Category: Net

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

Categories
Business Engineer peering voip

ITSPA Awards 2015 tickets now on sale – I’ll be there with LONAP at the Tate Modern

itspa awards 2015

ITSPA Awards 2015 – 2.30 – 5pm, 19th March, Tate Modern

Yo y’all. Tickets for the ITSPA Awards 2015 are now available here. If you are in the Internet Telephony Service Provider community or supply to them you need to be there. These events are always fantastic networking opportunities. You get to mix with most of the players in the UK hosted VoIP community.

If you are a supplier, most of your prospects will be there. If you are a service provider your competitiors’ CEO is likely to be there and very approachable. I’ll be there for a chat as well (fwiw).

As an added bonus some of the LONAP board will be there – I include myself. LONAP as most of you will know is an Internet Exchange Point (IXP). Quite a few ITSPA members are also LONAP members. We have also recently had a number of enquiries from other ITSPA members re joining LONAP.

The benefits of joining LONAP for ITSPA members are clear. Lower latency and lower internet access costs for your traffic – the use of peering in this situation has a well established business model.

So in the interest of world peace and low latency networking LONAP are inviting their members and prospects for a few beers after the Awards themselves. We will thereafter be decamping to a curry house of good repute.

If you are a LONAP member or prospect and are going to the ITSPA Awards let me know in advance if you want to come for the curry as I will need to pre-book the numbers. If you fit into one of these categories but are not coming to the Awards themselves and want to come for the curry also let me know. No freeloaders, time wasters or snake oil salesmen:)

Just as an fyi for the ITSPA Awards 2015 we have had 66 entries from 34 companies for the categories below:

  • Best Consumer VoIP
  • Best Business ITSP (Small Enterprise, Medium Enterprise and Corporate)
  • Best VoIP CPE
  • Best VoIP Infrastructure
  • Best VoIP Innovation

We aso have as separate awards

  • The ITSPA Members’ Pick
  • The ITSPA Champion

Exciting eh? Not everyone can win at the ITSPA Awards 2015 but you are guaranteed to have a good time and chat with useful people. Book your tickets now:)

Amazingly posts about the ITSPA Awards on this blog go back to 2008! Check em out here.

Categories
broadband Engineer engineering internet

Bufferbloat and Virgin Media

virgin media buffering

Virgin Media Buffering – Bufferbloat spat

Bufferbloat, as most of you will know is the situation in a packet switched network where the packet buffers are so large1 they cause high latency and jitter. Bufferbloat can also reduce the network throughput. This post is all about a guy called Dave Taht and his encounter with Virgin Media buffering issues.

On the face of it the Virgin Media headline speeds are great and one often sees tweets with pictures of speed tests showing near to spec speed results. Virgin’s DOCSIS cable modem tech is far better at meeting theoretical specs than is its various competing DSL technologies. I do however occasionally hear anecdotally about Virgin Media buffering problems with their broadband connections.

This blog post describing the Virgin Media buffering problem due to bufferbloat is a bit of an eye opener.

Dave Taht knows what he is talking about when it comes to network performance and pitched in on a Virgin Media forum to complain about why they weren’t doing anything about their buffering problem. Dave ascribed this Virgin Media buffering problem to bufferbloat. Dave is an expert on bufferbloat – check out his website.

In the forum post Dave offered advice on what to do to sort the buffering problem – there are a number of well established fixes.

Virgin not only deleted his post but blacklisted his IP address. This is quite counter productive. It seems to me it would have made much more sense to fix the issue than throw their toys out of the pram. The former course would have generated lots of good PR. The latter the opposite. Witness my own particular post.

The decision to delete Dave’s post was probably take by a low level supervisory person. If a member of the senior management team had been involved one would like to think they would have taken a different approach. It doesn’t matter now. It is interesting to understand that these consumer service businesses are all played out a 60 thousand feet. It’s a game of throwing enough money at specific macro level functions of the business – usually marketing.

Spending a lot on advertising how great you are goes a long way towards making a sale. Most people are sufficiently disinterested in the detail of how their broadband works to note buffering as an issue. It’s only when something gets really bad that people up sticks and go elsewhere.

I don’t know where buffering is at in the Virgin Media list of priorities – something quite possibly driven by the marketing department. It is a shame that they don’t seem to be wanting to fix it though.

1 The fertile imagination will now see a packet buffer large enough to store a whole movie – you will never get to see it:)

Footnote from Dave Taht this evening: (I take no credit for the result 🙂

Thank you. I got my access restored this morning and updated my blog
post, and will put out more information later today on the mailing
lists I spammed later today – BUT! I have no problem continuing
holding the entire industy’s feet to fire for a while, so I don’t
suggest changing your piece on that front.

However, it would benefit from the addition of an embedded link to
this talk at uknof – which is the shortest talk I gave EVER on this
issue, and thoroughly describes the revolution we could make,
together, if we work at it:

https://plus.google.com/103994842436128003171/posts/Kpogana4pze

(I don’t remember how to embed videos in html anymore!)

… after which I’d had such hope from the follow-on meeting at virgin
as to walk out walking on air. 2 years ago. 🙁

I certainly would like all ISPs to do a little testing of openwrt +
sqm-scripts with fq_codel (barrier breaker has all the fixes that work
on cablemodems, and has a nice gui and is stable. Chaos calmer has all
the DSL fixes, but is not quite stable and takes some work to use –
but it works on currently shipped things like the wndr4300. )

and publish appropriate settings. It is hard for users to get the
measurements right.

All the home router products that just shipped, got their shaping
algorithms terribly, terribly, wrong and missed DSL and PPPOe
compensation entirely. Sigh.

Categories
broadband Business

EE home broadband pulls plug on affiliate marketing partners

priority answer EE home broadband

EE goes it alone with direct marketing programmes & ditches affiliates

EE who are my mobile service provider have announced the closure of their EE home broadband affiliate programme. This means that they are likely to disappear from most comparison websites as there will be no incentive to push their products1. We will also be ditching them on Broadbandrating.com. Whilst we have a neutral policy on who we push – we let the data decide – we do want the ability to earn commission from sales generated through our site. They had already pulled the plug on any TV related commissions. These are the most lucrative with most ISP affiliate deals.

Broadbandrating.com in part uses Social Media Sentiment Analysis to decide who is the best provider of the moment. EE, with only around 750k subscribers is the smallest of the ISPs we monitor. In practice they had very few people tweeting about their broadband services which is likely to be a reflection of the general level of interest in the product.

