Category: Business

Business

MAC Code for Banks

Are MAC codes for banks long overdue?

Was discussing banks with Bloor on Facebook. He paid his credit card off early but the bank still took the payment as Direct Debit meaning he had paid it twice. Apologies forthcame and situation was rectified but then the DD wasn’t taken at all the following month so he got stung with a penalty charge. Again it was sorted but when things like this happen they can take days out of your life. It’s a bit like calling an insurance company or HMRC but takes even longer.

I had a situation recently where I paid a mortgage off but the bank still took the DD for it. Sigh… It did get sorted but the person at the bank, who was most helpful said that DDs are entered into the system 10 days or so in advance of the money being taken (as I recall – if not 10 days it was a simlar timeframe). Most banks will be the same. Their systems are antiquated.

I’m not sure it matters which bank you are with and changing banks is a pain in the arse anyway. We concluded that what was needed was a MAC Code system for banks. One that provided all the information needed to transfer not only your account but all the Direct Debits as well.

If nothing else this would prompt banks to be more competitive. If it was easy for people to move then they’d soon get their collective act together.

Banana cheescake…

Business food and drink

Sell by dates taken to the extreme

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 28 May, 2014
6 Comments on Sell by dates taken to the extreme

Activia yoghurt introduce very precise sell by dates. Ya gotta laugh innit. I was just polishing off this peach flavoured Activia, eaten in tandem with a medley of both fresh and tinned peaches with fresh ripe mango (for the foodies amongst us) and for some reason it occurred to me to look at the sell by date. Might be the use by date. Not sure.

Doesn’t matter really. Sell by or use by, it was sufficiently far into the future to give me confidence that no bodily harm would come to me having consumed the pot. Tasty it was too.

Then I noticed that not only had Activia provided a sell by/use by date but they had included a very precise time on that day by which the yoghurt would have to be sold/used. This degree of attention to detail and the customer’s well being is laudible but must surely lead to confusion in the aisles of supermarkets up and down the country. At eight minutes to seven the yoghurt is ok but one minute later and you had better look out pardner. “Health and Safety” would be up in arms, on your back.

I also note that Activia, in English, likes to spell yoghurt yogurt. My standard way of checking a spelling is to enter the word in the google search bar to see what comes up. On this occasion both yog and yogh seemed to be ok although WordPress would appear to disapprove of yog. This seems unusual to me because having originated in the good ole US of A I’d have expected WordPress to go for the simple spelling aka plow, color et al.

Reading Activia labels can also be very educating. In this instance for example we can see that translations of peach are peche and perzik. I leave it to you to decide on the languages. Choosing incorrectly could lead to embarrassing mistakes caused by not being understood by waiters and shop assistants in countries around the globe.

Notwithstanding all of this the yo’ghurt I consumed was the last in the fridge and we are unlikely to have to face up to “the date” as an issue.Based on this sample size of one I’d say Activia yogs fly off the shelves making me think that the only reason they have “a date” on them at all is that bloke in H&S again.

I quite liked my Activia. It went well with the fruit medley and is a handy, easy to throw together dessert for the busy exec looking to squeeze in a quality meal between emails and blog posts.

Other yoghurts are available. This post was brought to you by Activia, Yeo Valley, Danone, Actimel, Shape, Muller, Yoplait, Nestle, Yakult and the Heathrow Eggs and Dairy Company.

Ciao amigos. Drink more milk.

Business

Spark Notts business startup competition entry still open

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 22 May, 2014
No Comments on Spark Notts business startup competition entry still open

I may not have mentioned but I’m a judge in the forthcoming Spark Notts business startup competition. ~~Probably nobody else was available~~ This is a great honour which I am of course looking forward to.

Prizes include a year’s free office space at one of Oxford Innovation’s Nottinghamshire Innovation Centres, business coaching and a huge package of business support prizes worth £40,000 in total. Worth avin.

I have always been somewhat sceptical of “business support” services but in reality lots of people starting up in business are doing it without having had prior experience. This kind of support can therefore be very useful, as is free office space. Better to have a workplace to “go to” rather than doing everything out of your spare bedroom which you should be letting to a lodger to help with cashflow in the difficult early stage of the game:)

The competition is open to folk in Nottinghamshire and there is still time to get your entry in – details here. Maybe I’ll get to see you.

Editorial footnote – I am quite often heard to say that I can be bought but on this occasion it is not the case. I have promised to be totally impartial and objective. Even if your idea is for a microbrewery or an Indian takeaway business.

Business UC voip

#VoIPweek roundup

Last week was #voipweek on trefor.net. This follows on from #peeringweek and will be part of an ongoing programme of themed weeks focussing on particular technology subjects relating to the internet.

Although we do occasionally ask for specific posts the contributors to our themed weeks are by and large left to choose their own topic. This makes for a diversity of content that we probably wouldn’t otherwise see. Diversity is indeed what we did get.

The week saw the publication of 28 posts most of which were VoIP related. VoIP content was wide ranging and included articles on Net Neutrality (in the news at the moment), security and fraud, the technology of location identification for Emergency Services, considerations in designing conference phones, the birth of a new handset, will OTT services kill off the telephony service provider and more.

We saw nostalgia and forward thinking. What’s happening in the Google UC world and will ITSPs need to embrace Lync? There was also a post highlighting a real world case study of someone trying to find a serviced office that would allow them to use their own VoIP service.

In one sense VoIP is now a boring subject because it is mainstream. People like new things. It’s impossible to talk about new things all the time – they just don’t come quickly enough. The content for VoIP week was current enough though and being written almost exclusively by CEOs or Technical Directors in the industry was pretty authoritative.

The statistics make for interesting reading. During the week we saw 6,640 visitors, 9,352 page views. Add to this an average of 296 RSS feed reads a day. Posts were shared a total of 414 times including 90 via Twitter and a 188 via LinkedIn. Google+ at 73 shares came in higher than Facebook at 63. This mix suggests a predominantly business interest in the subject of VoIP.

One post which discussed the future of Unified Communications had 54 shares on LinkedIn which has to be a record for this blog.

All in all we can say that #voipweek was a great success and we should certainly look forward not only to more guest posts from those contributing last week but to other themed weeks in the months ahead.

I’d like to thank all the contributors for helping to make it such a success. Without their authoritative posts #voipweek could not have happened.

Business phones UC voip voip hardware

Invest Wisely to Get the Best from VoIP

Post author By Dan Winfield
Post date Friday, 9 May, 2014
No Comments on Invest Wisely to Get the Best from VoIP

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Dan Winfield, Co-Founder and CEO of Voxhub and 2014 ITSPA Council member.

Starting in, I want to say that this is only my second blog piece on Trefor.net (the first being The Smoking Rooms of Net Neutrality, published yesterday), so please excuse me if I state the bleeding obvious. Yes, I know this site’s readership is a refined audience, one with Gig connections, fibre thing, flashing lights and fancy equipment — the whole package — however I am aiming today at normal businesses that might stumble over here via Google.

I’ll try to explain.

VoIP is the most sensitive service that graces computer networks. It needs love and care to ensure that it performs as a telephone service should, for every call, over and over, 24 hrs a day. And to push it around, it craves low latency, as well as highly available constant bandwidth connectivity with reliable networking equipment. Ironically, for many VoIP is about saving money, yet the less you spend the less likely the chances are that it is getting the environment it needs. All of which is why you need to invest wisely to get the best from VoIP.

As a council member for ITSPA I can safely say that the vast majority of member service providers have invested well in their data centres and equipment. If you are a business that uses one of these providers and you are having quality problems, then 90% of the time (or more) it is your lack of investment that is to blame.

At Voxhub we often receive calls from people saying that they have poor quality VoIP from another provider and want to hear about what we can do better. Many years ago my first thought would have been that their problem had to do with their provider and I would have sympathised with them. Today, though, I go further and try to work out precisely why they are experiencing poor service. After all, there might be some underlying reason for the problems that we wouldn’t want them to bring over, should they opt to switch to our service. It never takes very long to realise that 90% of the time (or more) the cause of the problem is a lack of investment on their side, the most likely candidates being poor cabling, cheap routers, and single Internet connections that are shared between computers and phones.

