It slipped my mind when talking about FTTC last week that should anyone be interested in taking this service when we roll it out please let me know. My phone number and email address can be found here. Otherwise mail to [email protected]
Category: Net
connectivity and networking posts – both fixed and mobile, fast and slow
The Pope has been in the news over the weekend telling his team that they need to get blogging to better engage with the faithful.
He is a bit late out of the blocks here. I just took a quick look on Facebook and found that someone had already set up a group entitled “The Pope” with a princely 975 members. There are also quite a few already claiming to be the Pope on the Social Networking website.
I then took a look at Twitter. Same story here. I checked out thepope but his tweets were protected. This didn’t sound quite right and in anycase he said he lived in Spain and only had 57 followers so either His Holiness hasn’t pushed the button on the viral marketing campaign yet or this wasn’t him.
thepope.com is registered to someone with a Las Vegas address. This didn’t sound right either and a quick look at that website revealed that it was jam packed with religious organisations there on a pay per click basis. Seems to me he could fix this by getting is own Top Level Domain – .pope. He has the right contacts.
He could then have www.the.pope which could provide click through services for his flock without their having to pay. Obviously visitors would be able to make donations in order to contribute towards the cost of running the server – just click on the plate…
I was beginning to despair until I found pope2you.net which to my relief seems to be a genuine “Pope” website.
Now if I was the Pope I wouldn’t worry too much about the stuttering nature of what might be termed as the Vatican’s latest marketing campaign. He can hark back to the days when all Moses had was a couple of stone tablets with which to spread the news.
It did eventually take off, using viral marketing, a range of direct broadcast mechanisms and a fair old dose of Government intervention/regulation. That was despite the corruption to Moses’ original hard drive.
So my message to His Holiness might be stick with it but perhaps think about changing your PR Agency.
My two youngest kids are just playing Halo3 on the X-Box against two of their friends – also brothers. They are talking to the other kids through headsets – the younger lads in one team and the older siblings in another. Using VoIP over the internet!
I understand there is some echo on the voice (by the tone of the conversation) but they are plotting strategy.
I’m just flabbergasted by this. I know I knew this was doable but when you see it in action it is amazing.
Doesn’t stop their mum coming in and sending them upstairs to get into their pyjamas though. Some things never change!
I make no apologies for the nerdy nature of this post. It is basically a list of telephone exchanges and the approximate date by when they will be enabled for high speed broadband Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC). No guarantees – planning permission etc.
Despite being “just a list” make no mistake it is a thing of beauty. Apart from there being poetry in the names it represents a big change for many of the people living within reach of cabinets hanging off these exchanges. It means that these lucky, lucky people will be downloading multiple HD video streams at 3.5Mbps each etc etc etc rather than grinding away on their existing ADSL which, if it is running at the national average speed, could be doing somewhere between 3 and 5Mbps.
When I say lucky I do mean it is a bit of a lottery because to get FTTC you have to be living in a densely populated area – so maybe not so lucky if that isn’t your thing. Life is a bit of a trade off.
Sorry to my country dwelling friends who would give anything to get the national average ADSL speeds and happily settle for ordinary video quality instead of HD. For the moment they have to stick to admiring the poetry, until the balance of trade-offs shifts.
“update 18th March – I now keep an up to date list of exchange availability on the trefor.net fttp page here.
