Category: internet

another catch-all really for internet related posts

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Business internet piracy

Stephen Timms Digital Britain Minister

I met with Stephen Timms, Communications Minister today. His official title is Minister for Digital Britain.

I have met Government Ministers before in a long career spent lobbying Parliamentarians on behalf of various trade associations. This was my first meeting in what might be termed a formal environment. I was there with some of the ISP Association Council members to discuss topical issues pertinent to the ISP industry.

I was quite impressed with the process. We assembled in reception at 1 Victoria Street in plenty of time. At some stage an aide met us, whizzed us up to the top floor of the Department of Business Innovation and Skills. It was a round elevator – very impressive – funny what sort of things you notice.

Arriving at the 8th floor we were ushered into a holding room before moving in to see Steve himself. At the appointed time a different aide moved us into ST’s office where we said our hellos and got down to the business of the day.

I was quite impressed with Stephen Timms. Being in the Dept of BIS his remit is to look after industry and he seemed genuinely interested in doing so.

In 45 minutes there is only a limited amount we could cover. We discussed the P2P aspects of the Digital Britain report. I’ve written plenty about this. Key points put across today were that in considering the legislation the Government should ensure that a fair way of apportioning the costs was implemented and that a review of the licensing framework should be conducted.

The current proposals hinge more around sticks than carrots. If illegal music downloaders are to be pursued then a legal alternative should be offered. This is not easy at the moment because of the complexities of licensing the Intellectual Properties of the various rights holders. I’ll detail this in a separate blog post.

We also discussed “prospective effect” and, briefly, more of the Digital Britain report. I doubt many of you have heard of prospective effect – again I will need to write a separate post on this. If I said “mere conduit” perhaps that gives you a clue.

I have to apologise to those of you who wanted me to bring up the subject of broadband 2Meg Universal Service Obligation. We ran out of time on this occasion but now contact has been established there will be other opportunities. 45 minutes, though it seems short, is quite a lot of time to be given by a Government Minister. His diary is chock a block and the next lot were already waiting in the holding room as we were leaving.

As a footnote the clock in his office had stopped – funny what you notice!…

Categories
broadband Business internet mobile connectivity

O2Be and the Ever-Growing Complexity of the Broadband Service Landscape

Met with O2/Be last week to discuss their LLU broadband play. O2 has been winning awards for their consumer broadband service. They have an ADSL2+ solution that already supports Annex M.

For the uninitiated Annex M allows a service provider to trade some downloading speed on a broadband service in exchange for a faster (up to 2.5Mpbs!?) upload.

O2/Be have unbundled around 1,240 exchanges and so have one of the largest LLU footprints in the UK. They also claim to have 500,000 customers so in understanding the options for the provision of broadband service in the UK they are one of the companies that need looking at.

A complex web is being woven in the UK broadband landscape. Clearly O2 is serious. When they bought Be the LLU estate numbered no more than 30 or so exchanges. A lot of cash has been expended to turn it into the figure it is today.

O2 is telling the world it wants a seat at the table and is willing to put up a stake. It does have a different approach to Carphone Warehouse, the leading LLU player in terms of size, in that it only offers the broadband connectivity. Currently O2 relies on Openreach for the underlying analogue line.

Having looked at the economics of LLU myself it makes a lot more sense if you are taking the voice path as well as the ADSL. There are other benefits with LLU in that an ISP can tailor its own services and thus offer a differentiation in a crowded market. It still needs subscriber numbers to make it pay and at the consumer end it is unlikely that the service provider will want to offer too many variants – simplicity of broadband service means lower costs to sell, provision and support.

This brings me on to another point and that is that BT is now introducing FTTC which at 40Mbps down and 5Mbps up blows all the LLU operators ADSL2+ offerings out of the water, at least in terms of speed. There are then only two players in the game – BT and Virgin with their cable proposition. Other players will have to line up behind one of these two as a wholesale customer and note that Virgin does not yet have a wholesale proposition.

Now FTTC is in its early days of rollout but the footprint is likely to be the same Market 3 footprint as the unbundled exchanges, ie the densely populated parts of the country that make business sense.

So I think for the moment that LLU players have a market window that is probably no more than two years for their unbundled services. Two years will scream past, if the past five at Timico are anything to go by.

Coming back to O2/Be their play thus far has been very much into the consumer market. They look to be a solid player and I have heard good things about them from peers in the ISP community. Their sortie into the business market is through an L2TP play with relative newcomer Fluidata. I have nothing to say against Fluidata, not having worked with them but they are small and O2, if it is serious at the wholesale, game will want to do it in-house.

