Category: End User

End User

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End User video

Kodak and YouTube are burning up your bandwidth

Since I got my KodakZi8 in mid November I’ve been videoing – not a surprise. The statistics however are startling. In that time I have recorded around 13.3GB of HD video – all of which resides on my hard drive.

I have also uploaded 26 of these videos to YouTube with a modest 616 total views. I’m not sure what the average size of video is but a rough guesstimate is 1 minute and 100MB. This suggests that my videos on YouTube account for around 61GB of data download in around siz weeks (and 2.6GB of my own upload bandwidth). Let’s assume everyone has a YouTube account and is like me. In this case everyone will be downloading this amount of data. Ok I know they are not all doing it at this time but it certainly points to the future.

As a sanity check I looked at my own ADSL usage in December – 67GB!

Video is going to change the rules when it comes to growth in use of the internet.

Categories
End User social networking

Facebook is the latest tool for announcing school closures

Friend Lindsey Annison commented today on Facebook that both her kids’ schools were shut today due to heavy snow. Their websites , however, had fallen over and were not accessible to view the announcements. 

It didn’t stop the kids finding out though as the news spread like wildfire on Facebook and via SMS. Seems to me that every school should have a Facebook Group controlled by the staff even if it is just an intranet/forum. It would grow content far more quickly than a traditional school website (if there is such a thing) that depends on the good offices of an enthusiastic member of staff to maintain and update.

Last year my wife, who is a supply teacher, struggled for an hour through the snow to a school only to receive a text message announcing its closure just as she got there! She doesn’t use Facebook though :-).

Readers living outside the UK will perhaps struggle to understand these problems – this country grinds to a halt the minute the first snowflake hits the pavement. Two snowflakes almost constitutes a snowstorm and kids all over get ready to build snowmen.   Most schools in Lincolnshire are open today, much to the extreme disappointment of the Davies clan.

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broadband End User

Holiday (Broadband Browsing) Traffic – Internet Style

Holiday broadband browsing traffic, nice and fluid.

Thought you might be interested to see the traffic patterns for holiday broadband browsing habits.  Bear in mind that Timico is a primarily B2B ISP so when offices are closed or almost empty it is reasonable to think that internet usage will drop off.  This is quite possibly the converse of the situation for a consumer ISP.  All those workers sat at home with nothing better to do than gorge on chocolates, drink beer and watch iPlayer.

 

xmastraffic1You can see quite clearly how the Bank Holiday broadband browsing traffic resembles that of a weekend. Christmas Eve also show a dramatic ramp-down. Not surprising really. It is a dream driving into the office on these days with no cars on the road.  Someone has to keep the internet going 🙂 .

Categories
End User media

have you paid your TV license?

I pay mine on direct debit

click here

Just a bit of fun between Christmas and New Year. Thanks to Ian P. Christian for the link.

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End User internet social networking

Internet, the Christmas Number 1 and Climate Change

Those of you in the UK watching the Christmas Number 1 music chart battle between the X Factor winner Joe McElderry and Rage Against The Machine may or may not have realised they were watching the power of the internet in action.

Hundreds of thousands of people signed up to various Facebook Groups supporting Rage Against The Machine and have been hugely proactive in getting people to buy their song to keep the X Factor out of the top slot. My son Tom for example was regularly posting on the subject. There were active strategy decisions going on to discuss optimum methods of hitting number 1. How many times to buy the song from where? This is teenagers spending their (parents’ hard earned) pocket money.

Of course this is a fairly frivolous and trivial use of the internet. A bit of fun. It did strike me though that there were other far more deserving causes that could hugely benefit. Global warming for example. The world’s politicians appear to have been letting their voters down at the Climate Change Talks in Copenahagen, regardless of what spin we might be getting from them after the event.

I even thought about starting a Facebook Group on the subject. Then it occurred to me that there might already be one so I took a look. There already is one.