Sadly, a lot of businesses don’t invest in their Internet connections for any type of on-line service from which they plan to draw benefit, so any advice I give from this point forward applies to investing correctly to benefit from any VoIP, cloud, or on-line service used by your business. Of course, I cannot say precisely how much should be spent, and I think that for the smallest business investing doesn’t have to mean spending very much at all. I would suggest, though, that when you invest you think about the following to help put things in perspective:

1.	Don’t cut corners. Consider your goals and be careful not to erode them by being too cutthroat or going too cheap.
	Service Provider: “We have a proven 4 minute abs program for rippling muscles, guaranteed.” You: “Can you do it quicker? I have seen that available on-line for 3.
2.	Put your VoIP outlay in context by comparing it to what you spend on other business expenses.
	I know of a company that spent hundreds of thousands on fine wood floors for their new office and still took convincing to spend any money on good network equipment. If you have no problem buying an iPhone as a business expense then you have should have no problem spending half that on a router that is used by your whole company every day of the week.
3.	Imagine you are investing in an invisible team member.
	Everyone agrees that ‘Investing in People’ is essential for good business. As such, it can really put things into perspective to consider any Internet/VoIP investment you make as an invisible team member, a “person” who is relied upon by everyone in your business for all of your essential services, telephone, mail, administration, banking, security, and even employee happiness (if you let them watch cat videos and essential World Cup events). If you don’t make the right hiring choice you will end up getting poor attendance, under achievement…in essence, a “person” that lets down your whole team.
4.	VoIP may not work on a network just because the BBC website loads quickly.
	I am sorry to say it, but at some point the finer details become important. Working out what you need to invest versus what you have already invested requires some evaluation expertise. At Voxhub we take on this responsibility for our customers, providing advice, verified equipment, and testing tools for networks that tell us our customers what kind of performance they are actually getting.

Somewhere along the line you will need expertise and advice, whether the quantifying comes from your own team, your IT company, or your VoIP provider. Once you find the right source of help, trust them and let them deliver for you…then be sure to hold onto them and don’t let them go!

VoIP Week Posts:

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Hosted VoIP/UCaaS is Going Upmarket!

Post author By Huw Rees
Post date Friday, 9 May, 2014
No Comments on Hosted VoIP/UCaaS is Going Upmarket!

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Huw Rees, Senior Vice President of Business Development at 8×8

The hosted VoIP/UCaaS (aka cloud communications) market is growing strongly in the US and it seems that the UK market is not far behind. According to Frost and Sullivan, Gartner, and others, US CAGR is somewhere around the 25%+ mark, and certainly the results from the few pure play publicly traded companies in this space seem to be consistent with these figures. So what is really driving this growth? What is really going on under the bonnet (or hood, for those of you in the US)?

What appears to be happening is that cloud communications is being adopted by much larger businesses than it was even two or three years ago. The early adopters for hosted PBX services were the very small businesses, typically less than 20 employees. In terms of IT, these businesses were generally unsophisticated and the owner could make the decision rapidly without asking a lot of detailed questions, especially when the provider would clearly save him/her money and often offered some kind of money-back guarantee. Thus, with nothing to lose, these small businesses signed up in significant numbers. Larger business were not so quick to jump on this bandwagon, however, as they needed clear answers to such questions as availability, reliability, feature set, scalability and — of course — compliance and security. Their questions in these areas were not easy to answer in the early roll out of these services, and unfortunately some of these items (especially compliance and security) are still not being properly addressed by many providers.

As some of the vendors started to address these mid-market and even enterprise-level concerns, CIOs started to pay more attention. They began to see the clear benefits of a sophisticated, scalable service that they could subscribe to, effectively getting out of the telephone management business and concentrating their IT resources on projects that were critical to their business and part of the differentiation their business had in their markets (i.e., stop managing boxes in closets and start bringing real value to the business). Gradually at first, businesses of a few hundred employees signed up, followed by 500+, and now businesses significantly greater than 1000 employees subscribe to these services.

For the service provider, larger customers provide major benefits. For instance, they have more sophisticated IT teams, and so the ratio of support calls to deployed phones is reduced. Also, the acquisition cost is potentially less on a per-phone-deployed basis. And perhaps most importantly, the churn rate from larger customers is dramatically less, as larger businesses are generally more stable and therefore tend not to cease business with anywhere near the frequency of the very small businesses. This reduction in churn rate clearly benefits the service provider’s top line, as to grow revenue you must, of course, stem any revenue loss from defecting customers.

As we look forward to 2015, the trend of larger businesses moving to cloud-based communications will continue, to the point where the enterprise market will also start to adopt these services. Soon enough, it will not be uncommon for businesses with many thousands of employees — perhaps even tens of thousands of employees — to start subscribing, which will result in a booming business for the service providers that are truly ready to tackle such a scale.

VoIP Week Posts:

Apps Business Mobile mobile apps mobile connectivity UC voip

Will OTT VoIP Apps Destroy the Telecoms Industry?

Post author By Alex Kinch
Post date Friday, 9 May, 2014
No Comments on Will OTT VoIP Apps Destroy the Telecoms Industry?

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Alex Kinch, Founder and CEO of Ziron.

As soon as the Telecoms industry came to terms with the WhatsApp acquisition and what it could mean for their SMS revenues, CEO Jan Koum dropped another bombshell: the company would be launching voice services from Q2.

For many this announcement spelled the end. Surely operator executives around the world should start packing their suitcases and call it a day. After years of racing to the bottom the industry has finally hit rock. Well, not quite. In my view, it’s high-time these doomsayers started to examine the opportunities that come with the increase of OTT voice apps (mVoiP), rather than demonising the unstoppable tide of technological evolution.

The ‘telco industry camp’ and the ‘mVoiP camp’ needn’t be enemies. There is room a-plenty for them to co-exist, at least for the foreseeable future. News reports would have you believe that the only people using landlines are rural dwelling anti-tech luddites, however Ofcom has reported that in the last statistical year call volumes from both fixed and mobile phones were in excess of 100 billion minutes. Their report states that 82% of adults still use a home landline – but only 28% of adults use any form of VoIP. The report also said that there are currently 82.7 million active mobile subscribers in the UK, but a report from Analysys Mason clarifies that only 20% of them are active mVoiP users.

It is essential to keep in mind that mVoIP isn’t new, as in recent years a host of mVoiP apps have launched, including Fring, Nimbuzz to Viber. We’ve had a long time to come to terms with mVoIP apps and adapt business models accordingly. The key is to think about how you can value, rather than trying to stand in the way of change. At least one popular OTT app has been conducting trials with traditional telcos, in which calls from the PSTN made to a user’s regular GSM number are intercepted and delivered to the app instead of via the SIM. This kind of forward progress must be embraced. We must ask, “How we can add value and work together to deliver an enhanced customer experience?”

Massive scope exists for smart VoIP operators that can act as a gateway between the old world of the PSTN and the new world of OTT apps. As someone that has been in Telco for more years than I dare ever admit, I remember similar hysteria taking hold ten years ago when Skype first became popular. Today, Skype is feeding and contributing to the Telco industry, driving a third of the world’s phone traffic. The fact is that Telecoms is evolving, and,to survive we are going to have to evolve with it.

VoIP Week Posts:

Business voip

Provisioning, Cloud Management and Obihai

Post author By Mark Williams
Post date Thursday, 8 May, 2014
No Comments on Provisioning, Cloud Management and Obihai

The name may be new, but you’ve probably provisioned, configured or used an IP phone or ATA over the years that Obihai’s core engineering team had a hand in developing.

