Category: Net

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

Categories
broadband Business H/W UC voip voip hardware

Why the Desktop VoIP Telephone isn’t Going Away

Desktop VoIP Telephone

Major leaps in technology allow business phones — the desktop VoIP telephone — to serve a rapidly growing range of needs.

Trefor.net welcomes “VoIP Week” contributor Jeff Rodman, Polycom‘s Chief Technology Evangelist. Since co-founding the company in 1990 Jeff has been instrumental in the realization of Polycom’s iconic products for voice, video, network communications, and other media.

The death of the desktop telephone has been predicted for decades. Technology has steadily advanced, business processes and communications needs have grown, and it’s actually rather surprising how that stodgy old friend the “desktop phone” has prospered. Look at its challenges: the PalmPilot, mobile phones and the Blackberry first, then on to Skype and other soft clients, unified information systems, mobile iOS, Windows and Android devices, teleworking, personal video calling, open-air workspaces, multiple Unified Communications and Control (UC&C) platforms, and the internet itself. And, of course, an always-growing need for specialised applications and consistent, efficient globalisation.

The desktop device remains firmly in place, though. What has actually happened is something that many didn’t see coming, yet is obvious in hindsight. The question was never really about when the desktop telephone would disappear, but rather how changing work needs and new technologies would shape its evolution.

“Personal transportation” did not disappear when Karl Benz introduced the Motorwagen in 1885, it evolved as technology moved beyond the horse. A broad range of personal transportation solutions emerged, from the motorbike to the motorhome, addressing such specific needs as the sedan, snowmobile, and all-terrain vehicle along the way. Similarly, the phone (which we might describe as a personal desktop live communications device) is not vanishing. It is, rather, becoming even more critical to business success, as it has advanced from its roots. Once merely the “black phone on a desk,” there is now a range of devices to cover an assortment of user needs from a basic desktop VOIP telephone to the rich integration of essential capabilities known as the Business Media Phone.

What is a phone today?

Modern business phones exist in many forms, but the most basic requirements they all share are durability and reliability. They are always on and ready for use, unlike cell phones, which require charged batteries and wireless connectivity. Similarly, soft clients or UC clients running on PCs must be running to accept calls or place calls. A phone is one thing we expect to always work, which is why they have traditionally been built like “brick houses,” never knowing who might slam down the handset, douse them with tea or drop them off of a tall table. Any phone is designed for a tightly defined set of uses, which it flawlessly performs. Whether a particular phone today supports only voice or a full bouquet of functions and applications, it is expected to do those jobs with unblinking confidence. As we will see, any device that might hope to take its place must be measured against this simple but essential standard of absolute reliability and responsiveness, one which we might call the “phone’s prime directive.”

Beyond this, major leaps in technology allow business phones to serve a rapidly growing range of needs. The adaptations to serve these can be broadly categorised in three directions— extensibility, unification, and media. Manageability and reliability, looking at the centralized support model removes the hassles from the end-user who can simply use it and doesn’t have to worry about software updates or configurations.

Extensibility

Whether PSTN, SIP, or some proprietary network, the most basic analogue phone needs only a handset and a phone cable. The underlying vision usually supports a much larger assortment of abilities, though, and different models within the same family will express different combinations. These can take the form of additional interfaces to support Bluetooth, wired, and DECT headsets, memory stick hosting to preserve conference audio, additional Ethernet jacks, “sidecar” accessories to provide one-touch selection of additional lines, and even add-on interactive HD video. Each of these extends the usefulness of a phone, by enabling future enhancement without burdening the initial purchase. The extent to which a phone can support this kind of evolution is one measure of its suitability for an organisation.

Unification

Although the range of abilities, environments, and platforms that might be supported by contemporary phones is much broader than it was just a few years ago, the user still expects them to work together simply and reliably. This means that functions must tie together transparently, and any complexity has to be neatly and efficiently concealed. The functions performed by the desktop phone must be able to connect to a wider set of networks; but more than that, the user’s experience has to remain consistent—a user cannot be confronted with wildly different behaviour just because, for example, SIP dialling and the Microsoft Lync platform are both in use within the organisation. For this reason, one essential requirement of a properly-implemented phone is that it retains compatibility with existing infrastructure. This means that interoperability among different UC and UC&C host platforms and simple, predictable behaviour is essential for a successful phone, whether it is a basic voice phone with enterprise directory access, or a full-fledged Business Media Phone, such as the Polycom range of VVX Business Media Phones.

Media

Today, conversations can take place among almost any combination of styles and environments (i.e., HD or narrowband voice, accompanying charts and presentations, HD video, small-screen video from a handheld device, or even Immersive Telepresence rooms). They can be between two people in only two places, or among a gathering of groups and individuals everywhere (i.e., at airports, desks, homes, workspaces and conference rooms).

Although there is today a growing expectation that participants will join meetings with video, a phone must give its user a clear perception of the meeting and also present its user as a competent, efficient participant in that meeting, whether the user has joined with video or only audio. This means that whether sitting in open spaces or quiet offices, phones must reject surrounding noise while allowing their users to speak clearly. Further, if video capable, they must send a clear, high-fidelity image even if their display is compact. Just as a user does not want to sound like they’re on a muffled Smartphone, they also want to look as if they’re working from a professional HD video system, not shaking and blurry with a precariously- mounted camera.

Conclusion

The desk phone has changed and today it does enormously more than it did in the past, yet it remains a keystone of effective business operation. By providing consistency, reliability, comfort, and an easily managed connection, there are few tools in business that prove their continuing worth as well, or as quickly, as well-built table-top voice or Business Media Phones.

Over the past three years, the tables have turned. Savings that some organisations had expected to gain by leveraging employee BYOD’s have evaporated as enterprises are often now the ones who buy those smartphones for employees, often at considerably higher life-cycle cost than a well-built desk phone. This is one reason that we’re really not entering a “smartphone world,” and why the market for real desktop phones of all descriptions continues to grow. Organisations that experiment with smartphones discover that they’re no panacea, and they return to the purpose-built and IT-friendly desktop phone — and especially to its powerful newer sibling the Business Media Phone — as the tool for doing what they do best, communications without compromise…

The bottom line is that regardless of what the final decision for each employee turns out to be, the first step toward making correct choices is to carefully investigate, taking care to understand what is important to the organisation and to each user, and get the facts about the options available when making a long-term investment such as a phone system.

This is a VoIP week post on trefor.net. Check out other VoIP themed posts this week:

Why are major telcos afraid of encrypted VoIP? by Peter Cox
Emergency calls and VoIP by Peter Farmer
VoIP, the Bible and own brand chips by Simon Woodhead
Why the desktop VoIP telephone isn’t going away by Jeff Rodman
Small business VoIP setup by Trefor Davies
VoIP fraud-technological-conventionality-achieved  by Colin Duffy

Categories
broadband End User

BROADBANDRating soft launch – feedback welcomed

BROADBANDRating soft launch

The BROADBANDRating soft launch happens today folks.

Today is the BROADBANDRating soft launch. BROADBANDRating is a new trefor.net property that seeks to help consumers with their choice of broadband provider. Rather than being  site that just compares broadband deals we want to help people decide which ISP to go for.

This is actually quite a difficult task after all there are basically only two flavours of networks in the UK: Virgin Media and BT and most products are the same.  For the purposes of this activity we aren’t including the small emerging players who have a limited geographic coverage. All the big ISPs offer highly competitive packages, eg free Fibrebroadband for 12 months (!!!), and occasionally they chuck in amazing sign up deals. For example at the moment TalkTalk are offering £100 worth of Love2shop vouchers to go with an already cheap deal whether you choose regular broadband or Fibre broadband (sorry to lapse into non ADSL2+ and FTTC speak – this consumer game is affecting me :)).

The site is probably only 30% finished but it is good enough to get us started kicking a few tyres. The idea is that we have different metrics that we use to judge an ISP’s service. Initially these include “Phone Answer”, plainly speaking how long it takes a helpdesk to answer the phone, and “Social Media Rating”.

Working on “Phone Answer” has been quite interesting not all providers work the same way. Some ask for a minimal amount of information before sticking you in the call queue. On the other hand others, and Virgin Media specifically spring to mind here, take you through an IVR tree that includes some diagnostics. When emerging from the IVR queue the phone is answered immediately. This has to go down as a highly responsive service on the part of Virgin but is still involves queuing time. We just record the time it takes to get to a human because I think that is what most people will want. All ISPs are called at roughly the same time of day which may differ each day. The response times are converted into star ratings based on a formula that takes into consideration recent historical data.

The Social Media Rating is essentially Twitter Sentiment Analysis. This has been an eye opener. We use a tool to do a first pass Sentiment Analysis and then run a human check. You certainly couldn’t give the checking job to a minor. The language used can be seriously juicy. It also shows how much people have come to rely on their broadband connection and the emotions brought out when the B*&^%y thing doesn’t work. Some ISPs definitely seem to come out worse than others on Twitter. We expect that we will be able to show who gets more outages over a period of time than others because when this happens Twitter gets flooded with complaints. A week or so later and people may have calmed down. We rate a few thousand tweets a week. We must bear in mind that the ISPs listed have millions of subscribers so the complaining tweets represent only a tiny proportion of their customers. One has to consider how many people just put up with problems without complaint.

Social Media Rating currently attracts a higher weighting than Telephone Answer although we will be monitoring this and perhaps tweaking as we add more metrics. How we specifically rate for each category is listed here on the BROADBANDRating site. Some metrics will change more regularly than others based on the type of data being measured. The site should change most days.

BROADBANDRating is up and running but not yet being shouted about. We would be happy to receive feedback, positive or otherwise about any aspect of the site. The links should all work. Maybe you have some observations about the User Interface. It is still very much work in progress and as already mentioned we are only around 30% of the way through.

Please feel free to click on one and if you like what you see buy the service. There are some amazing deals, and that’s not just me saying. Affiliate Marketing commissions are the name of the game.

PS a few related posts here and here.

Categories
broadband Business

TalkTalk Fibre to the premises

TalkTalk fibre Broadband Technology

TalkTalk Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) rollout in York announced

I’ve been doing a bit of background work on UK broadband service provision, the output of which will appear in the fullness of time, in due course (etc etc). Yesterday the Twittersphere threw out the news that TalkTalk fibre to the premises was being rolled out in York. Digging into this (as one does when installing fibre 🙂 ) it seems that this is a part of a deal involving City Fibre Holdings, Fujitsu and Sky, TalkTalk and Sky presumably being the channel/retail partners.

I’m not going to regurgitate general press release blurb that you can find for yourselves. However it is worth saying that in the longer term the whole of the UK needs to be lit up with FTTP. I have pals working for BT who will nay say this and that Fibre To The Cabinet has plenty of mileage in it yet and that people don’t need the 1Gbps+ speeds that FTTP offers. They are right, at the moment.

The argument also comes partly from the fact that businesses need to see a return on their capital investments.  In telecoms this is a very long term game – BT’s Cornwall project for example had a ROI of 12 years only because of EU funding and even then I don’t think it met its subscriber targets which would have further pushed out the time to money date. Add to this the ferociously competitive marketplace with deals such as Sky’s £0 for the first year of unlimited Fibre and it is no wonder that large telcos such as BT don’t see a business case for ubiquitous FTTP.

The TalkTalk fibre to the premises availability in York is going to be an interesting one to watch. Interesting from the point of view of seeing the take up of the service and interesting to see if the business case pans out. York is a far more manageable proposition than the UK as a whole. It will involve capital but probably only a few tens of millions and not the £29 Billion that doing the whole of the UK would supposedly cost (see Caio report here). It will also be interesting to see how the infrastructure sharing works out (ie using BT’s ducts and poles) assuming that is the plan. Lots of scope for confusion there.

Having spent a fair chunk of my recent life looking at tweets about TalkTalk fibre and other broadband ISPs it is easy to see how fibre might take some problems away. Tweets either slate the ISP for poor speed, no speed or engineer no-shows and time spent on hold on the telephone. The poor speeds are often down to the copper line and perhaps end user expectations. This would largely disappear with FTTP (congested core networks aside but there really is no excuse for that nowadays). Engineer no shows I imagine are mostly down to resource problems due to having to cope with an ageing copper network and an increased demand for FTTC. The telephone hold times are a function of the problems caused by these factors.

So the TalkTalk fibre (and, lets be fair, Sky fibre too) rollout in York could be the forerunner of an Utopian ISP world where there are never any complaints about speed and the engineers turn up when expected because they don’t have any copper lines to mend (or replace those pinched). This world is also where probably the good citizens of that fair city spend their time playing with new and hitherto unimagined services happily available on their unbelievably fast and stable broadband lines.

TalkTalk fibre in York? It must be so.