FTTC Exchange rollout plan:
Phase1 – trial sites and thus available now
Muswell Hill,
Whitchurch,
Glasgow Halfway
Phase2 – End Jan 2010
Calder Valley
Cardiff
Dean
Glasgow Western
Halifax
Leagrave
Pudsey
Taffswell
Thamesmead
Bury
Didsbury
Enfield
Heaton Moor
Luton
Chelmsford
Chingford
Failsworth
Hemel Hempstead
Tottenham
Watford
Woolwich
Caerphilly
Basingstoke
Canonbury
Belfast Balmoral
Edmonton
Oldham
Rusholme
Phase 3 – End April 2010
Glossop
Waltham Cross
Billericay
Hoddesdon
Woodford
Lea Valley
Hainault
Loughton
Berkhamsted
Stanford-Le-Hope
Elstree
Brentwood
Slade Green
Barnet
New Southgate
Hornchurch
Eltham
Sidcup
Stamford Hill
Ingrebourne
Ponders End
Greenwich
Barking
Stalybridge
Prestwich
Denton
Urmston
Chorlton
Cheetham
Wilmslow
Swinton
Walkden
Moss Side
Manchester East
Hyde
Ashton Under Lyme
Altrincham
Edinburgh Corstorphine
Glasgow Giffnock
Edinburgh Craiglochart
Glasgow Bridgeton
Dartford
Penarth
Barry
Pontefract
Shipley
Castleford
Low Moor
Headingley
Armley
Hinckley
Chester le Steet
Hetten le Hole
East Herrington
Durham
Bristol North
Bristol West
Downend
Tettenhall
Leamore
Fallings Park
Nuneaton
Walsall
Great Barr
Northern
Wednesbury
Lisburn
Phase 4 – End July 2010
ALBERT DOCK
WANSTEAD
MILE END
PARSONS GREEN
SKYPORT
GREENFORD
BICESTER
NEWPORT PAGNELL
AYLESBURY
DIDCOT
HARPENDEN
MAIDENHEAD
CROWTHORNE
WOKINGHAM
EARLEY
LANGLEY
CAVERSHAM
READING SOUTH
HENLEY ON THAMES
SOLIHULL
EARLSDON
KENILWORTH
TAMWORTH
WARWICK
ORTONS
STONEYGATE
COALVILLE
WILLASTON
LLANISHEN
LLANEDEYRN
HEDNESFORD
TOOTHILL
BLUNSDON
CHIPPENHAM
WORLE
PORTISHEAD
LOCKSHEATH
CHANDLERS FORD
FAIR OAK
ANDOVER
EASTLEIGH
BRAMHALL
CONGLETON
LOFTHOUSE GATE
GUISELEY
BEAUCHIEF
RANMOOR
PENICUIK
DALGETY BAY
DUNFERMLINE
LIVINGSTON STATION
GLASGOW NEWTON MEARN
BOTHWELL
BRAINTREE
MERTON PARK
PUTNEY
WIMBLEDON
SUTTON CHEAM
MITCHAM
BRIGHTON HOVE
SITTINGBOURNE
PORTSMOUTH CENTRAL
BT today appealed to its partner community for more trialists for their BET service. Currently in pilot phase, Broadband Enabling Technology (or BET) uses SHDSL to offer a broadband connection speed of up to 1 Mbps over a distance of 12 Kms from the local phone exchange. By using another line and bonding them together the speed can be effectively doubled up to 2 Mbps.
BT is testing this technology at the following exchanges:
Badsey, Worcestershire
Dingwall, Scotland
Horsham, West Sussex
Inverness Culloden, Scotland
Leyland, Lancashire
Llanfyllin, Powys
Ponteland, Northumberland
Twyford, Berkshire
Wigton, Cumbria
Wymondham, Norfolk
So far there have been around 40 installations which isn’t much across 10 exchanges (cf 1,750 FTTC on 3 exchanges). I’m not sure why there have not been more takers – whilst it is targeted at less densely populated rural areas there must be more people in those areas wanting to get on the internet. The plan is, in theory, to roll out a further 200 exchanges but I don’t think it is a done deal yet with the decision to go to production not yet being taken.
BET has aroused some emotion amongst rural dwellers looking for equality with city slickers in the broadband stakes. They complain that an up to 2Mbps service (as mooted by the Government’s Digital Britain Review) doesn’t really cut it. I guess the pressure is going to be on BT to make sure that this service does enter production regardless of uptake. Interesting though.
Timico is not a BET trialist but if you need help with getting on the trials by all means drop me a line and I will point you in the right direction.
Today BT launched Fibre to the Cabinet broadband (FTTC). The trials as reported in trefor.net were conducted during the later half of 2009. By the completion of the trial phase BT had finished 1,750 installations over three exchanges: Glasgow Half Way, Muswell Hill and Whitchurch, with a fairly high success rate considering this was a trial. Well done to Lee Martin and the team at BT Wholesale for their work here.
The overall results, we hear, are a ringing endorsement of the technology. The average speed seen is around 25Mbps with the range being between 17Mbps and 39Mbps. Our trialists ran at around the average.
BT is now launching four flavours – two consumer and two business, the latter having the faster 10Mbps uplink. Timico will also be launching the product though we are waiting until there is a little more coverage.
Post trial there are 32 exchanges (2,000 cabinets) enabled in Q1. By May there should be 103 exchanges and a further 63 planned for adding by September. In terms of premises passed there will be 500k by the spring, 1.5 million by the summer and 4 million by the end of 2010.
There are a number of other developments coming down the jungle path of the connectivity world ADSL2+ Annex M is about to start trialing at BT Wholesale. Annexe M offers the opportunity to trade some downstream speed in exchange for more upstream. We don’t yet have pricing or an indication of the speed improvements though this is not going to be dramatic – a few hundred kbps.
This product does overlap with FTTC but should, when released, be immediately available in all ADSL2+ enabled exchanges. The ADSL2+ rollout will cover 55% of homes by March 2010, and 75% by March 2011. The lag between ADSL2+ and FTTC means there will be quite some time before FTTC is a viable mass alternative.