Back in 1999 a company called Komodo released the first ever voice ATA. The Komodo product quickly caught the attention of Cisco, the company was acquired and the Cisco ATA-186 quickly became ubiquitous in the emerging VoIP marketplace. Soon after, Jan Fandrianto and Sam Sin started a new company, Sipura, where they further evolved mass market low-cost VoIP devices and provisioning. The Sipura approach to secure, remote provisioning was quickly emulated across the industry, and Cisco acquired this business as well, after which the team further expanded the SPA product range before starting Obihai in 2010. Since that time they have been working on a new generation of voice hardware, supported by an advanced cloud management platform, and are now working to expand into global markets.

With a new company came a new opportunity — to design a voice platform from the ground up, and to innovate based on the knowledge gained over the past decade. First a new SIP stack had to be written, and Dr. Sin’s experience in writing the Komodo and Sipura SIP stacks ensured that this new stack would be feature-rich, expandable, and bullet-proof. Obihai have even used its SIP stack in its WebRTC implementation using web sockets. Next came the development of the OBiTALK cloud management platform, which is unique in that it can be utilised for HTTPS-based remote device management and provisioning in a wide variety of fashions, depending on the service provider’s infrastructure and cloud capabilities.

Customers can leverage the OBiTALK portal in a variety of ways, depending on how the OBi devices reach the end user. For example, end customers can purchase their own hardware for use via the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) service within the portal, which allows the customer to choose and sign up for IP voice services via Obihai’s “Approved Service Provider” (ASP) program. This program allows ITSPs to offer their services for provision via OBiTALK with the user selecting and purchasing the voice services, and in turn the device automatically configures for the chosen ASP. Once the ASPs services are added to the OBi device, the ASP can then check the status and change the configuration of their services on the device either via API into their own platform or via the ITSP view within the OBiTALK portal.

For ITSPs, there are a number of ways to provision and manage devices. A “Zero Touch” (ZT) approach is available, with the ITSP able to push XML-based profiles with smart adaption to the specified device. Traditional methods are available as well, including DHCP Option 66, TFTP, HTTP, and HTTPS. Profiles are sent securely to devices using HTTPS, Open SSL or by profile encryption using the OBCrypt tool. Additionally, cloud-based provisioning, configuration and management can be obtained via the OBiTALK portal. This approach allows the ITSP or their customer to purchase regular off-the-shelf Obihai devices and to add the device to the ITSP’s service by simply dialing a star code. It also allows even smaller service providers — those without a provisioning infrastructure — to offer ZT or near-ZT services to their customers. For ITSPs with a deployed provisioning infrastructure, the OBiTALK portal can be used alongside as a technical support and inventory management tool, showing all OBi devices on the ITSP’s network, their status, location and also enabling the ITSP to browse to the device’s local admin page. Additionally, all the functionality within OBiTALK can be accessed via API, allowing ITSPs to integrate the portal with their own systems. The ability to provision even extends to Obihai’s range of USB accessories, the OBiWiFI Wifi adaptor, OBiBT Bluetooth adaptor and OBiLINE FXO adaptor can all be configured by the xml profile.

Today, as evidenced by Obihai’s ATAs, and IP phones, almost anyone can securely provision and manage their devices regardless of existing infrastructure.

VoIP Week Posts:

broadband Business business applications internet net neutrality peering voip

Net Neutrality and Telephony

Post author By Rob Pickering
Post date Thursday, 8 May, 2014
No Comments on Net Neutrality and Telephony

Net neutrality and VoIP telephony – thorny issues the industry needs to negotiate

Trefor.net welcomes “VoIP Week” contributor Rob Pickering, CEO of ipcortex.

Most folks who work in the VoIP industry have at some point been subject to a casual horror story from a new acquaintance about evil VoIP and how they tried it once and that it nearly brought their business to its knees. My heart sinks whenever I realise that this is the direction in which the conversation is going, at which point I usually find myself wishing I’d said that I did something less controversial for a living…like writing computer networking software! I listen, though, nodding politely, already forming a conclusion — after all, it would be unlikely that the problems experienced were due to a fault in their equipment or termination provider, both of which are probably perfectly reliable. No, a lack of a suitable quality of service (QoS) between their premises and termination provider is almost always the culprit in such circumstances.

The UK service provider industry has developed lots of solutions to the QoS problem, and things are far better now than they were just five or ten years ago when the market was in its infancy. The quality and availability of last mile circuits, particularly in metropolitan areas, has massively improved with successive advancements such as LLU, FTTC, FTTP, and cost-effective, high bandwidth Ethernet IAD type circuits. There has also been a trend towards integrated providers delivering the whole service — access circuit, Internet and telephony — as a single package. Behind the scenes, this may or may not translate technically into a full end-to-end in-house QoS-managed solution, depending on the provider and sometimes the geography of the customer. It does, however, assign commercial responsibility for delivering a fit-for-purpose solution to a single party, and this can only produce a better quality outcome for the customer.

Such an approach is certainly not universal. The US market has developed differently, for instance, and most VoIP termination providers don’t get deeply involved in provision of access circuits, instead opting to rely on decent low loss, low jitter transit or peering arrangements, and their customers’ own commodity access circuits. Often they will do a bit of automated “connection testing” as part of their signup process, however in general customers on unsuitable circuits tend to weed themselves out. This does produce some benefits for customers, including more transparency with regard to costs, as well as a bit less lock-in as there is no commercial linkage between access and over-the-top (OTT) voice service. Today, in fact, several of those US suppliers are entering the UK market with this same business model.

Which brings us on to Net Neutrality. Whenever this subject comes up, we tend to think about its obvious effects on consumer entertainment services. The future development of the telephony industry is, however, intimately linked with this issue. Whilst the raw, per-consumer bandwidth requirements of a VoD service like Netflix is greater, the network characteristics required to deliver a reliable telephony conversation of at least ISDN quality are in some ways more onerous. Though buffering can always be used to counter horrible jitter on the underlying path for a video stream, and content caches are already used to reduce transit requirements, neither of these methods can be used to reduce the pain on a real-time voice conversation. If telephony providers can no longer get good, zero-packet loss, low jitter transit, or peering with many leading access providers, then an entire business model may very well be frozen out.

How do you think the industry will develop? Vertically integrated one-stop shops for network access and telephony, or universal OTT providers? I’d love to know your thoughts.

VoIP Week Posts:

Tags net neutrality, OTT, Telephony, voip

Business voip voip hardware

Voice Technology Makes Conference Calls Sound Amazingly Clear and Life-like

Post author By Jeff Rodman
Post date Thursday, 8 May, 2014
1 Comment on Voice Technology Makes Conference Calls Sound Amazingly Clear and Life-like

Trefor.net welcomes “VoIP Week” contributor Jeff Rodman, Polycom‘s Chief Technology Evangelist. Since co-founding the company in 1990 Jeff has been instrumental in the realization of Polycom’s iconic products for voice, video, network communications, and other media.

When was the last time you used a conference phone? Today or perhaps yesterday? For a good many of us it likely hasn’t been more than a day or two. For many of businesses today, open-air voice conferencing is as ubiquitous as the traditional handheld or headset.

To ensure maximum efficiency and productivity during conference calls, it is critical for the speech to be clearly understood. We’ve all had the unfortunate experience of struggling to work out what someone is saying, be it due to noise, their distance from a microphone, or just an unfamiliar accent. Our minds are good at compensating for missing words and blurred sounds, but the more time they spend figuring out what might have been said, the less well we understand is actually being said (as seen in this short video). Therefore, it is vital that the physical “what we hear” stage be as clear and as accurate as possible.

Five aspects of speech audio work together to make or break a clear, understandable conversation: Bandwidth, Reverberation, Amplitude, Interactivity, and Noise. These five aspects, taken together, are called the BRAIN model of practical audio communications. The job of any conferencing system is to tune and balance these aspects automatically to provide the best possible hearing experience for the parties on both ends of the call.