Categories
Bad Stuff broadband End User

Broadband sentiment analysis

broadband sentiment analysis

Broadband sentiment analysis used to examine broadband providers

When you browse an ISP website looking at the packages they have on offer it is really difficult to decide how to choose. By and large they are all very similar. Some may offer different TV bundles and you occasionally see the occasional high street store voucher thrown in as an incentive to sign up. Been trawling through various ISP streams on twitter doing a bit of broadband sentiment analysis. I though this might throw up some real world feedback on specific ISPs that might help people decide on the right one for them.

What came out was quite revealing and makes me glad I no longer work for a broadband service provider. The amount of vitriol that gets heaped on ISPs when their service goes wrong is amazing. It’s no surprise. The same probably happens when there is an electrical outage. People now rely on their internet connection as an utility.

In doing the work it is worth noting that an automated sentiment analysis tool isn’t perfect because computers can’t understand the nuances of human language. Sarcasm for example is very difficult to get right. eg

So and so is a great provider

versus

So and so is a great provider !!!???

Same words but the second would go down as negative sentiment if judged by a human. Because of this some human checking has to be performed. This human checking has brought out some interesting anomalies.

For example this tweet:

@drdeakin: Most reliable network @EE ? Rubbish! 4 mobile contracts plus mobile broadband each month and was about to add a business mobi…

was retweeted 112 times (at the time of writing). I found this curious so looked up @drdeakin. He has 177k followers. No wonder he was getting so many retweets. I also wondered how he got hold of so many followers whilst only following 412 accounts. Was he a celebrity? Turns out he just got married to the mother of someone in “One Direction” – a popular music group, apparently 🙂 (@JohannahDarling with 1.15M followers). On this basis I didn’t consider it fair to apportion negative sentiment to tweets other than the first, although a few did get through early on.

Other tweets were showing positive sentiment but clearly posted by someone with a vested interest. These were discounted (eg “@Exposure4All Get 152Mb broadband, 260+ TV channels & unlimited anytime calls to UK landlines → http://t.co/vYY5LuJFUN http://t.co/Br52f3djA0″ is on the face of it just a sales pitch)

One provider in particular, Plusnet, looked like drowning in complaints. Plusnet suffered a major outage during the window in which I was looking at the tweets. This was exacerbated by the fact that Apple had just released iOS8 and all the fanbois were at it in droves.  As such Plusnet came out very badly compared with other ISPs. However this is a constantly changing data set. I know from experience that ISPs occasionally have problems that seem to the huge disasters at the time but they are overcome. A historical trend chart of broadband sentiment analysis should reveal who is the most reliable ISP overall.

ISPs use Twitter as a means of engaging with dissatisfied customers. Twitter is used basically as an alternative inbound means of communication. Some seem to  handle it better than others.

These two examples illustrate how:

  1. @BTCare @someukbitch Happy to but need a better description of the problem, whats the problem and is the light on your Hub blue?
  2. @EE @RhodriOR Hi Rhordi, Afraid we can’t help with home broadband queries, Please call on on 0844 873 8586 from your … http://t.co/OCZ4Z8vDYs

In this case BT is doing a good job compared with EE who aren’t making it as easy as they could for their customers.

The one common thread that came out of the analysis was the number of times an engineer didn’t show up. People had usually taken days off work to wait in for the visit. This is pretty unacceptable but is unfortunately a situation that has prevailed for years now. Maintaining the copper broadband network is a nightmare.

I’ll be making the output of this broadband sentiment analysis available quite soon but thought some of my findings were interesting enough to publish beforehand.

 

Categories
Engineer peering

ECIX free 20Gbps Netflix bandwith Frankfurt

ECIX free 20Gbps Netflix bandwith Frankfurt,Netflix Germany chooses ecix,

ECIX free 20Gbps Netflix bandwith Frankfurt. More news from Deutchland as Netflix announce a deal with Frankfurt based commercial internet exchange ECIX.

ECIX free 20Gbps Netflix bandwith Frankfurt. I posted quite recently that ECIX had won the right to host Netflix traffic in Frankfurt. This was a surprise as DE-CIX, one of the largest internet exchanges in the world (universe!) would have been the favourite to win the business.

This latest announcement is all about an offer that ECIX are offering in conjunction with Netflix. Netflix have launched their services in Germany today. For internet service providers this is significant news as in other markets Netflix traffic represents a significant proportion of the total bandwidth used on networks with particular spikes in the evenings when consumers are more likely to be watching movies.

ISPs therefore need to be geared up to carry this traffic which is where ECIX come in. For anyone wanting to peer with Netflix in Frankfurt, ECIX are offering 20Gbps of bandwidth free of charge for the first year. According to the ECIX website this is worth E22k in the first year. As a promotional aside the cost of the equivalent offer at LONAP, where I am a board member, would be £6,500 for the year but this is a different market and ECIX is a commercial venture as opposed to the “mutual” not for profit nature of LONAP.

Netflix will also provide a free ECIX port for up to three years for all networks that qualify for and install a Netflix Open Connect Appliance. This appliance is installed in an ISP network to cache Netflix content and improved the quality the delivered service to the end customer. It should also cut down on the amount of peering bandwidth used.

It would be interesting to understand the business case here which will be based on the cost of the Appliance versus the value of bandwidth saved.

This ECIX/Netflix offer is quite innovative. In the German peering market it will generate a lot of publicity for both parties. Also it’s a fair bet that ISPs will take more than two 10Gig ports and certainly the traffic after the first year isn’t going to go away. The only way is up in this game.

ECIX free 20Gbps Netflix bandwith Frankfurt – you know it makes sense:)

Categories
Business ipv6

Business case for IPv6 #UKNOF29

IPv4 business case for IPv6

Participants at UKNOF29 in Belfast were unconvinced that there was a business case for IPv6

It’s over three years since the UK networking industry got together to celebrate the end of the internet as we knew it. The trefor.net “Move over IPv4, Bring on IPv6” party in the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden had almost 400 people sign up.  Every man jack of them there to dance on the grave of the old internet, drinking deep of the heady draught of IPv6. At the time the business case for IPv6 was simply that there would be no more IPv4 address blocks available.

In the meantime what has happened? Not all that much. According to Nathalie Kunneke-Trenaman of RIPE NCC, the organisation that dishes out IP addresses in Europe, the UK is 40th in the global rankings for IPv6 adoption. From personal experience network operators have been getting more efficient at using their existing IPv4 ranges. Recovering addresses no longer needed, moving small allocations around to free up bigger blocks for bigger projects. Stuff like that.

The thing that struck me from the talks at UKNOF29 was the seeming lack of urgency for IPv6.  Dave Wilson of HEANet, the Irish national educational research network (equivalent of our Ja.net) told the audience that they had IPv6 running in production for over ten years but the number of IPv6 enabled devices connecte to the network was so low that the HEANet management had questioned whether they should bother maintaining it. The business case for IPv6 just didn’t jump out of the page and scream “use me”.

This seemed to be the general feeling at the conference. “It’ll get there but there is no urgency”. There was also the feeling that equipment vendors that quoted their kit as IPv6 enabled had not done nearly enough testing and their gear was often bug ridden. This is really down to the lack of use of the features. If people were using IPv6, bugs would get found out and fixed.

Jumping ahead slightly in my timeline the subject of IPv6 came up at the ITSPA (Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association) board meeting yesterday. In the VoIP space the attitude of vendors seems to simply be “we’ll do it when we need to do it”. I doubt that there are any IPv6 enabled VoIP networks/systems anywhere. I’d certainly be interested in hearing about them if there are.

Whizzing back to Belfast it is worth finishing with some positive news in the space. BT are reportedly going to announce a roll out of IPv6 in their own network in 2015. This should be transparent to the end user and BT didn’t really consider it to be news. In reality it shouldn’t be. It should “just work”. The workings of the internet are hugely complicated and Joe Public doesn’t really need to know.

The business case for IPv6 is something Cisco are trying hard to push. Cisco Systems Engineer Veronika McKillop is leading an initiative called the UK IPv6 Council. Check out their LinkedIn page here. The last such initiative was called 6UK. 6UK foundered due to lack of interest and finance. At the time a very rough poll by me of large UK enterprise networks suggested that everybody had it on their list of things to do but there was always something more pressing that took up the resources.There was they said no business case for IPv6.

I think this time Veronika McKillop has a better chance of succeeding. The constitution of the board is as follows:

ISPs – BSkyB, BT, Virgin Media
Enterprise – Cisco, Glaxo Smith Kline UK,and  “a large financial organisation”
Academia – University of Southampton, JANET
Industry body – Institute of Engineering and Technology

The “large financial organisation” is going through an internal approvals process. I guess they really need more Enterprise participants – sticking Cisco in there is just making up the numbers as they should really be in a vendor category even though they are a large enterprise in their own right. The business case for IPv6 really has to come from the Enterprise.

The UK IPv6 Council’s first initiatives include a webinar entitled “The Business Case for IPv6” – you can sign up here. There is also a council meeting on 16th October at IDEALondon. I suspect that getting the UK up to speed with IPv6  is still going to be a long slow job but at least with the big ISPs on board they should be able to get some momentum/have some staying power.

More as it happens on trefor.net. You can also check out the live blogs from Monday and Tuesday at UKNOF29

Categories
dns Engineer engineering ipv6

UKNOF29 live day 2

UKNOF UKNOF29

UKNOF29 live day 2 – as it happens straight to your connected device wherever you are.

Welcome back to a beautiful late summer’s day in Belfast. Or is it early autumn? Anyway it’s a nice one and we have another great day in prospect. UKNOF live day 2 action is again brought to you from inside the Presbyterian Assembly rooms in downtown Belfast.

Today we have UKNOF in the morning with DNS action followed by a feast of IPv6. After lunch the ION conference kicks in. Stay with us for all the action throughout the day.

Don’t forget you can also follow the action on Twitter at #UKNOF29 and watch the live webcast on the UKNOF website.

btw if you missed UKNOF29 day 1 you can catch up here.

Categories
Engineer engineering ipv6 Net

UKNOF29 live blogging

UKNOF UKNOF29

UKNOF29 live blogging from Belfast – stay tuned for live updates as they happen – the best snippets brought to your desktop from inside the room

UKNOF29 is co-located with The Internet Society ION conference at the Assembly Buildings in Belfast. follow the conference on Twitter at #UKNOF29 or #IONConf and watch the live webcast over at www.uknof.org.uk . Alternatively stay with the  UKNOF29 live blogging action by following the frequent updates here.

Categories
datacentre Engineer engineering internet ipv6

Live blogging from #UKNOF29 and Internet Society ION Conference in belfast next week

UKNOF UKNOF29

Look out for live blogging from UKNOF29 and the Internet Society ION conference in Belfast next week.

UKNOF, or the UK Network Operators Forum have really interesting conferences three times a year. I’ve often thought one could fill the blog for  week or two with posts based on the content. The problem is that it takes a long time to write a post based on an individual talk at a conference and at the same time you need to be listening to the talks. it is therefore impossible to write enough posts in a timely manner to do justice to the job. Getting the speakers themselves to turn their talk into a post is also like getting blood out of a stone. Next week at UKNOF29 I’m taking a different approach.

One of the things I’ve noticed about conference talks over the years is that you can probably choose one or two decent slides from each talk and get the gist of what it is all about. The rest is mainly filler. If you had a digest of all that was good at the conference it would save a lot of time and effort. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t go to conferences because a big chunk of their value is in the networking opportunities the bring. However there must be a way to summarise the conference, an exec or engineering summary maybe.

The answer I think is the live blog, The live blog is what they use to provide updates for sporting events.

GOOOAL  1 -1.

Davies strikes the back of the net after a great cross by Evans from the corner post.

Penalty missed – still 1 – 1

You get my drift. Next week therefore at UKNOF29 in Belfast I’m going to try out  new plugin that provides this functionality. I’ve had it since the design of trefor.net was changed, around the time of the Pissup in a Brewery, but not used it yet.

When people go to these engineering events a lot of the action is on the IRC back channel. I don’t user IRC because it gets too busy although it can provide some interesting insights. I can only cope with so many means of communication. Also I’ve not identified a suitable plug in for the the chromebook yet. The other channel, which is pretty constrained due to its character limitation is Twitter but hashtags don’t seem to have that much effect at these technical conferences. I think it is more the domain of the marketing luvvie.

So I think the live blog could well work for this sort of event, if properly done. The beauty is that It almost only needs a line or two about each talk. Maybe cut and paste of info from twitter, an occasional pic of a slide etc.

It must be said there’s some great looking stuff being talked about next week:

“What went wrong with IPv6” by Dave Wilson of HEAnet (Ireland’s Janet)

“IPv6 only data centres” by Tom Hill of Bytemark

“Broadcast editing and delivering over IP” by by our old friend (he’s knocking on a bit:) ) Brandon Butterworth of the BBC.

Just a snapshot really of what is on offer. UKNOF29 is colocated with The Internet Society ION conference. There is more IPv6 stuff in their agenda which you can check out here.

At the time of writing there are 142 people registered to attend UKNOF29 . This is pretty good going considering you have to get to Belfast to be there.