You might ask what difference does a few hundred kbps make but if a business is looking to use SIP trunks this might mean the difference between making VoIP viable or not.
The one other development being discussed is true QoS over the 21CN network. BT has however been talking about this for a year and a half and whilst Q3 is mooted as a possible launch date don’t hold your breath.
By the way all this came out of the BT Wholesale ISP Forum that is periodically held at the Post Office Tower in London. A great venue and a great chance for the industry to discuss all things internetty.
For those who are interested in this kind of thing BT has announced that it will be introducing a higher grade of Service Level Assurance for broadband than the current Enhanced Care product.
Enhanced care offers a 24 x 7 service that includes a 3 hour response and 20 hours time to fix.
New in Q3 (September ish) will be “Business Care” product that offers 24 x 7 cover with 7 hours to fix – essentially same day. This is good progress as businesses are becoming increasingly dependant on their broadband lines and downtime = loss of cash. Note no guarantees are on offer here.
It is all subject to confirmation but it is progress.
I note that the number of available IPv4 addresses has dropped below the 10% mark. This is displayed on the counter on the right hand column of this blog but it took a link to the Number Resource Org on Facebook to alert me to the fact.
This year should see an intensification of efforts to move to the full support of IPv6. The Sept 5th 2011 date for exhaustion of the IPv4 pool is not very far away now. In reality there will still be stocks of addresses held “in private hands” so that date doesn’t see the unprepared fall off a cliff but it is a clear pressure point.
I should make it publicly known now that I’m planning a party for this date. Anyone wanting to come along should get their name in early as I anticipate huge demand 🙂 .
In the middle, as we are, of the birthing process of the Digital Economy Bill it is interesting to see how laborious this can be (and I have 4 kids!).
One of the gripes the ISP industry has (regular visitors to trefor.net will have become familiar with a few of them) is the fact that when it comes to copyright protection and the move to kill off illegal downloads there is too much stick and not enough carrot.
The big concern is that the Bill as proposed helps to compensate the music industry for losses incurred to an outdated business model and therefore removes the incentive for rights owners to embrace new business models.
ISPs are extremely frustrated by the difficulties in securing the licensing that is needed to offer consumers legal alternatives to illegal downloading. It has always been our view that a voluntary or legislative commitment to enforcement should only be introduced on the condition that rights-holders also commit to significant licensing reform.
Moreover there is a particular concern that some rights-holders are purposefully resisting reform of the licensing framework because they view legal models of online content distribution as a threat to their own existing revenue.
Lets take a look at some of the difficulties. These are some examples compiled by the Internet Services Provider Association as part of an as yet unpublished paper. There is some brain work involved here though I have tried to simplify it, largely so that I can understand the problems myself.
Existing problems
Taking a fully licensed music service to market is lengthy and onerous. Even if all the rights owners offered easy ways to access their catalogues, the complex contractual obligations wrapped around Intellectual Property rights in the reproduction, performance, and ‘making available’ of both musical works and sound recordings means that there is no guarantee of ending up with a fully licensed service.
Consumer expectations for online music are sky high. Given that many of them share a significant volume of unlawful music over P2P networks consumers are used to being able to download any track. Gaps in the available legal alternatives caused by licensing problems are not well looked upon and legal music services that attempt to offer incomplete catalogues are viewed as uncompetitive when compared with unlawful file-sharing.
Direct licensing or withholding
There are also additional obstacles to efficient music licensing which add cost and risk to the emerging digital entertainment industry.
Rather than using collective or wholesale clearing houses most music rights owning parties insist on licensing the use of their catalogues directly.
This means that direct licensing multiplies cost and difficulty for the licensee and allows each licensor the ability to set terms and rates that could critically damage the viability of a service. Licensors can also choose to withhold the catalogue required to offer a compelling customer proposition.
Ensuring that licensors negotiate through a collective or wholesale clearing house would assist licensees in securing the licenses that are required to offer a service that is attractive to consumers.
Territoriality
Rights-holders are currently able to limit the operations of music services to specific countries which enables them to introduce price discrimination from country to country. Also a single piece of music may well have different owners in different countries which adds cost and complexity to the initial rights negotiations and to the ongoing payment systems.
Advances
The larger rights owners usually demand advance payments and deal and delivery fees. These can be many times the expected royalty payments for the use of the music during the term of the agreement. This introduces a financing risk as well as adding a start-up cost to launching a new service. Often these will be staged as quarterly payments, with the threat of catalogue withdrawal or even insolvency proceedings should they not be met.
These advances are likely to be prohibitive to a provider launching a service. Advances also reduce transparency to other music stakeholders as they break the relationship between sales and royalty payments.