Bandwidth: The Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) most of us grew up with carries less than half the information inherent in human speech, and this shortcoming was unthinkingly brought over into early IP telephones. However, newer system greatly enhance intelligibility through the implementation of HD Voice, making conversation much easier to follow and less fatiguing. The standards-compliant IP phones and conference phones that deliver this much higher audio bandwidth offer amazing clarity that rivals the best video systems, making it seem that you are in the same room as those on the other end of the call

Reverberation: Room echo at either end of a phone conversation makes the sound die down more slowly, thus smearing words together. While a “perfect” solution would include acoustic wall coverings for absorption, wall-mounted diffuser panels, and a personal headset or lapel mics for every participant, the reverberation problem is much more easily addressed via a multiple-microphone conferencing system that can intelligently steer and focus the pickup patterns to dynamically match the location of each talker in a room.

Amplitude: Insufficient amplitude, or loudness, can make it difficult to hear a talker. Repositioning the talker and listener are obvious solutions, but are not always practical. Conference phones are available, though, that can automatically adjust microphone gain to greatly help in these situations, and the difference in ease of understanding can be breathtaking.

Interaction: Interactive speech between distant groups can be difficult to conduct for a number of reasons, due in no small part to the absence of a true full-duplex system that allows for transparent interactive speech. A conference phone with good full-duplex technology enables talkers at both ends to be heard clearly without any delays or distractions. Beware, though, as although many speakerphones today lay claim full-duplex performance it is a very sophisticated feature that few can actually deliver.

Noise: Common noise sources share much of the same spectrum with speech and can make it difficult to understand conversations. First, try to fix noise at the source. Move the microphones farther from air conditioner ducts, overhead projectors, coffee makers, and so on. There will always be residual noise, of course, but the HD Voice technology found in high quality conference phones eliminates traditional clicking, buzzing, hissing, and other noise artefacts, and can thus make a big difference in ensuring that the voices of all participants on the conference call are clearly heard in spite of any acoustic challenges in the room.

So the next time you plan or join a conference call, consider the elements of the BRAIN model. Remember that they work together: each BRAIN component can compensate for deficiencies in others, which can be very important as some are much easier to address than others (consider the cost and difficulty of soundproofing a room compared to simply slipping in a better IP speakerphone with HD Voice and steered microphones, for example). You can learn more about the BRAIN model from Polycom’s The “BRAIN” Model of Intelligibility in Business Telephony whitepaper.

VoIP Week Posts:

Business End User ofcom Regs voip

A VoIP Spring

A regular trefor.net contributor, Peter Farmer is the Commercial and Regulatory Manager at Gamma, as well as an ITSPA Council member and Chair of ITSPA Regulatory Committee. We are pleased to present his “VoIP Week” post.

So, Trefor asked me to approach an article for “VoIP Week” from a commercial perspective as opposed to regulatory…. took me a while, but sunstroked approaching Havant cycling from Esher to Portsmouth, it dawned on me.

We’ve had our VoIP Spring. We just don’t realise it yet.

Last year, there was much furore around Ofcom’s decision (enacting an EC Recommendation) to reduce geographic termination rates to the Long Run Incremental Cost (“LRIC”). These rates were previously calculated using Fully Allocated Cost (“FAC”). Very roughly, FAC is 5x LRIC in this market, so 0.3 became 0.06 pence per minute.

All the views espoused on that subject were valid, especially as we have a diverse industry with many niche interests and many unbalanced portfolios of net termination and origination. In the same market review, however, Ofcom transferred — for BT at least — the foregone common cost (the difference between LRIC and FAC, attributable to costs such as your CEO and Finance and HR teams, etc., and not directly to each incremental unit of what you are selling) in the termination market to the origination market. Granted, this had the perverse effect of reducing the cost (through the Significant Market Power Condition that governs non-geographic out-payments), but what it did to was virtually double the per-minute cost of the origination leg of Carrier Pre-Select and Indirect Access. Granted, again, this nets off against calls to UK geographic and non BT terminating non-geographic (why BT itself is exempt is a very long story that I will tell another day), but means that calls on legacy ISDN30 estates to mobiles and international numbers increased. Markedly. We are now in a situation where the direct cost of getting a call from the Network Terminating Equipment (“NTE”) over the Local Loop to the Digital Local Exchange (“DLE”) is five times that of getting it from the DLE to a mobile in the US of A. Seriously.

If you’re an over-the-top provider, your cost base just went down. You don’t have to worry about that leg from the NTE to the DLE. Your voice traffic is ones and zeroes encoded in packets of data over broadband frequencies, not analogue on narrowband frequencies. The per minute cost of providing the service to any caller has plummeted, relative to an ISDN2 or 30 or even a single WLR line.

And that right there, Ladies and Gentlemen, was our VoIP Spring. Let’s make the most of it.

Google+ Peter Farmer

VoIP Week Posts:

Tags ISDN, Ofcom, voip

Business online safety security voip

Voice Fraud – You Need to Act!

Post author By Simon Woodhead
Post date Wednesday, 7 May, 2014
1 Comment on Voice Fraud – You Need to Act!

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP guest contributor Simon Woodhead, CEO of wholesale voice provider Simwood.

In February, we published VoIP Fraud Analysis, a white paper that details Simwood’s three years of operating a Honeypot, coloured in by many years of real-world experience servicing wholesale voice clients of all sizes and seeing them compromised. Our research has been very well received in official circles from OFCOM to ACPO, at industry events comprising scarily competent people, and we’ve since been able to compare notes with others in darkened rooms who study this for a living. Of course, I won’t repeat the full content of the white paper here — and it certainly wouldn’t be appropriate to do so — but I will be glad to share a few observations from it.

VoIP fraud — an estimated $46bn a year problem — has come as no surprise to anyone, and as we’ve run through the mechanism of attack the majority of people in the audience have seen at least parts of the behaviour we describe in the wild. If we were describing other kinds of crime most people would be looking in from outside, but VoIP fraud is pervasive and everyone in the industry has seen it at some level. Similarly, nobody has questioned the solutions proposed; some of which are unique to Simwood though they can be employed by any provider on almost any equipment. Despite this, people remain reluctant to act and, dare I say, a little complacent. It is somebody else’s problem until it is their problem, and by then it may very well be too late. Remember, $46bn is the estimated measure of the good guys’ incompetence…the bad guys’ intent is infinite and, as we’ve seen, can quite literally put a provider out of business in just hours.

The sad fact is that the bad guys are becoming far more professional. Gone are the days of script-kiddy intruding with such blunt force that it was apparent as a DoS attack. They are still there, of course, and can still be very effective in breaching completely unprepared networks, but the serious people — the professionals — are…well, professional. There’s no impatience or fervour to their attacks and they do their homework very very well. Their reconnaissance is unobservable to those not looking out for it at the packet level, and their early compromise testing is lost amongst legitimate call traffic for those unaware of the test numbers identified. Then they wait, patiently.

Christmas 2013 was a busy time for us with almost every night seeing one of our customer’s end-users compromised. Actually, we saw the same customers compromised repeatedly night after night, as the bad guys had identified a specific vulnerability present in the equipment they’d deployed to their end-user businesses. Where the customers were ISPs (with a defined block of IP addresses containing customer equipment) the attackers had been able to identify a list of similar targets on their network vulnerable to the same attack. This would have taken a long time and a lot of patience, before striking when eyes were furthest from the ball. On every single occasion we identified the incident, proactively made contact with our customers to advise and help resolve the incident. The attackers left quietly, knowing they had a long list of other targets and could come back later. They did, every night for the Christmas period.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is just a “VoIP” problem. Many incidents are targeted and exploit non-VoIP technologies (e.g., those present by virtue of traditional PBXs being retro-fitted with IP capability) while many others are at other levels altogether, such as the http interface of CPE or provider admin systems. The traffic may pass over VoIP as a consequence, but in many cases once the VoIP side of it has been contained it will then pass over traditional phone lines connected to the same equipment. It must be an anxious time waiting for the CPS invoices afterwards!

