Categories
Business Legal Regs

Help Julian Huppert get re-elected

julian huppert crowd funding online rights framework

Julian Huppert crowd funding

Julian Huppert is, unsurprisingly, fundraising for his election campaign and has a crowd funding page for donations.

Now I, believe it or not, am not a political animal but I do take an interest in matters parliamentary that affect the industry that I work in. Subjects such as the Digital Economy Act and the Snoopers’ Charter have been covered in depth on this blog.

Julian Huppert is one of the few MPs in Westminster who knows what he is talking about when it comes to internet related matters and government. Julian was on the Parliamentary Select Committee for the Snoopers’ Charter (that won’t be it’s actual name) and was one of the voices of sanity and reason that was listened to when the Bill was killed off postponed for another attempt on another day.

ISPA Internet Hero of 2013 Julian has featured a number of times on this blog and last year I organised a fundraising dinner on his behalf. How Julian is trying to raise more money as part of his drive to be reelected.

The Julian Huppert crowd funding campaign “We’re backing Julian” can be found here. Help if you can. You don’t have to be in his constituency to donate.

Coincidentally this is a week of political posts on trefor.net in which guests discuss technology regulatory issues that they feel should be addresses by the next government. Other posts this week include:

James Firth on why government should stop looking to big corporates for tech innovation

Gus Hosein on Data Protection Reform and Surveillance

See all our regulatory posts here.

Categories
Business End User Legal Regs surveillance & privacy

Reform or go quietly – data protection and government surveillance

snooper's charter digital policy technology regulatory issues electronic communications code reform government internet policy House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee report on Cyber Security
photo source Wikipedia

Gus Hosein data protection reformData protection reform – Government should stop promoting industry and government interests at the expense of protecting citizens says Gus Hosein of Privacy International

You can tell it is almost election time. All the discussions with anyone in the policy sphere quickly moves on to the ‘next parliament’, and questions arise about who will be the next Minister, and probably more important, Committee Chair. And there is more talk of manifestos than positions on key pieces of legislation and policies that should be discussed today. Instead, everyone would rather wait for some indeterminate amount of time into the future where we know not when these issues will again find their day on the policy agenda.
In the meantime, the government departments and agencies continue their work to dismantle privacy.

It’s a sad state of affairs. After all, the coalition agreement of the current government declared, in heady and idealistic days of May 2010, very strong ambitions around privacy protections — deleting databases and discontinuing surveillance programmes, including communications data retention. Yet in the past five years we have seen repeated policy attempts and intense politics around expanded surveillance powers. And in the past five years, we’ve seen government resistance to stronger privacy protections in the form of data protection reform.

Despite all the news about lack of consumer confidence, data breaches, hacking, court decisions protecting privacy, and yes, over-reach by intelligence agencies, the UK Government can’t stop being the bad-boy of the western world on surveillance. And it continues to drag the rest of the world down, as it insists on expanding surveillance and retreating on privacy.

So what hope is there for the future? To be honest, despite past performances by all, I’m quite optimistic.

1. Data protection reform
At the moment, the Government is actively obstructing data protection reform. Neither the Ministry of Justice nor BIS want to see strong protections of privacy. The EU has spent the past five years trying to build a new legal regime to replace the outdated Data Protection Directive, and thereby the 1998 Data Protection Act here. But in recent years the UK Government has been active in promoting industry and government interests, at the expense of protecting consumers and citizens. This just can’t continue. Eventually the UK Government has to recognise that stronger data protection rules are essential to consumer confidence, civil liberties, and the marketplace. And if it doesn’t care about protecting UK consumers and citizens, then it would be best to get out of the way. And the emerging instruments will again set the example globally.

2. Reform surveillance law
It’s not just that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 was given royal assent nearly 15 years ago, before the spread of wifi, mobile internet, social networking. It’s not just that Parliament had to approve under duress, and under a Home Office manufactured ’emergency’, legislation that is due to sunset in 2016 requiring continued data retention despite a very clear European Court of Justice ruling declaring it unlawful. It’s not just that the Home Office is rushing through a consultation on when the Government should be able to hack computers. It’s not just that getting companies in other jurisdictions to cooperate with requests from UK law enforcement and intelligence agencies should require a higher standard of authorisation than just a ministerial warrant or a self-authorised request by police agencies. Rather, it is that the case for surveillance law reform has become so clear that we now have the opportunity to make UK law the standard for the rest of the world.

The UK can stop being the bad-boy of the western world. And it can be within the next Parliament.

 

Gus Hosein has worked in the field of technology and human rights for over fifteen years. He has advised international organisations and institutions including UNESCO, UNHCR, OSCE, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Terrorism and Human Rights. He has held fellowships at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the American Civil Liberties Union. As Privacy International’s Executive Director he coordinates work advancing the protection of privacy across the world, with a particular emphasis on developing countries.

This is a week of political posts on trefor.net in which guests discuss technology regulatory issues that they feel should be addresses by the next government. Other posts this week include:

James Firth on why government should stop looking to big corporates for tech innovation

See all our regulatory posts here.

Categories
Business Legal Regs

Hey, next prime minister, stop looking to big corporates to solve UK tech innovation challenges!

snooper's charter digital policy technology regulatory issues electronic communications code reform government internet policy House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee report on Cyber Security
photo source Wikipedia

James FirthJames Firth – Agile young start-ups challenge the incumbents and stop the market from getting lazy. Government innovation bods take note

In 2010, part-way through my “career break” as a lobbyist representing UK tech start-ups I ambushed the then green Business Secretary Vince Cable after a lecture he gave (on fiscal stimulus, a lecture he’d agreed to before finding himself Secretary of State) to ask him one question:

“How will you support smaller UK tech companies, and in particular companies selling into government?”

Given the chance I’d ask the question slightly differently on the 8th May. I’d ask why so much of the outgoing government’s innovation strategy seems to have been delegated to, and in many ways benefited, large established tech corporations; and what are you going to do about it!