What their long term strategy is though is a difficult one to call. Owned by Telefonica they should have the deep pockets to play. Play what though? When there are likely to be only two players and one of them is BT then you either have to be satisfied with being a reseller of BT or Virgin or you buy one of them. I can’t see the regulator letting O2 buy BT, it would be ironic if they did.

They might let them buy Virgin though.  And then where does that leave Vodafone, a business that is only dabbling in broadband at the moment…

The UK communications industry has never been as exciting a place to be as it is now. Any informed comment/feedback to this post will be read with interest.

Categories
Business internet

Digital Brital Digital Divide US Style

Digita Britain’s digital divide also exists in the USA. Regsister article dicsusses here. I need add no more.

Categories
Business internet

Digital Britain meeting with Stephen Timms Communications Minister

I have a meeting with Stephen Timms, Communications Minister at his office next Thursday. The topic of discussion is largely going to be Digital Britain.

If anyone has a specific internet related issue they want to pitch to me to bring up then please drop me a line through the usual channels.

Categories
Business internet

Call for FTTC trialists

If anyone is interested in taking part in a high speed broadband trial using FTTC (Fibre to the cabinet) could they please drop me a line.

You have to live in Whitchurch (Cardiff), Muswell Hill or Glasgow Halfway. The service is good for 5Megs up and 40 Megs down (subject to the usual caveats – line length etc) and we will guarantee 15Megs down. You need to have an available analogue line.

I’m offering a free trial to those wanting to participate. I don’t have a restriction in numbers but will play this by ear – if I get hundereds of people put their hand up I might have to be picky. The trial will only be for a fixed period that I have yet to determine but hey, it’s free… That’s free 40Mbps broadband. Fill yer boots.

For those that don’t know this is the first manifestation of the £1.5B investment being made by BT to the initial fibre roll out in the UK. It isn’t going to get to everyone but I will publish the road map as soon as I get permission from BT to do so.

Categories
End User internet

Internet time shortens life

I heard on the radio this morning that if you are born today you have a 50% chance of reaching the age of 100. (100 is the new 70 etc…). This sounds great but as far as I can see it won’t feel as if you have lived 100 years. It will probably still feel like 70.

This is because of internet time. Has anyone noticed how quickly time goes when you are surfing the web? As we spend more of our time on line time flies by all the more quickly.

I did think that his was just an age thing.  Something that went along with varifocal lenses and middle age spread. Now I’m not so sure. Life online is so fast moving that we no longer have the waiting time that can make the weeks seem to drag. Responses are instantaneous and require  you to move on to the next task far more quickly than used to be the case.

The result is cramming more into your week and the time passing in the blink of an eyelid/computer monitor. As I write this it is Friday afternoon – this morning it was only Monday!!!

There is no escape. Even when I take the kids on holiday to Center Parcs I can get online, in the villa, by the pool, in the restaurant…

There is a business opportunity here. Totally network free holidays. I realise that more destinations are trying to make it easier for you to go online whilst on holiday but this is unhealthy. Sounds like this needs a facebook group to get the campaign going.

Photo is from my summer holiday in Scarborough last year – free wifi on the promenade – there is no escape…

wifi

Note that internet time should not be confused with “Time Warner Internet”, “internet time clock” , “internet time service”  or  “internet timer”, all of which are close keywords to internet time (google adwords experiment – thanks for your understanding :-).

Categories
Business internet net neutrality Regs

Net neutrality governance debate

Interesting online debate next week concerning whether Net Neutrality can be “governed”. Although it is a North American debate I imagine it will cover lots of areas that we in the UK should be interested in. If I can fit in the time I will attend. Details here and below:

“FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has expanded from four to six the principles of freedom associated with Net Neutrality. Now however these principles are now going to be codified into regulatory rules. So the question has to be asked can the concept of “open” be governed. Join us as we look at how these principles will be incorporated into policy. What companies, services and devices will be subject to these rules. And discuss if the jurisdiction of the FCC has to be modified to enable these principles.

Participants include: Todd Daubert of Kelley Drye, Hank Hultquist of AT&T and Rick Whitt of Google.
Join us on Tuesday October 6th, 2009 at 12:30 EST to 1:30 EST as we see if Open can be Governed”

Categories
broadband Business internet

Britain is 25th in Oxford University Global Broadband League Table

Britain is 25th in the global broadband league table according to a Cisco sponsored study performed by Oxford University’s Said Business School. This was one of the headlines that woke me up whilst listening to BBC Radio 4 this morning.