My point here is not to scare you, but to highlight two trends: (1) providers are becoming more complacent, and (2) attackers are becoming more professional. A destructive combination, indeed, and one that is sure to end in more tears. Attackers are not going to become less capable and less professional, so the only option is for providers to be less complacent and to — this is critical — take action. Very few if any are doing everything they could, whereas others dismissively rely on techniques that may help but are incomplete and therefore give false confidence. The bad guys can turn on an attack at any point after the reconnaissance is complete, and if you think they cannot then how will you notice and be able to react when they do?

The solutions are often simple and free, however they require a willingness to implement and generally bring many other benefits. By way of example, the vast majority of providers operate SIP on UDP 5060 because that is the out-of-the-box behaviour, whilst you’d struggle to find equipment nowadays that doesn’t support TLS. Not only are TLS endpoints far less common targets, but TLS and SRTP also give end users the privacy I think they already expect they have. Similarly, billing more frequently and getting as close to real-time as possible not only enables fraud monitoring but provides massive operational and commercial benefits too. Your carrier monitoring and enforcing fraud controls on your wholesale account, safely away from your network, is by far the most effective preventative measure, and some of us do that to varying degrees.

There are many more solutions contained in the Simwood VoIP Fraud Analysis white paper, and we urge you to implement them, and also to lean on your carrier to help you to do so. Please note that in all the “Christmas” examples it was we the carrier — not our customers — who noticed end-user compromise.

The key take-away I want to leave you with is that if you are having no trouble sleeping at night because you believe it can’t/won’t happen to you, then you really need to act now. Your network may already be compromised, with eyes awaiting your being off the ball, perhaps over a coming Bank Holiday.

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Microsoft Lync, Embrace or Ignore?

Post author By Peter Cox
Post date Wednesday, 7 May, 2014
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Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week guest contributor Peter Cox, UM Labs Ltd. Founder and CEO

As the VoIP industry continues to grow, a new and potentially disruptive force has emerged. Microsoft Lync. While not exactly a newcomer (tracing its origins back through LCS and OCS), the latest version of Lync — Lync 2013 — is clearly making an impact on both VoIP and the Telecommunications industry in general. So the question is, should VoIP service providers and users embrace Lync or ignore it?

Microsoft is clearly positioning Lync to extend their reach from data into the VoIP world. The product is understandably popular with end-users who like the features that it offers, as well as with CIOs who see Lync’s Unified Communication services as a way of getting more out their investment in Exchange and Active Directory. Lync also provides Enterprise Telephony features, albeit at an additional cost.

So what does all of this mean for VoIP service providers and users?

One thing not in short supply is opinions on the merits of Lync. The consensus is that Lync is great for Instant Messaging and for integration with Exchange, but that it does not deliver the industrial strength telephony needed by many end-users, particularly those in call centres. Mixed deployments are the result — with Lync in the back-office, and a more traditional PBX in areas with tougher call processing requirements — and these present a challenge.

One of the hurdles facing any Lync deployment is the product’s sheer complexity. Even a simple system for a small office requires three or more servers, with scaling for larger numbers of users and multi-site deployments complicating the picture still further. But the greatest challenge comes from attempting to interconnect Lync with other VoIP systems. The Lync architecture includes the Mediation Server for 3^rd party connections, which can connect to a PSTN Gateway (Microsoft’s terminology), and as its name suggests can also provide restricted connectivity to other VoIP systems. The Mediation Server does not enable callers to be identified with anything other than a caller-ID, nor does it support presence or instant messaging, and therefore it cannot provide integrated Unified Communication services across a multi vendor network.

Lync is based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the same protocol that virtually all other VoIP products and services use. Microsoft have added so many extensions to the Lync version of SIP, though, that providing the level of integration needed for a mixed Lync and standard SIP deployment is beyond virtually all end-users and many system integrators. On the plus side, Microsoft has published details of the SIP extensions they have implemented. While these specifications will not help the average end-user, they have enabled the development of enhanced connectivity solutions for Lync. It is now possible to deploy a mixed environment, for instance, with Lync in the back-office and an alternative VoIP system in other areas.

The Microsoft marketing machine will clearly continue to promote Lync, end-users will continue praise the integrated services it offers, and CIOs will continue to value the improved ROI. Also, the ability to provide true interconnection with other VoIP products and services means that there is now an opportunity for service providers to offer new services centred on Lync, and for end-user organisations to benefit from the optimal mix of Lync’s UC services and call centre grade services from other vendors. End-users will continue to adopt Lync, and thus service providers and system integrators able to provide Lync integrated with other VoIP products and services will have an edge. As such, the VoIP industry needs to embrace Lync or become a casualty of its advance.

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Irrationally looking forward to meeting Pardeep or hello Pardeep goodbye Galaxy Mini

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
1 Comment on Irrationally looking forward to meeting Pardeep or hello Pardeep goodbye Galaxy Mini

Some of you will have been following the story of me being without my phone for over a week now. I well I am irrationally excited to tell you that it is nearly here. I’m sat at home in the conservatory waiting for Pardeep.

Pardeep works for courier DPD. I know exactly where Pardeep is. I’ve been following his progress with great interest to the point where I’ve been constantly refreshing my screen to see if he is getting any nearer my house. The screen shots at the bottom of this post tell the story.

There are a couple of very slight disappointments. The first is that there is a lag between the status shown and Pardeep’s real location. As he pulled up outside my house I wanted a screenshot of him doing so. It didn’t happen and the next time I looked, which was when he had gone, the status of the delivery had changed to “your parcel has been delivered”. Not a major issue, just a very slight disappointment:)

The second disappointment was that I wanted to take a photo of Pardeep. He was a very cheery bloke. The problem was that the device I would have normally used to take the photo was the one being delivered by Pardeep. He wouldn’t have wanted to hang around while I opened the box, took out the phone, inserted the battery, SIM, SDCard, entered my credentials and waited for all the device updates to happen.

Hey, no big deal:) The updates are happening right now. I am pleased to tell you that my wallpaper and lock screen photos are back in place although little things such as the screen lock, lock screen message (Tref’s phone) and misc other settings such as which icons go where have to be manually redone.

I can tell you that the last time I used this phone appears to have been on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23rd April, because that is the date of the most recent SMS restored by my Samsung backup account. The SMS, fwiw, is from my wife and it says “Powerpoint for beginners”. What gets backed up where is something I will have to check in making any decision to move handset vendors.

All my apps are being reinstalled. I’m not totally comfortable about all the permissions I’m having to give. Security around what an app can and can’t do is is something that the Android will need to sort out. It also seems odd that the “internet” app automatically installed on the home screen is not Chrome. It must be something Samsung has chosen. IE perhaps but there is nothing to tell me what it is. That one won’t last.

Anyway follow the progress of Pardeep as he winds his way through the sleepy streets of Lincoln towards my house, dropping parcels off on the way:

The Conception and Birth of a New IP Handset

Post author By John Bennett
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
3 Comments on The Conception and Birth of a New IP Handset

Trefor.net welcomes John Bennett, Managing Director snom UK Ltd

There are five mainstream manufacturers of IP handsets active in the world today, and for the business client, service provider or reseller seeking to select a handset supplier it can be difficult to evaluate the differences amongst them. Price is an obvious criteria but that reveals little about the expected handset life, quality of voice and the durability or usability of the handset, all of which contributes to the user satisfaction and the lifetime cost of the handset. Two reliable options for evaluation are (1) references from existing users, and (2) a good look at the manufacturing process.

A reliable quality manufacturer will operate an in-house research and development team. Interoperability and the ability to work with a very broad range of PBX and hosted service providers on the market are absolutely key in the specification of IP handsets.

The design, development and manufacturing guidelines for IP handsets are quality, security, interoperability, a practical and aesthetically pleasing design, and inclusion of features that meet the needs of modern communications. Products must be stable, functional, efficient, durable, and must provide a quality in which customers can have confidence.