Add to this the fact that EE’s Twitter account is unable to support any enquiry regarding broadband (they have been very useful to me re mobile) and direct you at an email address. It’s very poor. We are told that the decision to pull the plug is based on a “commercial decision … due to budget constraints”. Suggests cash could be tight at EE. This communications market is brutal and needs lots of free dosh to keep bringing in new subscribers whose loyalty by and large has to be bought.

To me this all points to the EE brand disappearing post BT acquisition, at least in respect of broadband. It’s such a weak proposition. The mobile play is a different kettle of fish.

I don’t think that network operators can lead with mobile if they are trying to sell broadband. Makes you wonder what the O2/3 team and Vodafone plans might be. I can only see TalkTalk, Virgin Media and BT in the game and TalkTalk have a bit of spending to do before they can really be players. More likely that they will be bought, assuming they have the appetite for that.

1 We will be launching business broadband services on broadbandrating.com during 2015. Not many business broadband providers participate in affiliate marketing schemes but this will not stop us pushing their services. We assume that there will be other means of generating cash

Categories
Engineer fun stuff peering

PRIZE COMPETITION – guess who’s wearing the sandals #LINX88

PRIZE COMPETITION

Guess who’s wearing the sandals at LINX88. There may be more than one person wearing sandals, this being an internet engineering meeting. Steve Lalonde plus the wearer of the sandals may not enter.

The prize is either I’ll buy you a beer or I’ll buy breakfast at Silva’s Caff on Shaftesbury Ave at 8am tomorrow morning. Steve and I will be there from 8am. It’s one the of the best.

If you want to add a caption for effect feel free.

Categories
Engineer peering

LINX88 notes thoughts and ramblings

LINX88

LINX88 notes and thoughts

LINX is without doubt a big outfit. The stats speak for themselves:

  • 603 member ASNs
  • 22 new applications in 2015
  • 1454 connected member ports
  • 851 member-facing 10GigE ports
  • 13 member-facing 100GigE ports
  • over 2.53 Tb/sec of peak traffic
  • 10.212 Tb of connected capacity
  • 583 members
  • 62 member countries

The internet plumbing game is an exciting place to be. It’s a place of constant growth. And change. Where there is growth and change there is opportunity.

The model hasn’t really changed much over the years. It’s all about connecting networks with increasingly faster links. We have seemingly only just started talking about 100GigE but now LINX has 13 live 100Gig ports. It’s only a matter of time before we see their first 400Gig connection. The first Petabit per second peak will surely follow.

The thing about the internet plumbing game is that there doesn’t seem to be any sign of an easing off of growth. We still have bandwidth drivers in the early stages of the hype curve. 8K TV for example. Internet of Things? How about 8K TV over IOT? Why not?

The engineers that run the internet are simple folk. Don’t get me wrong. They are highly intelligent but they see life quite simply. Give them enough beer, food and fine wines, fly them business class and put them up in comfortable hotels and they are happy. Given this they will happily work long hours and keep the internet running on your behalf.

LINX is 21 years old in 2015. That gives you a feel for how old the actual internet is. It also allows us to have a load of coming of age parties to follow on from the 20th birthday bashes last year but that is by the by.

Look out for the next post which is all about sandals and socks.

Categories
broadband Business Engineer Net

Virgin expansion – a quick shufty at the business case & why they aren’t interested in the final third

B4RN rural broadband virgin media expansion

Virgin Media expansion

All over the news today are the Virgin Media expansions plans. Virgin plan to spend £3billion expanding their network reach from 13 million to 17 million homes. That’s £750 per household passed. If, following this investment, Virgin grows its customer base by the same proportion as the growth in network coverage they might expect to grow their base from 5 million to 6.5 million customers. That would make it £2000 per acquired customer. Let’s not worry about other customer acquisition costs.

Virgin will depreciate that cost over maybe 25 years so that’s £80 per customer per annum, or £6.66 a month. That’s £6.66 of the monthly subscription cost of a new customer being the cost of laying down the network. This would be reduced if they depreciated it over a longer period which maybe they do – I imagine BT’s strategy is to depreciate over many decades as once in the infrastructure lasts a long time. A chunk of the £3bn might well be operational cost which would reduce the depreciation but add to operations costs.

Brings it home as to why these services cost what they do. It’s analagous to why a BT line rental costs roughly £16 a month although one imagines that BT has written off most of the capex of installing its copper. Even though broadband can almost seem to be free nowadays the cost at the lower end is driven by the line rental. When it comes to superfast broadband bandwidth costs come more into play.

The revenue growth would notionally increase from £4.2bn to £5.5bn although I’m being a little simplistic and not taking the effect of their mobile business into consideration.

I haven’t seen profit numbers for 2014 but I think they are pretty profitable. Lets assume 10% profit. Could be more. 10% profit of the delta sales arising from the new investment (our guess is around £1.3bn as stated) would be £130m a year. That would be a 23 year payback time for the £3bn of cash spent. It’s a long term game isn’t it?

These numbers are very rough back of a fag packet calcs but I think it certainly gives you an idea. I’m sure there are lots of Variables played in by Virgin accountants to come up with a business case. Also I’ve almost certainly missed something out but I bet I’m not far off the mark.

A 23 year Return on Investment wouldn’t pass muster with most companies. Even BT which is in the same long term infrastructure game as Virgin. I’m told that BT’s Cornwall infrastructure project which had the benefit of substantial EC cash only showed a reasonable time to money because of that EC money. And that was something like a 12 – 13 year payback.

Note there were according to the Office for National Statistics 26.7 million households in the UK in 2014.

So Virgin’s investment takes them to around 64% coverage. Their existing network reaches around 49% of the population so for £3m they get 15% more. If we were to extrapolate these numbers then the whole country would cost £20billion to service. I realise it isn’t as simple as that but the number isn’t orders of magnitudes adrift from the Caio report of a few years back which estimated the total cost of rolling ubiquitous Fibre to be around £29bn.

If we keep the maths simple and assume that rural areas would cost the same per household to service, which they won’t the cost of extending the Virgin network to every household would be just over £7bn. I don’t have the additional cost of servicing non-metropolitan areas off the top of my head but it wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t represented by the £9bn delta between my own calcs in this post and Caio.

So the cost of providing a high speed broadband infrastructure to the last third for a new provider feels as if it would be something like £16bn. We don’t have a number were BT to be the provider but BT will already have a chunk of infrastructure in place towards fulfilling the job.