These are the results of a Facebook search for “Rage Against the Machine” followed by those for “Climate Change”

You can see for yourself which is the most popular.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1 476,980 fans
rage against the machine – RATM 466,612 fans
Rage Against The Xfactor 326 fans
YES…Jedward has gone!-lets get rage against the machine no.1 😀 326,991 members
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1 – BACKUP GROUP 176,737 members
Rage Against The Machine 49,165 members

Slow Climate Change 55,599 members
COP15 – Climate Change – JOIN AND INVITE ALL 49,826 members
Climate Change 1,634 members
Climate Change 407 fans

The biggest challenge I think is how to get the Facebook Generation tuned into issues such as climate change so that they can make politicians sit up and listen.

PS I didn’t buy either of the singles myself. I imagine we have enough copies around hte house now though for me to legitimately have one if I chose to 🙂

Categories
End User internet

internet stats

check this out:
A Day in the Internet
Created by Online Education

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End User fun stuff

The youth of today… iTunes and LPs

The youth of today doesn’t know how to put an LP on a record deck.  That isn’t entirely fair.  It is pretty obvious that you take the vinyl disc out of its sleeve and slot it over the little nipple in the middle of the deck.

The only thing is on my old “music centre” in the attic you have to select tape, CD, phono or tuner and to someone who just downloads from iTunes it isn’t altogether clear that phono means record player.

I also had to show him how to press “start” to get start the deck revolving and move the arm over.

My 12 year old needed to write a review on a jazz record for his homework and Duke Ellington fitted the bill perfectly.  Problem is it was on 12 inch LP and in the attic.  I sometime retire to the attic on a Sunday afternoon with my pal Terry and a few beers to play with the train set and listen to some of the 250 albums and hundreds of singles that live up there.

Just for the record 12inches = 30cms and LP = Long Playing record. Happy days.

Categories
broadband End User internet voip

FTTC Broadband 10Meg Up Install

We did our first FTTC broadband 10Mbps uplink trial installation yesterday in Muswell Hill in North London. The customer is very happy with the performance. It will take 10 days to bed down but I’ll take a look after then and report back on speeds.

The installation itself, once the Openreach modem has been put in, is simplicity itself and takes only five minutes. We are using the Thomson Gateway TG789vn kit in our trials and have to say are very impressed with what you can get in a small piece of plastic these days.

I’ll be looking at productising some homeworker services using our VoIP platform, based potentially on the Thomson range. We have been very impressed with their responsiveness as a supplier.

Categories
End User internet

slow down – it’s all going to explode!

Worth watching. Blows my mind.

Categories
End User internet

slow down – it's all going to explode!

Worth watching. Blows my mind.

Categories
End User engineering

“error 30”

I was doing some interviewing this afternoon and one candidate came up with “error 30” – a great Tech Support Ticketing error resolution code that is used at one company he had worked at.

Error 30 is down to the entity 30cms from the PC screen. Basically if you don’t understand you are probably part of the problem 🙂 . I thought it was good enough to write down. I got back to the NOC and related this to the team and got a few others thrown my way:

PEBKAC – Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair

PICNIC – Problem In Chair Not In Computer.

I’m obviously easily entertained!

Categories
End User engineering

"error 30"

I was doing some interviewing this afternoon and one candidate came up with “error 30” – a great Tech Support Ticketing error resolution code that is used at one company he had worked at.

Error 30 is down to the entity 30cms from the PC screen. Basically if you don’t understand you are probably part of the problem 🙂 . I thought it was good enough to write down. I got back to the NOC and related this to the team and got a few others thrown my way:

PEBKAC – Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair

PICNIC – Problem In Chair Not In Computer.

I’m obviously easily entertained!

Categories
broadband End User

BT Chairman has Only Broadband Service in the Village!

broadband

Lucky Sir Michael Rake enjoys exclusive Hambleden broadband service.

Lovely piece reported by the BBC today, where British Telecom (BT) has admitted its chairman is the only person with broadband service in the village of Hambleden on the Oxfordshire-Buckinghamshire border.

BT said Sir Michael Rake’s broadband service connection was part of a trial of new technology. The village, they say, is too far from the exchange for a standard ADSL service.

The article doesn’t go into which technology was being trialled, but here’s a thought: BT could set up Sir Michael’s home as a POP and run tails from there. That way everyone in the village could get broadband service connectivity, and all would be happy. Sorted.