More UKNOF blog posts here. Check em out. See you at UKNOF29? Come up and say hello.

Categories
End User internet Legal net neutrality

Consumer Rights and Net Neutrality

Consumer Rights

Consumer Rights is a far less toxic term than Net Neutrality.

I’ve previously written for Trefor.Net on the subject of Net Neutrality and what it means to members of the VoIP community. And I think it’s high time for an update, but this time considering consumer rights.

After a promising start the European Union went off the rails, passing a first reading of a text that essentially outlawed 4G services. VoLTE requires prioritisation. Hard line elements on the subject of “net neutrality” managed to convince a strange coalition that it was a good idea to promote their ideological definition just before an election. It was spun as a vote winner, this despite that fact that 999 calls would no longer be treated differently. Consumer rights being protected, were they?

Unforeseen consequences at their worse, which is why I believe that net neutrality is now a toxic term and should be avoided. In fact, I’ve worked on briefing documents that are four pages long that completely avoid the term. I also try to avoid “Open Internet” for similar reasons, as both — as I’ve written before — mean different things to different people.

That’s where consumer rights come into play.

What we want is a level playing field. We want a distribution system for content that doesn’t discriminate against certain types of lawful content for vested reasons. Most of all, we don’t want people misled, and we want consumer rights upheld.

If you ask the average consumer on the street whether Skype and YouTube are part of the internet, anyone other than a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia that would no doubt answer “no”. By extension, I defy you to find anyone, other than hardcore employees of EE and Vodafone, who would suggest that internet access does not include access to Skype, YouTube, or similar services.

Remember the outrage when people were buying 15 burgers for 99p and it transpired that those burgers were made from horses? It’s the same thing. It’s a basic principle of consumer law that you don’t mislead at the point of sale; be it overtly or through trickery in the small print. Consumer rights need to be protected.

This is why I was so heartened to see Philip Davies MP (Conservative member of Parliament for Shipley) build upon his great performance sticking it to Ed Richards (Ofcom CEO – 40 minutes into the video on the link) on the subject by tabling an amendment to the latest consumer rights bill. This amendment basically just said that you can’t call something “internet” unless it complies with the spirit of everything I’ve said before. For those who are interested, the amended stated;

A term which has the object or effect of permitting a trader to block, restrict or otherwise hinder the access of a consumer to any lawful Electronic Communications Network or Electronic Communications Service on the basis of an unreasonable or unusual definition of “internet access”, “data”, “web access” or similar word or phrase. Nothing in this prohibition shall affect filters for the purpose of child protection.

Electronic Communications Network or Electronic Communications Service shall have the same meaning as in the Communications Act 2003.

tn_own_consumer-rights_tweetPhilip Davies MP is a libertarian Conservative and as a result is one of my favourite MPs. This means he’s often at polar opposites to Her Majesty’s Opposition and an uncomfortable bed fellow with their coalition partners. That makes it even more incredible that the amendment was gladly supported by both the Shadow Minister, Helen Goodman MP and Julian Huppert MP (Liberal Democrat Member for. Cambridge and a good advocate for the technological community). A rare moment of cross party backbench support that, alas, was defeated without Government support, which is still backing the self regulation horse.

All the amendment sought to do was to ensure that the likes of Vodafone and historically EE would be unable to call a spade anything other than a spade and that consumer rights would be upheld. As such, defeat was a great disappointment.

In any event, word on the street is that there may soon be new signatories to the Broadband Stakeholder Group’s Open Internet Code of Conduct. The amendment may get re-tabled in the House of Lords. And The Council of Europe may well get its ducks back in a row.

The battle is one that is very much being fought on three fronts, however the momentum is now behind those of us who just want a level playing field to compete on. Who knows, it might even be over by Christmas.

Categories
broadband End User food and drink fun stuff internet media travel

What I Did On My Summer Holiday (Digital Issue)

digital summer

Recounting a (digital) summer holiday, well spent.

I didn’t intend to take a break from writing during this year’s La Famille Kessel summer holiday in Normandy. No, I had plans to regale stalwart trefor.net readers with missives on the nature of my vacation from the digital perspective, intending to carry the content flag for anyone out there hungering for fresh pixelated meat during these dog days of August. Of course, I also planned to put sugar in the Latte Cannelle that just arrived to the left of KoryChrome here at Paris’s RROLL. Not salt.

Offering up the Yiddish proverb my departed mother used to wield easily and quite often, “Man plans and God laughs.”

Failures aside (gee, that was easy), in an attempt to backwards-engineer satisfaction of the aforementioned hunger I will recount five (5) areas of computer-based fun I indulged in around the edges of my mostly unearned R&R over the past four weeks.

<OK. Everybody take a breath. Here we go.>

  1. As an R.E.M. fan(atic) dating back to the 1983’s “Murmur” I was thrilled to learn in May that the band was finally making good on their long-held promise/threat to issue a rarities collection. And in typical R.E.M. style the boys over-delivered, kicking out not one collection but two — Complete Rarities: I.R.S. 1982-1987 (50 tracks) and Complete Rarities: Warner Bros. 1988-2011 (131 tracks). 181 tracks, the equivalent of 18 albums of “new” material. Of course, the fact that I already had 98% of the tracks didn’t make this treasure trove any less interesting, oh no! These two digital “boxsets” represented an UPGRADE opportunity supreme, as well as hours and hours of artwork foraging and data tagging and reconciliation amusement. Just my kind of BIG data.
  2. It seems that every summer for going on who-knows-how-many years I have on some late night or other sat down at my computer determined to finally get a definitive handle on media information delivery. Or, in other words, figuring out how to configure RSS feeds in a way that not only brought links across from my favorite resources in a great many areas, but that did so in a way that allowed me to spend more time benefitting from the deluge than managing it. I hesitate to whether I succeeded this time, but with RSS Notifier in place and tweaked pretty darn well I can say that my hopes are high. If next summer I find myself NOT re-attacking this project, at that time I will know that “Paid” has finally been put to this bill.
  3. The new trefor.net site that you hold in your hands, dear reader, has been praised far and wide, end to end, and in between the cracks (yes, I am the reason the store is out of clichés until next Tuesday). And on the surface it rocks far and wide, end to end…well, etc. Behind the scenes, though, quite a bit of work remains to be done to really get the thing humming. One major effort taking place is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) enhancement/reconciliation for legacy trefor.net posts going back six-plus years, an ongoing task that represented pretty much all of the work I did on the site during August, between opening my throat for copious food and drink intake, forming a marvelous first-impression of Guernsey (the result of a brilliant 4-day holiday-within-a-holiday excursion), and doing whatever-the-heck-else constituted a holiday well taken. Regular visitors to the site will likely not notice any changes to their trefor.net experience, save perhaps for greater crowds milling about the more popular attractions therein.
  4. 38+ rolls of film. In the four weeks stretching from 27-July to 24-August I shot over 38 rolls of film. “Holy Shutterbug, Batman!”, you are no doubt thinking, because presented like that the feat sure sounds impressive. And expensive. Leyna the Leica is quite the digital camera, though, so please temper your awe accordingly. Still, I do shoot in RAW and that necessitates that I “develop” the photos into .jpg files, adjusting various photo attributes as necessary (exposure, contrast, shadows, highlights, white and black clipping, saturation, sharpening, noise reduction, and perspective correction, to name far too many), so if you want to let your awe (awe for RAW?) run rampant then by all means please do.
  5. The “La Famille Kessel” cookbook project continued during summer holiday 2014, with 10 recipes added, the appendage of notes and photos to existing content, and even some scant thought paid to eventual production. The collection, an ongoing concern, is an amorphous beast of a thing that will bring together pass-down family and friend recipes and a wealth of those found in key cookbook/magazine/whatever over the years. Promises to be quite the tasty thing when version 1.0 is finally completed…sometime in 2022 or thereabouts, coinciding with the kicking of The Boy out of his broadband-enabled nest.

So in summing up my digital meanderings for summer 2014, it is apparent that it was all about data and databases (about as surprising as water flowing out of the spigot when the tap is turned on). And naturally, we at trefor.net are curious to know what you did to wile away the long days and short nights of summer — nobody will laugh — and thus invite your prolific Comments input. C’mon…have at it!

 

Categories
broadband End User internet Net

Openreach Profit Incentive in Action

BTOpenreach engineering visit Install ofcom strategic review

Openreach’s sub-contractors may not all be so bad after all.

I finally had BT Infinity installed a few weeks ago. Having watched the installation of Huawei DSLAM at the end of the road some time before that with much anticipation, I pondered how badly BT Openreach and its subcontractors would botch the job and ruin the frontage to our community, while also yearning to finally break beyond the 14 Mbps glass ceiling I have endured for 3 years.

With regular broadband I have been fortunate, being on brand new copper and only 100 yards from the primary connection point with a short run thereafter to the exchange; thus I’ve always had the top end of the advertised broadband speed. My problem was with up, though, not down. Regular readers will know I am a home-based professional nomad, and as such uploading documents to file servers etc. in a timely manner is rather important. 1 or 2 Mbps just doesn’t cut it.

I had done my research and knew that an Openreach engineer would have to visit to install Infinity II. Forums and blogs were full of details about cable models and data extension kits and Openreach engineers having to run new cables through peoples’ houses. In this industry, we would hardly trust them to dress themselves in the morning half the time let alone undertake works in our nicely decorated hallways. I was scared.

Turns out though that the BT Homehub 5 has an integrated cable modem, so that problem went away (and I note it has better in-house coverage for WiFi than its predecessors — I have been fortunate enough to have had a Homehub 2, 3 and 4 and a Businesshub 3 to play with — and it didn’t nerd up VoIP with SIP ALG either). Also, as the cabling in the house is only 3 years old and to modern standards, the engineer felt no need to run a new line or change face plates — useful as it is a large integrated one that includes TV aerial, satellite, etc. — and just plugged it in. The entire installation took about 20 minutes, including the jumpering in the PCP and DSLAM.

What struck me most about my Openreach install was that my neighbour was also having it done in the same installation slot. The engineer visited both premises and did what he had to do onsite, and then visited the PCP/DSLAM to do jumpering just once (i.e., he simultaneously did both jobs). Furthermore, he called me on my mobile from the PCP/DSLAM to check if it was working, thus negating the potential need for going back and forth. Turns out the sync speed is virtually the advertised 76Mbps up down and 19 Mbps down up, with the reality not far off (up is almost dead on, down hovers around 50/60 so far).

The engineer was a sub-contractor to BT Openreach, working for Kelly Communications. These sub-contractors are often derided for cherry picking easy jobs, making out that the customer wasn’t present when they were, so they can complete as many of the low-hanging fruit as possible to boost their profit margins.

I am not sure whether Openreach Direct Labour would’ve had the initiative to simultaneously perform two installations, thus, ultimately, reducing lead times and increasing customer satisfaction. I do know that Openreach Direct Labour, upon realising that there was insufficient copper in the ground between a PCP and the exchange to install a new line in a colleague’s home, had to get another engineer to pull it through and then that engineer couldn’t just provision the line, they had to get another one to do it (no doubt you can imagine how long that sorry saga took). If that job had been sub-contracted, I wonder whether it would’ve been done more efficiently and ultimately to a better level of customer satisfaction?

The incidents we have all endured at the hands of Openreach are many and would shock anyone. Anne Robinson and Watchdog even did a piece on it. Many of these incidents involve sub-contractors, however I think we are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater here as clearly the profit incentive is doing some good in certain circumstances….. it may even work to overcome the inherent moral hazard in the way Openreach’s prices are calculated (i.e., the industry often pays for inefficiency, directly through the charge controls and indirectly through non-Openreach brand damage). Surely, the real challenge is how to we promote the positives and negate the negatives.

Lots of posts on t his site re BT engineering visits – check out this one on BT engineering visit lottery

Categories
Engineer media peering

Netflix Germany launch to use ECIX instead of DE-CIX

ECIX free 20Gbps Netflix bandwith Frankfurt,Netflix Germany chooses ecix,

Netflix Germany launch uses ECIX instead of largest player DE-CIX

Netflix, in case you didn’t know is a company that streams TV to your home over your broadband internet connection. In fact in markets in which it operates Netflix is responsible for a big proportion of bandwidth usage. Last year Netflix was reported to have 29% of all USA ISP traffic. Netflix Germany is a new venture.

There are all sorts of issues to take into consideration before Netflix can launch in a new country. Content licensing rules and local regulatory rules for example and what the competition looks like. Some countries may demand investment in local content.

From a technical standpoint Netflix also has to make sure their network can deliver the content to local endpoints. They do this through a number of methods including placing a cache inside an ISP’s own network providing that ISP is large enough and its traffic levels sufficiently high to justify the cost of the equipment. For the most part your ISP will likely carry Netflix content through its peering arrangements.