Short-term deals
Many deals have a one-year term with no obligation on the rights holder to renew. This will in almost all cases be considerably shorter than the planning horizon for a large operator and makes a business case more of an act of faith rather than a serious basis to roll out services. It also makes it difficult for a service provider to guarantee that it will be able to fulfil contracts with its own customers.
For example if half way through a one year contract with a consumer a service provider has a certain catalogue withdrawn from its own deal with the rights-holder then that SP is going to be unable to fulfil its own obligations. It could also turn a profitable service into a loss making entity completely outside the control of the service provider if the rights holder decides to jack up the cost.
Minima
Rights owners use contractual minimum payments in order to inflate their revenues over and above the value of the music that is actually sold by a service. In some cases this is relatively benign, such as setting a minimum wholesale price per track and taking the greater of that or a percentage of retail price.
It can, however, be used to set a price per subscriber that is higher than the licensor’s pro-rata revenue share or it can be set across an entire service so that the rights-holder receives a fixed percentage even when their pro-rata share drops. The effect of this is to compel the licensee to pay out over 100% of the royalty pool, eating into margins or operating costs.
Customer proposition approval
Rather than set wholesale pricing and allow operators to develop compelling services, music rights owners seek control over most aspects of the consumer offering and look to insert conditions in contracts that require any changes to be agreed in advance. This would seem to be an anti-competitive measure and detrimental to the creation of alternative models of distribution.
Arbitrary conditions
Rights holders can sometimes put pressure on music services to accept arbitrary conditions, such as using a preferred provider for some aspect of the service, or committing to a guaranteed placement for priority releases. Some other arbitrary conditions might include action against piracy either as a pre-condition of licensing or a commitment included in a contract. It might also include access to a large amount of consumer behaviour data including data that does not relate to the music included in the contract.
All this, and I’m sure the experts can probably dig out more examples, adds up to an extremely difficult environment for the creation of legal music download services.
Somewhat a digression from my normal postings but a worthwhile one. Timico VoIP operations engineer Wayne Mills-Kidals is taking part in the 2010 Mongol Rally.
This is a race from the UK to Mongolia and takes him through Europe, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Kyrgystan, Russia, and no doubt a few more countries until he finally arrives at Ulan Batar four weeks (hopefully) later.
He doesn’t go until the summer but is looking for sponsors – the purpose of the trip is to raise money for the Christina Noble Children’s foundation. Anyone interested can check him out on his by-jimny website.
As an aside Wayne was born with a network connection in his mouth instead of a silver spoon. We will be able to follow his progress online – more anon.
Interesting to see that the .HT top level domain continues to function despite the devastation to the country’s telecommunications infrastructure. This is because .HT has six name servers, 4 of which are outside the country. The one in Port Au Prince, for example, is not currently working but all those overseas are.
If you are currently sat on a hillside in Haiti this isn’t likely to be much comfort. However work is underway to provide a route to the outside world via neighbouring Dominican Republic. Once this is in place then .HT based communications will then be able to restart within the country and it is to a certain extent an example of the resilience of the design of the internet.
The Digital Economy Bill will have its third reading in the Lords next week. Thus far each clause has been debated at each reading. It isn’t possible to forecast when it will finish in the Lords – a Bill can have up to 8 readings.
So we don’t have a proper handle on the schedule yet. What is highly likely is that it will be rushed through the Commons with a firm Government Whip. Under normal conditions this would be expected to be a shoe in but it will be interesting to see how many of Labour MPs leaving the House after this election break ranks.
At yesterday’s ISPA Legal Forum the subject of copyright law and the Digital Economy Bill was discussed. The Music Industry claims that legal methods of downloading music are being promoted. It is worth noting that at the event music site 7digital stated that in order to be able to sell some music online (eg Lady Gaga was quoted) they had to negotiate 40 different licensing contracts. Talk about getting bogged down in the goo. This is not consistent with “making it easier”.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills launched a consultation on Thursday on the best way to invest the £1 billion being brought in by the 50p broadband levy. Check it out here.
I did get a bit excited the other day when I read somewhere that Gordon Brown had announced more money to support NGA Broadband rollout. Upon investigation I realised that it was the money already on the table. A bit of a disappointment but not really a surprise!
What people mustn’t forget that when we say a £billion we mean a £billion over 7 years. They missed a trick here. Gordon could have announced £2billion over 14 years or 3£billion over 14 years and upped the fifty pence tax to a pound, phased in in seven years time (and so on).
Flippancy notwithstanding it behoves all stakeholders to read the consultation document and respond as appropriate to serve their best interests.