My guess is that there’s no way based on these projected costs that Virgin would ever seek to invest in the “final third”. Their RoI/payback would stretch almost to the next century. This is just a bit of an exercise but it does serve to illustrate the long term game that is the telco business.

Categories
Business End User media

Will Premier League TV deal drive up cost to punters

premiership tv rights

Premiership TV rights see 70% cost increase

In the news is the fact that BT and Sky have paid 70% more for the next chunk of Premiership TV rights than they did the last time around. In one sense this doesn’t affect me whatever. Although being a sportsman I do take a passing interest in all sorts of sports, the Premier League strikes me as a vehicle that attracts bad sportsmanship and a poor example to kids. Such is the money at stake.

We have a very competitive broadband market in the UK. ISP’s have been trying to layer services to squeeze more cash out of us and TV certainly brings more margin. BT recognises this which is why it’s dipped its toe in the TV market and why it has been going head to head against Sky for sporting rights.

For Sky this is almost a life or death matter. Sports have been Sky’s Unique Selling Point for donkeys years. Without this USP their offering is significantly diluted.

So in a market where it’s been a race to the bottom for some years now this sizeable increase in the cost of providing TV sports services is likely to squeeze margins further or result in price increases that wont go down well with punters. Over at broadbandrating.com we saw high levels of complaints when ISPs had to increase their analogue line rental costs, even though these increased were in the region of pence not pounds. Virgin saw even more negativity when their TV pricing shot up again.

Where I’m getting to is that whilst normally a competitive market drives down costs, in this case it’s driving up costs because the key bit of content, football, is sole sourced and has no incentive to roll over and play ball with lower prices (sorry).

There is no indication as yet as to how this might affect end user prices for Sports TV packages but Sky and BT need to show a decent return to shareholders and they can’t always absorb this kind of cost increase. I guess we will find out soon enough, for what it’s worth.

That’s it for now. Ciao amigos.

Categories
broadband End User

ISP report places Sky at top of rankings for Q4 2014

isp report

broadbandrating.com ISP report

Couldn’t help noticing that broadbandrating.com have published their quarterly ISP report.

Highlights include:

Sky was rated top provider for Q4 2014

Plusnet recovered from  a number of service outages in Q3 to rise  to second place in the overall ratings

BT showed a big improvement in customer support levels with average call waiting times over Q4 dropping from 15 mins to just over 6.

The report also shows a sustained social media campaign in the run up to Christmas took TalkTalk to the top of the Sentiment rankings with EE showing how a piece of good news (launch of TV service) influences the way people feel in a positive way.

Check it out yur. Some interesting graphs to look at in the isp report, one of which is the featured image for this post.

For those who didn’t already know broadbandrating.com is a brand recently introduced by trefor.net as part of our foray into the world of affiliate marketing. There is much dosh to be made in this game although you do have to be quite high in the search engine rankings to get your hands on it.

I first thought of adding such functionality to trefor.net but decided not to sully this site (too much) with the notionally crass commercialism that is the affiliate market.

broadbandrating.com does have some differentiators. We use Sentiment Analysis to rank ISPs – those getting it in the neck most on Twitter get lower rankings. We also use what is known as Customer Support ratings whereby we call up the ISPs every day to see how long it takes them to answer the phone. These result are quite revealing. You can have a play with the different charts for sentiment analysts here and customer support here.

When we first started, BT were often taking an eyewatering 15 minutes to answer the phone. Since then this has improved dramatically (see featured image) and chatting to a senior BT exec last week I’m told it reflects a conscious effort on their part to improve things. Fair play.

The next ISP report will be for Q1 2015 and is due in April.

More anon…

Categories
Engineer engineering internet

Live blogging from UKNOF30

uknof30

It’s hotting up here at UKNOF30 in Bishopsgate. We are deep the heart of the City of London and the place smells of money. Witness the scene that meets you as you walk into the local Tesco express: a large display of champagne – see the featured image. Times are clearly not hard around here.

Anyway I’m going to serve you with the occasional ad hoc snippet live from the meeting. We’ve had the intros from Keith and now it’s Tim Rossiter from Sky talking about their new core network.

Categories
broadband End User

Are ISP incentives to new customers going to be counter-productive and drive broadband churn?

broadband churn Broadband Technology Pipe

Offers to new customers could drive broadband churn

The broadband market is massively competitive. This is a good thing. As in many markets ISPs offer incentives for new customers to sign up. In the B2B world these incentives are frequently given to resellers rather than the end customer. However in the consumer marketplace where everything is automated and done online new customers often get a bung to join.

These highly visible offers often rub up existing customers the wrong way. They feel unloved, regardless of whether they received such an offer themselves way back when. It is also very noticeable that customers will complain about the slightest additional cost and when they have a service interruption look for compensation. I some cases, where their monthly broadband bill is already miniscule, for example TalkTalk’s standard monthly cost for their LLU ADSL product is £3.50 plus line rental, any compensation received is likely to be very token indeed.

So when a customer, such as Shaun Hamilton in our example tweet above wants to upgrade his existing service but finds that he can’t get a particularly good deal because such deals are only available to new subscribers it is easy to see how he may be tempted to up sticks and leave.

Regardless of the fact that all ISPs sting leaving customers with an admin fee , typically around £30, it is possible to make big savings in the first year of a new service. As well as attractive (free even) monthly rates in the first year up front incentives can often be over £100 in terms of cashback or a shopping voucher.

If you are going for a high end TV package the savings can occasionally exceed £300 in the first year, if you catch the offer at the right time.

One wonders what effect this has on churn. Apart from the occasional sporting package most of the ISPs offer similar TV packages, at least those that do TV, so it’s not as if the big consumer players have that much in the way of exclusive content.  Sport seems to be the one exception here and although Sky Sports is available via most ISPs BT have been building up some exclusivity with their rugby coverage.

It’s a difficult equation to manage. All ISPs assume a certain level of customer churn. One wonders whether churn generated by over-gilding the lilly for new customers might get out of hand. At least they can control this as they can just reduce their attractiveness to newbies.

It’s a difficult marketplace. You can check out the latest deals over at BROADBANDRating.

Categories
Bad Stuff Business ecommerce Engineer internet online safety Regs security surveillance & privacy

A quick guide to problems that will arise if we implement further internet surveillance measures

encryption adult content filter snoopers charter revisited TalkTalk Router Security Flaw ashley madison

Snoopers Charter revisited

The aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders has lead to goverment and opposition calling for more internet surveillance. Here are a few points for your consideration.