To be fair to the coalition there have been several inroads in improving the imbalance faced by small tech firms, from the mandated preference for open source (inherently favouring smaller businesses over the proprietary solutions of the global giants), to a centralised Contracts Finder designed to make contracts easier to find, and initiatives through the Technology Strategy Board and other agencies to fund innovative UK-based growth businesses.

But towering over the many and varied initiatives to help UK growth companies are the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and BT.

It’s not the contracts won by the big boys, but the way the government appears to have outsourced a large portion of its innovation strategy to the current market incumbents.

From the billion and a half of public money handed over to BT to speed-up deployment of “fibre” broadband, to the millions “invested” in innovation centres such as London’s Silicon Roundabout – investment often structured as tax breaks for the large firms spearheading the initiatives.

Surely if just a fraction of this money had been targeted directly at small UK businesses it would have yielded better results. I mean, look at what B4RN has achieved on a shoestring!

And it’s not just that the public money might have been better spent by smaller UK-based companies.

Think about it for more than half a second and you realise it makes no sense to delegate innovation to large companies.

Innovation is important for two reasons – the obvious being that society benefits from improvements in technology.

But the second reason is more subtle: innovation is regeneration and renewal in the market.

Consumers benefit from competition – it keeps costs low and prevents the kind of profiteering possible wherever there’s a monopoly of supply.

But after a while the market can get lazy, with none of the established players motivated to fund product improvements or find new ways of providing products and services more efficiently, and hence more cheaply, to the customer. The lazy incumbents get fat at the consumer’s expense.

That’s where innovation comes in. Agile young start-ups challenge the incumbents and stop the market from getting lazy. And market competition is not just about providing cheaper services – it’s also about providing better services; in the world of tech better could mean being more careful with our private data or showing me social media posts that are actually relevant to my life…

So the strategy that sees Facebook, Microsoft and Google fostering UK innovation is in my view like inviting a pride of lions to make sure your herd of young gazelles get all care and support they need.

Placing UK tech innovators under the wing of a multinational tech company not only gives that company early access to a wealth of new ideas – something companies used to fund themselves in departments called Research and Development – it puts them in a perfect position to acquire the successful companies at the lowest possible price.

Put yourself in a the shoes of a UK start-up with offices in Microsoft Ventures Accelerator or Google Campus having developed a successful product that runs on cloud services provided cost-free by your benefactor. Your product may even rely on social data or some other asset that your benefactor controls.

Once your company has proved the tech and the market, at great effort and cost to you and your early-stage investors, one potential suitor is in the driving seat when it comes to acquisition.

In fact your benefactor may make it near-impossible for one of their rivals to buy you, driving down the value in your business and allowing them to maintain their market dominance by swallowing services that threaten their own business and acquiring innovative new products and services on the cheap.

Yes of course industry partners have a very important role in shaping the next generation of technologists: call this education, training, or skills development… But please, stop calling it innovation!

The next generation needs to challenge the incumbents, not grow up in their shadow.

James Firth is CTO of Comprobo, a UK-based tech start up (comprobo.co.uk). He left Motorola in 2005 to start his first tech business, creating an innovative budget management programme in use on public-private highways maintenance contracts, and founded the Open Digital Policy Organisation in 2010 to lobby on behalf of UK technology start-ups.

Next up this afternoon, Gus Hosein of Privacy International on “Data protection reform – Government should stop promoting industry and government interests at the expense of protecting citizens says Gus Hosein of Privacy International”

Categories
Business End User Legal Regs

Next week is political week on trefor.net

snooper's charter digital policy technology regulatory issues electronic communications code reform government internet policy House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee report on Cyber Security
photo source Wikipedia

Technology regulatory issues next week on trefor.net

Yo all. Just a quick announcement that next week is political week on trefor.net. I have invited a number of high profile bloggers, academics, activists, MPs and regulatory experts to share their views on what internet and communications related laws they think the next government should be enacting or not enacting (works both ways).

We start first thing on Monday so keep yer eyes open. At first glance we have a very diverse set of posts. I’ve been careful not to prescribe any particular subject.

This is all part of the coverage of technology regulatory issues in the run up to the general election. Whilst any noise we might make is not going to have a material effect on the result of the election it does not harm to remind ourselves of the issues being faced by both the internet industry and our customers.

I’ve written a lot of posts on regulatory related subjects over the years. They can be found here. Next week I’m hanging back and leaving it to the guests. I’ve confined myself to adding bios where the guest has been particularly modest, and correcting a huge number of speling mistaykes and gramaticul errors. Only joking.

Y’all come back next week now.

Categories
Business events fun stuff gadgets

Friend of mine called Robert

Friend of mine called Robert signed up for a World Hosting Days London conference a couple of years ago. His motivation was that they were giving out free Samsung Galaxy tablets to anyone who would go around each exhibitor boot and get a card stamped.

When he signed up he put the words “I’m only here for the free tablet” in the field reserved for the company name. In the end he didn’t go but I hear that they ran out of tabs so it was probably a good thing.

Wind the clock forward and he now gets snail mail to the name and address supplied when he registered for the London gig. Except that instead of “I’m only here for the free tablet” some wily marketing data base cleanser has changed the text to “I am not allowed to get a free tablet”.  He he he.

I spoke at the conference last year on behalf of LONAP. Had quite a good chat with a few people who came to hear the talk.

That’s all folks.

Categories
Business Engineer internet peering

Internet bandwidth trend continues to new peaks almost daily @lonap

lonap internet bandwidth trend

Internet bandwidth trend – usage continues to grow

The title of this post might encourage the odd wise crack. Bear s&*%s in woods etc. Of course internet bandwidth use is growing. The point is though that in the past we have occasionally seen big spikes in bandwidth that have subsequently driven average usage and growth. The Olympic games, football world cup and general elections spring particularly to mind.

