Category: Net

connectivity and networking posts – both fixed and mobile, fast and slow

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broadband Business Regs

Digital Britain Final Report Delayed a Few Days

BERR on Friday issued a statement to say that the Digital Britain Final Report will not now be released on Tuesday as planned. Instead it is being presented to the Cabinet tomorrow and will be released later in the week.

There is also a meeting between Lord Carter and a few industry representatives tomorrow afternoon.  ISPA is being represented at that meeting so I will report back later.

There is a huge amount of expectation surrounding the publication of the Digital Britain report.  We think we know what is going to be in it but can’t be sure. However it turns out I’m sure it is going to spark a huge amount of debate.  Let’s enjoy the last few days of peace before it hits the street 🙂

Note the BERR statement isn’t actually a BERR statement. It is a Joint statement from Departments for Business, Innovation and Skills and Culture Media and Sport. I’m not politicaslly motivated but this does seem ridiculous. BISCMS ?!!! I could only just get my tongue around BERRRRRR.

Hot off the press – apparently the report will now be available on the DCMS website at 3.30 pm tomorrow.

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broadband Business internet ofcom

Broadband Internet Access. Ofcom says 1 in 5 of Households Without Will Get It Within 6 Months

broadband

Ofcom says Broadband Internet Access is coming to 1 in 5 currently without it.

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.

ofcom broadband internet access

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Business internet

ADSL growth is turning into ethernet growth

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!

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Business internet media

We7 cracks free online music streaming business model

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.

Categories
End User internet scams security

Email scams

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.

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Business internet

Light relief – fibre to the premises

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.

newarkfibre

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 :-).

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Business internet

Ethernet in the First Mile – EFM

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 🙂

Categories
broadband Business internet

BBC Claims BT is Throttling iPlayer

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?

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Business internet

Copycats? Digital consumers in the online age.

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.

Categories
End User internet

WolframAlpha

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.

Categories
End User internet

bing.com

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.

Categories
Business media

Rural broadband on the BBC news this morning

The BBC has picked up a rural broadband news item this morning with another community rolling out fibre, this time with a 20Mbps broadband service, presumably with a bigger backhaul than the 2Mbps that serves Wennington and Wray (see posts from 2 weeks ago).

I suspect the media is building up for more coverage when the Digital Britain Report is released in mid June.  There seems to be some disagreement in Cumbria as to the efficacy of the investment already made in the area. Whether individual communities already get coverage or not is somewhat a moot point really.

I think the issue that is quickly going to overtake us is the adequacy of the  “up to 2Mbps” speed being bandied around as a target by Government as a Universal Service Obligation.  Many city dwellers already have access to 40 or 50Mbps and with BT’s Fibre To The Cabinet trials about to start this figure will become very much the standard to aim for, unless you live in a rural community that is.

Whilst BT CEO Ian Livingstone maintains that 2Mbps is good enough for most people’s uses, experience in the Far East, where high speed internet access isn the norm, have shown that people’s online behaviour does change as faster speeds become available. They are more likely, for example, to watch High Definition video online.

This is all going to add pressure to ISPs’ networks but I do believe that the UK is being shortsighted in not considering a ubiquitous Next Generation Access fibre network from the off.

Categories
Engineer internet spam

Spam 2.0

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.

spam20

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…

Categories
Business internet

Microsoft breaking down walls whilst Opera is in the cloud

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.

Categories
Business internet peering

UK is becoming attractive place as an internet hub

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.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

#LINX65 notes on traffic growth

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.

linx65

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.

Categories
Business datacentre internet

Powergate initial tranche is 95% sold

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.

Categories
Business internet

Timico is announced as finalist for best customer service award

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.

Categories
datacentre Engineer internet peering

LINX 65 and Telecity

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.

Categories
Business internet

FTTH final installment

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.

Categories
Business internet security

Britain needs eJudge

Had a meeting yesterday with the Police Central eCrime Unit in London together with a few other leading ISPs and content providers to discuss how the industry can help tackle eCrime.

Part of the problem is the speed at which things happen in the internet world when compared with the “good old fashioned” Old Bailey style of justice where response times are slow and delay is the norm . 

For example a police officer working on a case can take days for to obtain a court order requesting data on a suspect from an ISP.  In this time the gang has moved on and is lost to the justice system. A Communications Provider needs a court order to do this as providing such data without one is in breach of privacy laws, despite the cause notionally being a good one.

The solution is likely to be to put a system in place to speed up the process.  Whilst speed of communications between police and ISP could possibly be improved it seems to me that the whole area would benefit from specialist “eJudges”. 

An eJudge would be conversant with the  workings of the internet and being able to respond in real time to requests for Court Orders.  Such a judge would not have to sit in on normal court sessions.

The bit about understanding how the internet works is a real issue.  In recent times ISPs have been the subject of court orders requiring them to “remove certain websites from the internet”. 

Whilst an ISP can take down a site hosted on its own servers it can’t completely remove it from the internet because that site is likely to be cached in many places (countries) and could be easily replicated elsewhere.

