another catch-all really for internet related posts
I’m looking at taking on a product manager with a background in the ISP industry. This is part of Timico’s evolution as a communications provider where our focus is increasingly on managed internet services. This could be a job for a literate engineer looking to expand their horizons into the business side of things. I’m also looking to expand our project management team.
If you fancy a chat about this drop me a line at Timico or give me a ring.
I understand that Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP is set to become the new Communications Minister, with responsibility for taking forward the recommendations of the Digital Britain broadband review. The position had been vacated when Lord Carter stepped down following the publication of the Review. It is likely that the role will change slightly, given that Mr Timms will sit jointly across the Department for Business and the Treasury, whereas Lord Carter’s position sat jointly across the Department for Business and the DCMS.
A former Internet Hero at the ISPAs, Stephen Timms brings significant experience to the role having worked in the telecommunications industry before entering Parliament and having previously served as a Minister with responsibility for e-Commerce at the DTI and BERR.
Whether the treasury connection will have any relevance remains to be seen. I see one of the biggest challenges for this Government is going to be how it faces up to the need to invest massively in the Next Generation Access network (ie fibre).
Whilst I was on holiday I visited my in laws in Liverpool. Grandad had saved me an article from the local paper describing the outcry amongst Liverpudlian councillors when they found that BT’s initial £1,5m investment in Fibre To The Cabinet was not going to be gracing their fair city with it’s presence whilst favouring local rivals Manchester. Nonsense I cried and reached for my BT FTTC broadband rollout map (never go anywhere without it).
To my surprise, he was right. All the dots identifying the initial (spring 2010) roll out sites come no closer than Altrincham. The good burghers of Liverpool should not feel that they have been singled out, because there will be huge swathes of the UK left out in the high speed broadband cold. I don’t for a moment blame BT, although I’m sure that competition from Virgin will in due course give them a bit of a prod in the right direction.
This is why I say that the Government has a lot to do in this space, and why I wish Stephen Timms every success in his new role.
You may have noted the spam theme of my posts this week. This is because we are in the process of upgrading our anti spam capabilities. The management of spam is a hugely complex process and involves many factors contributing to a scorecard against which an email is rated.
There is a general set of principles that the industry could apply that would make it a lot harder for spammers. Unfortunately many ISPs seem to the fairly lenient with their customers about how they set up their email services and are prepared to accept mail from poorly configured mail servers.
For example most spam comes from compromised Windows computers at residential or business premises. When a host connects, ie when a mail is being set up for sending, it should perform a HELO with it’s fully qualified domain name (FQDN) as specified in RFCs (industry standards or standards in waiting). The sender sometimes lies and presents a fake or incorrect HELO string, which can be used to judge the validity of the sending server. The string given at HELO time should have forward and reverse DNS that matches.
Additionally, the reverse DNS of the sending host could be considered. If there is no reverse DNS, it’s very unlikely that the mail is legitimate, and should be rejected. If the reverse DNS makes it clear that the sending host is within a DSL pool, ie at the user premises at the end of an ADSL line rather than an ISP’s mail server, this could also be taken into consideration when it comes to scoring.
A genuine Reverse DNS might look like mail.timico.net whereas a corresponding ADSL based DNS, (and therefore likely to be the source of spam), would be xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.adsl.timico.net where the x’s represent the ip address.
Another technique in the fight against spam is to rate limit emails from users. In other words to apply a policy controlling a maximum number of emails an individual can send in a day. A rate limit for a residential user might be 200 mails a day for example. It is unlikely that the residential user will send more than 10 or 20 mails in a day. A compromised machine may, however, send thousands in the same time period. The rate limit would prevent this.
Customers with a genuine need to send more emails than the limit can easily be accommodated. The limit is there to protect the user rather than to stop them sending emails. The spam being sent would normally be caught here anyway but this technique does at least minimize the load on spam filters.
The factors taken into consideration in spam scoring systems are not normally made public domain because to do so would just help spammers.