That in itself should be a spur for the UK to get its act together. For the BBC interview, however, Oxford University could have fielded someone  a little more conversant in the issues. The study itself, seen online,  looks to be purely factual but University don Alastair Nicholson seemed to to think that this lowly ranking was not a problem and that our broadband network was perfectly suited to our present needs.

Although this initially incensed me I’ve calmed down now.  Alastair Nicholson, as an academic overseer of some MBA students,  probably has little exposure to the dynamics of a high technology fuelled economy.  He didn’t do the country a favour though by suggesting that the hype surrounding the Digital Britain debate was partly pride and not driven by the absolute need to have faster and more ubiquitous broadband.

He is just wrong. This is extremely short sighted. Build the motorway and the traffic will come. The act of building this information superhighway will create the jobs that will help to dig our way out of recession.

Categories
Business Cloud internet

Salesforce.com Cloud Workshop: A Final Word from the CIO Council Meeting

So should you worry about using a service — one such as Salesforce.com’s Force.com, for instance — in “The Cloud”?

Ten years ago Oracle was ahead of its time when it tried to kill off Microsoft with the Network Computer. At that time it was a combination of the cost and reliability of the underlying network together with the lack of applications to run on it that likely killed it off.

Today these barriers have all but disappeared. Connectivity is orders of magnitude cheaper and the number of uses for the network has exploded.

WordPress, for example, is the platform that I use to write this blog. WordPress has 6,760 plugins available for download and they have indeed been downloaded 52,448,569 times to date.

A plug-in or widget is a small application that is used to run on a platform to enable certain functionality. In the case of trefor.net these applications provide the functionality in the right hand column – twitter feed, add/subscribe etc. I also use applications invisible to the reader such as wordpress seo, search engine optimisation.

I think nothing of using WordPress which is a totally cloud based application, unlike Dreamweaver for example, which at one time I used to use to design websites and which resided on my PC.

So as a final note on the Salesforce.com CIO council meeting last week I thought I’d look more into their cloud offering. The Salesforce.com Force.com platform has have 200+ native apps and 550+ partner apps. Not as many as WordPress but there again many of the WordPress plug-ins will never see the light of a real website and they are free.

The Force.com applications that are used, however, are of major interest to business, at least collectively. They must be because Salesfor.com has 63,200 paying customers with 81M+ lines of code with 16M+ customizations – modification that integrate the Force.com platform with other services used by these customers.

New WordPress plug-ins appear daily whilst Salesforce.com restricts itself to three releases a year – coming up to release number 30 this Autumn. In the business world a software release needs to be bug free as possible and fully tested which is certainly not always the case with open source equivalents.

So it is clear to me that the move to the cloud is well underway and anyone looking at their information roadmap strategy should have this at the forefront of their mind. Of course this isn’t going to kill off Microsoft anytime soon…

Categories
Business internet

New Technical Operations Centre – call for ideas

Having moved the Timico Network Operations Team to Newark this summer I am looking at upgrading our facilities to provide the business with a state of the art Operations Centre. With this in mind if anyone has any inputs on how we might approach this now is the time.

If anyone out there who are proud of their own facilities and wants to invite me to visit for a look see then I will gratefully accept the invitation.

I am also happy to be approached by vendors in this space if they have something that will add value here.  This could include monitoring equipment, posh screens, ergonomically optimised workstations, electronic whiteboards or even just nice plants etc, etc.

My contact details are available here.

Categories
Business Cloud internet

What lies beyond the cloud?

Something for you to think about. Technology comes and goes. What happens after cloud computing? What lies beyond the cloud?

Categories
Business Cloud internet

Salesforce.com Cloud Workshop: Report from the CIO Council Meeting

You may or may not have known that I am on the CIO Council of Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is a highly professional organisation that I believe really has its head screwed on.

This isn’t a sales pitch for them but I was sufficiently enthused by my Cloud Workshop day, held yesterday in the East Room on the 7th Floor of the Tate Modern Gallery on London’s South Bank, to gush in this post.

The meeting was attended by twenty five or so persons including some global cloud experts from our hosts but also by some heavy hitting CIOs from major international corporates.

What astounded me is the pace of the move away from Microsoft and towards Linux, Google Apps and, of course, Salesforce.com. Their cloud platform Force.com now has 750 Applications you can download. I don’t think anything in this cloudy world comes free but there are seriously well documented business cases and high returns on investment for treading this path.