I love this weather. I’m a big kid really. I want it to snow so much that I get stuck in the house and can’t make it into the office. This isn’t just me talking. I bet that most people in the UK are saying it right now. Some of them will be stuck at home and those poor unfortunates, like me, will actually have made it in and are busy making cups of tea, talking to customers, running the internet (delete as appropriate).
Staying at home of course doesn’t mean that the world of commerce has to grind to a halt. I was quite thrilled as I wandered around the Timico sales floor talking about colours (this is topical – if you don’t know I’m not telling you) when one of the team mentioned that they had had a customer cancel a visit on them but had replaced it with a Meet Me Now web conference session. What’s more they had pretty much closed an MPLS network opportunity during the call.
2010 – memorable for the best winter in (some people’s) living memory and the expansion of the VoIP online web collaboration market.
PS if you call me you won’t know whether I am at home or in the office anyway – 16 x 7 x 330. Stack those snowballs up ready!
The BBC reports today that singer Bono is claiming that the revenues lost by the music industry due to illegal downloading mirrors the growth in profits of the Internet industry.
This didn’t sound quite right to me but I doubt that anyone has any real data. It did prompt me to see if I could have a stab at sizing both industries myself from my limited sources of information.
Firstly in last year’s Ofcom communications market report the total number of ADSL tails is quoted as being 17.3 million connections at an average cost of £10.71 a month. This works out at just over £2.2Bn revenues in 2008. I realise that there will be other revenues that add to the total ISP take but ADSL will be the biggest portion of the whole. Also I have no doubt that the music industry would quote the total communications market size as the number to compare.
Now look at the available data on the music industry in the UK posted recently in the Times which suggests that turnover in 2008 was, wait for it, just over £2.2Bn.
Whatever the right numbers it clearly suggests that Bono’s claim is just the hype that most people will hopefully see through, or at least MPS about to decide on the Digital Economy Bill. We are at an important juncture in process of the DEB and it is important that the ISP industry gets its own message across as clearly and successfully as the music industry seems to be doing. I haven’t been monitoring the relative amounts of press coverage each side has been getting.
Finally the chart, taken from last year’s Ofcom market report shows how the media and telecoms industries have been performing relative to the stock market. It suggests to me that the media industry, again assuming the metric is the right one, is not doing so badly, relatively speaking.
I’m quite happy to be corrected with any of the numbers here but we do need to try and get a correct persective on the whole situation.
The BBC reports today that singer Bono is claiming that the revenues lost by the music industry due to illegal downloading mirrors the growth in profits of the Internet industry.
This didn’t sound quite right to me but I doubt that anyone has any real data. It did prompt me to see if I could have a stab at sizing both industries myself from my limited sources of information.
Firstly in last year’s Ofcom communications market report the total number of ADSL tails is quoted as being 17.3 million connections at an average cost of £10.71 a month. This works out at just over £2.2Bn revenues in 2008. I realise that there will be other revenues that add to the total ISP take but ADSL will be the biggest portion of the whole. Also I have no doubt that the music industry would quote the total communications market size as the number to compare.
Now look at the available data on the music industry in the UK posted recently in the Times which suggests that turnover in 2008 was, wait for it, just over £2.2Bn.
Whatever the right numbers it clearly suggests that Bono’s claim is just the hype that most people will hopefully see through, or at least MPS about to decide on the Digital Economy Bill. We are at an important juncture in process of the DEB and it is important that the ISP industry gets its own message across as clearly and successfully as the music industry seems to be doing. I haven’t been monitoring the relative amounts of press coverage each side has been getting.
Finally the chart, taken from last year’s Ofcom market report shows how the media and telecoms industries have been performing relative to the stock market. It suggests to me that the media industry, again assuming the metric is the right one, is not doing so badly, relatively speaking.
I’m quite happy to be corrected with any of the numbers here but we do need to try and get a correct persective on the whole situation.
In 1978 at school the computer studies class had to send punch cards off to Manchester University for their computer to process. It was one of the few in the world! There was no internet or any electronic means of sending the data. The output of the computer programs were returned as thick wodges of paper printout – by snail mail of course. The programs themselves were probably running simple arithmetic problems.
Between 1980 and 1983 I studied Electronic Engineering at University. We used DEC PDP machines – more than one class online brought it to a halt, especially when half of them were running programs with infinite loops. No internet.
In 1990 the first website was created at CERN. I worked for Marconi. We had no internet though around this time I got my first email mailbox. It was at our Long Island subsidiary and I considered myself to be super cool.
Circa 1996 I remember taking Tom, my oldest child, then five, into the office and showing him “the internet”. So for me the internet arrived sometime in the early to mid nineties and I was probably a relatively early adopter thanks to my employer.