Defining the Designer Baby

The starting point for any new handset development is with the customer, customer feedback is key to understanding what is working, what is not, and what is needed, what is liked or disliked. It is particularly important to understand the end user experience both for handset use and from a deployment and manageability point of view. A good way to develop such understanding is to process and analyse any returns or repairs working in close collaboration with development and production teams. This has an immediate benefit for the customer as minor modifications can be quickly integrated into production. It is perhaps even more important in that a constant and systematic analysis of complaints and faults allows companies to produce reports and identify trends and issues, thus allowing for continuous product quality improvement and the development of new devices that meet customers’ requirements and deliver high levels of reliably in the long-term.

It is also important to track the changing technology trends to ensure that handsets meet tomorrow’s needs as well as today’s, and to take into account the need to easily adopt new technologies into the business. In today’s business world, key capabilities are remote provisioning, support for virtual private networks (VPN), CTI solutions and integration with Microsoft Lync.

Once the specification is agreed to the next stage is the prototype build followed by market testing. Manufacturers should maintain a close relationship with key end customers that allows for market testing of new handsets, to establish they are not only fit for purpose but that they provide customers with a solution that will excite and motivate them to continue to buy their product.

The standards of the tests to which a manufacturer will submit their products are another key indicator of handset quality. Manufacturers should have very strict criteria, and before approving a handset to move to full production the phone must successfully pass various drop tests and tests on the electrical interface. One characteristic that is of particularly importance is maintaining highest standards of audio quality, not just at first production but on-going as the handset will likely be exposed to heavy use for five years or more. Products should be regularly subjected to audio tests and careful measurements taken to determine and resolve audio deterioration.

Product Birth is only the Beginning

Once the prototype has been approved the manufacturing process goes ahead full steam. Material selection and build quality has an effect on both the audio quality and the durability of a telephone handset. Developers should continuously monitor the production process, and handsets should be spot tested to ensure that quality standards are met. During the production not only should the operational performance of the handset be monitored and tested, but also the entire response frequency of each phone. The smallest difference in build quality can adversely affect the phone quality, and this can involve anything from build impacting on the audio quality to introduction of a specialist coating that prevents the discoloration of handset keys and ensures the handset durability.

Regular analysis and systematic review of problems or complaints can ensure that product quality is maintained and improved to effectively meet user needs.

So what should you look for when evaluating IP hone handsets? I recommend you consider the need for in-house testing and fault evaluation and feedback, a process of continual improvement rather than a throw-and-replace approach, and a controlled and monitored manufacturing process, all of which will ensure a high quality and durable solution.

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#voipweek on trefor.net brings diverse set of posts

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
1 Comment on #voipweek on trefor.net brings diverse set of posts

I have been involved with the VoIP scene since 1999 when my employer at the time, Mitel, decided it would “get into VoIP”. In those days the discussion was very much whether SIP or MGCP would win out. Each platform vendor had its own version of MGCP so the bet was placed on SIP.

At Mitel I developed one of the earliest SIP phones. It was a variant on one of Mitel’s standard (and proprietary) Minet phones that was sold in volume with their 3300 PBX. In those days it was the custom and practice of the great and the good of the SIP world to converge each January for the Paris International SIP Conference.

I recall that at my first year at the Paris Conference I went counted three SIP clients: a Microsoft soft client (for MSN), a Pingtel Java phone (now defunct) and if I remember right an Analogue Telephone Adaptor. The following year the number of handsets increased to around five including my own Mitel SIP phone and in year three we thought we had hit the jackpot as I counted a dozen or so clients. That was the year we considered the industry to have gone seriously mainstream.

Pingtel — One of the first SIP phones which happened to be Java based

I stopped counting after that because by year four I couldn’t fit all the handset photos onto a powerpoint slide.

The problem at the time was there were very few Internet Telephony Service Providers around to buy/sell the handsets. At the six monthly pulver.com Voice On The Net conferences only a single session was given over to talks by ITSPs. There just weren’t any and the small number that did exist had few subscribers.

Had we had a blog week of VoIP posts back then it would have contained primers on what the technology was all about, debates about which protocols would win out and wistful gazes into the future looking at a networked world that consigned ISDN and the Plain Old Telephone to the science museum. All pioneering stuff.

This week we are having a week of posts about VoIP on trefor.net. A wide range of real world subjects is on offer including the problems of VoIP fraud, how to defend against this fraud with more secure provisioning, why it is important to get your connectivity right, net neutrality, number porting in the VoIP world, how to develop a VoIP phone, designing a conference phone, location services for emergency calling using VOIP, the evolving world of Unified Communications and a look at Microsoft Lync.

The world has moved on from those early days of VoIP. In the UK the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association now numbers around 70 members and the reality is that the total ITSP count in this country is probably nearer double that as ITSPA members don’t typically include those white labeling or fronting someone else’s back end service. This diverse collection of posts has been written by C Level Executives from around the VoIP world, both from service providers and their equipment suppliers who now have a critical mass of sales to be able to support ongoing product development.

We are at the point where VoIP is no longer a hard sell. People are asking for it. They all use the tech in their every day lives and want to start seeing the benefits for their businesses. It will be a long time before the Public Switched Telephone Network disappears but you sense that time will definitely come. In one sense the only thing that is stopping VoIP from taking over completely is that you still have to have a copper line with an associated telephone number in order to carry the broadband line that allows VoIP to work. A move to a world of ubiquitous data only connectivity would kill off the PSTN once and for all. At least sooner rather than later.

In the meantime the VoIP industry goes from strength to strength. ITSPA membership is growing in number and every member is growing in size. It is a good time to be around VoIP.

Please come back and read the posts as they are published each day. For many of the contributors it is their first time on trefor.net but they are all leaders in their field and their views are worth hearing. None of the posts are intended to be sales pitches although some of them do use their own company experiences to illustrate their story.

It wouldn’t have been so long ago that these experiences would have existed only on paper and there isn’t a print edition of trefor.net:)

If you want to connect you can reach me via trefor.net on Skype or [email protected] on Google Hangout. We don’t do landlines at trefor.net…

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Ten Years of VoIP – Happy Birthday!

Post author By Colin Duffy
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
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Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week guest contributor Colin Duffy, CEO of Voipfone and ITSPA Council member

ITSPA and Voipfone are both 10 years old this year so perhaps it’s a good time to look back at how the industry has developed.

Back in 2004, VoIP was just becoming sexy; Skype had made a big impact on international telephony revenues and was in the public eye — particularly amongst students and those with family overseas. Perhaps more importantly for the industry in general, though, was the acceptance of two technologies: SIP (Session Initiation Protocol, which has become the international standard for VoIP telephony) and Asterisk (the brilliant open source PBX software that allowed anybody to build a telephone switchboard either for their own office use or as a Hosted Service Provider). The combination of these two technologies has efficiently killed the old TDM-based PBX and is well on the way to killing ISDN circuits.

Of course, VoIP couldn’t have been as successful as it has become if it wasn’t for the growth in broadband provision to home and office. In the early days, ITSPA was concerned that the entire industry would be strangled if the Internet Service Providers blocked VoIP, and net neutrality was a much-discussed issue. As it turned out it, ISPs have not stood in the way of VoIP and the two industries have learned to live together fairly peaceably, give or take a few issues surrounding the routers of end-users. Now, the main net neutrality issues correlate to the mobile networks, some of which are grimly determined to keep VoIP off their networks, despite advertising the Internet as a main selling point. (The Internet minus some of the services that the Internet provides is not, in my view, the Internet, it’s Internet Light.)