I sometimes sit and watch SPAM attacks coming in on our mail servers. ISPs are constantly having to ward off spam. It is like being in a cyber war. What is mind boggling is that sheer volume. The chart below shows unwanted mail below the x axis and legitimate stuff above.
You can barely make out the legitimate mail because in the scale it is dwarfed by the spam. It is also interesting to observe that the attacks come in waves. You can see the major incoming waves on Sunday evening followed by periodic smaller attacks which appear to be the work of botnets.
This spam is of course not passed on to our customers who pay us for a premium service. You can zoom in by clicking a couple of times on the picture.
The Internet Services Provider Association has been announced as the winner of Nominet’s Best Practice Awards in the Raising Industry Standards category. The awards recognise organisations that have embraced the challenge of making the Internet a secure, open, accessible and diverse experience for all.
The ‘Raising Industry Standards’ category honours organisations that promote high standards of ethics in business, deliver an exceptional standard of customer service to online customers, promote Corporate Social Responsibility within the Internet industry and take a leading role in developing consumer confidence in the Internet.
ISPA was able to prove that it has worked with members to ensure high standards through adherence to the mandatory Code of Practice and voluntary Best Practice documents. ISPA further cited its cooperation with Government in promoting effective self-regulation and its third party dispute resolution service for consumers as examples of raising standards in the sector.
I pinched that spiel from the ISPA website but I have to say I am proud to be involved with this activity. The ISPA is a very well run professional trade association which does a great deal of good work for the industry.
Nominet, for those of you who have never registered your own .uk domain name, manages all the UK’s domain names(eg .co.uk, .org.uk). Last time I looked there were around 8 million of these. The day will come where everyone will have their own domain name. If anyone is interested, in my will in I am leaving trefor.net to my 9 year old. Funnily enough at this time he isn’t quite sure that this is a good thing. He will come around to my view in time.
Our broadband network usage hit a new high yesterday as Andy Murray wallopped Juan Carlos Ferrero in straight sets at Wimbledon. The peak remained at a constant high between 4 and 5pm, at which point presumably everyone left the office and watched it at home because the network traffic dropped right off.
My understanding is that whilst an ISP’s network might well have been able to cope with the added traffic levels some problems were caused at local exchange level where virtual paths were seeing congestion. The virtual path is the backhaul from exchange into the BT network and on to the internet, and in this case to the BBC website.
BT’s new 21CN network should be better placed to withstand this sort of traffic burst.
Expect another peak when “our Andy” plays in the semi final. I feel as if I have known him all my life :-).
Here we go again. Wimbledon. I never used to be a Wimbledon watcher but since taking my tennis playing son to see the tournament last year (Centre Court, Murray, Nadal, Venus Williams) I have changed my attitude.
This year I’m watching it from the office. The web traffic that is. At 13.00 hrs our network usage shot up and looking at it it is a mix of video streams that is making it happen. The same happened during Obama’s inaugural speech, this year’s budget speech (why?!) and last summer’s Olympics.
The effect is a bit like half time at an FA Cup Final when half the country gets up to make a cup of tea. The other half of course gets up to go to the fridge to get another beer. Those kettles all going on at the same time ramps up the demand on the electricity network just like Roger Federer does for the internet.
I’m not really a football fan myself. Come on Andy Murray!
It’s worth looking at the heroes and villains finalists for this year’s ISPA Awards. The spiel that goes with each is an adequate summary of why they are in the list and needs no further comment from me. The heroes all deserve to win and the villains all deserve to lose.
On balance my vote goes to Stephen Carter for Hero. Whether he will have left a worthwhile legacy with the Digital Britain Report remains to be seen but at least he tried.