What we’re seeing now is different. We now have an almost daily general trend upwards rather than a big spike that breaks new records followed by a bit of up and down on the graph. There doesn’t seem to be any one thing driving it. It’s all general internet use.

LONAP is an internet exchange point (IXP) where networks connect with each other to share traffic (called peering). It’s not just general growth in internet traffic that drives the LONAP graphs up and to the right. There is also a realisation that peering is a far better means of accessing the internet than the alternative of commercial transit. Peering at an IXP is not just cheaper. It’s also better quality. Faster. Fewer hops.

There are a number of highly publicised business cases for use of Peering in IP connectivity in the wider commercial internet:

  • Amazon quote a 1% increase in revenue for every 100ms improvement in page load time
  • Yahoo increased traffic by 9% for every 400ms of improvement
  • Google – “slowing down the search results page by 100 – 400 ms has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6%”

Using Peering helps to lower latency and underwrites these business drivers. Content providers also like the better user experience that fast page loads bring and they are increasingly moving to join internet exchanges such as LONAP.

From what I can see all IXPs are growing. In London we have two: LINX and LONAP. Both are globally significant. In a world where infrastructure resilience is important operators are increasingly adding to the resilience of their own networks by peering at both London exchanges. London is said to have more AS number (individual autonomous networks or Autonomous Systems) POPs than any other city.  The presence of two major exchanges may be both a reflection of this and a reason why.

These drivers point to a growth in IXP traffic that exceeds that of the general internet. The chart in the featured image above shows the trend at LONAP over the past 12 months. It shows a pretty dramatic doubling of bandwidth usage over the year. This other chart (inset) shows the growth over the last few days. Ignoring weekends you can see a daily trend.

lonap-total-week

Looking back five years LONAP has been highly successful in growing its business. 5 year membership has grown from 90 to 145 organisations. Bandwidth usage has rocketed from 10Gbps to 100Gbps (151 ports to 256 connected ports) and the turnover has seen a steady growth from £190k to £409k. It must be remembered that as a not for profit organisation the objective is not to grow sales revenues but to hand as much as the profits back to members. The increase in membership numbers and bandwidth is seen as the real added value.

This year we are seeing significant momentum in both new membership applications and bandwidth growth. My gut feel is that when it comes to the end of 2015 we will be looking back at an even greater level of growth. With the internet bandwidth trend only going one way it’s an exciting time to be around. 

Check out other LONAP posts here (I’m on the board of directors so there are a few). General peering posts here and LONAP themselves here.

Categories
Business Engineer peering voip

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

itspa awards 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We aso have as separate awards

  • The ITSPA Members’ Pick
  • The ITSPA Champion

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

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

Categories
broadband Engineer engineering internet

Bufferbloat and Virgin Media

virgin media buffering

Virgin Media Buffering – Bufferbloat spat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
broadband Business

EE home broadband pulls plug on affiliate marketing partners

priority answer EE home broadband

EE goes it alone with direct marketing programmes & ditches affiliates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
4g End User

EE4g shock to the data usage system

4g data usage

4g data usage significantly higher than 3g

I’ve been using 4G since O2 launched their service. You may recall I was a trialist. Then I did the test trip around London comparing EE, Vodafone and O2 4g. For the last few months I have only been using 3g. I handed my SGS4 down and bought a Oneplus One.

The Oneplus phone is such fantastic value that having to exist without 4g was a small price to pay. O2 4g hadn’t reached Lincoln anyway so all I was giving up was faster service on the occasional trip to London. For those trips I use my EE4g MiFi in anycase.

The problem with the Oneplus is that the LTE frequencies it supports are only available on EE (and possibly 3). So when it came to switching my mobile contract EE was a no brainer really. There seems hardly any price difference between the various  networks, if you can manage to plough through all the offers.

Now before deciding on a plan I checked my past usage. The most I had consumed in a month in recent history was around 300MB. A 1Gig data bundle with all you can eat calls and texts seemed to do the job at £16.

What I didn’t budget for was the fact that the usage experience is so much better using 4g when compared with 3g that I would be using it a lot more. Google Hangouts with my daughter in Paris are far better quality than relying on the hotel WiFi, for example.

So now with 16 days of the contract month to go I’ve only got 285MB left out of my Gig 4g data usage bundle. I’m gonna have to see how it goes and take a view on a possible upgrade. For the next week I will be in the Isle of Man where the seriously rip off roaming charges will prevent me from using mobile data in anycase.

Loads of 4g posts here btw.

Categories
Business Cloud Engineer

Cloud Provider Survey – what do you look for most in a provider of cloud services

uc executive dinner voice recognition cloud provider survey technology marketing

Cloud provider survey

I’m currently putting together a website aimed at the cloud services market. People will be able to choose the best provider for them based on what parameters are most important to them. With that in mind I’m doing a cloud provider survey and as a little exercise I’m asking readers to tell me what are the most important aspects of a cloud service that they look for when choosing a provider.

I could make this a highly complex questionnaire but I’m not going to. If you could either just leave a comment or email me with a brief list of your priorities that would help me greatly.

The things to consider include price, performance, SLA, security and support etc. How do you go about choosing a provider?

The site is initially going to focus on storage and web computing services but I anticipate expanding the range of services covered to include applications. Even hosted VoIP could eventually make the list.

All comments (or emails if you want to keep it private) gratefully acknowledged. I’ll be taking all the inputs on board and playing them into the design of the new site.

Thanks in advance.

Tref

Categories
Apps End User mobile apps social networking

Working away from home & Natter

liver building

Natter Natter Natter Oy Oy Oy

The nature of the modern world is that people frequently have to travel as part of their job. In the internet plumbing game this is even more the case. I don’t think I’ve ever worked in an industry that has more conferences and meetings. In the UK alone there are 4 x 2 day LINX meetings, 3 x UKNOF meetings (that seem to extend to two days one way or another), a couple fo LONAP events, two ITSPA workshops and numerous miscellaneous other events.