We also dealt with VoIP regulation worries. Ofcom seemed determined to treat VoIP as something requiring separate legislation, in a ‘there be dragons’ sort of way, whereas ITSPA took the view that this was not necessary. ITSPA lost that argument, however, and — in one of the strangest of many strange meeting I’ve had with Ofcom — we managed to convince it that VoIP Service Providers needed to provide 999 services. Burning grannies were a big thing at the time…

Business Regs

Scottish Independence

The debate on the subject Scottish independence rolls on, and I don’t really have a personal view other than that the peoples’ right to self determination should be upheld and respected, however I am thinking about the ramifications right now as I train back from Glasgow.

We presently live with different rates regimes and other devolved affairs running networks between England and Scotland, but the consequences for independence are high. Will Scotland join the European Union, or will they have a special relationship like Jersey? This is important as the former protects travelers and those living on the border from roaming charges whereas the other does not (Jersey isn’t subject to the EU caps, for example). And what about VAT? What about a hosted PBX installation to an office in Scotland and one in England? How do you account for that under one contract, especially if there’s a different currency? Will there be a different Country Code and numbering plan? Jersey, Guernsey, and Isle of Man all use the UK code despite having substantial telecommunications sovereignty. Could BT and Vodafone’s nexus of Nortel DMS 100s and System Xs handle such a situation?

If there are call centres in Scotland but no EU membership, data protection legislation becomes interesting in terms of passing EU citizens data outside the EU for processing.

BT’s regulated assets are averaged out across the country, and they are less concentrated in Scotland. Thus, if an independent Scottish regulator applied the same charge control logic in Scotland we could see increases in Scottish consumers prices for broadband and WLR, and a commensurate reduction in English (and Welsh and Northern Irish) consumers.

The mind boggles once you really get in amongst the practical issues, and if there’s a “Yes” vote later this year I shall write substantially more on the subject as that would no doubt ring in a exhilarating and very interesting time for all in the sector.

Google+ Peter Farmer

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Business food and drink

How to cook the perfect baked bean

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 1 May, 2014
1 Comment on How to cook the perfect baked bean

You have to hand it to the Guardian. Their lead story this afternoon, occupying a fair chunk of front page real estate is “How to cook perfect baked beans“.

At last a voice of common sense in a world full of bad news stories. The rest of the front page is either gore, boring politics or the mundane. The quality of the research that has gone into the article just further illustrates the Guardian’s leadership position the Guardian. My own attempts to describe the perfect bacon sandwich are fair enough but are a clear second best to the efforts of writer Felicity Cloake.

FC obviously had access to some of the UK’s top chefs in researching her piece – writing for the Guardian opens doors. I don’t begrudge her this. I can only stand back and admire.

This article also vindicates the trefor.net approach of chucking non tech related posts into what is meant to be a technology blog. The Guardian too has its serious side, and who is to say that baked beans or bacon sandwiches aren’t serious issues. Most of us eat them after all. In fact the humble baked bean and the majestic bacon sandwich complement¹ each other.

I may have to try the baked bean recipe. The issue is going to be time. For example this Saturday is going to be the obvious time to try it. I am attending the official opening of the new Lincoln Rugby Club ground by TV star and former Lincoln club captain John Inverdale (I name this rugby club Lincoln – gawd bless her and all who drink (yards of ale) in her).

The official opening commences at 11am. The band doesn’t come on until 7.30 pm. This is going to require significant fortitude – survival skills even. Part of the survival preparation involves the consumption of a hefty breakfast before hitting the lemonade and this is normally where the baked beans would come in. On this occasion I just can’t see there being time to cook the beans as directed by the Guardian. It’s going to have to be Heinz, again.

Someday though…

Regardless of the weather this coming Bank Holiday Monday, after publishing the launch post for VoIP week on trefor.net, the BBQ will come out again and attempts will be made to cook the perfect steak. Watch this space:)

¹They may even compliment each other – that’s a very nice looking baked bean – thank you mr bacon sandwich:)

Mildly interesting Microsoft news on the wireless #Nokia

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Saturday, 26 April, 2014
No Comments on Mildly interesting Microsoft news on the wireless #Nokia

I know it’s the weekend but there was some mildly interesting technology news on the wireless (Home Programme) with the ratification of the sale of the Nokia mobile phone division to Microsoft.

Microsoft have an uphill battle to catch up with iOS and Android. Although commons sense suggests there has to be room for a third mobile market player my experience with the Nokia Lumia 920 suggests that Microsoft has a huge hill to climb. They lost me.

They also lost my daughter who bought a Chromebook when her windows laptop broke. It fits beautifully with her droid. My wife’s laptop has some adware on it. I suspect they are about to lose her too. It’s far cheaper and easier to buy a new Chromebook. All she needs it for is the occasional document, emails and iPlayer.

These big companies all too easily lose touch with the end user. A couple of years ago I tried to get in touch with someone at Microsoft. Left multiple voicemails and sent multiple emails inviting to person to speak at an industry bash. Not a peep. No acknowledgement. Nothing. These people spend all their time attending corporate meetings to discuss plans, strategies stock option price and bonuses. Useful and important things I guess.

Just spent a couple of nights at the DeVere Wokefield Park for UKNOF28. It was full of corporate types (no idea who they all worked for) wearing near identical suits and some of them, employees of the month no doubt, clutching bottles of cheap champagne. I suppose they could have been Microsoft staff.

Anyway Microsoft have a lot of cash, at the moment. They will spend a large fortune trying to catch up. This cash can easily disappear though especially if their Average Selling Prices have to plummet in an increasingly competitive commodity market.

I think I should stop here. I was only trying to tell you the mildly interesting news about the sale of the Nokia handset business sale to Microsoft. I heard it on the wireless set in the kitchen, on the Home Programme. In case you missed it…

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UKNOF 28 wifi at DeVere Wokefield Park

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 24 April, 2014
No Comments on UKNOF 28 wifi at DeVere Wokefield Park

At the DeVere Hotel, Wokefield Park, Reading for UKNOF28 (Google it). The hotel is huge. This does cause a problem. My room is in the Mansion House which is a good half hour walk¹ from the Executive Centre where the meeting is being held.

There has been a slight kerfuffle before the meeting starts as the UKNOF WiFi kit wasn’t exactly late arriving but certainly making the organisers a little nervous. Meetings such as UKNOF, LINX et al need to bring their own kit because that provided but hotels and conference centres is only designed to be used by “normal” people. ie not internet geeks and techies (it would be worth aggregating the home broadband bandwidth use of this community to see how it compares with the average).

You will be pleased to know the kit is now here and an announcement has been made alerting us to a short break in service whilst wires are switched over.

The object of this post however is to praise the WiFi service offered by the DeVere. It has worked brilliantly everywhere in the hotel. I used my mobile VoIP client last night because there is absolutely no mobile signal here. The bandwidth wasn’t perfect for VoIP but I imagine 7pm is pretty much peak time for hotel internet usage as folk get to their rooms, check email etc.

The lack of mobile coverage is an interesting situation for a venue that is filled with suits at corporate offsite meetings. Every open door you pass has a meeting table with overhead projector and people sat around doing stuff. Yesterday the Mansion House bar was filled with besuited-open-necked-shirted-enthusiastic salesmen clutching bottles of champagne awarded to this month’s top performers (etc). Filled me with dread.

As I walked to check out the conference venue yesterday afternoon there was even a bloke sat on his own around some “team building” equipment laid out on the lawn. He was waiting for the punters to turn up. Some time later it was absolutely chucking it down and I saw him packing up the stuff. Presumably his clients had abandoned that part of their offsite meeting and adjourned to the bar. Rain needn’t stop play – just changes the game 🙂

So well done DeVere on your WiFi. The screenshot in the header is the speed I’m getting inside the conference room. Presumably everyone else is now using the UKNOF kit.

More from UKNOF28 as it happens. Read it first on trefor.net 🙂

¹ Ok I’ll admit to a slight exaggeration here but it is a long way.

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Second Hand HP Chromebook for sale £199.99 !

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 23 April, 2014
3 Comments on Second Hand HP Chromebook for sale £199.99 !

CashConverters in Lincoln are selling a second hand HP Chromebook for £199.99.