As far as Villains go I think they should all be locked up in the big brother house and the winner is the winner, if you know what I mean. Otherwise if I had to vote I’d go for Sarkozy because of the port blockades, air traffic controller strikes etc 🙂
Internet Hero
• Billy Bragg and the Featured Artists Coalition – “For recognising publicly that the focus of music companies should be the development of new business models for distributing content online rather than attempting to pass responsibility to ISPs to take action against users”
• Community Broadband Network – “For their relentless pursuit and support for next generation access at grass roots level”
• European Parliament – “For rejecting by a significant majority an amendment to the Telecom Package designed to allow disconnection of users’ Internet connections for alleged copyright infringement without direct judicial oversight”
• Lord Carter – “For his attempt to bring a holistic view to government policy across the communications spectrum”
• Thomas Gensemer – “For showcasing the enormous power of the Internet in leading Barack Obama’s online presidential campaign”
Internet Villain
• Baroness Vadera – “For excluding a number of ISPs and Rights Holders in agreeing a Memorandum of Understanding that was exclusive and ineffective in progressing relations between the two industries”
• European Parliament – “For supporting an amendment to the Telecom Package on cookies which could yet bring the Internet to a standstill”
• President Nicolas Sarkozy – “For his continued commitment to the HADOPI law, which advocates a system of graduated response, despite repeated arguments suggesting the law is disproportionate from a number of important groups including the European Parliament”
• Stephen Conroy and the Australian Government – “For continuing to promote network-level blocking despite significant national and international opposition”
Following the publication of the Digital Britain Report there was a late entry suggestion that Lord Carter might also appear as a Villain with his 50 pence tax on phone lines. This missed the deadline so he stays as just a goodie on the list.
Timico has a table at the ISPAs. Look me up if you are there.
Two funding streams have been identified for the 2Mbps Universal Service Obligation and the longer term Next Generation Access broadband. The 50 pence per analogue line will raise about £180m a year and the diversion of funds from the unused digital TV switchover fund will account for £200m.
I guess my point is that in last year’s Caio Report the NGA network was estimated to cost £29Bn and a large proportion of this would have been spent in areas that currently can’t get broadband and would be in the USO area.. The per line cost of providing 2Mbps is probably not much less than the 40 or 50Mbps talked about in NGA.
So the funding identified for USO can only be a start and there is a scenario where they might just as well go straight for the fast stuff. It is good that the Government has recognised that the Digital Divide exists but they do need to do more.
2Mbps Universal Service Obligation by 2012.
This is the minimum that people need to get into the game. In the report the government recognizes that whilst much of the country will shortly be getting access to faster broadband (aka BT 40Mbps Fibre To The Cabinet or 50Mbps Virgin cable) a significant chunk won’t, which will exacerbate the Digital Divide.
The Government is therefore looking to promote/fund the extension of this Next Generation Access network into these “excluded” areas. I have been saying that 2Mbps is not enough and it is good that the Government clearly recognizes this.
The funding for the rural Next Gen broadband access is likely to come from a complex variety of sources. It includes a new tax levied of 50 pence on every copper phone line. I assume it includes Virgin cable connections to keep the playing field level. This will have to be passed on to customers so the immediate effect is a rise in the cost of broadband. It will also add to the overheads of the ISP which has to collect it.
The funding collected will be available on a competitive tender basis. I would expect the Government to somehow identify specific projects for funding and make the moneys available for competitive bids. Otherwise someone with BT with the massive resources available to put specific projects together would cream all the cash.
Music Piracy
Two things to say here. The Government recognizes that access to legal means of downloading music needs to improve which reinforces what the ISP industry has been saying (note the many blog posts on this subject).
Secondly the Government also wants a more graduated approach to punishing illegal downloaders. The three strikes and you are out approach has been replaced much to everyone’s relief.
We now appear to be looking at a scenario whereby the ISP would send a letter to the end user informing them that they have been identified as offenders. The next step would be to throttle the bandwidth available to users indulging in this activity or block P2P. The final resort would be legal action.
A cautionary note here. Most ISPs cannot easily block P2P. Only those big consumer players typically have the kit that can do it. Are we looking at the same scenario as the Data Retention Act where the Government only expects an ISP to follow the law only if specifically asked. In this case the ISP would have to be funded to do it.