Categories
End User internet social networking

Village shop to reopen – read all about it!

As usage of the internet grows it has of course totally changed the way people interact. It seems as if I sometimes don’t see my seventeen year old, Tom for days on end but it doesn’t stop me communication with him. We just chat on Facebook.

The image this portrays is of online addicts (of which I confess I am one) buried in their PCs for hours on end ignoring everyone else in the house.

This might well be an unfortunate by product of the internet age. I do however think that this is a phase we are just going through. As technology improves it will give us more control over our lives and allow us to start living again.

This is very much likely to be the case in what might today be called a dormitory village. Most people in these places commute long distances, buy their groceries from superstores on their way home (or online) and village life becomes an impoverished cousin of its glorious social past.

In the future the internet will take away the need for these people to commute, for at least some of the time. The efficiencies that will come will give people time to physically reconnect with others in their local environment and village life will come again. Maybe the village shop and Post Office will reopen!?

In the meantime I have to clean my rose tinted spectacles, get back to my 16 hour day and someone somewhere needs to get around to putting fibre into that village.

PS Tom does occasionally update his photo on Facebook so I do keep up with what he looks like as well. Kids change so quickly don’t they? 🙂

Categories
End User internet

Zi8 is a stunner and will drive internet bandwidth usage

Following on from the Jeff Pulver #140 Conference in London yesterday I’ve been trying out a new toy.

This is the Zi8 HD digital video camera by Kodak and I have to tell you it is a stunner. Presented to me yesterday by Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak the HD video quality is outstanding and it is extremely easy to use.

My kids have already latched onto it and started playing with it though rapid adoption by children is not necessarily a pointer to how easy a gadget is to use – technology comes naturally to them.

The camera facia comes printed with the YouTube and Facebook logos, which is a strong enough hint for even the dumbest of users.

I’m not going to bore you with the camera spec. What I will says is that the 75MB of the 59 second video below is well within the 2GByte allowance that YouTube gives for a single video!

The video is presented below for all to see. It’s no professional production and I note that I should have combed my hair first – I’m desperate for a haircut. That’s showbiz folks.

The Zi8 is groundbreaking and although I’m no expert I have no hesitation in recommending it after just a short test.

You may have noticed that this blog doesn’t major on gadget reviews.  The point here is that this another contributor to the growth in bandwidth usage as people start to upload more and more HD footage to sites such as YouTube. What goes up once of course gets downloaded many times, assuming it is any good. It’s a worry for those of us having to manage ADSL backhaul bandwidth but that’s progress for you.

Categories
End User internet social networking

#140conf London – a melting pot for realtime communications

Today I’m with Jeff Pulver at his #140 conference at the O2 Indigo. Jeff originally (not that long ago actually so to use the word originally seems a little strange) started the #140conferences in February as a vehicle to capitalise on the Twitter revolution.

Very quickly the theme of the conference has moved on to real time communications, rather than Twitter specifically although Twitter is still mentioned in every other sentence by every speaker.

Sitting here listening to the talks what strikes me is the complete diversity of people appearing on the stage – ranging from international media stars (ie Stephen Fry) the Chief Marketing Officer of Kodak, a farmer, an off license owner, a teacher, and a policeman to name but a few. Big business is here and so is small business

I’m not going to dwell on specific talks, although Stephen Fry interestingly uses the example of the invention of the printing press to compare with what is happening now on the internet with Twitter. I’m sure he pinched it from me because that is what I use for my new starter induction talk at Timico 🙂

Notably Kodak also ran a competition to name a new camera on Twitter. It was a  fast way of running a focus group with a huge number of people.

The biggest take away for me so far is the use of the word “authenticity”.  There is so much rubbish out there on the internet (Twitter, Facebook, blogland, everywhere) that you have to really have something to say to make an impact. Just rehashing other people’s stuff isn’t good enough, although I am always grateful for “retweets”. 

Being ruthless I have on occasion “defriended” people who indulge in uninteresting status updates.  I’m sure people have done the same with me – you have to be able to take the rough with the smooth.