In the interest of keeping my posts short I’m going to gradually trickle the seven pages of notes I made on the day into discrete bites on this blog.There are lots of really interesting tidbits. Like for example the market for cloud computing is worth $162Bn and that analysts claim that Salesforce.com has a 2 year market lead on its competitors.

I’ll finish this one by thanking my hosts for a very rewarding day and a splendid meal afterwards held in the privileged environs of the Poetry and Dream Gallery on Level 3 which included a couple of Picassos (The Three Dancers) and a Jackson Pollock.

Categories
Business internet piracy

Technology Strategy Board Digital Britain workshop

The Technology Strategy Board promotes the development and adoption of new technology, ideas  and applications in the UK. It has been given a pot of money to seed the development of technology that will underwrite the aims and objectives of the Digital Britain report.

The briefing was in London on Friday, the aim being to bring network providers and rights holders together to finalise the specification for the Technology Strategy Board’s Digital TestBed. About £30m is apparently available to spend and I understand that in excess of 400 application forms have been downloaded from their with a likely 80 projects to be chosen to go forward to the “feasibility study” stage.  Some applicants will clearly be disappointed.

Whilst I think that his activity is to be applauded I did hear of one interesting bit of feedback from the day.  The representative from Sony, who presumably was there to discuss ways of making music more easily available online in a legal manner, suggested that if it was licensing models that were up for discussion, he would need to get the lawyers on the case. 

The whole issue of legal online access to music is indeeed all about licensing models. The cost of the licenses basically. I get the feeling that the rights holders aren’t really interested in making this easy or lowering the costs. Once you get lawyers involved things take forever. You can’t talk about licensing without lawyers. ergo it will never happen.

Categories
Business datacentre internet ofcom

Video Streaming Regulation: Is Ofcom Going after YouTube?

This may be something that has been going on for sometime in the background, but Ofcom today launched its consultation into regulation of video on-demand (VOD) services.

Following the Audio Visual Media Services Directive, the Government is to regulate VOD services which are ‘TV-like’. The consultation is looking at whether the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) should regulate advertising in VOD services and is proposing that VOD services be regulated by the Association for Television on Demand (ATVOD).

The regulation will consist of a range of minimum content standard, new VOD rules delivered through a co-regulatory framework,  and Ofcom will be given primary responsibility to ensure the effective operation of the co-regulatory framework.
VOD regulation has to be in place by December 19 and Ofcom is seeking views by October 26.

I did wonder whether this meant that Ofcom would be trying to regulate the likes of YouTube. The consultation document does tell us that whether a service is in scope for regulation is defined by a range of criteria, including: whether the principal purpose of a service is to provide “television-like” programmes, on an on-demand basis, to members of the public; whether such a service falls under UK jurisdiction for the purposes of regulation; and whether the service is under a person’s “editorial responsibility”.

I suspect that YouTube falls outside of the UK for jurisdiction but this might not be the case in my mind if a specific video was stored on servers based in the UK. I don’t know where specific bits of the YouTube cloud are but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that some of it could one day be in UK datacentres. Looks like another potentially messy situation to me.

PS I note that my post titles are getting more and more tabloid-like and sensationalist. I rely on my friends to tell me when it is getting out of control 🙂

Categories
End User internet

Last night of the proms iPlayer versus freeview

Just a quick sound byte.  Watching Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall on both iPlayer and Freeview.  Sound comes through about half  second faster on iPlayer.  Take note all ye on line betting syndicates:-)

Categories
broadband Business internet online safety piracy Regs

UK Government Efforts ISP Regulation Gets Opposition from Unexpected Sources

There has been a lot in the press recently regarding Government plans to regulate the ISP industry. ISPs have been vociferous where they consider that this regulation is unnecessary and adds cost burdens that will have to be borne by consumers.

Quite pleasingly other industries which the Government is likely to think would be the beneficiaries of the legislation have also come out against it.

For example the high profile “three strikes” approach to Music Piracy whereby persistent file-sharers have their broadband cut off is attracting a lot of opposition from the music industry itself. The BBC reports:

Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien, a member of the Featured Artists’ Coalition (FAC), said: “It’s going to start a war which they’ll never win.”

Feargal Sharkey’s UK Music allegedly has a war chest of up to £20 million a year to lobby Government on the subject of ISP regulation. This FAC stance seems to be clear disagreement within that industry.