  1. Storing this data will inevitably result in it being hacked, left on a train/taxi on a laptop/memory stick and details of a government minister affair with another MP being made public. Example here (29 Jan 2015)
  2. The overhead associated with having to gather and store the data in a secure way will be proportionally huge compared to the size of the business and to the number of customers for smaller ISPs. This will result in the government deciding not to force these businesses to store the information and settle just for the biggest 7 ISPs aka the Digital Economy Act. The consequence will be that potential terrorists will just use these smaller ISPs for their internet services leaving a big hole in the “surveillance net”
  3. The resources required to make this happen will be huge. The French government already knew about the Charlie Hebdo killers. They just lacked the feet on the street to keep tabs on them. Diverting staff to managing the data gathering project will mean even fewer feet on the street or divert cash from adding more feet.
  4. The technical challenges with managing sender and receiver data for email clients is not small due to the hundreds of different clients out there with non standard formats.
  5. Most email is in any case encrypted these days and is run on platforms that are not necessarily owned by UK businesses. The difficulties associated with extracting these data will not be small (if not impossible). Ditto social media platforms.
  6. Forcing these platforms to provide a back door into the encrypted data (assuming it will be doable) will erode trust in areas of the economy that also rely on such encryption such as banking and ecommerce.
  7. Businesses will move away from the UK. It will be the start of the rot and leave us with a reputation akin to China et all when it comes to “surveillance society”.
  8. Terrorists will move deeper into darknets and continue to kill innocent people.
  9. On balance I’d spend the money on more feet on the street.

The rush to call for the snooper’s charter to be implemented would result in a bad law that will not have had adequate scrutiny. My wife and one of the kids were in the audience during last night’s BBC Question Time filmed in Lincoln’s Drill Hall. I watched despite it being well after my bedtime.

None of the panellists or the audience really had a grasp on the issues which reflects its highly complex nature. It’s very easy for MPs to support this type of legislation. Most right minded people will agree that it’s a good thing to stop terrorism. It’s just that they don’t understand the implications.

Check out other snoopers charter type posts here.

Categories
Engineer peering

@lonap AGM 2014 cc @SteveGlen @prt2m

You will all be aware that society publications such as OK Magazine, Allright, Hello and Hiya major on publishing photos of as many people as they can to guarantee that someone buys them. They at least get as many sales as people in the pics.

Well we’re a bit like that at trefor.net, the Xmas bash being an example. This is not always the case though. Sometimes we go for sheer artistic merit.

On this occasion the background for said art is the Court Room 7 St Andrew Street and the venue of the Lonap AGM 2014. In 2015. St Andrew Street is so called after the church of that name and the Court Room looked as if it might be the vestry or simlar. Very nice room it was.

I only have two pictures for you. One is of Warwicknet’s  Steve Glendinning praying. Those of you who know Steve will attest that he is a very spiritual man. Steve, Steve, Steve, praying isn’t going to stop that network problem 🙂 Note the LONAP phone chargers and biros on the tables. No expense spared us.

Steve Glendinning at prayer

The second photo is simply surreal. Paul Thornton is sat in a highly meditative pixiesque position in the fireplace. What goes Paul? Course I might have suggested he sat there – for the art and the subsequent publicity:) (fwiw).

paul thorntonIf you want to know what goes on at a LONAP AGM and the subsequent social why not sign up. It’s a terrific organisation to be part of with serious engineering and business benefits for your own company.

Categories
broadband Business

TalkTalk get 75k Tesco broadband customers plus 5 million clubcard points

Tesco TalkTalk

TalkTalk buys Tesco Blinkbox & broadband for £5m cash

I’ve been watching the consumer broadband market as part of the development of the broadbandrating.com site. In this space size really is everything. Every day we perform sentiment analysis on the Twitter activity of all the ISPs we monitor – BT, Sky, Virgin, TalkTalk, Plusnet and EE.

It’s very noticeable that the levels of activity (ok complaints mostly) fall into three tiers. BT, Sky and Virgin get roughly the same number of tweets every day. Likewise Plusnet and TalkTalk at maybe a quarter of the above. Then EE typically get very few mentions.

Virgin and Sky get lots of complaints about TV problems. BT gets it in the neck I suspect because of Openreach. TalkTalk and Plusnet I assume “do well” out of not having as many TV customers (none in the case of Plusnet).

EE very much stand out as the smallest ISP by subscriber numbers in this cohort. At 750k subscribers last time I looked they lag behind everyone else who are in the several millions (note we don’t get to see any separately published data for Plusnet who are part of BT).

EE do get a ton of complaints on Twitter but they mostly concern mobile services – unsurprising considering EE are the biggest mobile operator in the UK.

Where is this conversation going?  It seems clear to me that this is evidence of the chances of success in the consumer broadband market being very much down to scale and also the ability to offer a full suite of services – triple play, quad play – call it what you like. This is why EE introduced a TV service. We can’t believe it’s doing that well or we’d see more talk about it on Twitter.

It’s also why TalkTalk have gone and bought the Tesco Blinkbox service. TalkTalk want to be up there with BT, Sky and Virgin getting more complaints about their TV services (not really but you get my drift – they want to be talked about because that will mean more people are buying their services).

It’s clearly also why Tesco have given up on broadband. If EE with 750k subs are hardly getting any exposure, other than what they pay for, then Tesco with 75k customers stand no chance. You might ask why they even bothered with the Blinkbox service in the first place. Tesco are up against the big boys in the broadband game and now it’s game over.

Outside the big ISPs mentioned here there are a number of other smaller operators that sell to consumers. These guys very much sell on service and quality of their product and tend not to have a TV play. There could well continue to be a place for them (I’m not mentioning any names although I wonder how long the Post Office will stick at it) but the market is increasingly going to be driven by bundles that include TV and very soon mobile.

I’ll finish with the vision of TalkTalk CEO Dido Harding turning up at a Tesco checkout with 75k broadband subscribers and the Blinkbox business in her shopping trolley. She hands over £5m cash and presents her Tesco Clubcard. That should get her 5 million Clubcard points. Had she been able to pay with her Tesco Clubcard Master card the could have doubled the points. Unfortunately Tesco only let you have a credit limit of around £7k or so that must have discounted that possibility:).

Categories
broadband Business Mobile

BT branding strategy with EE?

BTOpenreach engineering visit Install ofcom strategic review

Will BT keep the EE brand?