Categories
broadband End User

Stormy Weather Affects Phone Lines, Broadband

broadband

The cats and dogs rained merrily upon the good citizens of the UK on Friday and Saturday, and in consequence the number of problems with phone lines and broadband shot up. I don’t have the definitive numbers to hand as I write this as I am headed southbound on the train, but anecdotally we probably saw double the number of faults being reported compared with a normal Saturday.

These would have been for phone lines and broadband, though I know from experience in driving home through a cloudburst that mobile services also degrade during really bad weather. Roll on Fibre to the Premises, I say.

Categories
broadband End User

Digital Divide Anglesey Style

Anglesey mobile broadband service

Pillaging mobile broadband service gold, they are!

Last night I met someone at the Engineering Dinner at Bangor University who put a different slant on the Digital Divide.

Stephen Yates lives on a small-holding just outside Holyhead on the Anglesey coast. Although only a three mile walk from his nearest pub in Holyhead he can’t get broadband service – the copper winds its way around the lanes and by the time it gets to his place the speed has slowed to an unusable dribble.

Interestingly, he does get a very fast mobile internet connection but only when there are no ferries passing by. This puzzled me at first. Is the steel side of the ship having an effect on the signal strength? Actually no. Whenever a ferry comes into sight of Holyhead everyone on board starts using their mobile phones and all of a sudden instead of having the base station practically all to himself the cell is shared with the incoming hordes.

In the old days these incoming hordes were called Vikings, pillaging gold on their way around the Irish Sea. In modern times they just pillage the mobile broadband service bandwidth.

Categories
End User engineering

Engineering at Bangor University

Attended a meeting of Bangor University Industrial Panel today. I am pleased to say that undergraduate intake is up on the previous year which was itself up on 2007. Moreover all places were filled well in advance. This is I’m sure helped by two factors.

The first is that Bangor’s School of Engineering is ranked second in the UK according to the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise.

Secondly when students are graduating with debts of £20,000 they are increasingly looking for value for money in the degrees that they take, particularly during these recessionary hard times. An Engineering Degree from Bangor is not an easy option but a valuable one once attained.

An University faces challenges remarkably similar to industry. One of these is to provide products, in this case course material, relevant to the employment market place that their graduates will face. This is of course where the Industrial Panel can add value and I feel honoured to be invited to contribute.

The irony is that the meeting today was held in the library of the Engineering building. Somewhere I hardly visited as a reprobate undergraduate 🙂 (Only kidding…?)

Categories
End User social networking

Virtually there is no escape- parenting via Facebook

I just put one of my kids to bed via Facebook.  He had already been sent up to his room but I could see that he was still online  – almost certainly using the wifi connection on his iPod touch.

The IM conversation went like this:

Tref          oy

Tref          bed!

Joe           ok

Tref         goodnight

Joe          is offline

I know that the cynical amongst you will decry this as poor parenting but pshaw I say. It is modern life – location independent fatherhood.  There is still, however, no replacement for a real cuddle which is dispensed regardless of the age and sensitivities of the offspring.

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Apps End User internet social networking

Google wave first thoughts – Grassroots Digitalbritain and the digitally excluded

Had a day or two to play with the wave.  Some of my Facebook friends have already commented that it is no good without others to communicate with.  At this time I have two friends in my wave contacts list :Luc from Google who invited me and Cyberdoyle.

This fits into the category of sad git with no friends.  However Cyberdoyle, who is the most advanced farmer’s wife (for I believe such is she) in the world when it comes to the internet, is showing me the way.  Cyberdoyle is hugely knowledgeable when it comes to Rural Broadband (or lack of) and the Digital Divide.  Martha Lane Fox should recruit her.

Cyberdoyle, ok Chris, started a wave and showed me the way.  Pic below:

Grassroots Digitalbritain wave
Grassroots Digitalbritain wave

There are currently 14 people catching the wave, none of who I know other than Chris. The resolution of the jpeg doesn’t do it justice. However what you are seeing is a multimedia collaboration work in action. This could be a cross departmental business tool, a group of friends planning a party or something online usable by any community anywhere (except where you can’t get broadband!)