In this instance the ISP would likely be in breach of the court order even though it had removed the offending site from its own server.

I realise that it is unlikely that a court would pursue the ISP in such a case but this does hilight the ignorance of  the judiciary in these matters.  

Rumpole of the Bailey is not equipped to cope with modern criminals and specialist eJudges would be a very cost effective solution.

Categories
broadband Business internet

Broadband Fibre Farming Tails – The Happy Ending

Rural Broadband Fibre England

Last episode from the broadband fibre network laying story that has gripped the nation (see earlier posts here and here if you missed them). I am pleased to say that it has a happy ending, and Wennington now has two more users connected by high speed link to it’s network. Shame about the 2Mps backhaul.

As I write, I understand that the Digital Britain Report has been completed and is awaiting publication on 15th June. I believe it has the 2Mbps USO clause in it, and also some support for Next Generation broadband access in rural areas. Whether this is new money or simply rebranded existing EU funding remains to be seen. Let’s hope this broadband fibre video story becomes a quaint historical note sooner rather than later.

Anyway here’s the video.

Categories
End User internet

I love the French

It was only on 6th May that the European Parliament rejected Article 8 of the Telecoms Package Review.  This was the one that called for the “three strikes and you’re out” termination of broadband connectivity for anyone repeatedly found to be indulging in illegal P2P piracy. It was widely reported.

Yesterday the French Parliament under the direction of President Sarkozy did exactly the opposite of this.  I’m sure it is going to cause a huge furore.  If they have any sense UK plc will let it play out in France before having to decide what to do in the UK.

I can’t beat the FT for reporting resource so you can read their spiel on the subject here.

Although we complain when they have air traffic control strikes, baggage handlers go slows,  port blockades etc we do sometimes get good value for money from across the channel :-).

Categories
Business internet

Episode 2 – JFDI – Just Farmers Digging for Internet access

This is episode two of the Lancashire based rural soap opera in which farmers dig for victory in the Battle of Digital Britain and Fibre To The Home. Yesterday’s post attracted a lot of attention which suggests there is a great deal of interest in this subject. 

Note in this acronym infested industry I had never quite understood (I’m an innocent boy from small town Wales) what JFDI meant and obviously kept quiet about it to avoid embarrassment.  Now I realise it stands for Just Farmers Digging for Internet Access! :-).

Looks like there might be a third episode coming along in this video manual on how to lay fibre. NTL et al take note!

It really does feel as if you are there when you watch this video. Good luck to all rural dwellers everywhere.

Categories
broadband Business internet

Farmer Rolls Out First Rural Broadband Fibre Network as Digital Britain Takes Too Long

On the hills high above Wennington in Lancashire the local community is taking its internet destiny into its own hands and is laying broadband fibre.

The Wennington/Wray communities were no hopers when it came to the provision of ADSL so in 2005 they were awarded a £25k grant by the North West Development Agency to roll out a 2Mbps symmetrical mesh wifi network. The initial 12 users charged themselves £25 a month which provided a kitty for further expansion of the network to 22 endpoints.

They are now at the point where the remaining 30 homes/businesses are out of reach of wifi and the only way to get connected is by using fibre.  The YouTube video, hot off the press this morning (thanks to Lindsey Annison for that), shows the first cable run being laid.

This is initially an experiment to get to understand the costs involved before deciding when to add more locations to the network.

The network is a huge boost to the quality of life in the community allowing workers to stay put instead of commuting as far afield as Manchester and Edinburgh.

It is clear from the numbers here where the issue surrounding Universal Service Obligations being discussed in the Digital Britain Report reside. That initial £25k served 12 users –  just over £2k each – which realistically can never hold down a business case based on £25 a month. Being generous that probably would result in £1,500 Gross Margin pa which will never repay the initial investment.

There are problems for the community in increasing the size of their 2Mbps backhaul. A 100Mbps link to Lancaster would cost £76k to install with a £64k pa ongoing cost. This is almost an order of magnitude higher than the same connectivity in large metropolitan areas that would also have many more users at the end of the line.

It ain’t going to happen without Government assistance and I believe that it is key to the economy for UKplc to provide this. Now is the time to make it happen.

Find out more on the Wray village website with thanks to cyberdoyle for the info and  Fibrestream, Lucidos and Optech Fibres who have helped with this initial fibre project.

Check out the promo video of the initial project here.

Categories
Business internet social networking

Speeches 2 b reduced 2 140 chars at nxt election

We all have to suffer over exposure to politics during the run up to an election. It is going to get worse!  The next UK General Election will be played out in minute detail and in glorious Web2.0 technicolour using Twitter.

In fact there is now a website dedicated to furthering this cause.  Tweetminster.com is a wonderful resource for those actually interested in politics. The site concentrates the tweets of MPs, sorts by party, constituency and by subject matter and even has a tweetometer that indicates who is ahead in the tweeting game on any particular issue.

You will be an expert on MPs views like never before and the resource makes it easy to engage an MP in debate on a specific topic.

One wonders how we will cope with the sheer volume of information that will be coming at us, other than by switching off of course.  There is definately something advantageous to be said here about the British election system when compared with that of the USA.  At least we will only be getting a few short weeks of it rather than the protracted years they take across the pond. 