Being involved with LONAP I also have other international events such as Euro-IX and RIPE meetings to attend.

The point is that wherever one goes one’s office goes with you. It wouldn’t have been so many years ago that this would not have been a simple activity. Taking this to the extreme I remember early on in my business career having to send a proposal to our New York office for onward transmission. The whole thing was faxed. I had a word processor but not email. The internet was in its infancy and applications a rarity.

I made many last minute changes to the somewhat substantial document but each change had to be made entirely within the page. I had to be able to refax a single page without having to change any of the other pages as this would have meant resending the whole document. We won the business btw 🙂

That sort of activity would have been unthinkable in our modern fast moving world. I’ve just had to fill in a new supplier form for an organisation I am doing business with. It needed a signature. I don’t do paper! I very rarely have to print anything out so this form is a bit of a nuisance.

No problemo. I scribbled my signature on a scrap of paper, took a picture, uploaded it to google drive, cropped and trimmed, inserted into the doc and downloaded as a pdf for sending. Hey presto a signed doc. Whether they accept it or not is another issue. These things are sent to try.

Today I am working from a hotel room in Liverpool – the featured image is the view from my room. Iconic. I’m not using the hotel WiFi as I have my EE MiFi which is more reliable. At least more reliable than the free WiFi. The premium service might be ok but hey…

I’m here because my dad is in hospital for an operation. Tref’s taxi service etc. As it happens both sisters had the same idea so we are having an unscheduled family get together. It’s worked out as I then didn’t have to get up at 6.30 to take dad to the hospital.

natterAnyway it’s actually just a normal working day out of my hotel room. As I was lying in bed this morning catching up on stuff on my intergalactic hand held communicator I was shoved an ad for Natter by Twitter.

Natter is “yet another social media platform”. I guess. You are only allowed three words. I signed up and had a play. My first attempt was “one two three”. Then I realised this was quite boring so I decided to see what I could get away with. I went for “supacalifragalisticexpialidocious  Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism #Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis”.

Natter came back with messages:

Just Three Words, please! (You can also include one @username and a #hashtag) and

is too long (maximum is 75 characters)

I looked up the last two words btw but the first I already knew.

I can’t see Natter becoming the hit that is Twitter. Note the 3,544 followers cf the 34 Million of @Twitter. This means it’s guaranteed to be successful but hey… Other than signing on to make sure I get a decent username (tref) which I do for new things that I come across, I am unlikely to adopt it. I haven’t got any followers and follow noone. I also note that Natter was launched in Bath in 2011. It must have just got some cash to advertise but in four years I’d have thought it would have already come to my notice if it was going to take off.

I do quite like the idea of keeping it short. After all Snapchat has taken off with exactly this philosophy though others have also gone before and failed. There was a 7 second video service whose name totally escapes me but seems to have disappeared from view.

I suspect 3 words ain’t enough though. Now the Haiku is a different game. With the Haiku you have 17 syllables to play with and the result could be quite classy. Constraining people to writing only in Japanese poetic form might limit the audience but we aren’t in this game to pander to the masses are we? Eh?

I’ve rambled on enough. This self indulgent blogging is all very well but there is a business to run. From my hotel room.

Ciao.

PS I’m https://natter.com/user/tref on Natter

Categories
Apps ecommerce End User mobile apps

Phone picks up NFC signal from wallet

nfc signal

NFC signal WTF?

Just noticed btw that my phone has been picking up an NFC signal from my wallet! Took me a while to figure out what was going on. The phone kept pinging an unfamiliar sound when I put it down near the wallet.

It’s a slight worry because whilst I’m sure my phone wears a white hat who knows what other devices there are around that might just be sitting there listening for NFC enabled devices. I only have an oyster card and my bank debit card with NFC enabled but the latter is very specifically the one you don’t want anyone gaining access to.

Now I’ve not researched this so don’t know what security arrangements are built in to the NFC chips but it does raise an eyebrow.

I’ve looked at NFC as a transport mechanism for a few different business opportunities, largely as a means of engaging advertisers with punters. Up until now it hasn’t flown. Originally one of the reasons was that NFC wasn’t supported by Apple. Now Apple do support NFC but it is only as a means of accessing Apple’s own payment gateway.  It’s not any use for transmitting other files.

The Apple use case includes having to have your thumb on on the home button to authenticate that it is you using the NFC for payment. Sounds like Apple getting deeper and deeper into personal info on you if you ask me. Next up will be DNA recognition!!! The fanbois will say I’m getting paranoid and that I should just accept all this “yes master stuff”. Well no thanks. We can fight this nyahahahahahahaaaaaa.

Y’all have a great day now. Would you like ketchup with that. I see your DNA suggests that you are a ketchup kind of guy.

PS if you don’t know what NFC is read about it here. Other mobile app stuff on this site here.

Categories
5g End User

5g – ever given it any thought?

5g network

The 5g network – all of a sudden I’m quite looking forward to it

I write a regular column for the Institute of Telecoms Professionals Journal, a worthy tome that should be read by engineers everywhere. Usually they chuck a subject over and I hastily scribble something down just before the deadline. Normally the subject matter is something that I’ve come across or been involved with in my working life. This time it’s 5g which is something I’ve never had the occasion to look at. It’s always been something way into the future.

Either you are deeply embedded in what’s going with the 5g standard or an article on 5g demands a little research. I went to Wikipedia and I’m going to start by plagiarising a paragraph which in turn whipped it’s content from the NGMN Alliance.

“NGMN Alliance or Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance defined 5G network requirements as:

  • Data rates of several tens of Mb/s should be supported for tens of thousands of users.
  • 1 Gb/s to be offered, simultaneously to tens of workers on the same office floor.
  • Up to Several 100,000’s simultaneous connections to be supported for massive sensor deployments.
  • Spectral efficiency should be significantly enhanced compared to 4g.
  • Coverage should be improved
  • Signalling efficiency enhanced.”

