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Business internet

Marvellous Monitoring Mashup

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

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

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

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

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

monitoring embedded into Google Earth

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

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

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

Categories
Business internet

UK Council For Child Internet Safety

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

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

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

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

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

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Business internet

Staggercast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Business internet

Timico Goes Live With 21CN

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

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

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

Onwards and upwards.

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

Categories
Business internet

BT Slips IP Stream Connect By Over a Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hopefully we will now have weathered this BT induced storm.

Categories
Business internet

The Caio Report – Next Generation Access

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Categories
Business internet

Lincoln City Centre WiFi Project

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

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

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

Categories
Business internet

Suicide and the Internet

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

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

Categories
Engineer internet security

Network Monitoring Network Monitoring

So good they named it twice. Actually I was trying to think of a sexy title for network monitoring but I couldn’t. Network monitoring is the unsung hero of a communications business. A network has to have monitoring in place to allow staff to keep an eye its health but it isn’t what might be called an exciting product.

You would of course expect an ISP to monitor its network. Perhaps less expected would be for a normal business to do this. However as a business grows, so does its network and the truth is that the network is increasingly likely to become mission critical.

Monitoring individual nodes on a public network has been standard practice for a long time. However when it comes to a private network then traditionally this has been done from a device (monitoring server) within the network. This is fine but if that network is purely private with no external access then it can be difficult for a network operator to provide support. 

A neat solution is via virtual server which is what Timico does for private networks requiring ongoing monitoring. A virtual server sits logically inside a customer’s private network but is accessible via secure command line from the Network Operation Centre.

This a hugely more cost effective solution than providing a standalone network monitoring server for each private network. It is also easier to provide resilience to the service by providing two separate virtual machines on two geographically separated bits of hardware.

And what gets monitored?  The list is endless but here are a few ideas

  • Bandwidth usage on a link – have you provided enough connectivity to a location
  • Router temperature – anticipate a failure
  • UPS battery voltage – does it need replacing?
  • Ping response times – is there a quality issue in the network?
  • server hard drive usage – forecast capacity requirements
  • remote router up or down? minimise downtime with speedy replacement.

There isn’t one single ideal solution for network monitoring. Best practice involves amalgamating a number of tools and providing suitable alert mechanisms. 

What is done with the alert also needs to be considered in the light of the needs of an individual business. Some might get away with a next day fix and others might need a speedier solution particularly where health and safety is concerned or when downtime means loss of revenue.

If you need advice on network monitoring drop me a line at Timico.

Categories
Business internet net neutrality

The complex world in which we live

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Business internet

Online reading

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Business internet voip

September 11th

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
End User internet

Large Hadron Collider

The LHC is in the news at the moment. I am pleased to tell you that I gave a talk at CERN probably 15 years or more ago, about radiation hard circuit design using Silicon on Sapphire technology. The LHC was being planned at that time. It involved having to go to Geneva and dining in the executive canteen (restaurant) in the company of 3 Nobel prizewinners.

It’s all very well of course but how does this relate to the subject matter covered in this blog. Much of the R&D for the world wide web was done at CERN, culminating in the world’s first ever website in 1990 (pictured below – sorry I don’t have the source to credit other than CERN themselves).

For anyone worried about the end of the world happening when they switch on the experiment follow this link for reassurance http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/.

 

Categories
broadband End User internet

How to Get Faster Broadband — Move to Spain

If you want to get faster broadband move to somewhere like Spain. Aha do I hear you say? Just the excuse you have been waiting for to make the move to a place in the sun? A bit drastic I’d say especially when I explain that the reason you might get faster broadband in Spain is because it almost certainly rains less there than in the good old UK.

It’s very interesting what snippets you pick up at Timico. Today, whilst gazing out the window at yet another downpour, I quizzed the tech support team as to whether there were any hot topics occupying their time. “Broadband” they responded. “We always get more broadband calls when it is raining”.

This took me somewhat by surprise but I checked it out and it is true. If you are a long way from your telephone exchange a bit of wind and rain can cause higher than normal noise on your copper cable, usually due to imperfect connections at the telegraph pole. That’s electrical noise – not something audible to mortals. It isn’t something easily diagnosed and ground based connections and leased lines do not suffer the same problem.

This noise can result in a temporary slowing of your broadband. Hence if you want faster broadband speed move somewhere where it doesn’t rain as much.

You heard it first on trefor.net.

PS if you do need tips on where to relocate the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.

Categories
Business internet

Ethernet circuits now cheaper than E1s

The market for Ethernet circuits really seems to be moving forward apace. It is now generally cheaper to put in a 10Mbps Ethernet leased line than a 2Mbps E1 although there is still an element of geographic dependancy in some cases. If, for example, your business is based in London then the pricing for Ethernet is becoming very aggressive. It is now possible to get a 10Mbps circuit in London for half the price of a 2Mbps line which is based on an older  technology.