There is also a fairly significant onus on Ofcom to make all this happen which is going to be an interesting play. I imagine it will take no small level of resource which probably doesn’t currently exist.
All in all I think this is a good report. There were always going to be difficulties with putting together a document with such a wide remit and I’m sure that as we get time to digest it other questions will arise. However Lord Carter should be able to move on to his fresh challenges with a reasonable sense of satisfaction.
Bit of a long post title but this is the feedback from research conducted in June on consumer behaviour and preferences in respect of music downloading. The research was commissioned by music site We7 and conducted on 2012 consumers aged 16 to 60 over 7 days in June 2009.
Its key findings make very interesting reading:
All this reinforces the ISP industry’s position that what we need is more legal ways for consumers to easily access music online. 7 million consumers can’t be criminals. We7 is doing a great job pioneering this so thanks goes to Steve Purdham, and his team.
Tonight I’m going to go home and listen to some free and legal music streaming online. Frank Sinatra methinks.
Virgin has announced a deal with record label Universal that will provide unlimited access to the company’s music catalogue for a fixed monthly fee. The level of this fee is as yet unnanounced but is reckoned to be the equivalent to the cost of two albums. The service will be available by Christmas 09.
The biggest aspect of this news is that Virgin has also undertaken to attempt to tackle the problem of online music piracy with the ulitmate disconnection a potential penalty for persistent offenders. This appears to be a big step forward and is likely timed in advance of the Digital Britain report, delayed now until later this week.
This deal is likely to bring pressure to bear on other large consumer ISPs. It does remain to be seen how the removal of broadband service from persistent pirates (to put it poetically) is handled. This has been the one aspect of the debate that has had ISPs up in arms. They don’t want to be seen to be doing the police’s job.
The Virgin paid for model is of course different to the We7 advertising funded service discussed last week. The whole area is of a great deal of interest to many people. My We7 posts get more hits than any other published item on this blog. Helped no doubt by the fact that I have been giving away free We7 promotional codes :-).
If you want one let me know. I got a fresh batch in recently.
An Ofcom study suggests that 2 in 10 people without broadband internet access at home intend to get it within the next six months. They say that 70% of us already have it (68% broadband internet, 2% narrowband!). So the 20% of the remaining 30% suggests that 6% of the whole population will rush to sign up in the next 6 months.
That’s a fairly significant number of people signing up for broadband internet access. Being a bit of a sceptic sometimes I did read the report (exec summary anyway, me being an exec and all) to see whether I could believe it.
Actually, there is one simple metric that does tend to support the number: growth in people with PCs at home. The chart below shows the growth in fixed, mobile, internet and PC use at home. You can see that a significant 4 percent of people have a PC but not an internet connection. That together with a continued growth trend does suggest credibility.
Note the flat mobile growth and the gradual decline in fixed line.
There has been a land grab for broadband over the last few years with some high profile industry consolidations aimed purely at growing market share and bulking up what has long become a commoditised ADSL business.
Whilst the ADSL growth has not stopped at Timico we are seeing a trend of businesses installing leased lines as well as broadband. Companies are becoming increasingly reliant on the internet and IP communications to run their business critical applications. Down time costs them money and leased lines are more reliable than ADSL because there are fewer areas where things can go wrong.
Also the cost of leased lines have dropped significantly in many areas of the country as UK PLC grows its infrastructure. Going for higher bandwidth and reliability that comes with the technology is no longer as cost prohibitive as it used to be.
It is an exciting time to be around for a communications provider. I’m finding that the more leased lines we sell the better we get at doing so which in turn means we sell more. Hooray!
I have been getting more and more hits on an old post about We7 where I was giving away promo codes for free music downloads.
In a dialogue on this subject with We7 CTO Gareth Reakes I was extremely impressed to find that they seem to be on the way to cracking the business model for giving away “free” music online.