The leak in the Independent this week that the Queen’s Speech currently is planned to propose mandatory blocking of consumer broadband connections for child abuse images has also created a bit of a stir.

The vast majority of consumer broadband connections already have such screening and it seems that the Government is trying to make political capital out of a subject which everyone will of course support in principle.

The issue is how much effort and money will it take to cover the last few consumers not already “protected” particularly as it is smaller ISPs who are most likely to be affected. This is particularly relevant considering that all we are not talking about stopping hard core child abusers who already know how to get around the blocking.

The Register has come out with an interview on this subject with Jim Gamble, Chief Executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), and effectively the UK’s leading investigator of online child abuse who has come out against legislation in this area.

There is potentially a lot more regulation in the pipeline. Somewhere in a Government office near you someone is plotting to gain more control ever our every day lives. It is at least nice to see that there are people out there with some common sense who are willing to stick their hands up and say “this is not right”.

Categories
Business events internet social networking

#140 characters conference London

I’ve just left a networking event organised by my friend Jeff Pulver to promote his forthcoming #140 characters conference (#140conf )in London.  Scheduled for November 17th/18th the event will take place at the O2 Arena.

This will be the third such do organised by Jeff after the first in New York earlier this year and the forthcoming one in Los Angeles.  What astonished me was that there were more people from London at the New York event than from New York itself and London is considered to be the twitter capital of the world.  Hence the London conference.  LA was second in terms of origin of attendees.  I even met someone from London at the bash who had spoken at the NY event – Kate Arkless Gray or @RadioKate.

The number of attendees at tonight’s event was also impressive.  When I signed up for it two days ago there were 70 or so people registered.  Jeff was expecting a total of 90 but in actual fact he ended up with 190!  There is clearly something happening here. Didn’t realise that Jeff is also an investor in twitter.

Anyway I’ve signed up as part of the cast of characters for the #140 character conference.  In my mind it is definately worth taking a look at attending.  If you don’t know what it is all about just google it or visit http://140conf.com/

Categories
Business internet

child internet survey

The UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS – see a number of previous posts) has published a questionnaire to get the thoughts of stakeholders on what the measures for success (of the committe’s work) should be. The responses that are received will then be fed into the discussion of the Executive Board on 3rd September.

This activity was kicked off last December. I don’t know when the questionnaire was published but it seems that me things are moving very slowly in the world of child internet safety. This has always been something of a concern to me. Unfortunately UKCCIS has a huge task on its plate and when beurocracy gets involved things grind away at a snail’s place.

It isn’t just UKCCIS. I think there has to be a gear change in the whole country when it comes to matters relating to the internet. It’s about competitiveness of UK PLC and also the fitness of the internet as an environment to work rest and play.

Categories
Business internet

Mandelson U-turn on P2P

The Goverment today did a U turn in respect of its approach to the treatment of illegal music downloading. One of the key features of the Digital Britain review is the fight against music piracy. The ISP industry has been in deep discussion with the music industry over this for at least 18 months and probably more and the outline approach being adopted in “Digital Britain” was something notionally agreed by the various stakeholders.

Today Department for Business has today published an amendment to the original consultation on P2P. The amendment contains proposals to give the Secretary of State the power to introduce technical measures and proposals for the cost to be apportioned in the legislation.  The amendment also reintroduces the idea of suspension of broadband service as a final resort.  This is something that is being opposed in many camps for many reasons already discussed in this blog, not the least being that it is difficult to prove who was doing the downloading.

Although I’m not a lawyer I understand that there is a scenario here that the Government’s own Code of Practice on Consultations has been breached.  The amendment is already causing large ripples in the industry and I think we can expect to hear a lot about this in the press over the next days and weeks. 

There are already reports in the press that this change of mind is rumoured to have been occasioned by a meeting between Lord Mandelson and Music Industry mogul David Geffen during the summer break.  I am all for making things happen quickly.  However it does seem to me that Lord Mandelson is inserting the boot here without enough understanding of the issues.

In my mind he would be better off spending his time trying to raise funding for Rural Next Generation Broadband Access, an aspect of the Digital Britain report that has been widely criticised as being a cop out.

Categories
Business internet

The pirating of Pirate Bay

It is somewhat ironic that The Register reports that The Pirate Bay website has been pirated. Copies are available for download free of charge by bit torrent. The acquisition of Pirate Bay by Gobal Game Factory X also looks to be off because the acquirer apparently doesn’t have the cash.