Peering in internet terms is the sharing of traffic between service providers. I’ll carry yours if you carry mine. It is by far the most cost effective way for an ISP to connect to “the internet” which is of course just a large global collection of individual ISP networks. To make this easy the industry has spawned Internet Exchanges (known in the game as IXPs). In the UK we have a number of them including LONAP, of which I am a director, LINX, London’s largest and the UKs oldest, IX-Manchester, IX-Scotland and IX-Leeds. The regional market for IXPs is an emerging one. The IXP model is that of  mutually beneficial not for profit.

Netflix Germany has put its peering arrangements in place and there is a shock in store. The natural thing for Netflix would have been to join Frankfurt based DE-CIX, the world’s largest IXP. However instead Netflix Germany has opted to join ECIX, also based in Frankfurt but much smaller than DE-CIX. In Frankfurt ECIX has 34 members compared with DE-CIX’s 580. Logically you would opt for DE-IX as doing so would make it a lot easier to connect to many more ISPs and thence to their end users.

However the Netflix entry on industry resource peeringdb shows the following message:

***NOTE ON FRANKFURT, GERMANY***

Netflix will not be on DE-CIX Frankfurt. We encourage you to join ECIX and will also allow PNI from any network that desires to interconnect with us at Equinix FR4 & FR5

This announcement has sent shockwaves around the IXP world. It’s great for ECIX as it will encourage new members. The alternative of Private interconnect through Equinix would probably come at a cost as Equinix is a commercial, for profit data centre operator.

Word has it that the decision was taken because DE-CIX pricing was far too high.

This is quite interesting as there is a tendency for the larger internet exchanges to add overhead. The internet is growing so fast that IXPs are growing almost automatically along with it. With growth comes new members, bigger ports able to handle more capacity and also more cash.

The relatively easy availability of cash is what makes the scenario interesting. It is easy to understand how an organisation with lots of cash might look around at ways of spending it. The purely mutual model might suggest that this cash is returned to the members in the form of lower operational costs and membership fees. However the European IXP market is also becoming quite competitive as organisations fight to attract new members moving into the area. For example LINX, DE-CIX and AMSIX (Amsterdam) might all be competing to be the first European peering point for North American and Asian networks. This competition demands marketing resources. With the growth of traffic over an IXP network also comes responsibility to maintain uptime and this also costs money.

Getting the balance right of where to spend the cash is not an easy one and one wonders whether, if we are hearing right that this is a pricing based move,  this is now reflected in the Netflix Germany decision to choose ECIX over DE-CIX.

Netflix Germany end users will be oblivious to all this but it does go to show that underneath it all the internet is a complex organism with lots going on to make it work. It’s also an industry that is highly interesting to work in and gets more so with each passing year. If there is anything more to report I’ll get back to you. You heard it first on trefor.net etc…

Categories
Engineer ipv6 scams

IPv4 leasing & IPv6 penetration into networks

ipv4 leasing or move to ipv6?

IPv4 leasing offer from broker but uses gmail address.

Got an email at my LONAP address yesterday asking if we had any spare blocks available for IPv4 leasing. I used to occasionally get them when at Timico as I think did most of the industry. This time it’s prompted me to look a little deeper into the issue. After all it is over 3 years since the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address space – you may remember the Move over IPv4 Bring on IPv6 party which was a huge success even if I say so myself.

I looked at the google keyword stats for “IPv4 leasing”. The UK averages only 10 searches a month for this term. Doesn’t really smack of an industry getting desperate. The “brokers” of IPv4 addresses do appear to exist in somewhat of a twilight zone. For example the email I got was from an Adam Green with an address of [email protected]. If he was kosher he would use a proper business address. It isn’t a kosher business model anyway.

These guys swipe email databases from the likes of RIPE. The one I got didn’t address me by name which in the gmail world normally leads to automatic spam labelling. In November we have RIPE69 coming to London and I’ll be looking for guest posts on the subject of IPv6. The subject of IPv4 leasing will almost certainly come up at the meeting although to be honest people should be focussing on moving their infrastructure on to IPv6, something that still isn’t particularly mainstream.

It would be interesting to hear from anyone with an IPv4 address space problem although I doubt anyone would put their hand up to admit it.

Taking a look at some LONAP stats, out of 152 connected networks 113 or 74% of them have registered IPv6 blocks with the IXP.  At the LONAP AGM we ran a little exercise with prizes for those who registered using an IPv6 address. Of the 50 or so attendees and excluding LONAP staff we had 8 people register using an IPv6 address. Suggests that use of IPv6 is still somewhat limited even amongst the network engineering community you would think would be early adopters.

Taking the exercise a little further we looked at the websites of LONAP members. Of the 149 checked 74 of them have no IPv6 enabled site. If you have no idea what I’m talking about with IPv6 this info will be of no interest whatsoever. However those in the game should find the stats v interesting and probably not a surprise.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more IPv6 stuff as it hits my screen…

Categories
broadband End User

Home broadband deals – how to choose?

home broadband deals from EE

Home broadband deals for consumers getting very competitive – help needed

I’ve been spending some time preparing for the launch of broadbandrating.com. This is a new trefor.net site we are working on to make affiliate advertising revenues from the broadband market. In doing so we’ve been signing up with ISP partners and getting an eyeful of the home broadband deals available. The offers are primarily for consumers but very eyewatering. You’re talking to someone who never looks at his own comms charges.

On Friday I walked past the EE shop in Lincoln and noticed this home broadband deal – see featured image above. £21.25 for unlimited landlines (whatever that means), unlimited broadband, 1000 mobile minutes, international calls (uhuh) and Now TV (I could look it up).

I can’t keep up with the pace of competition in this game. In fact faced with so many offers how on earth do people make their minds up?

I recently booked a family holiday in Mallorca. I spent hours online looking but gave up in the end and remembered there was a Coop travel agent in the nearby Carlton Centre. I popped down there and within ten minutes had opted for a hotel in Cala D’Or. The travel agent had been there and was able to recommend it.

Also a couple of weeks ago I was chatting to a pal of mine who had recently had an agonising six months getting his new office networked with the main one in town. He was crying out for good advice (he should have asked me 6 months previously).

The world is is crying out for good advice. Holidays, business connectivity, even insurance – ever tried to decide on how to choose an insurance policy. There’s small print everywhere!

Where comms are concerned there are so many home broadband deals with tons of stuff bundled in its bewildering. It’s no use going to a comparison website. All you get is a list of deals. These guys just work on volume. They spend a fortune getting themselves up the Search Engine rankings and then rely on a percentage success rate on a high volume of clicks. The consumer isn’t really helped. They still have the problem of staring at the page trying to decide which deal to choose.

We aren’t ready to go live with broadbandrating yet but when we do I’m hoping we will go some why towards helping people with their buying decisions on home broadband deals. It’s long overdue.

Coming back to the blackboard outside the EE shop the offer sounds good but the devil is in the detail and I ain’t going in to that detail right now because I haven’t got it.

Stay tuned…

Categories
Engineer gadgets peering

BYOD strategy revealed at LONAP board meeting

lonap board notebooks byod strategy

BYOD strategy revealed at LONAP board meeting.

Lonap held its regular board meeting on Wednesday at Will Hargrave’s house. These are very long days but worthwhile. We have a lot of stuff to plough through. LONAP operates a BYOD strategy. The IXP is very leading edge especially when it comes to HR and IT.

The featured image illustrates the byod strategy at work showing Will, Andy (Davidson) and Rich (Irving) sat around the board table in front of the various notebook computers. Andy is a Microsoft guy. He has a Windows computer with a touch screen Needs to be to get the most out of Windows 8 or so I’m told. Will is an Apple fanboi. He is actually sat in front of my Chromebook but you can see his Mac on the table next to Rich. The various makes of notebook have a white letter near them to denote flavour.

Rich has a letter T next to his. That’s because his notebook is made of tree. It’s quite nifty. Comes with its own advanced carbon based stylus which has a neat way of erasing mistakes. The stylus has a soft plastic top to it which when moved back and forwards across the lines on the page left by the carbon erases the carbon marking, or most of it anyway.

Tree based notebooks aren’t perfect but nobody expects the finished goods so early on in the product lifecycle. The stylii for example still have some way to go. The sharpened front end does have a tendency to break although Rich seems to have mastered the art of applying just the right amount of pressure to avoid damaging the tip. These stylii do represent a marketing opportunity to sell accessories. The product team must have all worked at Apple at some point in the past. They seem to know their stuff.

Available for purchase are a sharpening device (v handy in the post 9/11 security conscious world of the global internet executive) together with a nifty case that can hold multiple stylii. Rich pointed out that you can get them in a huge range of different colours. They also sell storage containers known colloquially as bookcases. These are also made of carbon although like in any market there seem to be cheap imitators on sale made of something called MDF.

Being a fan of cloud technology myself I did ask Rich whether there was a virtual version of his Tree technology. He mentioned something about Carbon offset which I didn’t completely get and not wanting to look stupid in front of the others I kept shtum. There’s bound to be a cloud version available or at least coming soon.

Readers looking to implement their own byod strategy should at least take a look at Tree technology when considering notebooks. The one at the LONAP meeting certainly had a nice feel to it. They have the weight just about right and Rich says it is totally customisable. You adjust it by simply tearing out pages until you get to the weight that suits you. I should warn you that this process is irreversible so you do need to take care. If in doubt consult a qualified Tree surgeon.

That’s in regarding the LONAP byod strategy. Lots happening in the Autumn. Stay tuned for loads more useful tips’n stuff though not necessarily anything to do with LONAP’s byod strategy.

LONAP is a Global top 20 Internet Exchange. Read about them here. Also loads of LONAP content on this site – check it out here.

Categories
Apps broadband End User fun stuff H/W internet Mobile Net phones

The Hump Day Five (23-July-2014)

Respect Your Beach

The Hump Day Five this week goes to the pictures, gets the picture, migrates the pictures, wants a phone that takes the pictures, and offers a picture of Paris on Summer holiday.

1

A few days ago a filmmaker friend of mine asked if I would be interested in screening a rough cut of a documentary he has been working on for some time. I was somewhat flattered that he would ask, of course, and I have quite a strong propensity for documentaries, so I instantaneously responded with “Yes, please.”

Not long after I received the details of screening the documentary, and it was at that point that it all started to tweak my interest beyond the subject matter of the film itself, for two reasons. One, the film was presented to me as a video stream via Vimeo (password access, naturally). And two, my friend specifically requested that I promise to watch the film straight through with no breaks and without distraction.

So this is where we are today. Able to grant immediate access to video works in progress via the Internet, and as a result of that delivery method needing to beseech the viewer to take special care to not multi-task when viewing said film via the Internet. Not that I don’t get the reasoning, because I absolutely do, though it does have me thinking that in the not-too-distant future there will be technology deployed to tighten such tasks up. Insistent Streaming? You can watch vwxyz, but you have to do so in Full Screen mode and without screen deviation lest you have to start over from the beginning.

The screening request came across five days ago and I have yet to watch my friend’s film. Really, it is pretty sad that I am finding the idea of being-connected-yet-essentially-disconnected from AppleKory for 90 minutes straight to be daunting!

2

I’ve been hush-hush for a while now regarding my search for my next smartphone, waiting patiently for the one I had mostly settled on — the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom — to become available in France. I did manage to put my hands on a GKZ while I was in London for trefor.net’s Pissup in a Brewery last month, and this helped to both move me closer to pulling the trigger and towards establishing a sharper perspective on my decision.

In short, I realized that as much as I would love to have a Galaxy K Zoom as my next smartphone friend, I will only do so if my carrier (Bouygues) can offer it to me at a subsidized price. They do this with a good many other Samsung smartphones, including the flagship S5 (which costs €599 unlocked, without subsidy, but only €221 paid out over 24 months with a correlating commitment), so I came to expect I could put myself into a Galaxy K Zoom for under €200 (versus €499 unlocked, without subsidy).

No dice. Or, at least, no dice yet. Despite my best efforts to make such a deal happen, and the encouragement of a Bouygues drone who told me he could do so but in truth could not (seems that he was willing to say just about anything to me over the phone to get me to walk in the shop), I remain wanting. And with the Summer holidays descending quickly in France, it seems I will remain saddled with my iPhone 4 at least until the start of September. And with the iPhone 6 announcement likely to take place that month…?

3

A few months back I made one of those big decisions. You know, the kind that changes everything, after which nothing will ever be the same and from which there is no going back. A paradigm shift of immense magnitude.

Thick, running irony, like motor oil straight from the can.

I decided to change photo management software, from Apple’s not-bad-for-a-toy iPhoto to Adobe’s truly terrific Lightroom 5.

For a good long time iPhoto worked for me. There were some significant bumps along the way, to be sure, such as dealing with the product’s generosity when it came to gobbling up AppleKory hard drive space with it’s need to maintain two copies of any photo that was modified in any way (including simple rotation). For the most part, though, iPhoto and I got along fine, even as my photography skills outgrew the software’s cutesy function set.