The whole music streaming business model has been a debating point with the content industry for the last 12 months or so as ISPs and the Music Industry struggled to find a viable, mutually beneficial approach.
Several big name sites have got into difficulty over the model. YouTube have allegedly lost hundreds of millions of dollars (apparently 89% of YouTube traffic is(was) music) and imeem.com allegedly in debt to the record labels for tens of millions.
It is easy to attract visitors to your website if you are giving something away free but not so easy to make money.
What We7 has done is to fine tune the model so that the revenues balance out the costs.
Reakes said “We are trying to grow at while increasing ad revenues as we go and ensuring the model can work. What it comes down to is the number of ad impressions you get per stream you serve (this includes ads as they surf around the site looking for new content). With us that ration is between 3 and 4.
What this means is that you can get to a reasonable CPM rate (cost per thousand impressions – its how ads are priced) which is as low as £2.50. This really is an achievable rate. That’s not even factoring in the recent MCPS/PRS reduction in rate from 0.22p to 0.085p which reduces our costs per stream by over 10%.”
The key here is that We7 can get as many as 4 ads in your face/ear whilst you are listening to a track. This adds up to the equivalent of a CMP rate of £10 whilst the advertiser is on average only charged £2.50. Compare this with up to £60 at the FT and £25 at the Register. Not the same target audience I know but it does give you a feel for the attractiveness of the rates.
The reduction in the MCPS rate has also been a big help although this together with payments to the record labels still amounts to around 1 pence per stream.
We7 has been growing at a very attractive rate. Reakes again:
“We will reach a couple of good milestones soon (we are nearly at million monthly unique visitors). I suppose one of the most interesting things from my point of view is that we are starting to get great reach with our widgets. We now have partnerships with The Guardian and NME where they show the widgets. They are also picked up in many many other places. The whole distribution of music and being able to listen to it anywhere is very interesting. We have had .75 million unique visitors to the widget on all its sites in the last 30 days! (that excludes anything on our site).”
This is a great story and the team at We7 is to be congratulated on their progress. I didn’t ask them whether they have reached profitability yet but this suggests that it can only be a matter of time.
I have had quite a few unanswered requests for We7 promo codes recently. Hold on tight guys and I’ll send some more out this week. Also We7 have said that if I want more to just ask so keep the requests coming. This batch is for ad free music.
I went in to BBC Radio Lincolnshire this morning, as is my occasional wont, this time to talk about email scams. I am not particularly a security expert but I guess being in the ISP game I would get more exposure to this than your average Radio Lincolnshire listener.
It was all about phishing emails from people after your bank account details, and especially spoof emails notionally from people you know. As a bit of background research I googled “how to hack MSN” and I was astounded to find 952,000 websites on the subject.
Similarly there was plenty on Twitter and no doubt there will be stuff out there on Facebook and others. I didn’t follow more than a couple of links and the first article had already been removed. It does certainly highlight the vulnerabilities of the web.
I get phishing email daily, mostly caught in my spam quarantine folder, and all of which get ignored/deleted. I do get some very genuine looking spam though appearing to come from reputable contacts. In one example a business partner of Timico’s had its contact databased copied a number of years ago. I still get spam appearing to come from this partner. There is nothing they can do about it. The data is gone.
I have never personally met someone who has been caught out by one of these phishing attempts. Not that is until last night when a friend rang me up and during the conversation mentioned that it had only just happened to him. He was busy and stupidly responded to an email and typed in his bank account details!
Luckily for him the bank spotted an unusual transaction and refunded the cash after calling him to check. It just goes to show how easily it can happen – to the unwary.
We are just in the process of installing a 1 Gigabit Ethernet fibre link to the Timico Headquarters in Newark. The process is in massive contrast to our friends in Wennington, Lanacashire who have had to get a digger out and become experts at diy fibre laying.
In our case this first Gig link will go into existing ducts. See photo below.