Earlier this year Domain Name Industry Brief published by VeriSign Inc suggested that by the first quarter 2009 there were as many as 183 million domain names. By the end of the second quarter 2009 it was estimated that the World Wide Web contained at least 25.21 billion pages on over 109.5 million websites.
Wikipedia shows the following spam statistics with the caveat that the numbers are unreliable:
• 1978 – An e-mail spam advertising a DEC product presentation is sent by Gary Thuerk to 600 addresses, which was all the users of that time’s ARPANET, though software limitations meant only slightly more than half of the intended recipients actually received it
• 2002 – 2.4 billion per day
• 2004 – 11 billion per day
• 2005 – (June) 30 billion per day
• 2006 – (June) 55 billion per day
• 2007 – (February) 90 billion per day
• 2007 – (June) 100 billion per day
Bill Gates is said to receive 4 million emails a year, mostly spam.
WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION STATISTICS
Source: Table data obtained from www.internetworldstats.com.
The top websites according to Alexa.com are:
- google.com (Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages. The company’s focus is developing search technology.)
- facebook.com (A social utility that connects people, to keep up with friends, upload photos, share links and videos)
- yahoo.com (Personalized content and search options. Chatrooms, free e-mail, clubs, and pager)
- youtube.com (YouTube is a way to get your videos to the people who matter to you. Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide!)
- live.com (Search engine from Microsoft)
- wikipedia.org (An online collaborative encyclopedia)
- blogger.com (Free, automated weblog publishing tool that sends updates to a site via FTP)
- baidu.com (Music search engine and free MP3 & video streaming for all kind of topics)
- msn.com (Dialup access and content provider)
- Yahoo!カテゴリ (Yahoo Japan)
- trefor.net (World’s leading communications blog (only joking 🙂 )
I am a regular user of Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube. I am clearly not entirely with it because I’ve never heard of baidu.com!
Facebook publishes its user stats online. You should check them out. They have 350 million active users half of whom log on every day. With only 25% of the world with internet access there is still a long way to grow for the likes of Facebook and that’s before they have saturated their existing Serviceable Available Market.
I use email. I have three email addresses – timico, trefor.net and google. I am however increasingly using other means of communications – Instant Messaging is the norm between teams at work. When you send someone an IM you generally get a real time (ish) response. You know they are online before sending. Socially mostly I use Facebook to communicate, either by writing on someone’s wall, sending a Direct Message or via IM though the latter is hit and miss because people tend to dip in and out of Facebook and are therefore not particularly online for any length of time. Although I have an account I am not yet a regular Google Wave user.
I use twitter as a broadcast marketing tool and not as a personal social networking tool. For me it is not going to replace Facebook. Also I don’t get spammed on Facebook 🙂
Almost 20% of Facebook’s active users also access the site via a mobile device. The O2 data network in London failed to cope with demand in the run up to Christmas. They are adding more capacity. They will need to because the use of the internet from mobile devices is probably going to outpace the growth in fixed internet access which in itself is racing forward (50% year on year growth in usage per user at Timico). Much of the growth in mobile network revenue is coming from data.
So where are my predictions for 2010 and beyond? I have no idea. If bankers on exorbitant salaries can’t get it right what hope us mere mortals that drive around in N reg Peugeot 406s (other N reg cars are available though decreasingly so). Internet usage is going to continue to grow massively and mobile internet will play an increasingly important part. Costs will come down, speeds will go up and by the end of the decade the top ten site rankings will have changed beyond all recognition. Hopefully I won’t be driving the same car!
There you go. Let’s review this on New Years Eve 2019 and see if I was right.
Holiday broadband browsing traffic, nice and fluid.
Thought you might be interested to see the traffic patterns for holiday broadband browsing habits. Bear in mind that Timico is a primarily B2B ISP so when offices are closed or almost empty it is reasonable to think that internet usage will drop off. This is quite possibly the converse of the situation for a consumer ISP. All those workers sat at home with nothing better to do than gorge on chocolates, drink beer and watch iPlayer.
You can see quite clearly how the Bank Holiday broadband browsing traffic resembles that of a weekend. Christmas Eve also show a dramatic ramp-down. Not surprising really. It is a dream driving into the office on these days with no cars on the road. Someone has to keep the internet going 🙂 .
If you have managed to keep a job in 2009 it has probably not been a bad year for you. For consumers, fuel apart, costs have by and large come down as vendors compete more aggressively in the tough market conditions. In the UK we haven’t started paying for it yet. If you have been out of work in 2009 I guess it will have been a different story.
At work Timico continued to grow both in sales and profitability. It hasn’t been easy but the year end looks as if it will be significantly up on last year.
Highlights in the year include decommissioning our last 155Mbps ATM connections to BT, followed later in the year by our 622Mbps pipes. They have been replaced by resilient Gigabit Ethernet Hostlinks.