Picked up this little gem from Twitter. It’s a good question because it opens up a discussion regarding BT’s strategy post acquisition. Assuming it all goes through.

https://twitter.com/FMLDNCAPO/status/544618159349956608

When BT bought Plusnet it was convenient to keep the brands separate. Plusnet became BT’s “value” brand although it is interesting no note that one might consider some aspects of their service delivery, such as UK call centres, to be premium (BT broadband call centres are in India).

EE brand image is very much consumer value oriented and at least on the broadband side is a direct competitor to Plusnet.  Plusnet doesn’t have TV in its bundle (ok you can buy BT Sport if you also happen to be a Sky TV customer) but you get the impression that the EE TV offering is very much a last gasp blimey we need TV or we ain’t in business pitch.

BT is buying EE for its mobile base and not for any other reason. BT is also a major infrastructure provider to EE through BT Wholesale which supplies thousands of Ethernet circuits to EE cell sites so there will be efficiencies there.

So the question is would the EE brand remain? If I were BT I’d want the BT brand to be at the forefront of the market. With 24.5 million mobile subscribers EE has many more end users that BT’s fixed line services (BT annual report says 2013/14 broadband tails = 7.5m Openreach “broadband tails” 18.5m – presumably you don’t add the two together). Too much scope for confusion I’d think. BT will want one big brand, eased in over a two year window perhaps. Integration would be slightly complicated by the fact that EE are still probably in the process of integrating TMobile and Orange.

On the other hand I really know nooothiiing. Otherwise I’d be running BT and dictating this to my PA’s PA from the back of my Rolls Royce.

In answer to Fraz’ question I imagine he will still be able to source low cost broadband through some BT brand or another. If he can’t he could always take his business elsewhere.

Categories
broadband Business media Mobile

The future UK telecoms landscape

future uk telecoms landscape

Future UK telecoms landscape – UK telecoms in period of massive change.

The twittersphere is going wild following the news that BT has tabled a bid for EE. Mostly with messages like this one:


I’m not commenting on the tweet itself, just reporting. I’m also assuming that the deal will go ahead. I’m further assuming that Vodafone will buy Virgin Media, or its parent company Liberty Global. Last week a reliable source told me that Voda has already tabled a bid although I don’t think this is yet in the public eye.

So in the UK that leaves us with two giant telcos – a red one and a purpley bluey green one, a content provider (Sky) that rides on the back of the purpley bluey green network and TalkTalk (mostly purple with yellow tinges) who coincidentally have recently teamed up with O2 (blue) having ditched Voda as their mobile provider.

Word has it that these manoeuvres have been going on for a while with the protagonists delaying to see if someone else moved first in order to get around the tedious Ofcom process that will inevitably ensue. Once this concept of market consolidation has been accepted as workable it will ease the passage of the second and maybe third mergers/acquisitions.

Sky may be able ride high and operate as a content provider that all the other networks will want to work with. BT however has been after a piece of Sky’s pie and has been buying up sporting rights left, right and centre. One wonders what will happen to the Murdoch machine if it gets to the stage where it’s TV packages no longer have the best content deals.

All good stuff. Here’s an interesting one for you. In the future UK telecoms landscape Sky, TalkTalk and O2 merge… Not so stupid an idea. TalkTalk is talking about building out a UK wide fibre network. That would give us three completely separate networks and some serious basis for competition.

The future UK telecoms landscape – you heard it first on trefor.net, maybe.

Categories
Engineer food and drink fun stuff internet

#trefbash2014 – the official photos

Last Thursday night the UK internet industry got together in London for trefbash2014, the 5th Annual trefbash. This one was better than ever with Radio2’s Alex Lester putting in a personal appearance and the Adforesight photo booth being a real hit (see live picture gallery).

I’m sure there is lots more to be said but for the now I’ll just leave you with the output of the official photographer. Note the colours. Most people really entered into the spirit of the beach party theme and the only exceptions were where the shirt hadn’t been delivered in time or people had afternoon business meetings to attend

Categories
broadband Business

Vodafone looking at Virgin Media Acquisition

 

Further UK telecoms consolidation?

It’s all over the tech/comms news that the Big Red is looking at the possibility of buying Virgin Media’s parent company. Google it. There is a fit because both companies have bright red branding so they wouldn’t have to change much.

It was only recently we discussed the fact that Voda was looking into buying TalkTalk.

What’s more other recent rumours have suggested that BT are looking at buying either O2 or EE. BT of course sold off O2 all those years ago – what hindsight can tell you eh?

I think it is inevitable that there will be more consolidation in the UK telecoms landscape. We only have to look at the ISPs we follow in trefor.net brand BROADBANDRating. Of the six we look at, BT, Virgin, Plusnet, TalkTalk, Sky and EE EE has by far the fewer subscribers and this would appear to be reflected in their social media engagement.

If you look at EE’s twitter stream it is very busy. However it is mostly people complaining about/discussing their EE mobile service rather than broadband. So if we thought that the future world was going to revolve around broadband then you wouldn’t bet on EE being one of the winners, even though they are trying to change this with the intro of EE TV (etc).

O2 already gave up on their broadband project. One wonders at which point EE would do the same although you would then think that this would write them off as a long term player.

It feels as there is going to be further consolidation in the UK telecoms market and we are going to end up with just 4 players in the UK, remembering that Plusnet is owned by BT.

I’d guess

BT + O2 (or EE?)

Voda + Virgin

TalkTalk (+EE or O2?)

Sky (Sky could buy 3 for good measure)

This could all be a load of rubbish but there’s no harm in speculating. If I’m right it will make me look good. If I’m wrong I could just delete the post… 🙂

There is an argument that says that even 4 players is too many but I can’t imagine many people would want there to be fewer – the competition has been great for prices and product development in the UK.

Categories
Engineer peering

IXLeeds 4 this Thursday

ixleeds 4 at AQL conf

IXLeeds 4 is on this Thursday – that’s the day after tomorrow

If you’ve been umming and ahing about going umm and ahh no more. The IX Leeds people are a great crowd and they put on terrific meetings. They do of course have the benefit of AQL’s conference centre at Salem Chapel which again, if you haven’t been to you need to go.

These meetings are attended by a wide range of engineering types including people who are real experts in their subject. Their beauty lies in the fact that everyone is very approachable – you could be sat having coffee with someone who turns out to be very handy for advice when it comes to solving your latest problem/pointing you at suitable suppliers etc.

Having spoken at a previous IXLeeds I can tell you that the audience is very receptive and asks highly intelligent questions so you’re going to learn stuff you hadn’t considered before turning up.