I suppose I knew that at some point I would need to move from iPhoto into something more robust, however in dabbling with other photography management packages over the years — window-shopping, as it were — I became fully aware of how difficult and tedious an endeavor it would be, fully switching over. Man, that is one deep and dark path to walk down, and if it wasn’t absolutely necessary…well, I could make iPhoto continue to work for me. That is, until I couldn’t.

For reasons unknown, at right about the same time I was beginning to explore shooting in RAW (though this had nothing to do with the issue), iPhoto stopped accepting modifications made to picture files. The changes I made — upping the contrast or vibrancy of a photo, for example, or cropping an image — would stick, but only until I exited iPhoto. Thus, when I would start the application again, any modifications I had made during the previous session were gone.

Naturally, I google-binged my problem, and I discovered that I was not alone. A great number of my fellow iPhoto users had been dealing with the same problem, and as far as I was able to tell in my digging none of them had come up with a solution short of abandoning iPhoto for one of its competitors..

The writing, as they so (too?) often say, was on the wall. iPhoto, it has been nice. Enter Lightroom 5.

It has taken patience and time to do it to do it to do it to do it to do it right, child…er, move everything over, and I have hit my share of lulls, but a marvelous documentary I saw last Friday about the recently-discovered photographer Vivian Maier kicked me back into it, and finally I am finished. And nothing will ever be the same.

4

It has now been three weeks since I took AppleKory into the Apple Store at Opera to have one of their supposed Genius folk render opinion and possible solutions for a fan and heating problems. For reasons unknown, the poor girl’s CPU was running regularly at about 90 degrees Celsius and her fan was blowing at the maximum 6204 rpm. A friend who is also my OSX Guru has long told me that I run too many apps and processes simultaneously (foreground and background), and he was convinced that was the problem, but even when I turned just about everything off the CPU heat spiked and the fan in response ran loud enough to her in the next room (quite strange for a MacBook Pro).

The Genius who attended me ran some diagnostics and found no problem. He then, though, suggested that it could be a problem with the thermal paste in conjunction with the heat sink, and that such a repair would only cost €29…and a three separation. Wanting to have a happy and healthy AppleKory, I swallowed hard and handed her over. I then went home and told my Guru that he was wrong (Wrong! Wrong!), and that the problem was not running AppleKory too hard, but that it had to do with a hardware issue.

HAH!

Two days later the Apple technician called. He told me in broken-but-not-bad English that the thermal paste was fine, and that as far as he could tell there was no problem with my system. “Perhaps you are asking it to do too much at the same time?”, he said. “Anyway, it is ready for you to pick up anytime.”

Grr.

I retrieved AppleKory soon after, and — go figure — since then she has been purring like a kitten (so to speak…that is, without the noise). I have changed nothing with regard to the software I run or the intensity of such (over 20 Google Chrome tabs open as I type), and yet it is a rare occurrence when her temperature exceeds 80 degrees Celsius or her fan exceeds 5000 rpm (and most of the time both of those numbers are significantly lower…at this moment, 72 and 2588 rpm).

Like the child whose symptoms disappear upon realizing a visit to the doctor is in the offing? Or the sick cat who seems to get better when a visit to the vet is imminent? That Apple technician must be one scary dude, indeed!

5

Approaching the end of July, it is evident that the France Summer holiday has begun to take hold. Signs are appearing in the windows of shops and restaurants announcing date ranges of closure, the foot traffic on the street is significantly lighter, there are fewer people in the Metro (and fewer trains running, as well), there is a lot less ambient and incidental noise leaking into Chez Kessel. You would think, though, that with fewer people in town taxing Internet pipe capacity that my broadband service would be much improved, wouldn’t you?

Categories
Bad Stuff broadband Business

UK Broadband — Not Fit for Purpose

Not Broadband

Ignore the pachyderm! By 2017 100% of the UK will have broadband (supposedly).

It would seem that far too many people are happy to skirt around the issues, to deliver platitudes and sound bites to willing journalists who don’t actually feel like investigating the truth or facing the elephant in the country. Particularly in the countryside. I was brought up in Yorkshire where a spade (particularly when used for a fibre dig) is a spade.

UK Broadband is quite simply not fit for purpose. There – a trunk, 2 flappy ears and a long memory. See it?!

Oh yes, there are a few people in the nation who can use iPlayer to watch TV shows they’ve missed without buffering, catch up with friends and family on Facebook and not worry about the automatic video downloading, make the odd Skype call without sounding like an alien or being pixelated, and game with others around the world. The applications mentioned, though, are not bandwidth intensive or real-time critical, though, so it would be more than remiss if our telcos couldn’t provide sufficient connectivity for these types of activities. More worrying is that a huge number of people cannot do any of these things, let alone do more.

Smart meters (a truly bad idea, anyway) are not going to work for many, especially in rural areas, tele-health is bordering on impossible still, innovation has gone by the wayside, etc. Not only have we not been able to do this since the ADSL roll-out, it is looking increasingly unlikely that we will be able to do so this decade. The claims that 20,000 people per week are being connected with “superfast” broadband start to fall over the minute you log onto any of the broadband consumer forums and read the real-world experiences behind such claims. It is just hype, crafted for the press release, and spread with jam for the minister appearances in front of the House or news cameras.

The truth is that however much money the UK government seems to throw at BT to deliver nationwide broadband (ADSL, now superfast), the company continually fails to do so. And in a spectacular fashion that requires successive ministers to lie to the public about progress. As good little boys and girls, we all believe what we read in the press and see on TV (right?). We are endlessly told that all is going well, that by 2017 100% of the country will have broadband, and that the mandarins in Whitehall know that they are getting true value out of our money. Yet even though we can see this is definitely NOT the case (as can PAC, NAO etc) we allow good money to be thrown after bad, and with nary a challenge in the mainstream media as investigative journalism appears to have lost the wheels from its wagon.

Recently, there has been a surge in network outages (VirginMedia being the most recent at the beginning of last week), and an increasing number of complaints about (1) paying for superfast and getting nowhere close, (2) people being disconnected for months whilst the ping pong game between ISP and telco fail to resolve faults or long line issues, (3) dirty tricks campaigns that prevent utterly fed-up communities from JFDI themselves, and so on. The list of failures within telecoms at present would be almost funny, in fact, if it wasn’t so very sad that as far as connectivity goes Britain is quickly becoming a third world nation.

Many network operators surveyed recently say that their networks are at full stretch now, and that without substantial investment the strain of IoT (Internet of Things) could cause further breakages. Consumers know first-hand that this is the case because their connections often grind to a halt. Yet, where is the long term cross-party plan, after discussion with that most vital stakeholder (the consumer)? Where is the inquiry into why BT failed to deliver the first round of broadband, yet persistently lied in saying that 99.7% of the country had precisely that? And who the eff decided to set the procurement up so that it could all happen again? (Yeah, yeah, no one ever lost their job buying IBM, but an entire country is losing out right now).

Where is the platform for the great and good of the broadband world, who unsurprisingly do not lurk in Whitehall or Westminster like the paid lobbyists, always ready to advise the policy wonks on what is required and how to reach the day where we can all sit back and enjoy our connectivity? After all, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that in order to break the cycle of the Broadband Groundhog days of the last 2 decades, the entire country needs to be fibred up with an upgrade path for the future that is gigabit+. Whether individual homes and businesses are on wireless, mobile or a wire, it all has to be fibre-fed. And the closer the fibre is to each premises, mast, hub, etc., the better.

Where are the MPs flocking in droves to Lancashire, Oxfordshire, etc. and exclaiming in joy at the solutions being put in place by (mainly) privately funded alternatives? Where are the lessons learnt from all that has gone before being put into practice? It sure ain’t in a £10M pot for innovation that includes one company whose directors recently all resigned, some satellite providers, and a voucher scheme or two. Where is the MORAL FIBRE, the concern to find the right solution for the well being of this nation, the cojones to face up to errors and JFDI right?

We have covered all this before — over and over, I daresay — and for more than 20 years now. We have shouted, even from within Westminster and Whitehall, but hell, what do we know? We are only the people who need to use it.

If BDUK had adopted Fibre To The Village Pump as even a possible concept, you can guarantee right now that BT would not be sticking cabinets in B4RN villages and cutting through water pipes or fibre, as happened last week. As a BT shareholder, I would want to know what they think they are doing with the company’s capital if that is the best plan they can come up with to capture market share. I mean, really, why compete with a gigabit network that has the support of pretty much all of the community when your only offering is a substandard tech using over-lengthy copper phone lines? (And yes, we know BT could do FTTH on poles, but are all still holding our breath to see this actually occur in Dolphinholme).

Quite simply, these days it is depressing to be a British broadband campaigner. You watch (seemingly on an endless loop) the farcical decisions, policies and spend coming from an establishment that cannot even manage to keep track of its own files, which are on paper (water-damaged is today’s excuse). ON PAPER? Really?!? They feel fit to advise us on digital issues when no digitisation has been done, and even when it is done the serfs (sorry, civil servants) lose it on trains?

So, back to the elephant….

British broadband via BDUK is not fit for purpose today, nor at the current rate will it be in the future, and nor are those making the decisions to spend (WASTE) our money with a company that cannot deliver fit for purpose either.

[And if you want to know how I would deal with the elephant — aside, of course, from addressing it in articles such as this one — I am available as an experienced, consumer-oriented, opinionated, best practice Solution Seeker who has a weekly show on TechQT that discusses all of this broadband stuff and more.]

Categories
Business ecommerce internet mobile apps

Old Websites

Old Web

Considering Internet detritus of the slash-and-burn order, often the walking-dead creations of fly-by-night “web developers” who took the money (and lots of it) and ran.

Websites. For small businesses. Probably built by someone nice met at a local business networking event.

In Drupal? Joomla? TYPO3? For those without a care in the world, those first two aren’t places (except in web developers’ multi-conversant-code-language-script-caffeine-based frontal lobes), not even in the Hindu Kush. No, these are programming languages often used to build websites. Took that certain ‘someone nice’ years to learn that, and it would have taken many hours to build, let alone discuss wireframes etc., with you, their patient ‘How long is a piece of string?’ client.

What did you pay? £500? £1500? £6000? More !?! Wow! How was the ROI? How much is the SEO still costing you?

Hmmmm…. Guessing that if that was a few years ago, you’d currently have more chance of tracking down a yeti in a blizzard than locating the whereabouts of said web developer, who’s possibly off finding self, tracking yetis in the Himalayas etc. (or perhaps even heading up a super secret division looking into ants at Google HQ!)

Having had to track down (hey, thanks #socmed) and drag one web developer back to his Himalayan base camp, to make contact by satellite phone at an allotted time, and say ‘Just give us the bloody admin password’ so very small but critical changes could be made to a client’s site, I feel for SME owners caught in this trap. He of course wanted us to wait until his return in three months. Client wanted to call Nominet and serve a fortnight’s notice. Compromise met, password released. In that particular case, thin ‘partition walls’ existed between all the small sites he had on the server and with the main admin password I could of course see everything: clearly he’d done quite well and was now spending his earnings travelling. I hear new examples of this every week.

I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg and that there’s a lot of these about, perhaps enough to one day push Nominet into ringing round asking if you were “mis-sold a website”, which you maybe won’t even own the domain registration of, and hence have not a clue what to do.

Nobody can claim WordPress ($free) is the be-all-and-end-all of web design (sorry Editor Kory!) or replace what a great digital agency can do for £50K, but with the availability of plugins such as WooCommerce ($free) and Information Street’s ‘Connector4 WooCommerce’ ($147) integrating the popular SMB commerce tool InfusionSoft ($pick your pain level) and thus taking the financial sting out of DIY self-build SMB websites, just what will all the newbie web developers cut their teeth on in the future?

Mobile apps for these previously desktop-only greats like WordPress (and all its plugins) and InfusionSoft enable, empower and look very shiny (“Give me that power!”), and they just kill that web developer’s rough version of your site (beautifully coded in C++, for less than a fiver an hour most probably, demo’d and discussed frequently in Nero’s).

Seriously, how long before there is nothing you cannot do on your business’s site/blog/e-commerce backend on your tablet sitting on the beach (except actually see it in direct sunlight)?

Ouch. Poor web developer.

However, it’s ‘out of the pan, and into the fire’, dear Reader. Those web developers; I have a sneaky feeling if they’re not working at $P$R$DigitalMegaBucks$$ design agency, many have gone off to design WordPress themes — and now the 2014 equivalent to the above scenario is discovering they haven’t updated that theme you bought two years ago (and they aren’t going to any time soon either, as it’s snowboarding season!). They just haven’t got the time or incentive to continue to support it, just so it will work with the newly-patched WordPress release for your newly-old website. For example, there’s the Jewelry Shop Theme by Sarah Neuber (see also this if you’re affected!) although I have no idea about Sarah Neuber’s reasons for leaving no forwarding address (it’s probably not yeti related) again you can feel the obvious pain of the SMB owners.