We also set up our new Network Operations Centre in Newark and saw the successful move of the NetOps team up to Nottinghamshire from Ipswich.
One of the big success stories of the year is the growth in the high bandwidth leased line business. Uncontended (ie dedicated connectivity) leased lines are becoming more affordable and companies are increasing offloading (at least some) corporate resources into the ”cloud”. We have similarly seen a growth in our MPLS estate with some customers signing up for hundreds of connected sites.
2009 also saw some major technology introductions. ADSL2+ was introduced early in the year. The technology is capable of “up to 24Mbps” though we only quote 16Mbps to our customers – most users will not get the max performance and I think it is better to manage expectations in this way rather than have unhappy customers.
Timico was the second ISP in the country to sell Ethernet in the First Mile and have also been participants in the BT Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) trials, the early stage of the much promoted £1.5Bn investment in Next Generation Access technology.
“Digital Britain” was also a much used “buzzword” during the year. It is easy for me to criticise and I realise it is a lot harder when you are making the actual decisions but I am afraid that we will look back and decide that the present Government did not do a good job on this one. The first 4 months of 2010 are going to be very important with laws being passed or not passed that will potentially adversely affect every internet user in the UK.
Don’t get me wrong though. 2010 is going to be an exciting year with lots happening. More tomorrow.
I pay mine on direct debit
click here
Just a bit of fun between Christmas and New Year. Thanks to Ian P. Christian for the link.
Channel 4 and Talk Talk have joined Project Canvas, the BBC’s set top box standardisation effort that already includes the BBC, ITV, BT, Five.
The end goal is to connect the internet to your TV and allow programmes to be streamed over your broadband connection. The BBC press announcement doesn’t go into schedules but it does talk about offering services that include:
Linear TV (eg Freeview, Freesat) with HD and storage (pause, rewind, record)
Video-on-demand services (eg BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 40D)
Other internet-based content or services (eg Flickr, Amazon, NHS Direct)
My only point in regurgitating this BBC news is that the time is not so very far away when consumers will have to start factoring the cost of all this downloading. What is perceived to be a free TV programme is effectively going to become Pay As You Go and the cost of an hour’s watching will be something known to all. I can see kids being given an allocation by their parents just in the same way that they have pre paid mobile phones.
As a footnote my kids have been trying to persuade me to buy them a new 42″ flatscreen LCD TV for the “den”. I’ve beaten off the assault by saying that we don’t actually have a source of HD video other than their own laptops and PCs. Even this line of defence looks as if it will only be shortlived.
More TV related stuff:
Those of you in the UK watching the Christmas Number 1 music chart battle between the X Factor winner Joe McElderry and Rage Against The Machine may or may not have realised they were watching the power of the internet in action.
Hundreds of thousands of people signed up to various Facebook Groups supporting Rage Against The Machine and have been hugely proactive in getting people to buy their song to keep the X Factor out of the top slot. My son Tom for example was regularly posting on the subject. There were active strategy decisions going on to discuss optimum methods of hitting number 1. How many times to buy the song from where? This is teenagers spending their (parents’ hard earned) pocket money.
Of course this is a fairly frivolous and trivial use of the internet. A bit of fun. It did strike me though that there were other far more deserving causes that could hugely benefit. Global warming for example. The world’s politicians appear to have been letting their voters down at the Climate Change Talks in Copenahagen, regardless of what spin we might be getting from them after the event.
I even thought about starting a Facebook Group on the subject. Then it occurred to me that there might already be one so I took a look. There already is one.
These are the results of a Facebook search for “Rage Against the Machine” followed by those for “Climate Change”
You can see for yourself which is the most popular.
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1 476,980 fans
rage against the machine – RATM 466,612 fans
Rage Against The Xfactor 326 fans
YES…Jedward has gone!-lets get rage against the machine no.1 😀 326,991 members
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1 – BACKUP GROUP 176,737 members
Rage Against The Machine 49,165 members
Slow Climate Change 55,599 members
COP15 – Climate Change – JOIN AND INVITE ALL 49,826 members
Climate Change 1,634 members
Climate Change 407 fans
The biggest challenge I think is how to get the Facebook Generation tuned into issues such as climate change so that they can make politicians sit up and listen.
PS I didn’t buy either of the singles myself. I imagine we have enough copies around hte house now though for me to legitimately have one if I chose to 🙂
Nortel yesterday announced that Verizon had implemented the first commercially available 100Gbps network on a 893km link between Paris and Frankfurt.
There are several significant (or at least I think they are interesting) points to be made regarding this milestone.