When I were a lad studying Electronic Engineering at Bangor University we learnt about Smith Charts. I never got on with Smith Charts. That and the fact that our Communications lecturer had written a book that he used as the basis for his course content meaning that I didn’t have to take any notes and therefore never remembered any of it suggested that I wasn’t destined for a career in RF engineering.

It didn’t matter. There was a whole technological world outside RF that profitably filled my days. In the heady period of early post graduation employment, RF stood largely for an analogue brick that you lugged around in a briefcase or glued to a car battery and whilst important and revolutionary I regarded as a black art of limited interest.

Winding the clock forward, gulp, 35 years RF engineering has suddenly taken on a different importance. RF now sits very much as an integral part of our modern technology ecosystem. My own use case for RF is probably identical to everyone else’s. Bluetooth in the car to hook my phone up with the car kit. WiFi gets used wherever there is a hot spot in preference to cellular connectivity. This is largely for economic reasons although WiFi performance where I spend most of my time – home and office – does come into it. This isn’t true everywhere.

Then I use 4g. Sometimes I use my mobile phone to talk or send a text but most of the time my use of 4g is for the data channel when I’m out and about. 4g has been a huge step up from 3G but still has its limitations. In building performance is not as good as it might be and coverage can be somewhat binary, at least at this still relatively early stage of network maturity.

Except for my home and office my preference is to use 4g wherever possible for my internet connectivity. If there is 4g coverage it is far more reliable and performs better than alternative WiFi networks that may be available to me in hotels, pubs and so on. When there is good 4g coverage it is great.

The problem we as users of mobile connectivity have is that we are going to want more and more of it. We aren’t particularly going to want it to work faster on our mobile phones although technology drivers such as 8K video streaming might suggest that our laptops would prefer faster access. We are however going to want it to work reliably and consistently and on more devices. Our personal technology roadmaps see us having many devices that require connectivity.

Forget the fridge. It’s our central heating systems, our CCTV, our electricity meters, cars. Also my wallet and keys. I’m forever putting them down somewhere and then forgetting where. It’s the Internet of Things, innit?

So the problem that the 5g network needs to address is, yes a certain demand for faster and faster connectivity but also better and more ubiquitous connectivity. Lots more endpoints are going to be connected to the 5g network.

I’m sure that other arguments will apply to the 5g network business case. Fixed line connectivity should be well into the Gigabits per second by the time we get an ubiquitous 5g network so the competitive speed benchmark will change. I am happy with my 4g service  when I can get it but I think I’m just persuading myself that I’m actually quite looking forward to my first 5g connected phone:)

Ciao bebe.

PS I’ve written loads on 4g over the years. Check it out here.

Categories
Engineer fun stuff peering

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

PRIZE COMPETITION

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

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

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

Categories
Engineer peering

LINX88 notes thoughts and ramblings

LINX88

LINX88 notes and thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
broadband Business Engineer Net

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

B4RN rural broadband virgin media expansion

Virgin Media expansion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Apps End User

Sky News on Snapchat

Obvious one really. Nobody wants to watch repeats of the news so Snapchat seems to me to be the perfect vehicle for it. This is why Sky News and Sky Sports have announced a new Snapchat app.

The one thing I have had against Snapchat, apart from the unwanted spam from Team Snapchat that I can’t seem to switch off, is the fact that it’s an ephemeral service. It doesn’t store what is sent. This is likely why people use it but I like to fill up data centres with stuff that never gets looked at again and just contributes to the growth of big data.

News is different. How often do you find yourself saying to yourself “o gawd not this again”. Usually when your on a car journey and have to listen to multiple bulletins about politicians having a go at each other about how they are all such slimebags1.

There is only one thing better than having the news on Snapchat and that is having no news at all. The world would be a happier place if all we could watch were repeats of Dad’s Army, Tom and Jerry, Top Gear and Futurama (only the first two were mine). The Tom and Jerry has to be a Fred Quimby though. I digress.

This Sky announcement is another step towards the ever shortening of our attention spans. In fact why do they even bother with Snapchat when Twitter is clearly the ultimate medium for this kind of stuff. Not only is a tweet very quick and easy to ready but half the time it’s disappeared below your screen so quickly that you haven’t even had a chance to read it. Perfect when it comes to bad news tweets, or election tweets from politicians having a go at each other yet again.

I specifically note the political thing because I live in the bellweather seat of Lincoln and we have them all mooching around kissing babies, inspecting new bits of equipment that will lead to new jobs and generally seeking media exposure of any kind. Today it’s Geo Osborne. Next week it’s Glen Millerband Dave Ed Miliband.

Dunno why I’m getting overtly political just now. I am not affiliated with any party btw and am happy to engage with politicians of all hues. I only recently found out (after 26 years of marriage!) that my wife is interested in politics. This might explain why son 1 did a degree in history and politics and why son 2 is lining up to do the same.

Son 2 in particular can’t understand my apathy and unwillingness to engage in political discussion over the dinner table when all my TV (1) and Radio (many) appearances have by and large been to discuss political stuff.

I’ve rambled on far more than intended and certainly not in keeping with the short attention span instant gratification we demand in our lives nowadays.

Arrivederchi.