Moral of the story? It’s tempting to reiterate that if you want something done properly then do it yourself, but if your business is actually keeping you busy, you probably don’t have that time. However it’s 2014 and you now have no excuse not to have at least some working knowledge of what to do if that nice web developer checks out of town, and to ask that it’s built entirely upon WordPress in the first place?

Categories
Apps chromebook Cloud ecommerce End User gaming google H/W internet Mobile mobile apps mobile connectivity Net phones social networking

The Hump Day Five (16-July-2014)

Colorfulish

The Hump Day Five is on Red Alert this week, getting all Google-y powerful on music in the cloud, Leftovers, and Ping Pong Mania.

1

Started watching a new TV show a couple of weeks back called “The Leftovers”. If you haven’t haven’t seen or heard of it, the premise is quite simple. On 14-October at a precise moment in time approximately 2% of the world’s population randomly disappears without a trace. Drivers from moving vehicles, criminals from prison cells, babies from car seats, one moment there the next moment gone. It doesn’t take much imagination to see compelling story elements in such a framework, and in fact it is easy to see how the utter chaos of such a situation could become too much of a good thing (entertainment-wise, that is). The creators, though, very smartly opt to confine the drama to a single small town somewhere in America and how “The Departure”, as it is called, has affected and continues to affect the populace three years down the line. Succulent details are offered via ancillary media — overheard radio, television news programs being watched by this-or-that character, etc., not a small amount of Internet-y stuff — and go so far as to include a list of celebrities who number among the 2%. Dark stuff riddled rich with despair, sure, and as television goes it isn’t for everyone, but if you like your diversion disturbing and in-your-face I highly recommend checking it out.

2

Since late June a new application for both iPhone and Android has been making its way through the zeitgeist in direct response to the once-again-heightening tensions between Israel and Palestine: Kobi Snir’s Red Alert Israel. The idea behind this new app is to alert users of incoming rockets so they can stop whatever it is they are doing and take shelter*. The alerts received (tied directly to Israel Defense Forces and Homefront Command) can be configured quite tightly — there are a great many individual areas, considering the country’s small land mass — and each alert offers allows for comments, which can include prayers and encouragement, as well as — not surprising, but enraging nonetheless — inflammatory notes full of disparagement and outright hatred. Red Alert Israel also includes streaming Israeli radio (in Hebrew) to supplement its alerts with more detailed information (I assume). All in all, it is a noble idea that falls definitively on the side of the angels (and I say this even knowing that there is no Red Alert Palestine equivalent).

So I am sensitive to the dead-serious nature of Red Alert Israel and applaud and support its above-reproach mission, but I would be fibbing BIG-time if I said the image of people running for cover from flying ordinance with their hands flailing high above their heads clutching their phones didn’t loosen a small smile. Got too many episodes of The Simpsons under my belt, I suppose. Please excuse (or feel free to flame me up but good in the Comments).

The Red Alert Israel app is free, as you would expect, though it does run shifting banner advertising, because in these times absolutely nothing should go unsponsored. I mean, think about it…is there an advertiser out there who wouldn’t want their product or service to be associated with the saving of lives? And thus a new business model is born!

*The users in Israel, that is, as it is quite evident that Red Alert Israel is being downloaded and put into use by people living elsewhere..for purposes of showing solidarity, inspiring prayer and greater empathy, to stoke flames of outrage, to feed whatever vicarious needs, perhaps to serve as the basis for gambling or drinking games, etc.

3

For someone who spends as much time driving keyboards and mice as I do, I really can be late to the party at times. Take cloud-hosted music (aka online music lockers, aka online music storage services). Available in various flavors for a few years now (the majors all bowed in 2011 — Apple, Amazon, Google — whereas an early achiever called AudioBox left the starting block in 2009), it was only this past weekend that I started to consider the idea of throwing some of my music up into the ether for ready access across my computers and smartphone. Naturally, I was aware of the cloud-hosted music concept, but that awareness was mostly relegated to Apple’s iTunes in the Cloud/iTunes Match service, and as I trust Apple’s software and service offerings about as much as…well, not at all, actually, I put up a willful “blind spot” to the whole idea. Of course, it also helped that my music collection far exceeded the 25,000 song limit put on the $25-per-year service by Apple, and that at the start – as is unfortunately so often the case — the service was available to U.S.-based users only.

A couple of years passed, and then along came KoryChrome. And with KoryChrome came promotions for Google services. And with the promotion in particular of Google Play Music — which I learned is now available in France and which includes the ability to load/match 20,000 songs absolutely free — came my revisiting the subject of cloud-hosted music this past weekend. 20,000 songs for uploaded/matched for free? Songs I can access from any Internet-connected computer capable of running a browser (Google Chrome need not be that browser, either), or from any Internet-connected smartphone? All without commercials or listening limitations?

Yeah, I know this party started ages ago, but as far as I am concerned there is still beer in the fridge and it’s still ice-cold.

4

On the subject of KoryChrome, La Famille Kessel returned to our Pays d’Auge family hovel in Blangy-le-Château this past weekend, and my keen and cool new Chromebook was thus reunited with its power source. And this time that power source made it into my computer bag for the trip back to Paris at weekend’s end. No doubt, a great many of you will now breathe easier and will stop wanting for sleep.

5

Got struck hard by a serious wave of irony a few hours ago when My Missus and I put The Boy on a train to summer camp. The camp he is attending is called “Ping Pong Mania” (translate from French), and it promises to be exactly that, with 90+ minutes of table tennis play and training each morning and another such session each afternoon. I blush with a certain amount of pride in saying that my kid is really quite masterful at the game, in no small measure because other than ping pong his free time these days is overwhelmingly consumed by Minecraft, Clash of Clans, SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition, youtube videos galore rooted in gameplay and game parody and what-have-you, and a bevy of other sofa-bound veg-and-play games and experiences.

My hope is the next 10 days will find The Boy matched up with other kids his age who are at or near his level. Otherwise, his hesitance to get off the couch and get out in the world (read: separate from his MacBook and iPad and Nintendo DS3) will have been justified…or so he will say and think, anyway. And this is where the irony lies as 32 years ago I remember feeling similar hesitation at heading off to summer camp, too…summer computer camp!

Categories
Apps End User fun stuff gadgets google H/W internet piracy

Yes, I Read Super Hero Comic Books

Comic Books

There are far worse things you can carry from childhood to adulthood than super hero comic books (and fewer that look better on your tablet screen).

For me, super hero comic books are just one of those things. I loved them as a child in single digits, continued to look in on them occasionally (and sometimes more often than that) through my teens, and plugged in harder than ever when Frank Miller and Alan Moore took them to the edge of serious dark pop art in my early 20s. I suppose I lost the thread somewhat as my 30s approached, though I am not sure if that was me or the simple fact that both Marvel and DC jettisoned creative storytelling during the 1990s in favor of marketing tricks designed to make every issue a collectible (not to forget to mention doubling the price of single issues…and then doubling it again). Regardless, moving to Paris — a land where reading comic books is less a geek tattoo and more proof of an enlightened mind — hooked me back in kinda-sorta, a side effect of my haunting the English language comic shops in and around the Rue Dante lying in wait for the latest can’t-miss graphic novels by the likes of Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Daniel Clowes, among many others. And I am sure that is where I would be today — hooked back in kinda-sorta — were it not for the darn things all going digital.

I don’t recall the first time I read a comic book on a computer, though it certainly predates my 2008 Mac re-entry. I do remember, though, how awkward it felt, viewing each scanned page one at a time before moving on to the next page using the → key or the Space bar. I also remember how annoying it was to have to hit the ← key repeatedly to go back to check some plot detail I skimmed past (annoyance that was multiplied by having to then hit the → key repeatedly to return to where I had left off). It all felt so trivial at the start, so “Take it or leave it.” And I left it. For a while, anyway, I left it.

Mostly, I left it. OK, every now and again, usually nipping at the heels of 3AM, I would download some issue in the Batman or Daredevil scheme of things and indulge (won’t say how or from where or whether it was a legal happenstance or not, no way). Just to stay up on the story, you know? Keeping up with the characters, these old friends of mine from childhood/teenagehood/young adulthood..whichever ‘hood I am inhabiting as I barrel towards 50.

And then My Missus brought home the iPad.

Like so many of us, I was tuned into the whispers and rumors of the iPad that were flying thick and furious during the back half of ‘09 and up through its introduction by Steve Jobs in late January of 2010. By the time of that announcement, though, I had driven an iPhone around the town a little bit without falling under its spell, and at first blush the iPad looked like nothing more than an iPhone on growth hormone. Interesting? Sure. Curious? You bet, because it was the birth of a new gadget category (and, naturally, because it was a new Apple product). Necessary? Uh…no. Not for anyone who had access to a computer and/or smartphone, anyway.

Not long after the iPad announcement I was able to put my hands and fingers on one of the first to make it to France. I can slide the apps pages back and forth. Smooth. I can touch an icon and open an app. Expected. It plays music and movies. Hmm. OK. Here you go, and thanks for letting me play with your new iPad. Enjoy. Oh…uh…can you make phone calls with it?

So getting back on track…a first-generation iPad made its way past over the Chez Kessel moat towards the end of ‘10, courtesy of My Missus, who as a publisher had been tasked with starting down the path of developing textbooks for the darn thing. Again, I held an iPad in my hands, and again I swiped the screen from side to side, touched app icons to watch the apps open, and clocked that it could be used to input music and video content. Then just as I was about to hand it back I had the thought, “I can read .pdf files on it, and book files in Amazon’s .mobi format…maybe…YES!”

Digital comic books, most often traded in .cbr (Comic Book Reader) and .cbz (Comic Book Zip), had proved to be a somewhat strange experience on a computer screen, but the iPad looked like it just might be a worthy delivery vehicle for suchness. And when a short google-bing turned up info on Cloudreaders, a free program able to read files in these two file formats (.pdf, too), I was on my way back to regular sustained web-slinging, shield-wielding, power-ringing, bataranging, billy-clubbing, hammer-throwing, repulsor-raying…OK, I’m OK. Can stop that now.

Now I had the means and the method, but what about the content? Well, as I stated earlier WITHOUT ADMITTING TO ANY INAPPROPRIATE ACTION OR BEHAVIOR, at some point I became aware of ways in which a person with an interest in doing so could easily obtain digital super hero comic books and at no cost. Speaking further about that person and their interest, it is a fact that pulp science fiction and comic books were among the very first pieces of “analogue” reading materials to be fan-digitized, to the point now where it is seriously difficult to think of content that cannot be had, ripe and ready for e-reading (and quickly, at that). Just to illustrate, do-do-that-goo(gle)goo(gle)-that-you-do-so-well on the following terms: “Complete Marvel Chronology” and look for links to Internet file-sharing destinations that I AM NOT TELLING YOU TO CLICK-THROUGH TO.

To close, I will share here that I really was (am!) one of those cliched kids whose now-priceless super hero comic book collection fell victim to tragic circumstances. In my case, “tragic” means a parental ultimatum issued: I could sell my comics at our “We’re Moving” yard sale or I could give them away, but there was no way they were being placed on the truck that would complete our summer 1976 family transfer from Chicago to Dallas. I unloaded hundreds of valuable pulpy friends* for $0.07 to $0.10 each on that August day, imagining not for a moment that I might be reunited with them someday down some dusty ol’ digital road (feel free to replace “digital road” with “information superhighway” if you must, because I just cannot bring myself to do so).

*Valuable to me, that is. Despite all of the ballyhoo I offer, my comic book collection wasn’t priceless…most of the issues were in tattered well-read condition, in fact, and fewer than five pre-dated 1970. I did, though, have issues 121, 122, and 129 of “The Amazing Spider-Man”, and you most assuredly did not.

Categories
Bad Stuff broadband End User fun stuff Legal Net piracy

Geo Restriction Means a Pirate’s Life for Me…

God Kills a Cinea

Accessing the whole of creation…what is available in my “region” of it, that is.

A regular contributor to trefor.net, we are as always pleased to present insight from James Blessing, the current Chair of the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) UK.

Once upon a time in the west, a man sat and contemplated the state of the world and the marvels that now existed upon his doorstep. With a simple gesture he could now access the whole of creation, every song that’s ever been sung, every work of art painted or love poem written in a moment of teenage angst. And the cats, don’t forget the cats…

Maybe that’s the future, it’s almost the now, but there is a problem that means that “every” gets dropped on the floor and is replaced with the slightly less poetic “everything that we could managed to get the licensing conditions approved for in your country right now, but maybe not next week” and that problems is lawyers.

When I started to think about this article I was going to focus on the benefits of the Internet and broadband, and then I tried to watch a clip from the late show…and then I changed tack. This isn’t the first time — and it won’t be the last — when content isn’t available in my “region”, where geo restriction has reared its head and made it so that if I want to watch content I have to either fire up a VPN to the “right region” and watch the content from there, or I will have to  head over to a friendly Pirate resource and unleash a p2p application. Do you want to know the worst bit about this? The content was being pushed to me by the DailyShow itself.

