net Neutrality and the throttling of certain types of traffic such as peer to peer (remember P2P has legitimate uses as well as illegal ones)
  • liability of ISPs in respect of websites hosted on their equipment
  • the safety of children on the internet – ref UKCCIS – UK Council for Children Internet Safety
  • the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AMSV) and what constitutes TV and should therefore be licensed
  • Piracy
  • who pays for free content downloaded from the internet (it is possible to put a cost against a 60 minute TV show for example)
  • legal intercept of VoIP based telephone conversations
  • provision of 999 location based information
  • data retention
  • should ISPs moderate content on their network

The list is endless and represents rich pickings for the legal profession hovering nearby. I trust that I will be able to provide readers of this blog with suitable insight into these subjects as we move forward.

Categories
Business internet

Online reading

I was recently rung by a salesman from the Daily Telegraph trying to sell me a low cost subscription to the newspaper. Other than the fact that it was probably going to cost me as much to get it delivered as the the cost of the paper I told the chap that his call was fruitless as I usually read his paper online. 

As I was queuing up to buy a shot of caffeine at Newark Northgate railway station I noticed that the man behind the counter was snatching glimpses of the Beano comic in between serving coffees. One of the perks of the job at a newsagents cum coffee shop I thought 🙂 .

Now on the train where I am writing this blog post courtesy of the on train free WiFI (actual cost £128 return) I have checked to see whether the Beano, like the Telegraph, is also available online. To my delight it is .

I heard an article on Radio 4 the other day where someone was heralding the death of small newspapers. I guess what we are really talking about is the death of hardcopy. There will always be a place for printed matter but it must be moving towards niche status and it would be interesting to see what the statistics were for online versus hardcopy readership.

PS now I have a dilemma – Beano – hard copy or online?

Categories
Business internet voip

September 11th

It is 7 years to the day when the 9/11 tragedies happened in the USA. The event has different memories for us all.  I was attending a SIP Summit VoIP conference in Austin Texas and Tuesday 11th September was the first day. The conference was abandoned after the first day and most Americans hired cars and drove home. In some cases it was a 3 day drive.

The experience of overseas attendees was a strange and highly stressful one as noone knew when they would be able to go home. I eventually made it out on the Saturday on a very nervous flight. The barman at the airport hotel where we were staying said that we were the first regulars he had ever had.

The event was quite significant from a technology perspective. The mobile networks in New York stayed working although it was virtually impossible to get a line. The fixed line network did not work – the Central Office (telephone exchange) in the area had burnt to the ground.

What did remain up was the internet and students at Columbia University, which is where Professor Henning Schulzerinne did much of the development of VoIP signalling protocol SIP, were able to call home using their University VoIP accounts.

Internet Protocol, the IP in VoIP, was designed to run over networks resilient to nuclear attack. 9/11 was a good, if terrible, real life test bed for this.