This is impressive and I’ll keep you posted on progress with the Grassroots Digitalbritain wave which you might or might not have gleaned is all about a community of people trying to get the internet into their lives.  I get this image of an inner city council estate where the residents are trying to make life better by raising money for a community centre. There is no difference between them and rural communities wanting to access the internet.

Anyway Google Wave – so far so good. Thanks Luc for inviting me and who needs lots of friends when you have Cyberdoyle.

Categories
End User internet social networking

Google Wave invite has arrived

Can’t say I’m not excited!

More when I do have something to say:-)

Categories
End User scams security

New phishing attempt doing the rounds under guise of HMRC

It amuses me more than anything to see phishing attempts hit my inbox though it does worry me that I will one day have this uncontrollable urge to click on the link provided.

Today’s, looking as if it had come in from Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue, was mildly believable.  It is after all coming up to that time of year where we have to think about tax returns.

The message read:
Taxpayer ID: trefd-00000159883557UK
Tax Type: INCOME TAX
Issue: Unreported/Underreported Income (Fraud Application)

Please review your tax statement on HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) website (click on the link below):

We caught this spam but it did attempt to get delivered to many Timico employees. For the safety of the reader I haven’t reproduced the link but I’d be mildly interested in a straw poll to see how many people got the email. And how many actually responded to it!

That’s not my taxpayer ID by the way 🙂

Categories
End User social networking

Ryan Seacrest unfollow

I’m doing a bit of tidying up on twitter. In the early days of twitter I thought it would be a good idea to follow as many people as possible. What a mistake that was! I now get so much rubbish that it makes twitter unusable as a browsing machine.

So now I’m sat on tweetdeck “unfollowing” people with whom I feel I have nothing in common. It’s amazing who I find I am following. I’ve just deleted someone called Ryan Seacrest who has 2,411,465 followers despite only following 124 people himself. I obviously live sheltered life because I have never heard of him! 2,411,464 people clearly have!

Categories
End User internet

Internet time shortens life

I heard on the radio this morning that if you are born today you have a 50% chance of reaching the age of 100. (100 is the new 70 etc…). This sounds great but as far as I can see it won’t feel as if you have lived 100 years. It will probably still feel like 70.

This is because of internet time. Has anyone noticed how quickly time goes when you are surfing the web? As we spend more of our time on line time flies by all the more quickly.

I did think that his was just an age thing.  Something that went along with varifocal lenses and middle age spread. Now I’m not so sure. Life online is so fast moving that we no longer have the waiting time that can make the weeks seem to drag. Responses are instantaneous and require  you to move on to the next task far more quickly than used to be the case.

The result is cramming more into your week and the time passing in the blink of an eyelid/computer monitor. As I write this it is Friday afternoon – this morning it was only Monday!!!

There is no escape. Even when I take the kids on holiday to Center Parcs I can get online, in the villa, by the pool, in the restaurant…

There is a business opportunity here. Totally network free holidays. I realise that more destinations are trying to make it easier for you to go online whilst on holiday but this is unhealthy. Sounds like this needs a facebook group to get the campaign going.

Photo is from my summer holiday in Scarborough last year – free wifi on the promenade – there is no escape…

wifi

Note that internet time should not be confused with “Time Warner Internet”, “internet time clock” , “internet time service”  or  “internet timer”, all of which are close keywords to internet time (google adwords experiment – thanks for your understanding :-).

Categories
End User piracy Regs

Government P2P plans could cost broadband users £365 million a year

In its response to the Government’s consultation on Music Piracy BT has stated that the three strikes approach may cost each broadband user £24 a year (up to £1million a day in total). This represents what BT thinks may be the cost of implementing the legislation and which it might find itself having to pass on to its customers. It would likely be the same (if not more) for all ISPs. It makes the proposed 50p tax on phone lines pale into insignificance. There should be no doubt that it is a tax.

Actually I’m not in principle against raising taxes to spend on the roll out of a national fibre network. It’s just that 50 pence is inadequate. We would all better spend this money on the fibre roll out.