Sorry, but this video is unavailable from your location

And it gets worse. Wil Wheaton has written a blog about this very topic, in fact, as he’s seeing an ever increasing number of people using bittorrent to download his new show, and he is worried that if it continues the show won’t be renewed. It even pushed me into writing a quick email to Syfy UK (the network that produces the show in the US), but even they can’t get the show:

“We instigated proceedings to acquire the UK rights, but a number of legal complications surrounding differences in UK and US clip clearance legislation, have unfortunately prevented us from doing so.“

Now here is something that needs fixing. I have no “magic bullet” solution, as there are too many vested interests that won’t have a sensible conversation unless someone waves a stick at them and the politicians seem to be too scared of big media to unleash their sticks. There is an election next year, though, and it sure would be nice if one (or all) of the parties could commit to making an effort to resolve this issue…your local MP could be an excellent place to start!

Editorial note – check out our new site – BroadbandRating.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
broadband Business H/W internet Net servers

FTTC Broadband — Upgrade Your Router

Munin

FTTC installed…and then the problems started.

Once again, Trefor.net welcomes contributor Tim Bray, Technical Director for ProVu Communications. “FTTC — Upgrade Your Router” is Tim’s second “Broadband Week” post.

At ProVu we, don’t often do onsite installations, preferring instead to leave them to our resellers. Sometimes, though, a problem comes along that requires that we get involved in helping to figure out what is going on.

One of our customer’s sites was activated for FTTC broadband. This customer ran an office with a small call centre and about 10 office PCs, and they thought the higher bandwidth would be useful. Zen (the ISP, in this case) had a special offer on ADSL to FTTC upgrades, so the time seemed right for upgrade. Our customer swapped their onsite router out for a model that could do both ADSL and FTTC, and all appeared ready for an easy change over once the Openreach engineer arrived.

ProVu logo

On the scheduled day the Openreach man showed up, and our customer had just 10 minutes downtime while he performed the jumpering in the cabinet. Up came the new 40 Mbps download line (which also had, more importantly, a massive upload speed). Magic. Everything worked, and the internet seemed to be lightning fast. And then the problems started. “The internet is slow!” “We’ve got bad call quality!” And so, a site working properly and perfectly had stopped doing so because of a service upgrade.

We added lots of monitoring. Smokeping and Nagios. Sure enough, we learned of intermittent bad packet loss on the line that came and went, usually at such quiet times as evenings and weekends. We could tell that something was on the network opening a large number of sessions through the NAT in the router, and we knew that the problems started as we got towards 600 TCP sessions. We wondered whether with FTTC when you open a browser window with all your saved tabs the computer would hit those tabbed sites — Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, BBC News and all their associated ad networks and image CDNs — all at the same time, perhaps causing these events to happen too quickly and to throw too many ports open at the same time.

Running just a small consumer type router, we couldn’t diagnose the issue to the point where we could determine what was causing it. As such, as we needed better instrumentation to investigate further, we decided to install a proper linux server as a router in lieu of the dedicated hardware. BT Openreach provides PPPoE termination, so it is easy to deploy standard PC hardware with 2 ethernet cards to act as a router. We used Munin to add every kind of monitoring. We had graphs of UDP sessions, TCP sessions, and traffic graphs for voice traffic against other traffic…you name it, we graphed it.

Everything we could think of that might help us to figure out what was causing the issues being experienced was in place. And it was that moment that the problems went away. Again, magic. Once the new router was installed, everything worked. We saw large throughput and sessions through the router, but no corresponding packet loss. And no user complaints.

Very puzzling.

Then one Saturday I noticed the traffic graph on the router rise up to 30 Mbps download speed and stay there. Not the first time this had happened, of course, but it was the first time I was there to watch. My suspicions were raised, so I phoned the call centre. “No, all our calls are fine.”  The new router was coping with this traffic fine. So I ran Wireshark and discovered that the call centre staff were watching telly using Sky Player on a sneaked-in laptop. And from watching the trace, I could see that Sky Player was streaming the video by opening a new TCP session every few seconds, which coupled with the large number of phone calls must have been what was overwhelming the old router.

I phoned the call centre manager with my findings, and she sussed that they were watching the footie. And regarding a remedy, lets just say some HR Department action occurred!

At this point, let me sum up the learning points:

  1. A bigger router might be needed for FTTC, as the router could be the slowest bit and not the ISP.
  2. The router might have a limit for packets per second.
  3. Even a small office can open a lot of ports through a NAT, something for which small routers cannot cope.
  4. With a good enough router, it is possible to run a small call centre and stream TV at the same time.

As an aside, I think this is a great point where IPv6 would help. IPv4 and NAT is stateful on the router. The router has to record each session and rewrite the packets. IPv6, though, would be stateless, so the router would have only need to pass on the packets rather than having to track sessions and rewrite port numbers. Also, there is the old adage: Use a separate connector for voice to your data. I suspect that some of the poor voice quality that encourages this is actually the voice and data services acting in conjunction to overwhelm the router, rather than there simply not being enough bandwidth. Bufferbloat may be part of the problem as well. But I suspect a router with more grunt may make it so the second line isn’t required.

I’ve done various consultancy jobs to investigate ‘SIP phones dropped off network’, and by scripting to monitor the NAT state table have found the router/firewall just dropping the session from the NAT table, which is obviously either a bug or just not enough capacity in the device.

Editorial note – check out our new site – BroadbandRating.

Categories
broadband Business piracy

Kiwi ISP Slingshot promotes piracy amongst punters

skull & crossbones - broadband internet copyright infringement

Kiwi ISP Slingshot promotes piracy amongst  Antipodean punters – broadband internet copyright infringement

New Zealand based ISP Slingshot is providing pre-VPNed connections so that New Zealanders can watch BBC iPlayer or subscribe to Netflix etc for free. A VPN, or Virtual Private Network in this case allows users to tunnel across the internet so that it looks as if they are located somewhere else. Effectively corporate promoted broadband internet copyright infringement.

BBC programmes are made available to UK license payers on computers tablets and smart phones via iPlayer streamed over the internet. iPlayer is blocked from streaming to non-UK IP addresses on the basis that they are unlikely to be genuine UK residents and thus will probably not have paid their license fee.

Netflix is a paid service but not available in every country around the globe. New Zealand based subscribers wanting to sign up have to lie about where they live. Slingshot provides the IP spoofing, presumably via a proxy based in the UK which can then also be used to access iPlayer.

From a Netflix perspective the issue is likely to be the fact that Netflix themselves may not have the licenses to stream certain content in markets other than those in which they operate.

As a UK BBC license payer I am of course outraged that I am effectively susbsidizing the TV watching of New Zealanders. I can’t see how they have time anyway. One assumes that most of them are out playing rugby  every night.

It’s interesting as this sort of thing is probably legal in NZ. Slingshot takes no responsibility for the fact that customers may have told Netflix porkies about where they live.  It’s the way of the world of course. The internet doesn’t care (much) for national borders, unless you live somewhere the government is trying to control what you access…

Anyway that’s it. Interesting broadband internet copyright infringement snippet methinks.

Editorial note – check out our new site – BroadbandRating.

Categories
broadband Business Net

Africa Broadband Snapshot: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Africa Internet

Despite double-digit growth over the last four years, Africa accounts for only 7% of of the world’s Internet users and less than 0.5% of the world’s fixed-broadband subscriptions. The key to bettering those numbers? Innovation and collaboration.

Trefor.net is pleased to present the following “Broadband Week” post from Michele McCann, Business Development Manager for Teraco Data Environments. Michele’s post is her first contribution to the site.

For anyone who has not had the opportunity to see Africa outside of the context of a safari with lions, elephants, rhinos and the ubiquitous donkey, here is a quick snapshot view of second largest continent in the world.

Geographically, Africa makes up one-third of the world’s total landmass, with a total population of a little more than 1 billion. The population figures are really only an estimate, as the majority of our people have generally not been counted due to lack of process and technology. This rough estimate equates to 15.6% of the world’s population, but only 7% of the world’s Internet users. Our internet penetration is a mere 16.3% and rising, with content players such as Facebook enjoying contributions from over 51 million African subscribers at a 4.8% penetration rate. We are the 2nd largest mobile market globally, with over 650 million mobile subscribers and 700 million SIM cards currently in use.

Teraco

The 2014 landed cable capacity is now >30Tbps and is expected to double by 2015. This capacity growth has happened in a mere five years, from its previous humble capacity of just over 300Gbps. Multiple landing stations are available throughout the continent, with South Africa alone having over 10 landing stations directly connecting to four different continents. This has resulted in improved latencies from >800ms to just under 200ms.

The terrestrial fibre inventory of Africa is estimated at over 732,662km, reaching 40% of the population, of which 313m people are within a 25km reach of a fibre node.
Considering Africa’s explosive and constant growth, why are we still experiencing average fixed broadband speeds of 5.6Mbps at a rate of $20 for a 5GB package, excluding the line rental which is over $100 per month? And mobile broadband speeds averaging at 6.9Mbps at a rate of $80 for 5GB?

Recently released ITU statistics indicate that by the end of 2014, fixed-broadband penetration will have reached almost 10% globally. 44% of all fixed-broadband subscriptions are in Asia Pacific, and 25% in Europe. In contrast, Africa accounts for less than 0.5% of the world’s fixed-broadband subscriptions, and despite double-digit growth over the last four years, Africa broadband penetration remains very low.

Globally, mobile-broadband penetration is expected to reach 32% by end 2014; in developed countries, mobile-broadband penetration will exceed 84%, a level four times as high as in developing countries (21%). The number of mobile-broadband subscriptions will reach 2.3 billion globally and 55% of all mobile-broadband subscriptions are expected to be in the developing world. Mobile-broadband penetration levels are at their highest in Europe (64%) and the Americas (59%), followed by CIS (49%), the Arab States (25%), Asia-Pacific (23%) and Africa (19%).

So why is Africa still lagging? Is it a lack of infrastructure? A lack of Internet eXchange Points (IXPs)? A lack of access to content? A lack of innovation?

The answer to all of these questions is “No.”, except perhaps for the last one citing a lack of innovation. As you have seen, Africa has loads of infrastructure, which can reach millions of people. The top 5 largest content players have invested in Africa and are connected to the key hubs – e.g., South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt – all of which have functioning exchange points located in neutral facilities. Therefore, as content, infrastructure and distribution points are easily available then the only conclusion is a lack of innovation around how to generate revenues in a changing world rather than hanging onto old business models of high transit and interconnection costs.

Is this something that will change in the near future? In my opinion, the operators should change or sell out! As users become more and more tech savvy, pricing models and service levels are being questioned. And with more and more global operators and content providers looking to Africa as their new market expansion opportunity, existing African providers are going to need to adapt business models and provide services that are relevant to their market place. Great examples of African innovation stories include Orange providing free access to Facebook for all their African users, Bharti Airtel providing one mobile rate across Africa, and – in what is perhaps the biggest game changer – the launch of mobile money markets through M-Pesa by Safricom (which allows users with a national ID card or passport to deposit, withdraw, and transfer money easily with a mobile device). All of these innovations are focused on services that users can obtain using broadband as the vehicle.

For the necessary innovation to occur and aid in solving Africa’s broadband Internet problems, cable operators, infrastructure providers and ISP’s all need to collaborate across services and pricing, and they need to start keeping the end user in mind across all business models.

Categories
broadband End User

The (Hidden) FTTC Wall

FTTC Wall

Local exchange FTTC-enabled, cabinet within easy view, power and fibre laid down…

Trefor.net welcomes Broadband Week contributor Tim Bray, Technical Director for ProVu Communications.

Here is a small tale about my own company’s experience with FTTC.

ProVu logo

The ProVu Communications offices are in Milnsbridge, which is just outside Huddersfield. As we are heavy broadband users, we were really happy to discover that our local exchange was being enabled for FTTC. A new cabinet appeared directly across the road from our front door. Some BT men came, dug up the road right outside our front door, and laid power and fibre to the new box.

Here is the view from our front door, with the FTTC box across the road. Note the fresh line of the roadworks coming across the road to us.

We eagerly checked on the DSL checker, but our phone numbers never activated. Then we started to dig around, checking the phone numbers of our neighbours.  It seems our phone lines are exchange-only lines, and thus there is no cabinet…and no FTTC. Although just across the road, all the houses and commercial properties have FTTC.

Here is a picture that offers…well, the whole picture. The houses beyond the road junction and past the No Entry signs can all get FTTC. Our office? The red front door on the right.

The problem is that this information isn’t public, and there are no public maps of which lines connect to which cabinets.   If we were a business moving premises, for instance, there is no way we could be sure about getting FTTC in our new location without first ordering a phone line and checking the number.