The other great aspect of the meetings is the post conference social. These are usually very generously supported and the pubs around the Salem Chapel are great. Moreover they are a short walk from Leeds train station so it is easy to get in and out. IXLeeds 4 is an afternoon job – the agenda is here.

I was last at the Salem Chapel for EuroIX earlier this year. The output was a load of guest posts which can be viewed here:

UK internet history – The Early Days of LONAP by Raza Rizvi
INEX’s IXP Manager – Tools to help manage an Internet Exchange by Barry O’Donovan
Regional Peering in the UK by James Blessing
Co-operation makes internet exchanges future proof by Pauline Hartsuiker
Experience of launching an IXP in North America by Ben Hedges
The evolution of an IXP network engineer by Rob Lister
Why does Scotland need an Internet Exchange? by Charlie Boisseau
IX Manchester – It’s quiet up North by James Blessing

I expect quite a few of the guest authors to be at IXLeeds 4 so tap them on the shoulder and say hello.

That’s the plug for IXLeeds 4 over and done with. I guess we are coming up to the party season with conferences supplemented with socials. I will be at the ITSPA Christmas Lunch this week and of course next week is the culmination of the season with #trefbash2014. If you’re coming see you there. If not there is always next year:)

Ciao amigos.

Categories
Engineer peering

IXScotland4 meeting Dec 1st

ixscotland4

IXScotland4 is happening on Monday 1st  December, in Scotland. If you’ve never been to Scotland it’s a great time of year to go. Whisky tastes a heck of a lot better when it’s ‘orribly cold and wet out there. Oh and dark.

ixscotland4Only joking. 55 people from 36 organisations have so far registered to attend. Its a good level of interest considering IXScotland’s membership currently numbers 13. It’s also fair going for what is still a nascent operation carrying on average below 40Mbps of traffic. At that level of bandwidth there’s a long way to go.

However go it will. The policy of opening regional exchanges is a good one. What’s the point of hauling traffic hundreds of miles and back again when a short cable under (or over) a corridor will do. Peering exchanges are all about the customer experience. Speed. Adjacency. Networks connecting at IX Scotland will be providing their customers with the best possible internet connections. People do notice these things1.

Traffic will grow and having the exchange there will also encourage this. The UK has a number of regional exchanges, ie those outside of London. IX Leeds is independent  but LINX operates IXPs in Scotland, Cardiff and Manchester. A regional IXP will normally need some kind of support to get it going be it from the membership, local government or as is the case in Scotland, LINX.

The model doesn’t necessarily work everywhere. It really needs a carrier neutral POP. A town where there are lots of independent datacentres would have each datacentre wanting to host the IXP with the others reluctant to participate as it would look as if they were supporting their competitor.

You can find the agenda here. An interesting afternoon in prospect. LINX tell me there will be more on their recent pricing announcement plus “A major provider of anycast DNS services is about to set up a node at IXScotland.” Oo. Wonder who it could be:).

Of particular interest is the panel debate:

How do we improve connectivity in Scotland?
Panel will consist of representatives of Scottish government, commercial and community broadband access provision in Scotland, content provision in Scotland.

This is an universal question that could be the subject of discussion anywhere. Scotland of course probably has a significantly higher proportion of beautiful open countryside that is the root of the problem connectivity problem. It’s a dilemma.

Anyway if you fancy a trip to bonnie Scotland in December this is your chance. See you there? Also read loads of great peering contributions in our peering category here. Och aye.

1I had occasion to look up a website in Liberia recently. Took minutes to load a small 90 seconds promo video. I subsequently found out that the only connectivity in to Liberia were 16E1s vi satellite link. It’s an extreme comparison but people fast connectivity is becoming increasingly important.

Categories
broadband Engineer engineering

Openreach engineering visit

BTOpenreach engineering visit Install ofcom strategic review

Openreach engineering visit fixes one fault and finds another

The doorbell rang yesterday just after lunch. It was an Openreach engineer. Good news. He had come to fix our phone line. I wasn’t expecting him but there again wasn’t going to turn him away.

Out phone line has been jiggered since Saturday. It’s ok as the broadband was still working fine and the only persons that call us on our home phone are scammers and my mother in law. In one sense that was a bit of a result although funnily enough that was not my wife’s view on the situation.

The fibre to the cabinet connection only needs one wire but the phone needs a pair so it is  quite possible for one to continue working without the other.

openreach engineering visit - up a poleSo the engineer turns up and does a few tests both inside and outside the house and proceeds to find two faults. One is the one on the ticket which turns out to be a short circuit somewhere in the house (hoover bashed the socket!?). We fix that by just disconnecting that socket.

The other, which was a bonus, hasn’t been fixed yet and relates to a mismatch between the impedance profile on the two wires, or something along those lines. I wasn’t totally listening.

Our telephone wiring has been butchered about no end of times over the years so it comes as no surprise that there is a fault. It all started when I got so annoyed with BT that I ordered a second line and had a second ADSL line installed with a different provider. Funnily enough after getting the second line put in I got a sales call from BT trying to sell me broadband.

Having two lines coming in to the house has confused things from time to time especially when one of them was no longer in use. During one Openreach engineering visit a couple of years ago the engineer reused one of the spare wires from the second line to fix a fault in the first. This I think is where this current problem lies.

I’m not getting involved. Just leave it to the Openreach engineers who are actually quite a competent bunch of lads. Their (openly stated) problem lies in the fact that the whole copper network is just a pile of cack and it’s a difficult job to stay on top of the faults.

BT do from time to time make announcements to the fact that they are taking on more engineers (go to BT jobs pages here if you are looking around). The time may well come that the cost of maintaining the ageing network will outweigh the cost of rolling out fibre everywhere.

It’s gonna be a while. The only way I can see it happening short term is if we all go out and steal the copper lines. If the whole network was pinched then it would probably make sense to replace it all with fibre. Glass is cheaper than copper. Please don’t try this one at home though. It was merely a throwaway jocular remark intended to raise a smile. It was not intended to be genuine guidance for the frustrated home owner looking for reliability and genuinely high speeds in their broadband connections. Also it would be illegal. You have been warned!

Anyway back to my outstanding fault and the Openreach Engineering visit. My broadband speeds have been a bit up and down of late. I’ve been reluctant to raise a fault as I’d be getting in to a maze of engineering no shows and the possibility that they wouldn’t find a fault anyway as the problem is intermittent. Also it’s not helped by the fact that whenever I do a speed test using one of the network ports in the kitchen it runs at the correct speed. I just didn’t fancy wasting hours trying to improve the home wifi performance.