I can see another spike in internet bandwidth usage coming..!

If anyone is interested I did a search for the topic “expenses” on tweetminster and came up with 161 references 🙂

c u l8r

Categories
Business internet

Carphone buys Tiscali

I know this is big news in every single media outlet there is today.  CPW has bought Tiscali for £236m making it the second largest broadband provider.

So what can I add to all that is being said?  Whilst the “big six” is now the “big five” there are still hundreds of small ISPs out there serving niche, mostly business to business customers.  The time will come very soon I think that this base of hundreds of service providers will have to shrink. 

Many ISPs are now 10 – 15 years old having started during the initial dial up boom.  Most are “owner operated” with proprietors facing a difficult time ahead and the need to find capital to invest in new capacity and at the same time facing the cost pressures applied because of consumer ISP pricing strategy.

Another tier of B2B ISPs is going to emerge as clear winners.  Just being an ISP will not be enough. These will be specialist Communications Providers able to satisfy the complete range of business communications requirements. These companies already exist but the gap between them and the rest will become wider and the day will come where most of the small businesses will disappear.

Categories
End User internet

Consumers have no voice

As a footnote to yesterday’s posts from the ISPA Legal Forum one of the things to have stuck in my mind is that consumers are not being consulted in any part of the discussion surrounding P2P filesharing.  Whilst the inter industry argument rages we are in danger of losing out on some basic human rights.

Categories
Business internet

Digital Britain Final Report delayed until end of June

A very interesting ISPA Legal Forum session this afternoon yielded quite a bit of bloggable stuff, some of which has already been covered in posts earlier this evening.

The Legal Forum format was based on a panel session that included Clive Gringras as Chair, Simon Persoff, head of Regulatory Affairs at Orange, Steve Rowan of the International Policy Directorate and Daniel Sandelson, Partner at lawyers Clifford Chance.

Firstly the Digital Britain Final Report which was meant to be out in mid May is now likely to be delayed due to the “purdah” that is applied to such publications during election times – there are both Local Government and European elections in the forthcoming months.

Secondly the formation of a Digital Rights Agency, touted as part of the initial DB Report now seems to be far from a done deal. Many of the stakeholders involved thought theRights Agency was a bad idea. The ISP industry thinks it could be ok provided it steers clear of enforcement (of the law against copyright infringement by illegal downloading).  The Music Industry thinks it is a good idea provided it only focuses on enforcement.

ISPs say that the Music Industry is trying to avoid being seen as the bad guys by getting the ISPs to do the dirty work by terminating the broadband connections of (allegedly) guilty parties. ISPs don’t want to be seen as the bad guys, say that switching off broadband connections is disproportionate and if forced to do would want to fully recover their costs from the Music Industry. 

Because Copyright Infringment is a civil offence any costs incurred in the enforcement of private commercial rights, which is what the Music Industry wants the ISPs to do, can be recovered.  In this case by the ISPs from the Music Industry.  The Music Industry is saying it won’t pay. 

This is all looking like a right buggers muddle and I can’t see how it can end amicably. All this when a Government survey (in Glasgow for what it is worth) suggested that illegal P2P downloading is rife, nay becoming mainstream.

It isn’t possible to fully distill two hours of intense and useful discussion into a short blog post but I will finish by saying that it seems to me that the Music Industry is onto a loser and needs to reinvent it’s business model which at the moment it seems incapable of doing.  In going after the ISPs it is picking the easiest target. Is a search engine (Google?!) equally responsible becasue it helps transgressors find out how they can break the law? 

As an experiment try searching on Google for “how to download free music albums”.  You will find 48,900,000 links on this subject. The cat is out of the bag and isn’t getting back in.

Categories
Business internet

20% increase in P2P downloads since Pirate Bay court case.

At the ISPA Legal Forum today it was stated that research has shown that illegal P2P downloading has increased by 20% since the high profile Pirate Bay court case.

This was revealed as the result of a recent 3 month research study into Consumer online behaviour by University College London academic Robin Hunt. Hunt said that a snapshot of Bit Torrent activity indicated that there were 1.3 million sharing sessions online – up 20% from before the litigation.

He also stated that in a breakfast meeting yesterday with David Lammy, the IP Minister had estimated that there were 10 million people in the UK involved with illegal P2P downloading.  The scale of this is such that if 10 million people are breaking the law then “there is something wrong with the law” said Hunt.

The prospect of criminalising 10m people is clearly unimaginable.

Other snippets from the Forum suggested that since YouTube had stopped rights holders such as Warner Brothers from posting videos to the site there had been a growth in kids uploading videos made from their own local copies.  This has lead to unknown teenagers getting a huge number of hits.

What’s more with the plummeting cost of storage – £150 can now get you a Terrabyte hard drive – it won’t be long before the whole iTunes back catalogue can be stored on a single PC. It is estimated that 10 Terrabyte hard drives will be available within two years.

This problem seems to me to be about to come to a head as we await the Digital Britain Final Report.