FTTC can make a massive difference to a business, with availability potentially meaning the difference between using a hosted email provider or installing a server onsite. Or between deploying a hosted phone system versus having to buy an onsite PBX. Or between having workers who can work at home via VPN or requiring that all work be performed from the office at all times.

The moral of the story? Don’t get excited just because your exchange is FTTC-enabled and there is a cabinet nearby. Wait first to see if the BT checker displays “Available”.

Categories
broadband Business Net

Rise of the Gigabit Cities

Gigabyte City

With broadband, too much is not enough, and the safe harbour of status quo will not meet the ever-expanding needs of the market.

Trefor.net is pleased to present the following “Broadband Week” post from Hyperoptic Managing Director Dana Tobak. “Rise of the Gigabit Cities” is Dana’s first contribution to the site.

Everyone has moments in his or her career that they can’t forget – for me, one such moment was during the press conference in 2005 at which Be Broadband was launched. We were incredibly excited to be the first provider to take advantage of Local-Loop-Unbundling and offer 24Mbps to consumers, the fastest broadband speed available on the market at that time. During that press conference a journalist raised their hand and asked me, “is there really any need for 24Mbps? Will anyone ever need speeds that fast?”

The question took me by complete surprise, illustrating that some people didn’t understand — and still don’t — the need to innovate and challenge the status quo. Fast-forward nine years, and with our new venture Hyperoptic we are now offering consumers and businesses 1,000Mbps (one gigabit per second). And we aren’t alone. 2014 has definitely been the year of the gigabit cities in the UK.

Hyperoptic

So why do we need gigabit cities — cities whose broadband infrastructure is predominately fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) — and what is fueling the expansion? A lot of people think that the rise of the gigabit cities started with Google Fiber in Austin, Texas, but it actually goes much further back.

In the UK there is massive confusion in the market regarding what ‘fibre’ broadband actually is. The reason for this confusion is that the big providers have muddied the waters by marketing their services as ‘fibre’ broadband, even though the fibre actually stops at the cabinet and the connection into the house is delivered over telephone copper cables. And of course, this has definitely contributed to the UK being slow to join the gigabit cities club. Businesses and consumers think they are getting full fibre broadband, but in truth they are getting fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC).

We believe that the UK is a market that can hugely benefit from Hyperoptic’s full fibre approach – after all, the UK has the most Internet based economy of the G20, contributing 8.3% to the UK economy. From our experience with Be Broadband, however, we knew going in that there would doubters who would question why anyone would need a gigabit FTTH broadband when FTTC broadband can deliver speeds up to 76Mbps (the key phrase here being “up to 76Mbps” – because there is the copper component, consumers and businesses are subject to an undependable performance, peak-time slowdowns and barriers to fully utilising their connections).

Educating the market hasn’t been easy. Many people still don’t understand that there is a better way and that once they get FTTH, broadband becomes an indispensable service on which they can truly depend. Other countries have been quicker to innovate and create a network of gigabit cities. For instance, China and Japan currently have 37 million and 24.7 million FTTH subscribers. Also, thirteen countries in the EU have experienced growth greater than 30% in subscribers in the past year, with France and Sweden now each exceeding1.2 million FTTH subscribers.

Currently the UK isn’t even figuring on FTTH rankings, but this is starting to change. Hyperoptic launched in London in 2011, and has since then passed 35,000 homes in the Capital with recently announced availability in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Cardiff, Bristol and Reading. Sky, TalkTalk and CityFibre have joined together and will soon launch gigabit broadband in York (City Fibre has also said that it will be launching 20 new gigabit cities by 2016).

The UK may have been slow to start, but now the gigabit cities are growing apace. Industries are becoming increasingly digitised, and we are changing the way that we consume media and entertainment (with online streaming only set to increase). The status quo will no longer suffice, the time for doubting is over.

Categories
broadband Business internet Net

It’s Not Size that Matters, it’s What You Do with it that Counts

Connectivity

Sell not the thing, but the benefit in having the thing. Broadband? No, thank you. Connectivity? Well, I don’t mind if I do!

Trefor.net is pleased to welcome “Broadband Week” guest contributor Clare Greenall, Marketing Manager for Timico Partner Services Ltd.

Let’s talk about how to sell *Broadband (ahem, connectivity) in the twenty-tens, as it’s quite a hot topic of late with all the Superconnected City schemes that are prevalent right now.

To start, I want to address the asterisk in the paragraph above beside the word ‘Broadband’, which is a term widely used to cover the whole spectrum of different types of connectivity (and a topic of discussion that regularly rears its head in our office). Traditionally, Broadband is perceived as a home-user product that provides access to emails, a bit of web surfing, and some social media. And it absolutely does all of those things, but that perception dates back to the days when 512k was the download max and the dial-up modems were still screeching in the corner of the room. Time has moved on.

Timico Partners Ltd.

With all of the new-fangled adaptations of Broadband (ADSL), such as; Ethernet, GEA, FTTC, EFM (the list goes on…) we can’t possibly cover off all these with the title ‘Broadband’ as it just doesn’t do it justice! The Government uses the word ‘Broadband’ and other providers use it, all because we assume the general public doesn’t understand any other term for connectivity. Let’s reeducate and start calling it ‘Connectivity’, or — better yet — give each product its proper name… Seeing as sales of connectivity are ramping up yearly, shouldn’t it be considered important to teach the masses about the huge diversification of connectivity? Will it not be beneficial to highlight the massive advantages that fibre offers over copper?

Increased bandwidth suddenly opens up endless possibilities for small and big businesses alike. For instance, take ‘the Cloud’, the attack of which some businesses fear as if it is some 1950s horror movie, not possibly understanding the real benefits it can provide. At its start, VoIP (Voice over IP) got itself a bad name because no one seemed to get the underlying connectivity piece right, calls were dropping, and voice quality was horrendous. Having access to these types of solutions is really only workable if they are run on robust Internet connectivity.

Let’s not kid ourselves here, though. Consumers really don’t care if adding Annex M to their ADSL connection will increase the speed up to 2.5Mb, and they don’t give a monkey’s *(*%$#^ if their EFM is delivered on GSHDSL technology. No, what they want to know is what paying more for their connectivity every month is really going to deliver, in terms of tangible benefits.

It’s like that old saying, ‘It’s not the size that matters, it’s what you do with it that counts.’ (sexual connotations aside, of course).

Businesses today don’t want Telecoms salesmen rocking up and spieling off countless numbers and technobabble about how their product works and the technology it runs on – trust me, I come from a voice environment and have had my mind blown by the detail in the ISP world – they just want to know the real benefits. I understand that all of the underlying facts and figures are necessary when building the solutions that overlay the connectivity, but that level of detail should be left to the IT folk and solution specialists to discuss.

I suppose what really bought this to the forefront of my mind, though, is seeing the countless email promotions coming through for the Superconnected Cities scheme. Even as I’ve been writing this piece, a promotional email has arrived from an IT firm that obviously has no idea how to market superfast connectivity so that people will actually want to buy it…

“YOU, Mr. Customer, can have from £250 up to £3000 towards the cost of your installation fees and you can have connectivity technology allowing for speeds of between 30Mbps up to 1Gbps.”

Great…OK, but what does that mean for the average business user?

We have to change the way we sell Broadband…ahem, er, sorry, Connectivity. It’s a means to an end. What’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? All the customer really wants to know is:

  • How will this help me to grow my business?
  • Will it cut costs in the long run?
  • Will it help me to work smarter?
  • What kinds of services will this allow me to use?

And that’s what we should be encouraging the channel to sell: the benefits of superfast connectivity. With only a couple of sales made through our local Superconnected Cities scheme in Portsmouth, it’s pretty clear that current attempts to sell a service that most businesses are crying out for have been unsuccessful. It’s time to show businesses what they can do with their big fat pipes.

Categories
broadband End User fun stuff

Isaac Newton woz ere but no superfast broadband in Grantham

isaac newton and superfast broadband in grantham

Isaac Newton woz ere, according to the plaque on the wall but no superfast broadband in Granthan

I was picking up Kid3 from a gig in Grantham’s St Wulfram’s Church last weekend. Nice enough gaff as churches go, if you like that sort of thing. Kid3 plays in the Lincolnshire County Orchestra – it has a name but that eludes me as I write as it has changed over the years. Before picking him up I hung around the graveyard for a bit, as you  do and couldn’t fail to notice a plaque on the wall opposite.

It read “In this hall of the King’s School Isaac Newton was taught 1654 – 1660. This plaque was set up to mark the tercentenary of the visit of the Royal Society 1960”.

Another of those, “gosh was he really” moments, somewhat akin to me seeing the Meccano bike but different. Now I’m not really comparing Isaac Newton to a Meccano bike. He was a superstar of literally earth moving magnitude, having “discovered” gravity or at least being the first person to notice what it was he was looking at.

Interesting to muse that Newton lived in the 17th Century and thus would have had little conception of technologies that exist today. They probably didn’t even know what a virus was in those days let alone a computer virus. In the interest of fitting with this week’s broadband theme I did a broadband availability check on Newton’s Alma Mater, or at least of the church over the road. The results are given below:

BT BROADBAND AVAILABILITY CHECKER

For Postcode NG31 6RR

Featured Products Downstream Line Rate(Mbps) Upstream Line Rate(Mbps) Downstream Range(Mbps) Availability Date
WBC ADSL 2+ Up to 17 — 10 to 19.5 Available
ADSL Max Up to 7.5 — 6.5 to 8 Available
WBC Fixed Rate 2 — — Available
Fixed Rate 2 — — Available
Other Offerings
Copper Multicast — — — Available

 
For all ADSL and WBC Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) services, the stable line rate will be determined during the first 10 days of service usage.Throughput/download speeds will be less than line rates and can be affected by a number of factors within and external to BT’s network, Communication Providers’ networks and within customer premises.The Stop Sale date for Datastream is from 30-Jun-2012; the Formal Retirement date for Datastream is from 30-Jun-2014. The Stop Sale date for IPstream is from 31-Dec-2012; the Formal Retirement date for IPstream is from 30-Jun-2014.Note: Please note that postcode and address check results are indicative only. Most accurate results can be obtained from a telephone number check.Thank you for your interest.

I wonder if they knew it was Isaac Newton asking for superfast broadband in Grantham whether they would have accelerated the roll out in the area. After all with such a great mind what discoveries might be hindered by the lack of uplink speed. Hanging out with his scientific cronies would certainly not have been a great experience. Better maybe than the several months round trip time for a letter in those days.

Note the formal retirement date of 30th June 2014 for IPstream. This was the old ADSL backhaul network. BT moved ISPs on from this to it’s 21CN version years ago by making cost of bandwidth on the newer service far more attractive than IPstream.

Categories
broadband travel Weekend

Cygnets seen during today’s walk to work

signets at Lincoln's Brayford Pool

Cygnets at Lincoln’s Brayford Pool

My walk to work always bring new sights. You see a lot more at my gentle strolling pace than when you are stuck in a car waiting at traffic lights, queuing at junctions and generally polluting the atmosphere.

This morning I came across this swan and her three cygnets. I can’t imagine the cygnets are more than a couple of weeks old although I’m no expert on this subject. The photograph was taken from behind railings only a few feet away. The swan remained calm but I’d like to bet that if I’d tried to get closer  to the cygnets she would have let me know it didn’t make a lot of sense. I assume it was a she but I’m not sure how you tell the difference.

At lunchtime on my way to the gym I spotted some blokes with a white van laying some fibre. I wanted to take a photo but felt this would have been a little conspicuous. Odd even (hey 🙂 ). Apparently we have a new building on campus that is being lit.

Around 5ish I set off for home. Didn’t notice if the cygnets were still there.  I have a very steep hill to walk up, called Steep Hill funnily enough. We are simple folk in Lincoln. Like to tell it like it is. Walking up Steep Hill is a challenge at the best of times but when you’ve been to the gym it is especially hard going. Must be doing me good, I’d imagine.

This is broadband week on trefor.net. So far this week we have had 12 posts, including this one which is nothing to do with broadband unless you count the fibre laying. It’s been noticeable that whilst on a typical day we get 15% return visits this week it’s been more like 20% per day. That’s more of our “regulars” coming back for the broadband themed week. As time goes by (You must remember this…) we will be having more themed weeks, now that we have the new site theme and hopefully will build up the visitor numbers.

There is still a fair bit to do before the site is finished. We are currently working on improving the sharing buttons – the plug in being used is a bit hit and miss with the shares. The comments system is also not as seamless as I would like. The previous design used the built in comment facility. This has been moved to Disqus on the basis that it is one of the leading systems in the game. However I’m not too impressed with it. Disqus adds more steps to the commenting process and whilst some of this week’s posts have attracted a reasonable level of comment I’d like to bet that some of you have abandoned the process due to the number of clicks you have had to make.

Anyway, more anon. Got a football match to watch. Ciao bebe.