This 1Gig link is actually the first of two diversely routed fibre connections that we are putting in to increase resilience to the site. I’m goingto follow the upgrade together with developments in our colo offering in pictures on the blog.
The photo does bring a wry smile. The fibre, if you can make out the colour is lilac. The blue is the thin rope that is used to pull the fibre through the ducts – in theory this is left in place underground in all ducts for this very purpose. It makes me think of the tin can and string telephone analogy. The string can carry a single conversation. The fibre, as it stands, could carry around simultaneous 20,000 calls.
Lastly I did struggle with the title for this post. “You light up my life”, “let there be light” and “trip the light fantastic” all sprang to mind. Take your pick :-).
I’m happy to say that Ethernet in the First Mile is starting to get customers excited. EFM? Yet another !”£#@ acronym do I hear you say?
Yes and actually EFM is quite an exciting proposition in 21CN enabled exchanges around the country. That’s around 600 now with notionally 1,100 by the time BT has finished the rollout.
EFM is a copper based Ethernet service to the customer, capable of carrying high bandwidth connections without the need for fibre into the customer premises. It provides “up to” 10Mbps (<3km from the exchange).
The beauty of the technology is that it bundles up to 5 copper pairs from the exchange to the premises to attain the bandwidth throughput. If any of these pairs “go down” then the service will rate adjust to a lower speed based on the remaining circuits rather than failing completely.
Whilst customers don’t necessarily get the reliability and uptime of a fibre leased the EFM circuits are considerably cheaper with much faster installation lead times (and don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying EFM is unreliable – it’s basically the same as ADSL).
What’s more we can incorporate EFM connections into an MPLS VPN/PWAN. EFM gives businesses far more flexibility in the type of circuits they can build into a network design.
It does strike me that anyone thinking of getting into the ISP business these days is onto a loser. Timico has its own direct connection to BT for EFM. This is in addition to circuits for SDH, framestream, Ethernet, SDSL/ADSL, ADSL2+ and 3G (wireless).
We also have direct connectivity with BT Wholesale, BT Openreach, Telewest/NTL/Virgin (whatever you are used to calling them), Global Crossing, Claranet, Tiscali (ahem) and Cable and Wireless, notwithstanding our links to transit providers and peering exchanges such as LINX.
I’m not saying that the situation is different to what it was like 5 years ago when Timico started. At that time our decision was to buy Atlas Internet to get into the game and since then we have added two further acquisitions. The complexities and the scale required to be competitive have however changed.
Our first BT central pipe (ie wholesale ADSL connection) was a single 34Mbps link. Now we are into multiple 622Mbps and multiple Gigabit fibre. These represent large cost commitments that new entrants should balk at or at least recognise that they would have to have very deep pockets.
Note 1 !”£#@ = “bloomin”
Note 2 apologies to friend and blog reader Dan Ellin who has made some comments on Facebook regarding the number and incomprehensibility of acronyms in this industry 🙂
The BBC has an article online regarding the fact that BT is broadband throttling the iPlayer traffic of customers taking “Option1”. Option1 appears to be BT’s cheapest broadband package at 8Mbps with a 10GB download limit.
I’m afraid that it is a fact of life that ISPs cannot afford to keep providing the services they do at the prices they do without some element of constraint over what consumers can download.
BT’s website does have a long list of caveats for its broadband service. They are quite open about the fact that they “network traffic manage” P2P and video streaming between their peak hours of 5pm and midnight although you might argue that the fair usage policy has become quite a complex one for people to understand. Also whilst openly promoting the fact that users can watch online TV they fail to mention that only the lowest quality iPlayer setting is accommodated at these peak times.
The problem is about to get worse as higher speed 21CN connections become more prevalent and trials about to begin on 40Mbps services using Fibre To The Cabinet. Customers will expect to be able to get high quality video streaming with these services. Indeed video and likely HD video, will be one of the drivers for uptake of faster broadband.
Note whilst checking out the BT website I observed that the company sells its 10GB download limit as the equivalent of 2,500 music file downloads, 14 videos or 25 hours of streaming iPlayer a month.