Any perceived value that The Pirate Bay may have had must surely now have disappeared.  The likely appearance of multiple copies of the website with idential functionality will dilute the strength of the brand.  It’s rough justice out there on the wild wild web.

Categories
Apps Business internet media

Bandwidth bandit CCTV

One of the applications rolled out as standard when people are trying to promote the use of faster broadband is Closed Circuit TV. I’ve always treated this with some contempt as a poor contribution by some unimaginative marketeer somewhere desperate to think of reasons why someone should upgrade their connection.

In the interests of pursuing the theme of bandwidth bandits I was however prompted to look into CCTV as a subject. I am amazed the progress in this space. 

Timico uses a product called X-Protect.  Cameras plug directly into the LAN and are powered by Power over Ethernet.  The product supports a number of codecs including H264 and MPEG-4 and you can select the quality of your stream based on how much bandwidth you have.

As an ISP with a high bandwidth Gigabit fibre based WAN Timico has plenty of bandwidth and our cameras stream at an aggregated 10Mbps to the recording server.  Timico IT staff can view these streams from anywhere in the network, including from home and including on the move with their PDAs.  The bandwidth used for viewing from outside the network does not of course have to be the same as on the LAN/WAN.

What this does show though is an application that is promoting high bandwidth usage.  Manufacturer Milestone Systems states a recording capacity of 960GB per day per server.  A quick back of a beer mat calculation suggests this would need a total of around 90Mbps streaming to support this capacity.

The only way is up for bandwidth usage.

Categories
Engineer internet media

Video streaming is going to be a mix of technical and commercial problems

Interesting talk  at Linx66 by Giles Heron, Principal Network Architect for 21CN at BT. I’m not going into it all but towards the end he discussed video streaming on the network and ways that this might be made more efficient.

Whilst ISPs and network operators take on the challenge of managing the growth in video streaming I think there is just as big an issue coming along in respect of the commercial and regulatory aspects.

The time is not far off, I believe, where people will stop buying purpose built boxes and rely purely on their internet connection for their TV watching. My kids already do it. The advent of FTTC is going to accelerate this. If you watch TV over the internet the rule is in the UK that you are supposed to have a TV license. This is not currently policed as far as I can see and it is difficult to do so. Last night someone in the family was playing a game on our TV so I watched Usain Bolt do his stuff on my laptop.

It will not be long before the BBC will start seeing its license revenue take start to decline (maybe it already is) which is going to prompt a very high profile crisis. We are going to start getting the same debate re TV watching as we have been having with music piracy – who is going to police it?

The alternative is that the BBC will have to move to a pay as you go model for iPlayer watching.

Well done to Usain by the way if you are reading this. Very good 🙂

Categories
Business internet

Bandwidth Bandits

Internet bandwidth use is continually on the up and is further stimulated each time we roll out faster broadband services.

As the UK ISP community lines itself up to offer 40Mbps broadband based on BT’s Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) proposition it is worth looking at what services and applications businesses are going to use that will take advantage of the increased speeds.

I’m going to start a Bandwidth Bandit thread on trefor.net. A Bandwidth Bandit is an application that uses lots of bandwidth. Deleted in the great category cull of February 2014 🙂

So what do I hear you ask? The point is that it is easy to look at the consumer world and see how someone sitting at home watching online TV might benefit from the access speeds supported by FTTC. Full screen, HD for example. However this isn’t going to turn on a business.

The owner of a business is more likely to say “I don’t want to promote TV watching on my company’s internet connection because it will distract staff from their job”.

Every time I look at the drivers for faster internet access the industry has always come up with the same story – better file transfers and better quality video. Now the use of video has still not really taken off in business, other than the occasional educational stream coming from someone’s website.

So I want to take a look at the bandwidth needs of different applications and see whether faster broadband is really going to facilitate a change in the way businesses work. I guess the biggest enabler is quite likely to be faster uplink. FTTC will in theory support “up to” 5Mbps.

Posts are going to appear on this subject from time to time over the next few weeks. In the meantime if anyone wants to contribute or point me towards material that is likely to add value here please feel free to do so.

As a footnote a business typically uses twice as much bandwidth per broadband connection that a consumer despite the impression one might get from some areas of industry that all consumers do is sit on their broadband connections downloading music and video. Apart from the fact that the business ADSL is more likely to have more people sat behind it using accessing the internet it must also mean that there are an increasing number of applications out there wanting the bandwidth.