1 OK I believe the word currently in favour is “dodgy” but it’s all the same and all said under the protection of parliamentary privilege 🙂

Categories
Apps End User fun stuff

Randomly dictated

uc executive dinner voice recognition cloud provider survey technology marketing

voice recognition

Giving the kids a lift to school this morning. T I thought i’d fill in some time was waiting for the kids to get ready by randomly dictating a post.
New line
I i also did this yesterday from the cafe in the office because i didn’t have a key with me and i was there before everybody else. 3 lot of errors in that situation because i had to keep my voice down and i’m not sure of the quality of the wifi in a cafe. I’m finding that at home when i don’t have to whisper or atleast speaking subdued tones and with good wifi at i’m able to speak quite quickly and the dictation turns out quite well. In fact it looks as if ur speaking more quickly turns out a better quality of dictated post. At least with the interpretation of the words are concerned if not the quality of what is being dictated.
New line
You could actually get quite used to do this if it wasn’t for the fact that speaking out loud in the office is going to be a disruptive to the other people in the office a good way, and efficient way of writing text. Nowadays my handwriting skills are very poor because most of the time i’m using keyboard i can see in future if my typing skills might suffer because i will just be using my spoken word.
New line
In one sense this will be coming full circle time with only the spoken word existed there was nothing there in terms of the written word available or having been invented yet and in fact the language that use these days probably reflects the language used by cavemen from the stone age in it uh know what i mean. I’m sure that the cavemen would be insulted to think that i was saying that their language wisdom downs but she hasn’t arrived on the scene at that time.
New line
Which 8:35 there are signs of life signs of children getting ready getting the shoes on. I’m already ready i’ve had my coat on for 15 minutes. I had to go out and check the diesel levels in the jeep. Where ok i can get them to school so i don’t know that getting back from school. 🙂

Stardate wednesday bingley to school mr spoc

 

There ya go – back to typing now. It’s not bad, and I know I’ve written about it before but I thought it was worth an update. The most interesting aspect of it was the fact that it quite liked me speaking quickly.

Categories
Business End User media

Will Premier League TV deal drive up cost to punters

premiership tv rights

Premiership TV rights see 70% cost increase

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s it for now. Ciao amigos.

Categories
charitable Engineer

Support Ben White – he could do with your help

support ben white

Support Ben White

Ben White is a really nice bloke. He is a networking engineer and used to work for me at Timico before growing out of the job and heading for greener grass. Ben is also a really good networking engineer. In fact he is both a really nice bloke and a really good network engineer.

Ben has a problem. He is into adrenaline rushes and has for years been into freefall sky diving. Unfortunately last year he had an accident. The upshot is a broken back,  5 months of hospital and rehab, 4 major operations to fix a broken femur, 6 broken ribs, 5 broken vertebra and to stabilise a crushed spine, while coming to terms with being a T10 complete paraplegic who has no feeling or movement below his belly button.

He is lucky to have the love of Jen who writes:

“It turns out, the hardest part of this journey so far is coming home and being faced with a house that fights you at everything you try to do.

Ben sustained his injuries during a hard parachute landing at Hibaldstow drop zone in July 2014, while training for the skydiving world championships. British Silver medallist in freestyle, just 4 weeks before the competition, Ben’s life changed forever and his dream was over. Now he faces challenges he never thought he would have to, struggles that wouldn’t even occur to most people as we do things like sit down on a couch and get up again naturally without even thinking about it. It takes Ben 2 hours to get up and get ready in the morning when it otherwise takes me 30 minutes. Basic things are obstacles to overcome and I just want to help Ben, by making his house wheelchair friendly. I want him to be able to shower and to cook a meal and to leave the house to get milk without needing my help.

Unfortunately Ben does not quality for a government grant to make essential adaptations to his home, which include wheelchair access to the property, and through floor lift, washing facilities and an accessible kitchen as well as items such as a lightweight wheelchair and other recommended equipment. We are therefore asking for your support with donations, large or small to help make these adaptations so Ben can live as independently as possible.

If you’d like to donate you an do so at: https://www.youcaring.com/helpbenwhite “

Please support Ben White. You may also want to “like” his Facebook page here. Be has occasionally appeared elsewhere in this blog in the past. Here he is modelling a new whiteboard!!

Categories
Business End User piracy Regs security

Unknown Roku streaming stick on network, Virgin Media, DEAct & Spotify

roku streaming stick

Roku streaming stick

Interesting one this. A Roku streaming stick has to be plugged into your TV. It’s a bit like a Chromecast but different. One assumes that Joel knows that he hasn’t got a Roku streaming stick plugged into his TV. It must therefore be plugged into somebody’s else’s TV hanging off Joel’s network.

This does bring up the issue of wifi network security and the fact that other people may be making use of others’ broadband bandwidth. Who hasn’t had a look at their wifi settings when in a strange place to see if there are any open networks there. There often are, at least in public places.

This issue to me is further highlighted by the fact that we are coming up to the next general election. At this time 5 years ago the Digital Economy Act was rushed through just before the election. One of the many points landed on the deaf ears of government by protesting voices at the time was the very fact that it was difficult to prove who was actually doing the downloading/copyright infringement.  The rogue Roku of our introductory Tweet reinforces this. The DEAct has still not properly been enacted.

The issues that rights holders where highlighting in pushing for the Digital Economy Act have of course not gone away. I was talking yesterday to a 21 year old recent graduate about where he got his music from. He said it was all downloaded free of charge from online sources. This was despite the fact that his broadband provider Virgin Media has a block on access to specific sites associated with this activity. He said that that none of the people that he knew ie 18-25 demographic, paid for their music.

The blocking orders imposed by the courts on ISPs are not working. I did ask him about proxies and he was very familiar with the technology.  He was very familiar with proxies and had used them. However many were also blocked by ISPs but because sites such as Pirate Bay morph very quickly into similar sites and the kids know how to follow them they never have a problem accessing music.

I asked him what he thought about the fact that if nobody paid for them there would come a time where there would no longer be any record labels. His answer was that bands seem nowadays to make more out of their live shows than they do the out of selling music.

Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of the situation, it is what it is. I have a Spotify Premium account. It’s a great service.  For the 21 year old concerned £10 a month is actually quite a lot of money. Rob, the trefor.net developer, is a little older at 24. Rob has Spotify Premium. Rob also pays £6 a month for Netflix and doesn’t see why at £10 the music service is more expensive. He has a point maybe.