Caught my eye in the window as I was walking home from work yesterday. Second hand Chromebook for two hundred quid?! When you consider that I paid £180 in VAT for the Acer Chromebook I’m using to type this post makes you wonder how clued up the management at CashConverters are about this sort of thing.

I suppose they are offering easy terms.

Business fun stuff

Buyer beware – 50% off kids at Easter

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 23 April, 2014
No Comments on Buyer beware – 50% off kids at Easter

50% off kids at Easter! Sound too good to be true? You can bet your bottom dollar it is.

Take it from me. 50% off might sound like a good deal but get those kids home and the magic will soon wear off. They will want feeding, clothing, educating etc etc etc. That 50% will soon be a drop in the ocean compared with the ongoing maintenance and operational expenses.

Sure there are consolations. Fathers’ Day cards, new pairs of socks at Christmas. Nobody is going to turn those away. But before you buy take a long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself what you see in front of you. If you want to see your whole head and shoulders then don’t take them up on the 50% offer because pretty soon that mirror will need lowering so that the kids can see themselves in it before heading off to school. Brush their hair, adjust school uniform…

50% off kids at Easter? Buyer beware:)

Easter bunny – one for the ladies
As sure as chocolate eggs is chocolate eggs

broadband Business

Broadband funding

B4RN broadband BT rural broadband reinvestment B4RN business model broadband vision

Broadband funding for rural broadband projects is not working that well says Lindsey Annison.

Recently, I was part of a very interesting discussion on TechQT about funding broadband, particularly for areas where there has been (or where it is perceived that there will be) a level of failure in the superfast roll-out.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHGptEl6_D0]

Whilst many will argue that both the commercial deployment and that associated with the BDUK funding are still ‘in progress’ (and, hence, this discussion could be deemed to be premature), it is already becoming clear that there will be a shortfall not only in coverage percentages and the tech being used (FTTC or worse, instead of full-blown, full-fat FTTH or FTTP), but also in availability even where the area has been deemed covered.

What will people do in areas where the superfast solution is not being deployed? Or in areas where FTTC simply will not technically work? Or in areas which appear to have been forgotten or ignored?

Tags funding

Business fun stuff

Waitrose free paper and coffee – a partial dilemma #savetheplanet

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Saturday, 19 April, 2014
3 Comments on Waitrose free paper and coffee – a partial dilemma #savetheplanet

Just got a free newspaper and a cup of coffee from Waitrose. I don’t drink coffee but Anne does so I got her a black one to maximise the chance of it staying warm until I got it home. We only live 5 mins away.

I don’t read hard copy newspapers either. I get them all on the internet, at least those without a paywall. Now this did give me a bit of a dilemma. Here I was taking a freebie totally gratuitously knowing that I probably wouldn’t read it. My thinking was that it would come in handy to light the firepit this weekend. Not great from a planet saving perspective.

This marketing tactic of Waitrose has to be working big time. Anne never used to go there but she often does now. One of her friends just pops in for a coffee without even buying anything. The cost of a few coffee beans is nothing compared with the additional revenues from their ~~more expensive~~ quality groceries and they will get their papers at a heavily discounted wholesale rate.

I’ll finish with a little snippet of a conversation held with my wife over sms:

Anne: Fiery red rice for the salad available in Waitrose

Me: Yay – you can rely on Waitrose to get the basics right

:))

Future Broadband Planning Requirements

Post author By Lindsey Annison
Post date Thursday, 17 April, 2014
12 Comments on Future Broadband Planning Requirements

It seems to be one of those weeks where UK broadband stories are coming thick and fast. Not only that, but more and more people are pitching in with considered opinions on stories and, in fact, the comments are beginning to make for far more valuable reading than the original articles! And perhaps that could be the case here too. 😉

I want to follow up today on two stories that have broken this week on new build and broadband.

The first story was on ThinkBroadband, regarding a new build housing estate in West Yorkshire and broadband availability for the new homeowners in Calderdale. ThinkBroadband believes that this new estate will have a reasonably good chance of achieving that oh-so-elusive “superfast” connectivity from cab 106 — approx 93% chance of greater than 30Mbps. (Bear in mind that this is only in reference to download, so anyone looking for a reasonable upload should hold their horses before buying!)

The ThinkBroadband article makes the point that though this is not a rural cab it has been funded by BDUK, which if you recall was for the Final Third and rural properties, so questions probably ought to be asked as to why taxpayer money is being used to fund what should have fallen into BT’s commercial rollout in Halifax.

Oh look, in the comments! Questions *are* being asked!

John Popham notes:

This is all good news for the people who live in this area, but….. this is a relatively new housing development built well beyond the point when most of society realised that broadband was an essential component of life. And now, the taxpayer is having to subsidise their connections. This does not make any sense at all.

Can it be that difficult to put planning conditions into new developments that they must make provision for fibre-to-the-premises connections? From the developers’ viewpoint it would help the properties to sell.

Popham makes an extremely valid point that should be raised over and over again. Why have planning agencies, housing developers, and the government not yet cottoned on to the importance of building homes that are broadband enabled? Isn’t that like building houses that from the moment the architect gets involved are not legislated to be environmentally friendly, cheaper to heat, with a reduced carbon footprint and so on? Ah….no, we have not yet mastered that either.

So whereby countries other than the UK can 3D print a whole house out of recycled materials for less than £1500 in a couple of hours, we have not yet quite gotten around to enforcing environmental standards on new build, let alone tech requirements?

Tags broadband, Butchers Arms, community pub, Crosby Ravensworth, Cumbria, FTTH, housing, new build, planning authorities, village pump, West Yorkshire

Business servers

My name is Andy and I work for Tesco

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 16 April, 2014
1 Comment on My name is Andy and I work for Tesco

Walking to the station this morning en route to an ITSPA meeting in Town I noticed a young suit staring into his phone.

As I got closer I saw that his name was Andy and that he worked for Tesco. His name was displayed on a badge on his lapel. I’m not sure what font size Tesco use but it did the job. I could see it clearly without having to stop and peer.

Don’t ask me why this stuck in my mind, other than the fact that I made a note of his name using my voice recorder. I do that sort of thing.

Continuing with the thread, I used to attend dinners thrown by Dell. A guest speaker entertained and we would have an after dinner debate on the theme of the evening. They were good dinners fair play to Dell.

My only gripe was the size of the font on the name badges. It was far too small to be able to easily read the name, especially considering these dinners were held in private dining rooms dimly lit for atmospheric effect. Clearly labelled badges are important if you are in a room full of strangers with lots of wine flowing. How do they expect me to remember names after all that wine. After one of the dinners I completed the assessment form and said all was good except for the badges.

At the next Dell dinner the badges were the same. No change in font size. Far too small to read. I’m sure it was the usual excellent evening but at the end of it I refused point blank to provide feedback. What was the point? They obviously didn’t read the feedback. Either that or they didn’t consider my feedback worth responding to.

Taking feedback to the extreme one of the readers of this blog was at a trade show in London looking to buy a server. He hung around the HP stand waiting to be sold a box. No sales pitch came forth and in due course, after having his badge scanned and informing HP of his enquiry, left serverless and bought one off IBM just down the aisle.

A few weeks later he received a phone call from a HP sales person following up on the exhibition lead. He related his story, told them they were too late and considered the matter closed.

Wind the clock forward another few weeks and HP were back in touch again. The PA of the VP running the HP server division wanted to know if he would have lunch with the VP to provide feedback of his experience at their trade show booth. Sure said my friend. Anytime.

Only problem is the lunch was to be at HP’s Corporate HQ in California!!! They flew him out a couple of days early and he had lunch with said VP in their company canteen. The whole thing lasted 90 minutes and then they flew him home. I’m sure he had a good time.

One wonders what effect his feedback may have had. I’m also sorry the VP must remain nameless. That’s because I can’t remember his name – nothing to do with the font size of his badge.

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