The competition is such that it is now very much worth shopping around. As businesses depend more and more on the internet for their every day functioning then they are increasingly turning to leased lines. The usage doesn’t appear to be driven by any particular application or function. It is right across the patch.

Timico uses a number of major infrastructure partners some of who, at any given point in time, will have a good deal or offer on the go. It may well be the case that in order to provide the optimum price and technical tradeoff a network solution provided by Timico will have connections from a number of different network partners but which is transparent to the end customer.

Categories
Engineer internet security

The buzz of the Network Operations Centre

It always gives me a great buzz to sit in our NOC. It’s because when we started Timico only 4 years ago there were only four of us sat in the room of Tim Radford’s parents’ stable block (it was cheap and there was no room at the inn anyway). Now on a normal working day there are more people sat in the NOC than there were in that original room. It is a world away.

Today sat in the NOC some of the engineers were setting up a MPLS PWAN for a customer. This particular PWAN had over 80 sites – a mixture of leased lines and ADSL. In itself it isn’t a big news item. It isn’t our biggest PWAN by a long chalk. However it is another new customer and an endorsment of what we set out to achieve four years ago sat in the stable block.

It is a good feeling to be at Timico.

Categories
Engineer internet

Data centre power consumption

Power consumption is, as I’m sure you are all aware, a huge issue when building data centres today. The data centre giants such as Google and Microsoft build their facilities close to sources of hydroelectric power in order to minimise their operating costs.

An ironic fact about data centres is that it takes almost as much power to cool the room as it does to create the heat in the first place. ie the cost of powering a server is as much as the cost of running the air conditioning unit to cool it down. This, compounded by the rising cost of electricity, is why people look to implementing “green” low power servers.

If someone could harness the excess heat of data centres and turn it into electricity to power the air conditioning then that would be a serious contribution to lowering power consumption and saving the planet. Credit goes to Chris Nicholls of the Timico Netops team for this idea.

Categories
Business internet olympics

ISPs heave a sigh of relief after end of Olympics

I wrote recently about the effect of the Olympics on internet usage. At the time we had seen a 10% or so increase in ADSL based internet usage as people went online to watch the opening ceremony.

Well the success (hooray) of Team GB prompted even more people to watch the Olympics online. Timico saw a staggering 24% increase in peak ADSL internet usage. Ordinarily this would have caused a problem to our customers because Timico has a policy of not thottling usage – the increase in usage would normally have slowed the performance of their web access.

However in this instance we had had the foresight to order additional capacity as part of our standard planning process and were able to bring it forward so that it timed nicely with the success of Team GB.

Interestingly our customers with homeworkers showed a much lower increase in usage than those with connections into their offices – presumably this was because homeworkers could have the TV on in the corner of the home office and didn’t need to watch online.

Now that the Olympic Games are over everything is back to normal.

Not sure about the name “Team GB” though. What’s wrong with “Great Britain” – would have been far more appropriate under the circumstances. My kids, suitably enthused, have already put their names down as volunteers to help in 2012. I’d do the same if I could be sure of getting in to watch the beach volleyball.

Categories
End User internet

Wonderful domain name scam

I just had a great email from someone called Williams Huang based (allegedly) at a domain name registrant in China. In it he told me that he had had a request from some unknown organisation to register the Timico domain name with the .tw, .co.tw,hk .asia, .net.cn and .org.cn.

Fortunately for me he had “checked to see whether this organisation was a genuine applicant and had the right to register the domain”. Finding that Timico was actually based in the UK he got in touch to give us first refusal on the domains. Phew what good luck!

Does this provide me with a dilemma? Actually no. It just gave me some good material for the blog. It might, however, play on the concerns of some businesses. What would you do in this case?

Hope you are having a good Olympics and whatever you do don’t respond to cold calls from the internet.

Categories
End User internet

Municipal WiFi Scarborough style

Categories
broadband End User internet mobile connectivity

A Teenager’s Homepage

Before we set off on our camping holiday (destination unknown) I sat down at my daughter’s pc to print out some campsite options in Yorkshire.

I was somewhat bemused to find that her homepage was set to BBC iplayer.

Look out ISPs everywhere. Your bandwidth forecasts are inadequate.

My trusty E71 got me to the first campsite on the list and that is where we stayed. I also used it to write this post.

Categories
broadband End User internet mobile connectivity

A Teenager’s Homepage

Before we set off on our camping holiday (destination unknown) I sat down at my daughter’s pc to print out some campsite options in Yorkshire.