Now I’m not here to defend anyone’s business model, have a go any ones business model or anything else to do with business models other than to say that business models do change. Clearly the music industry is in the middle of a period of change that they’ve been struggling to come to grips with. Whether this is to do with legacy deals, royalties payable or cost base who knows.

We do hear of bands withdrawing their music from Spotify because the live streaming service doesn’t pay enough for the privilege of carrying their stuff. One wonders what proportion of Spotify’s royalties actually go to the band as opposed to the record label. I took a look at SpotifyArtists but it was either too complicated for my small brain to get around or it just wasn’t obvious.

We ain’t going to solve an industry’s problems in this blog post but I can only say that the efforts and the money spent on fighting online copyright infringement don’t seem to be working, at least based on my own local evidence.

PS I’d never heard of the Roku Streaming Stick before I came across this tweet. I’d get one and do a review except I already have a Chromecast in the port the Roku would use and the kids use it a fair bit.

Categories
Business social networking

Dear LinkedIn community manager

linkedin community manager

Dear LinkedIn community manager.

I realise that I signed up for the group (or at least I think I did – there are so many of them) but I don’t really want to be spammed with invitations to Webinars. I don’t do webinars. I have a short attention span and webinars want you for a lengthy period of time. I’d like to bet that the salient points of each and every webinar could be got across to me in one short paragraph. I’d read one short paragraph.

Dear linked in person. I don’t want to meet your “just visiting the UK expert” to get the benefit of a free consultation regarding agile QA processes. Your targeting is very poor and I’m unlikely to be in London for a quick coffee at the same time. I might be around if a few beers and a curry were on offer but only if I happened to be going to town anyway. Or maybe not.

The latter bit of LinkedIn spam, which seems to be on the rise, reminds me of emails I used to get at Timico from “new telecom practice managers” at recruitment consultancies suggesting they were in the North London area on Thursday and did I fancy meeting up for a coffee. More poor targeting considering my office was in Newark.

Then there was the foreign currency trader (foreign currency???!!!) who would be happy to come to my office to discuss my future currency hedging needs (or words to that effect – I didn’t get the lingo and he was another example of someone who had no idea of who I was or what I did.

Fortunately all the LinkedIn spam is filtered by gmail into the social tab that I hardly ever look at. Still slightly irks though as I have to look at the inbox when I fire up LinkedIn (usually when I want to spam people with my own stuff 🙂 ). I did leave a comment on LinkedIn this morning – participating in Steve Haworth’s post on Why 3 buying O2 matters. Read it if you want to see what I said.

The linkedin community manager seems to be a breed of person on the rise. trefor.net gets most of it’s social media shares as linkedin shares so the platform does seem to be getting used. It’s also true for broadbandrating.com at the moment which I guess is a reflection of the community of people in my ecosystem. I expect that to change as broadbandrating.com gains traction.

That’s all for now. Just back from Paris and need to head in to the office:)

Categories
4g End User Engineer Mobile

Mobile data bandwidth in channel tunnel

channel tunnel mobile data rate

Channel tunnel mobile data rate impressed

Over in gay Paree for a few days to settle my daughter into the next six months of her year abroad adventure. yesterday was a freezing 11 hours traipsing around prospective flatshares.

Couple of things I noticed both here and on the way over. In the Channel Tunnel I was getting LTE on my Oneplus One phone. I’m with O2 and the Oneplus doesn’t support O2 LTE spectra in the UK. The Chunnel however was a different ball game. Despite having data roaming switched off I found I was getting 16Megs down under the water. Whiled away a bit of the journey.  The rest of it was spent listening to sounds on the phone.

The next thing I noticed is that people were using their phones on the Metro in Paris. If you haven’t been the Paris Metro is just like the London Underground. It’s underground. Why can’t we have mobile connectivity on the tube. It was the same in Barcelona. People talking on their phones on the Metro.

That’s all for now. Just one thing before I go. If you are thinking of coming for a leisure break to Paris in February I’d say there were better places to go. It’s absolutely freezing here. Of course I’m here to do a job but the same advice applies

Categories
Business social networking

The value of Social Media in website Traffic Acquisition

Having just launched broadbandrating.com I am clearly interested in doing what it takes to build up traffic to the website. The more visitors it gets the more the likelihood of a click through and a commission payment.

We are right at the beginning. This morning I took a look at visitor patterns and it is clear that when broadbandrating gets a mention on social media the site gets a burst of visitors. The chart below shows the spikes when I share posts from the tweeterrific blog.

traffic spikes on broadbandrating.com

The big spike on Monday follows the release of the ISP Report for Q4 2014. It shows how you can begin to build traffic. It does help that I engage with lots of people on social media having been active on most platforms since early on in their development. Further spikes follow the publication of blog posts and their subsequent sharing on social media.

Some businesses wanting to promote their own products and services may not have been at it as long and therefore have a smaller network. It does serve as an indication of where to put your efforts.

The visitor acquisition sources for broadbandrating .com currently look like this:

broadbandrating.com visitor acquisition sources

A substantial element of acquisition via social media plus a pleasing number of direct visitors – people going straight to the site. Compare this with trefor.net, a much older site with far more visitors.

trefor.net visitor acquisition sources

The trefor.net profile will have changed over the years but it does reveal the efforts we have put in to Search Engine Optimisation. Trefor.net also has a cohort of regular readers as may be seen from the proportion of directly acquired visitors.

I’m not sure what the ideal mix is for broadbandrating.com. Certainly we will want the Referrals from other sites to grow together with those from Organic Search. However the good start it has had from Social Media activity s interesting to observe and again is a pointer to how other new websites might begin to engage.

Media exposure is a big factor in all this. On Tuesday night I was on the BBC Radio Lincolnshire Drivetime Show discussing broadbandrating.com with presenter William Wright. Not only did the realtime visitor numbers rise during the interview but his Tweeting also brought a few “favourites”, “mentions” and “follows”. Goes to show you have to have a mix of approaches.