Categories
broadband Business internet

The European Commission has Issued its Digital Competitiveness Report

The European Commission is claiming the credit for increasing internet usage in Europe.  In its Digital Competitiveness Report, published a few days ago, it said “the number of regular internet users has increased from 43% in 2005 to 56% in 2008”. Apparently it is all down to it’s i2010 Strategy formulated in 2005.

Fair play to them, I say. Next time someone tells me that YouTube, Facebook, myspace, iPlayer et al are responsible for increased internet usage I will know how to respond 🙂

The report also goes on to say that “the market for mobile phones has exceeded 100% penetration — increasing from 84% of the EU population in 2004 to 119% in 2009. This makes Europe the world leader in mobile penetration, as the rates in the US and Japan are around 80%.

Consumers spend more time talking and texting at prices at least 34.5% less than in 2004, including a 70% drop in roaming charges since 2005.”

At least it is fair to give the EC the credit for the drop in roaming charges. It does amuse me, however, to think that you can have over 100% market penetration. I know this means people have two phones but it doesn’t quite sound right does it?

Categories
broadband Business internet Regs

Digital Britain Broadband Implementation Plan

broadband

Digital Britain publishes 18 headline projects, evokes thoughts of Russian WWI mobilisation plan.

You will all be interested to know that the Government has published its Digital Britain broadband implementation plan.  It’s a headline set of actions that reminds me of why I am not a civil servant.  It makes me think of the Russian mobilisation plan of the first world war for some reason.

Anyway, the Digital Britain broadband implementation plan contains 18 headline projects including a catch all called “Other Relevant Activity”.  Two of them are ones I have been commenting on relating to Next Generation Broadband and Illegal File Sharing.

I just noticed that the timeframe given for 90% penetration of Next Gen broadband access in the UK is 2017.  This is so far into the future in in internet terms as to not matter. I imagine they will have invented teleporting by then which would be ideal for rural dwellers but of course it won’t be availabe to them!  Meanwhile I can envisage a Government celebration party being held to celebrate the 90th percent being hit for what will by then be ultra slow broadband.

Also of interest is the presence of Martha Lane Fox on the Programme Board.

Categories
Cloud Engineer internet

Virtual Machines

I’m doing some research into Virtual Machines, storage trends and cloud computing. I’d be interested in hearing from people who use these services, thinking about using them or from software vendors offering solutions in this space.

I’m particularly interested in who is using such products in the UK. Timico already offers these types of services but I’m looking at expanding this area of activity and would welcome input with product definition and market segmentation.

Anyone wanting to contact me can either just leave a comment on this post or email me (tref at timico.co.uk) and I will happily call them back.  Thanks in advance.

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Business internet

How the Internet can help you through the credit crunch

Article written by yours truly for this month’s Federation of Small Businesses “Business Network” magazine, reproduced herein case you didn’t get your copy.

The last year has been a tough one if you are in business in the UK and preservation of cash has been foremost in the minds of most managers. Companies that emerge successfully at the other end of the downturn will be not only be those that have saved costs but also those nimble enough to position themselves for growth during the new cycle.

Often this means adopting new technology that can improve efficiency as well as saving money. In today’s terms this means moving towards being an “online” business. This doesn’t just mean having an attractive website. It means moving some of the functions of your business into the internet “cloud” thereby reducing costs and increasing productivity.

Typically this also involves moving to a subscription based model with low capital outlay and the ability to scale up or down as your business needs it. The vast majority of applications needed by business today are available either free or via a rental model on the internet.

VoIP
Voice over Internet Protocol, as the name suggests, makes use of internet technology to make phone calls rather than the old fashioned telephone network. No longer an emerging technology VoIP has gone mainstream in a big way and is now used by tens of thousands of businesses in the UK.

During the recession sales of office phone systems have plummeted. People have just stopped buying. Businesses have instead been turning to “hosted VoIP” solutions.

Hosted VoIP is where the phone system is held remotely, typically at a secure datacenter in London’s Docklands. Instead of buying a box to sit in the corner of your office you just rent the service off an Internet Telephony Service Provider, of which there are over 100 now in the UK. All a small business needs is a broadband connection.

Hosted VoIP allows a business the flexibility to grow without having to invest in expensive systems. They are also ideal for companies with home workers (eg sales people) or people who like to work from home sometimes which, with today’s environmental concerns and the cost of fuel, is increasingly becoming a trend. A home worker gets the same service as if he was in the office and calls between extensions are free wherever they are.

eMail
eMail was one of the first internet applications to be adopted by business. Historically for small businesses basic email was provided by their Internet Service Provider. Big business bought its own, highly functional email system, normally Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes.