There is clearly a lot of politicking going on in what is the run up to the next general election. The Government is looking for quick PR wins. If it is not careful this is one that is going to come back to bite.

I read the BT position in the Daily Mirror. I obviously have a wide range in tastes when it comes to literature 🙂

Categories
End User social networking

twitter follower

When I started to use twitter a little more earnestly I took a look at some other twitterers and determined that there was a pattern in getting lots of followers.  These Tweeters (if that is the right word) were also following lots of people.

So I did the same.  I randomly started to follow people and found that half of them then began to follow me. Of course the downside to this is I get a lot of traffic in my “in tray” with comments from people who I really have no interest in. So much so that it is hardly worth looking at the feed.

I now periodically unfollow people who, after looking their profile, I feel I have nothing in common with. I’m trying to narrow it down to a useful set of “follows”. My criteria are I keep a friend if they are in the UK and look “normal”, in my business space or do seem to have something interesting to say.  There are a lot of people out there spouting rubbish and a lot of “services” that are no use to me – local news alerts in other parts of the world for example.

Spending a little time “unfollowing”  in the early hours this morning I am astounded to come across some accounts that have huge followers.  One, @DigitalRoyalty, had more than a million! Drilling into her profile I found that she was an online PR specialist. Clearly good at her job.

This is a new world. I feel a little like Captain James Cook setting out on his first voyage of exploration.

Categories
End User internet

Last night of the proms iPlayer versus freeview

Just a quick sound byte.  Watching Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall on both iPlayer and Freeview.  Sound comes through about half  second faster on iPlayer.  Take note all ye on line betting syndicates:-)

Categories
broadband End User

Who Ate All the (Broadband Fibre Optic) Pies?

broadband

Reading the news online before breakfast this (Saturday) morning I came across the PIEMAN project in Ireland. PIEMAN, or The Photonic Integrated Extended Metro and Access Network, is an EC funded project researching new broadband fibre optic technology.

The project potentially promises broadband fibre connectivity over distances of up to 100km in a single hop.  This would be a huge advance over today’s 25km (ish) for an ethernet circuit. I’d guess we turn down business on a weekly basis, because the customer’s site is too far from the nearest POP for a connection to be economically viable.

PIEMAN also introduces the idea of low cost 10Gbps connectivity, with many more users able to share the same broadband fibre. This makes the Government target of 90% penetration of 40Meg by 2017 seem very tame.

Categories
broadband End User

What Type of Traffic Uses Up Broadband Bandwidth?

It is interesting to see the mix of traffic on the Timico ADSL network and thus what is taking up the broadband bandwidth usage. As a B2B ISP the profile will be dramatically different to that of a consumer provider.

For example the amount of bit torrent traffic is fairly low at around 6%. This compares with up to 40% sometimes seen on residential ADSLs. There are legitimate business uses of P2P but it does suggest that a few customers are hitting it hard. The nature of P2P is that it will hog all available bandwidth which actually makes it a highly efficient protocol for transferring large amounts of data. In fact the 6% of P2P traffic on the Timico could well be largely down to half a dozen ADSL2+ customers hitting it hard which represents a tiny proportion of our customer base.

The usual business type applications such as email and VPN are apparent on the chart but the biggest driver is clearly simple web browsing. No great messages here regarding bandwidth growth.

There are however some hidden gotchas. This chart was a snapshot over one working day sometime recently. It does not, for example cover the Ashes cricket matches where video streaming saw a huge growth as people at work tuned in on Skyplayer. How many business managers knew that their staff were watching the TV all day instead of working?  It is costing them twice – in the salaried time spent watching the cricket and in the cost of the bandwidth.

Also it is daytime usage and does not cover night time where a significant amount of file transfer traffic takes place. We do see a small rise in P2P in the evenings –  Timico provides thousands of corporate homeworker ADSLs. However the overall bandwidth falls significantly for us after 5 o’clock which is the exact opposite to what is seen in the consumer world. It will be interesting to periodically track the changes in usage and look at where the trend takes us over time.

traffictypes