So I’ve been burying my head in the sand and avoiding the issue. Now thanks to the inadvertent discovery during my other Openreach engineering visit the problem may get sorted. Yay.

Don’t forget you are all invited to the trefor.net xmas bash. When the tickets are gone they are gone.

Categories
broadband End User

Calling the fibre broadband rollout team

B4RN broadband BT rural broadband reinvestment B4RN business model broadband vision

Fibre broadband rollout not reaching “parts that other rollouts cannot reach”

My heart goes out Jazz – see tweet below. We hear that metropolitan areas get new tech rollouts because of their population densities make the return on investment faster and more attractive than say rural areas.


Reality is not all city slickers get the fast stuff early. There are many possible explanations for this. For example Jazz could be unfortunate enough to live near an industrial estate.

BT tend not to upgrade cabs next to industrial estates because compared to residential there will be fewer subscribers in a given area. The cynics amongst you will no doubt say the real reason is that BT want to keep selling businesses their more expensive Ethernet services. Come now. Surely not.

Another reason could be purely logistical. There could be a problem with the existing cab., planning permission issues maybe, a blocked duct or insufficient power. It could be that the cost to BT of sorting out the problem was such that they prefer to spend their money elsewhere

Unfortunately for Jazz it isn’t just a question of having a word with the fibre broadband rollout team. BT would have so many people wanting to talk with that fibre broadband rollout team that they would never get any work done.

We can only hope that BT hasn’t actually finished in Jazz’s area and moved on leaving him as one of an unfortunate few left on the legacy “normal” broadband.

In all fairness to BT they are cracking on with their fibre broadband rollout generally (I know @Cyberdoyle will have a go at me for calling to fibre broadband but hey…).

The purists amongst us will not settle for less than Fibre to the Premises but that is another story..

Ciao amigos. Skinny latte in the trendy coffee show around the corner anyone?

Categories
Apps Engineer peering

Slack Instant Messaging

Slack

Using Slack Instant Messaging for our LONAP communications

Just trying out Slack Instant Messaging for now. My first reaction when one of the boys suggested it was “oh no, not another IM system. Why can’t we just use hangouts, or messenger, or anything we already have.”

I’ve changed my mind. Having a system that is essentially private for one company is great. I get notifications on my Android when a Slack IM comes in. Normally I check my mail for LONAP messages but only do it periodically. We don’t use gmail which is my normal platform for everything else.

Slack UII also have slack for my Chromebook. It’s a web based service so no plugin. At least not one that I am using. I  can enable desktop notifications but have happily left this switched off as I prefer the notifications to come in on my phone. I do like the fact that you can choose keywords for alerts.

It’s generally early days for us with Slack but the omens are good. We are expecting it to turn us into a more responsive organisation. It’s all about serving our members 🙂 We are a very distributed team all working remotely so good comms are essential.

If you don’t know or haven’t been following recent posts, LONAP is an Internet Exchange Point that connects eyeball networks with content providers. We have some major global names as members: Twitter, Google, Netflix etc.

There is a good chance that if you are using social media in the UK you are reaching it via LONAP which has a great reputation as being a network run by engineers for engineers.

As far as Slack goes I have been a user of Instant Messaging almost from the start and have grown sceptical as to whether anyone needs a new service. There seem to be loads of them all over the place.

My mind has been changed, by Slack. I’ll still use Facebook to chat to the kids and Hangouts for the trefor.net businesses but where LONAP is concerned, Slack Instant Messaging it is.

Categories
Business internet

Plusnet website down

plusnet website down

Plusnet website down – not great for an ISP

Saw on Twitter that the plus.net website is down. Somewhat of a faux pas for an ISP. We’ve probably all suffered from such situations but it is usually extremely embarrassing for the team responsible.

I daresay we will find out what happened in due course. This is a fairly major event because one assumes that plus.net will have a high availability platform for their site – load balancers, multple ip addresses and servers etc etc. All the usual good stuff. They will also have multiple DNS and multiple connections into the platform.

What it says is that nothing can be guaranteed to have 100% uptime. In many industries these days downtime of such a service will be measured in lost cash. The likes of Amazon, eBay etc.

The industry traditionally most sensitive to such scenarios is finance. I recall years ago a pal telling me he’d been to a data centre in the USA where a major bank had a cage. Inside the cage sat three engineers playing cards. They were there in case there was a network problem. Expensive but just part of the cost of insurance.

This isn’t practical for most businesses so they have to rely on a good partner. I don’t think plus.net do any hosting but this would probably harm that side of their business if they have one.

Having been in the situation of running a network which also had data centre resources  I can tell tell you that the only way to ensure a good night sleep is to invest in resources. Qualified staff and quality network design and equipment.

Plusnet will certainly have done this and still have a problem. Hey.

All I can say is that with the plusnet website down the alarm bells will have been ringing at the ISP and a team of guys will be rushing around like blue arsed flies looking to see what is wrong. The best way to get it sorted is to leave them to it.

Categories
internet

RIPE69 wrap up – Karaoke BoF

ripe69 karaoke

RIPE69 karaoke – excruciating 🙂

T’was a week of excess. Excess conference sessions, excess coffee and excess alcohol. It would be difficult for an outsider to understand that the internet is actually fuelled by coffee and beer. That’s what makes those packets move. No sleep is involved. There is also whisky.

On Thursday night, deep in the bowels of the Novotel, far below anywhere you might see a member of staff at night, unless in pairs, the Karaoke BoF was in full fling. Excruciating, gruesome noises emanated. Wild men sprang from their laptop cocoons. Cockroaches scuttled for the safety of the air-conditioning ducts. Loud music thundered. Lights flashed and dazzled.

Men and women danced in their free conference t shirts. Beer, whisky, whisky, beer. Lights, music, whisky beer. As the night drew on more people arrived to press the momentum of the Karaoke. Microphone fodder.

That night the internet was invented, disassembled and reinvented. DNS, BGP, dark fibre, SDN, IPv6.

5am came. Then breakfast, for the few. There is a rule. Work hard, play hard, and work begins at 9am no matter how hard the play. So the internet keeps working, for the people. Breakfast is optional. The @lonap sponsored coffee station worked overtime.

Then came the wrap-up plenary. After that the doors were closed, 750Mbps of internet pipe shut off and the meeting went into its final session1.

Afterwards we hailed an Uber and made our way to KIngs Cross Station. Preparation for the journey North. Fish and chips accompanied by pints of London Pride. Then we went our separate ways, back to our homes and loved ones and an early night.