This riles the music industry no end. Does anyone believe that consumers download 2,500 “paid for” music files? Is BT inadvertently helping to promote illegal P2P filesharing here?
I woke up Friday morning to a BBC news report claiming that a report had found that there were 7 million people in the UK indulging in illegal file sharing. This was based on a report by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property and one which I have been looking forward to reading.
The report does in fact make very interesting reading though even the executive summary is fourteen pages long so I’m not going to replicate it all here. This then is the executive summary of the executive summary with bits left out.
Between 44% (USA) and 79% (Eastern Europe) of internet traffic is taken up with illegal file sharing. As a B2B ISP Timico does not see this level of P2P though I can understand why consumer ISPs invest heavily in packet shaping technology.
Up to 7 million people are illegalling downloading music and movies. With only 2.3 million full time students this must mean that non students are also doing it.
A large number of people assume that they can get such material for free and that they won’t get caught. This is changing basic assumptions about the idea of ownership, sharing and copying content and that new business models are needed.
The report also does suggest that industry, ISPs included, need to play their part but recognises the difficult situation that ISPs are in. If consumers get clamped down on will this change the way they behave generally in using the internet?
All this is good reading in the run up to the publication of the Digital Britain Report in a couple of weeks time. Although I hope I am wrong I increasingly get the feeling that Digital Britain is not really going to come up with any kind of solution to this problem.
Both the exec summary and the full version of the SABIP report can be found here.
Having discussed the suitability of “bing” as a name for a search engine someone mentioned that they had recently found a site called WolframAlpha. Now that’s what I call a name.
WolframAlpha is a “computational knowledge engine”. It is worth a look. I suspect that it has a long way to go before matching google though. I typed in a simple question: “how many IPv6 addresses are there” and it didn’t know where to look.
Also it is fairly flawed in other ways. I typed in my birth date, December 9th, 1961 (it likes it the American way round) and whilst it did come up with some really useful statistics such as the fact that I have now been on this planet for 17,338 days it could only come up with some actor called Joe Lando as having been born on that day. Huh!
Interestingly, site founder Stephen Wolfram went to Eton with our CFO Jonathan Radford.
As a footnote to the bing post I have already seen some favourable comments on it on Facebook. Time will tell.
I see that Microsoft has launched “bing” as its latest offering to compete with Google. I checked and this isn’t April 1st so it must be true. All I can say is it better be good at what it does because the name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue and it will need real customer loyalty for people to go to the site.
Ping would have been hugely better but no chance of getting that domain name. Microsoft will have spent millions researching the name!
I wonder whether bing is the Urdu word for white elephant? I’ll check.
I don’t know about you but I have started getting spam through Facebook. So far it isn’t the classical type of spam selling viagra etc. I have however been getting friend requests from attractive young ladies with exotic names.
I also seem to be inundated with notifications of rubbish that I have no interest in checking out.
I was discussing this with Dave Ward, one of our Tech Consultants, who mentioned that Fortinet have now brought out Spam2.0 filters for their firewalls. Social Networking sites have started having their vulnerabilities exploited.
People are getting spammed with direct messages, apparently from friends. Facebook chat, for example, is one way used to insert worms onto someone’s PC and thence onto your network.
Fortinet has an application that allows companies to let employees access Facebook whilst blocking access to applications such as chat known to be vunerable. Screenshot below. You might need to click a couple of times on the picture to get it to a viewable size/quality. Also check out the recent Wikipedia article on Social Networking Spam.
PS Don’t get me wrong here. I am a happily married man and whilst I’m sure I quite like being chatted up by nice young ladies one has to ask why complete strangers, whose interests seem to be dating and meeting members of the opposite sex, would want to approach me…
I attended Wireless 09 at Olympia today. There were a number of talks I thought worth hearing including one by James McCarthy, Microsoft’s Head of Business Marketing. This one turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Probably my fault really as I was looking for details of Microsoft Mobile Applications and how they interact with the desktop.