First of all Nortel is clearly a leader in Optical technology, as it is in a number of its other areas of business. 100Gbps has been discussed at the last few meetings of the London Internet Exchange (LINX) but largely in terms of the fact that 100Gbps equipment has only been achieving 40Gbps, an interim step.
It is a crying shame that the mismanagement of the business during the earlier parts of the decade resulted in the Chapter 11 situation we now see today and the break up of the business. From Timico’s perspective this is at least focussing minds at Nortel and we have seen a significant improvement in responsiveness and keeness to get things done. Good I suppose.
The 10Gbps standard was ratified in 2002 and, doing a quick trawl the first network rollouts seem to be around 2005 – this is the case at LINX who tend to be up there amongst the leaders. Truth be told it was probably earlier than this.
The 100Gbps standard has not yet been ratified so there are clearly commercial pressures and advantages to running with the technology for a commercial operator to push ahead with it. Historically this has been 4x the cost for 10x the throughput. So it is clear that the cost of bandwidth is going to continue on a downward trend the more people use it, which they are doing.
This is an interesting wave for ISPs and network operators (surfers) to be riding. We have to be nimble atop the big rollers making sure that we keep our network costs down quickly enough to match the competitive pricing pressures of the market place.
At Leicester Tigers’ Welford Road rugby ground on Thursday Timico launched “Meet Me Now”, a brand new Web Collaboration and video conferencing service with Presence and IM.
I missed it due to ITSPA prize awarding duties at the House of Commons. I also had to miss out on a long planned trip to watch the annual Oxford v Cambridge varsity match at Twickenham which was also on the same day. You might say that this was very poor diary management!
I’m told that all events went really well. I can vouch for the ITSPA one of course because I was there. Timico was a finalist in two categories (SMB and Enterprise).
Anyway this is not the point of this blog post. We have been reviewing the year at Timico HQ today. The business has grown. Considering the market conditions in 2009 and that the interim results of some of our competitors show shrinkage this has to be taken as extremely positive news.
Next year is I believe going to be another tough one for business. We ain’t though this recession yet. This means that customers are still going to be looking for cost savings and productivity improvements. More so probably.
In 2009 Timico very much saw a trend towards home/distributed working. This, for example, saw one hosted VoIP customer shut their office and set their six employees working from home. There was no disruption to their comms as a result – they were on hosted VoIP.
Clearly for 2010 a product that makes it easier for people to work from home makes a lot of sense. Enter “Meet Me Now”.
Meet Me Now is a multimedia Meet Me Voice Video and Web Collaboration service. It can be used in stand alone mode or for customers using the Timico VoIP For Business service it can also be integrated with your existing voice communications.
Our (home working) sales force has been playing with Meet Me Now for some months and using the service the channel team in particular can sit at home churning through 8 or 10 online Business Partner meetings in a day. It is hugely productive and in fact has encouraged a high number of channel partners to take up the product from day 1. They have already seen the power.
There’s also been a lot of talk about “The Cloud” in 2009. For ease of support reasons home worker solutions are largely going to be “cloudy” if that is the right adjective and certainly this is the case for Meet Me Now.
Quite exciting really. Semi sales pitch over.
check this out:
Created by Online Education
We did our first FTTC broadband 10Mbps uplink trial installation yesterday in Muswell Hill in North London. The customer is very happy with the performance. It will take 10 days to bed down but I’ll take a look after then and report back on speeds.
The installation itself, once the Openreach modem has been put in, is simplicity itself and takes only five minutes. We are using the Thomson Gateway TG789vn kit in our trials and have to say are very impressed with what you can get in a small piece of plastic these days.
I’ll be looking at productising some homeworker services using our VoIP platform, based potentially on the Thomson range. We have been very impressed with their responsiveness as a supplier.
Worth watching. Blows my mind.
Worth watching. Blows my mind.
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“error 30”
I was doing some interviewing this afternoon and one candidate came up with “error 30” – a great Tech Support Ticketing error resolution code that is used at one company he had worked at.
Error 30 is down to the entity 30cms from the PC screen. Basically if you don’t understand you are probably part of the problem 🙂 . I thought it was good enough to write down. I got back to the NOC and related this to the team and got a few others thrown my way:
PEBKAC – Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
PICNIC – Problem In Chair Not In Computer.
I’m obviously easily entertained!
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"error 30"
I was doing some interviewing this afternoon and one candidate came up with “error 30” – a great Tech Support Ticketing error resolution code that is used at one company he had worked at.
Error 30 is down to the entity 30cms from the PC screen. Basically if you don’t understand you are probably part of the problem 🙂 . I thought it was good enough to write down. I got back to the NOC and related this to the team and got a few others thrown my way:
PEBKAC – Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
PICNIC – Problem In Chair Not In Computer.
I’m obviously easily entertained!