What do I remember most about the week. The excellent WiFi access. It is as you would expect from an internet conference.  Next time it is in Amsterdam and they will have 10Gbps of connectivity. That’s a proper broadband connection.

Have a good day now…

1Nod’s as good as a wink to a blind ‘orse.

Categories
Engineer engineering internet

Prince Harry special guest appearance at #ripe69 social

#ripe69 social

RIPE69 social sponsored by LINX on their 20th birthday

Whoever said the conference game is a nice little cushy few days out of the office has clearly never been to one. RIPE69 is in London this week and has an action packed schedule. There is very little downtime.

This is partly because as soon as the day’s official business is over the official unofficial business begins, in the bar. These events are big budget gigs and most evenings there is a social of some kind. A social for the 600 people attending RIPE69 is no small organisational challenge and comes with no small price tag.

Last night’s social was at the Jewel Bar in Picadilly Circus. Jewel directly opposite the tube entrance and was a very easy hop from the conference venue at the Novotel in Hammersmith. RIPE69 also coincides with LINX’s 20th birthday and LINX last night were very generous sponsoring the evening. The internet runs on beer and LINX have done a very good job in organising a number of parties during the year to demonstrate leadership in this space.

Last night was such a big event in the London party calendar that it attracted a number of A-listers. The featured image shows me with Prince Harry. You can see he was surprisingly bashful about having his photo taken with me. Don’t worry. I was able to keep the conversation going.

Being a quiet living type I left before the end to make sure I caught the last tube home. Not everyone was as sensible. A number of walking dead have been seen around the @lonap sponsored coffee station injecting espresso directly into their veins.

I don’t recommend this method of revival. Far better to make yourself get up early and go for a 5 mile run. Clears the head in no time. Never done it meself but I do hear it works wonders:).

Today is only Wednesday. There are three more days of RIPE69 to go!!!

As we are talking about working hard and playing hard I’ll take this opportunity to remind readers that they are invited to #trefbash2014.  Link here password is “friendoftref”.

Categories
Engineer internet Net

RIPE69 wireless LAN

ripe69 wifi router

RIPE69 wireless LAN is terrific

You have to hand it to our industry. Whenever I go to a conference the WiFi internet access is usually terrific. On this occasion at the Novotel in Hammersmith we have 600 or so engineers crammed into a meeting room. That’s a lot of folk using the internet whilst listening to the talks – most people have their laptops open, just like I have when typing this post.

600 people needs quite a hefty network. In this case you only have to look under the tables to find out how they do it (see featured image).

I’m currently getting 50Megs down and 62 Megs up. Happy days. RIPE69 is my first RIPE meeting. I can’t see it being my last!

 

Categories
Engineer peering

Euro-IX 25 Bucharest live commentary Day 2 pm

Euro-IX 25 Bucharest live commentary Day 2 pm

Was too busy doing stuff this morning and much of it was tutorial, AGM, elections so didn’t do any live blogging. This afternoon am back on the case. Yesterday’s coverage of day 1 here.

Categories
peering

Euro-IX 25 Bucharest live commentary – Day 1

Euro-IX 25 Bucharest live commentary – Day 1.

 

Categories
broadband Engineer engineering net neutrality

ISP traffic management policies

namecheap net neutrality video ISP traffic management

An overview of consumer ISP traffic management policies

ISP traffic management in which some types of traffic may be prioritised over others has been the subject of an ongoing debate. This is particularly the case amongst the Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP) communities but also elsewhere. NetNeutrality is the issue (look it up) and is extensively covered on this blog.

This post is a simple one. It takes a look at the biggest six ISPs, tells you if they traffic manage and provides a link to the ISP’s own pages on the subject.

ISP Do they traffic manage? Comments
BT No Fair play to them
EE Yes Lots of contractual stuff
Plusnet Yes Looks complicated to me
Sky Yes and No Sky Connect only – Unlimited and Lite packages are free of Traffic Management
TalkTalk No Except to prioritise TV packets which is fair enough
Virgin Media Yes Also looks complicated

It is generally the case that if an ISP does traffic manage they generally prioritise time sensitive packets such as VoIP and gaming. Traditionally this has been done to save bandwidth costs at peak times. However I will say that if TalkTalk who are traditionally seen as a pile it high sell it cheap ISP who you might think would need to conserve bandwidth costs,  can manage without traffic management, so to speak then there should no reason why all the others can’t follow suit. BT and Sky (mostly) do.

It could be down to their having older core networks that require investment but I can’t say for sure. Whatever the reason, bandwidth is cheap and ISP traffic management needs to be seen only in the rear view mirror. It is outdated.

This does to a certain extent come down to scale. The bigger your network the cheaper the bandwidth on a per unit basis. 1Gig connectivity is more expensive per gig that 10Gig etc etc etc

If you need more details on ISP traffic management click on the links in the table. Lots more stuff also on this blog here.

Ciao amigos.

Categories
broadband Business

Plusnet music on hold = “Don’t you want me baby”

Plusnet music on hold = “Don’t you want me baby”

In the big consumer ISP world I would think people expect to have to listen to music on hold whilst waiting for their ISP support line to answer.  Usually it’s why a business will pay that little more for a broadband line – just to make sure of the better level of support.

I’ve been quite surprised however at the range of telephone response times when calling consumer ISPs. ISPs with pile it high sell it cheap reputations don’t necessarily live up to the poor support reputation of such an ISP. At least when it comes to how long you have to wait before answering the phone. TalkTalk for example normally answer in less than a minute whilst BT can take anything between 10 and 20 minutes. Both use Indian based call centres.

The mere fact that the call centre is in India would stop me using the services for business. One wonders perhaps whether business customers get onshore customer care. However if I was considering having a second broadband line in as a backup to my main business one then using a low cost consumer service seems a no brainer to me.  Consumer broadband is ridiculously cheap and there are even offers around a the moment that give you free Fibre Broadband for one year as an incentive to sign up (eg Sky).

And not all the consumer players use Indian call centres. Both Sky and Plusnet are UK based. Plusnet seem to have a reputation for great music on hold. The problem is that you have to spend time on hold to them (seems to be the norm)  in order to find out. I’ve seen more than one Tweet that mentions the fact that they have heard “Don’t You Want Me Baby” as  music on hold whilst waiting for Plusnet. Their customer services director must have a sense of humour 🙂

If I was a business I’d definitely consider getting a low cost consumer broadband line in as an insurance policy for when my main one fails, which it inevitably will at some stage. Internet access is mission critical these days.