Instead we were treated to a high level philosophical talk on removing barriers in business based on some research that Micrsoft had commissioned. Typical big company, big marketing budget stuff I thought.
I think most of the audience thought this too. The chap next to me fell asleep and there were initially no questions. When the questions did arrive they were on standard Microsoft products with no real link to what had been the subject of the talk.
Ah well. James McCarthy incidentally, not to do him down, was a good speaker and was the spitting image of actor Hugh Grant.
The previous talk was by Jon S. von Tetzchner, Co-Founder and CEO of Opera Software. Opera is an interesting company and I hadn’t realised the size that they have grown to- 675 people according to von Tetzchner.
Their browser business is based on the fact that all applications are moving into the cloud and every device needs to be able to access these apps. I doubt anyone would argue otherwise but he did put up some interesting statistics.
It was suggested that back in 1997 80% of all Applications were based on someone’s PC, with the 20% balance being web based. By 2007 he said that his had changed to only 15% being based on the PC and 85% on the web. Whilst adding a caveat that his was not a scientific survey it certainly does underline the trend.
Because the value of the British pound has dropped in recent times the UK is now becoming an attractive place for international ISP networks to connect.
LINX in particular has seen 17 international networks join the peering group out of a total of 19 new members in the last three months.
In order to keep costs down ISPs peer with other networks. In other words they agree to route each others’ traffic for free. Running the LINX network obviously costs money and this is funded by the members so it isn’t a “free” service but it does play a major part in keeping down the costs to customers.
LINX CTO Mike Hughes told us that traffic across the LINX network has reached 460Gbps. Thats up 40Gbps in the last quarter and around 60% up year on year.
The growth is partly due to new members and whilst this isn’t a definitive statement on the growth rate of the internet it does match quite well with other sources.
In the last year the growth pas particularly come through an increase in the number of 10Gbps connections, up now to 175 ports. The LINX team is already preparing for 100Gbps technology, the standard for which is due to be ratified next year.
The chart clearly shows the growth of the number of 10 Gig ports over the last few years. It’s a bit grainy but clear enough. The network capacity is now north of 2Terrabits per second over 650 ports.
Following on from yesterday’s post re Telecity’s new capacity plans in Europe the company told me today that the first tranche in Powergate, its new West London datacentre, is 95% sold. That’s 95% of 4.5MW according to Telecity, and in less than a year!
With a total of 10MW potentially available there is still some way to go but it wouldn’t mind betting that they are already looking for a site for their next UK build.
I’m pleased to report that Timico has been selected as an ISPA Awards finalist in the Best Business Customer Service category.
When you consider that there are hundreds of B2B ISPS in the UK Ithink this is good going especially as this is our first attempt. There was also a record number of entries this year which makes it feel even better.
Levels of service are what differentiates ISPs in this game so this is an important category to do well in. This will hopefully send out a strong message to potential new customers – we want your business 🙂 .
If you see me at the awards evening on the 9th July come up and say hello.
First day of LINX65 produced the usual interesting mix of talks. Today included IPv6 and VoIP QoS.
The sponsor’s talk at the end was given by Rob Coupland, COO of datacentre operator, Telecity. In Europe Telecity operates in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Milan and Frankfurt. A good footprint to have.
What was interesting was the statistic he floated that the company is doubling its datacentre power capacity over the next couple of years.
I counted 26.5MW in total! They plan to sell this over the next 3 – 4 years. This is a big bet that they appear to be confident of placing based on the uptake that they are already seeing. One of the big drivers they are (unsurprisingly) seeing is content provision.
I’m not making any comment re the effect on Global Warming here seeing as we at Timico are also in the business. I guess at the scale that we are talking about though cooling efficiencies will make a huge difference.
For completeness the last two videos in the series including the connecting and lighting of the fibre. You need to follow the posts from the beginning of the week to get the full story.