Nowadays this differentiator has disappeared. With hosted Exchange and Hosted Blackberry even one man bands can now have the same high end email and mobile email function as the biggest corporation.

If you don’t want to pay anything and provided you don’t want to use your own company domain name you can also use free email and calendar services such as those provided by Google et al.

Web based marketing
Web based marketing, as stated earlier, no longer means putting up a website and counting the vists. It must encompass many strands including lead generation and online ordering, (ie eCommerce).

Companies would also do well to harness the power of new Web2.0 facilities such as Facebook and Twitter. Large companies employ staff just to manage the company’s Facebook and Twitter presence. Dell, for example, is proactive in seeking out people commenting, good and bad, on the company’s products and services. Dell contacts the complainants and find out how they could improve the customer experience.

This needn’t mean employing dedicated staff. It might means as little as setting up a Facebook page to advertise a specific product or service.

There are some very high profile business successes where Facebook has been used to market a product. Animoto, for example, was a startup offering an unique photo album service. Customers upload their photos and Animoto’s system sets them to music in a slide show that is totally different for every customer.

Animoto used Amazon’s cloud computing service to host their system. Within 48 hours of advertising their service on Facebook the rush of new customers meant that they had to scale up their use of Amazon’s cloud based “virtual” computers from 30 machines to 4,000.

Cloud computing
This use of the internet by what was a small business meant that Animoto could grow their system without having to make the risky capital investment up front. The same rationale can be applied to storing your company’s vital data. Many members of the FSB will be too small to have their own IT resource. Subscribing to an online backup service can bring huge peace of mind. The ability to quickly recover data from a crashed PC could make or break a business.

Whatever tactics you employ to survive the credit crunch it is clear that the internet should have a big part to play in your plans.

Categories
Business internet ofcom Regs

Ofcom report indicates reduction in music downloading

The Communications Market Report published by Ofcom yesterday has thrown up some interesting stats in subject areas regularly commented on in this blog.

For example Ofcom says that there is an overall reduction in the number of people downloading music and videos.  This overall decrease is only 1% but the number is marked in certain age groups.  15 – 24 year olds are downloading 8% fewer files and the maturer 25 – 44 age group is at it 5% less.

Now there is nothing to say that all these downloads are against the law but this must surely point to an overall reduction in illegal P2P filesharing which must in large part be down to all the high profile activity in this space of Feargal Sharkey and UK music. Any comment Feargal?

There is an awful lot of work left to be done in this area and it is going to be the subject of discussion for some years to come.  Ofcom’s chart purloined below – click twice to get a better res view.

ofcom09

Note downloading has increased amongst older folks. One imagines this age group is less likelyto illegally fileshare. Also note increase in uploading content.  This is going to be a driver for Next Gen broadband as currently being rolled out by Virgin and trialled by BT.

Categories
Engineer internet social networking

Twitter downed by ddos attack

I have to apologise to Dave Ward who manages the firewall at Timico HQ in Newark.  I complained to him that he was blocking me from accessing Twitter and he scurried off to check having denied it all. (it’s not a criminal offence in my book anyway).

I just read that Twitter was this afternoon hit by a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack which took out the service for a few hours from around 2pm.  Sorry Dave.  Whenever I publish a blog post Wordpress automatically sends a tweet on the subject which in turn updates my Facebook status. What would we do without Twitter eh?

Categories
Business internet net neutrality voip

Net neutrality, Skype and Commissioner Reding

Continuing with the theme of reports I’ve been reading the EuroISPA report that comes across my desk every month. Like it or not when the EC magisterially waves its authoritative hand we do feel the ripples in the UK.

This month in response to a parliamentary question on T-Mobile blocking Skype over broadband networks in Germany, Commissioner Reding, interestingly, referred to the provision of the Universal Directive, namely art. 2(3), whereby National Regulatory Authorities are empowered to intervene by setting minimum quality of service requirements for network transmission services, “as an additional safeguard in instances where competitive forces alone, are not enough to safeguard the openness of the Internet”.

If you’re like me your mind goes blank when you read all this regulatory jargon.  However with this one we need to note that in the pursuit of net neutrality, which as a consumer I’m all for, setting minimum quality of service levels requirements on ISPs is going to cost money. Skype should not be blocked by anyone but neither should ISPs be obliged to prioritise Skype traffic without someone footing the bill.

By the way you can use Skype to your heart’s content on the Timico network though most of our business VoIP customers chose to use our own VoIP service.