I was somewhat bemused to find that her homepage was set to BBC iplayer.

Look out ISPs everywhere. Your bandwidth forecasts are inadequate.

My trusty E71 got me to the first campsite on the list and that is where we stayed. I also used it to write this post.

Categories
End User internet security

Alphabet attacks

Following my last post which was on security I was sat in the Timico NOC today and interestingly watched a SPAM attack in progress.

It was an alphabet attack. This is one where someone’s email server is compromised and used to send out SPAM by rotating through the alphabet for email addresses (eg [email protected] – the SPAM algorithm works its way through every combination of alphabetical variants. In this case it was targetting Italian .it addresses.

Our network monitoring picked it up and we immediately blacklisted/shut down access to that Exchange mail server. We also contacted the customer to let him know and so that he could take remedial action and remove the offending SPAM.

Apart from being interesting to watch it in action, a bit like standing on the edge of a battlefield watching the fighting, it again highlighted the need to have secure passwords. In this case we tried accessing the offending server and were able to log on using a simple admin/password combination of credentials.

When I started this blog I didn’t think that security would become such a mainstream subject but I was wrong

Categories
Business internet

Finding out more about social networking

The more I play with websites such as Facebook the more I find out. Initially I couldn’t see the sensible use of Twitter. The selling pitch to me was that it provided someone who was sat in a closed meeting with the ability to send messages that could be broacast to the outside world from their mobile phone. I didn’t really get this.

Now i have found out that I can use Twitter in conjunction with Facebook. When I send a SMS to Twitter it not only posts the message on Twitter but also as a status change on Facebook. For me it is easier to do it this way than to use the Facebook mobile upload.

I have used the Facebook means of uploading photos from my mobile – I just send an MMS message to a Facebook address and hey presto the photo appears in my profile.

This is all technology that now looks useful for business purposes. The Twitter SMS service, if embedded in my company intranet might be a secure way of me sending out messages whilst on the move (ok I can email it but Twitter can be programmed to send the same message as an SMS to other mobiles). I could say the same thing for the photo upload. This adds to the flexibility of business communications and who knows what it will evolve to.

I don’t know if businesses will use Facebook in anger or whether they will demand closed websites that are specific to their use. This is to some extent possible with Facebook already but would I trust my secure business data to Facebook? Probably not yet. Still the ride is exciting.

Categories
Business internet security

“Stealing” domain names is just not cricket

Businesses need to be mindful of the need to manage their domain name strategy sensibly. There are any number of individuals and organisations out there ready to take advantage of the careless.

For example take a look at http://www.cricinfo.com/. Not a bad time to be visiting the site during an exciting match between England and South Africa (yes I did say exciting).

If you now visit http://www.crickinfo.com/ you will see a difference. The spelling mistake is an easy one to make for someone looking for the main cricket website in the world (wide web). A good domain name strategy would have seen cricinfo snaffle both domains.

Now visit http://www.cricinfo.co.uk/. This one you might think would certainly take you to cricinfo but it doesn’t. It is owned by someone else and until recently took people to a cricket shop completely unassociated with cricinfo.com.

This is quite a high profile example of someone not doing something right when the business was small and it didn’t matter but paying for it downstream.

There are other different examples – the famous myspace court case where the .co.uk domain name was owned by an ISP long before myspace.com existed.

It is quick and easy to check your own business’ domain name – click here if you need a domain name checker.

Good luck England.

Categories
End User internet

"Stealing" domain names is just not cricket

Businesses need to be mindful of the need to manage their domain name strategy sensibly. There are any number of individuals and organisations out there ready to take advantage of the careless.

For example take a look at http://www.cricinfo.com/. Not a bad time to be visiting the site during an exciting match between England and South Africa (yes I did say exciting).

If you now visit http://www.crickinfo.com/ you will see a difference. The spelling mistake is an easy one to make for someone looking for the main cricket website in the world (wide web). A good domain name strategy would have seen cricinfo snaffle both domains.

Now visit http://www.cricinfo.co.uk/. This one you might think would certainly take you to cricinfo but it doesn’t. It is owned by someone else and until recently took people to a cricket shop completely unassociated with cricinfo.com.

This is quite a high profile example of someone not doing something right when the business was small and it didn’t matter but paying for it downstream.

There are other different examples – the famous myspace court case where the .co.uk domain name was owned by an ISP long before myspace.com existed.

It is quick and easy to check your own business’ domain name – click here if you need a domain name checker.

Good luck England.

Categories
End User internet

.UK domain snippet

Interesting fact that came out at the nominet meeting today was that they have almost 7 million .uk domain names under management. These are being added to at the rate of 137,000 new registrations a month, offset by the fact that only 70% of domains are renewed when they expire.