The one aspect of the early marketing activity for this site that doesn’t yet seem to have borne much fruit is the press release. This was home grown and focussed on the output of the ISP Quarterly Report. With hindsight it might have better focussed on the fact that we major on the fact that we use Sentiment Analysis to rate ISPs rather than the results themselves. Time will tell. Had we used an external PR Agency the results might have been different although when we did use an agency during my time at Timico, quite often any national exposure came as a result of personal relationships I already had with the journalists involved. This time around an agency might definitely have helped with the targeting.

Broadbandrating is a fun and interesting project and is the first of a number that you should see emerge during 2015. I’ll report back every now and again on how our various marketing activities bear fruit.

Categories
Bad Stuff End User online safety security

I blog about nail polish – what’s wrong with your filters?

web filters block list

 

Web filters block list includes fashion blog

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559720386112552960

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559720218155835394

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559722059660795904

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559722582921207808

The point about this is that the only reason Ashleigh-Jayne found about about this is because she is a TalkTalk customer. TalkTalk’s own web filters block list had her site down as being adult only.

Now maybe parents wouldn’t want little girls (or boys) checking out nail polish and fashionable shoes. The little darlings grow up too quickly these days. However we hope this is just a mistake. Ashleigh-Jayne will almost certainly be able to contact TalkTalk and get her site taken off the black list.

However if she hadn’t been a TalkTalk broadband customer she might never have found out whether her site was on the list. Millions of people might be wrongly denied access to her site. This is a problem with the system. The blacklists are automatically produced by machines that tbh are inherently untrustworthy because they get it wrong too often.

The following link takes you to an Open Rights Group website that can test your own website to see if it is blocked

http://linkis.com/www.blocked.org.uk/TJZCq

I took a look at trefor.net and the results are in the featured image. The BT and TalkTalk results that are inconclusive don’t necessarily mean they are blocking me buy it is certainly raises an eyebrow or two.

Haven’t actually looked at Ashleigh-Jayne’s blog but I’m taking her word for it that it’s not pornographic. As far as I’m aware she is a fine upstanding member if the blogging fraternity (sorority?).

As I write I realise that I will soon need a new pair of shoes. I doubt I’ll find them on her site mind you but I should be OK. I don’t think that ja.net has the same filtering policy. I’ll leave you with a little story about dubious websites that perhaps should be blocked from viewing by children (once the parents have opted in to the filter of course).

A year or two ago I gave a talk on VoIP security at a ja.net conference. An engineer came up to me afterwards for a chat and the conversation got round to how ja.net would have coped had they had to implement the Digital Economy Act and monitored its hundreds of thousands of users for their downloading habits.

The guy told me a story of how they had one been alerted to a really high bandwidth usage coming out of one room in a hall of residence. They went on an investigative visit and found that the female occupant of the room had moved in with a pal. The room had been painted purple and now had a pole in the middle of it surrounded by 4 webcams. Four enterprising female undergraduates had been paying for their university education by doing some professional internet pole dancing.

Now will that get me on a web filters block list?

Categories
fun stuff

Facebook down – oh

I note facebook is down. I checked it on twitter. Twitter is alive with the news. Suddenly occurred to me that it doesn’t matter.

It is interesting, however, to consider that facebook must have a massively reliable platform but still has problems.  It goes to show that you can never achieve 5 nines reliability.

Twitter told me that the problems started at 5 past 6 this morning . It is now nearly 7 o’clock. 5nines is only something like 5 minutes of downtime a year. It’s a good job that facebook isn’t mission critical.

On this occasion twitter is serving as an alternative platform for communication. Its different but its does serve a purpose. Twitter and facebook are the two sites i turn to first thing in the morning. Facebook tells me an unimportant gossip about what my friends have been doing. Twitter tells me what’s going on in the world,  in this case facebook not working. Although that’s stating the bleeding obvious, it is useful to know the other people have the same problem. Nobody wants to be alone!

Dictated from the comfort of my bed whilst listening to radio 4. No mention of facebook on the news funnily enough.

Update 7. 19. It’s made the radio 4 news with rory cellan-jones. Apparently its back up now speculation is that it was a cyber attack.

Categories
broadband End User

ISP report places Sky at top of rankings for Q4 2014

isp report

broadbandrating.com ISP report

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

Highlights include:

Sky was rated top provider for Q4 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More anon…

Categories
End User security surveillance & privacy

Pretty graphic reaction to ISP porn blocking

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

Thought I’d slip this one in – adult content filter eh 😉

adult content filter

I don’t know John Harvey but he seems a fairly forthright kind of guy. From Yorkshire maybe.

It’s not so much that you are telling your ISP anything when you opt out of the adult filter, or whatever it’s called. We doubt that any human intervention is involved in the process. It’s the likelihood that the information that you don’t wish adult sites to be blocked is leaked or hacked. That’s the issue.

If the information isn’t there is can’t be hacked. If this was an opt in that would sort it, aside from the fact that these filters aren’t renowned for their accuracy.

As an aside I assume that this site will henceforth be blocked by these filters. Probably already is. Parents don’t want their kids to know that they go to parties like trefbash or the pissup in a brewery. The blog was once blocked by the Timico firewall as “social media” sites were frowned upon by whoever set the policy in place (not me – I used to spend all my time on social media – I had a different set of permissions:).

The question is would Twitter be blocked. There’s a lot of graphic language on Twitter. I once unfollowed someone because of his non stop use of swear words. Not my kind of thing. Would be interesting to hear from anyone who has adult content filtering in place to see whether Twitter was visible or not.

Looking on the positive side, if you have opted out of the adult content filter, and are therefore “down on the list” you can always say it’s because you wanted to read posts on trefor.net;)

Effin read it first on trefor.net. wtf!

Read this highly popular and relevant post on the consequences of allowing government to monitor our online habits here.

Categories
Engineer engineering internet

Live blogging from UKNOF30

uknof30

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

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