Categories
Business phones

RIM – what is there to say?

RIM is being sold to one of its existing shareholders who will take it private and in theory reshape the business away from the public glare. The same is happening, or trying to happen, at Dell. Nokia is being bought by Microsoft. All three brands may well fade away into the distance.

Shed no tears. Shit happens. Move on. We live in a very fluid world where aside from technological advances that can in theory be forecast because of historical trends – Moores Law etc – nobody can really predict the future. It takes remarkable vision to be able to move with the times, especially if you are a huge company – it’s like trying to do a handbrake turn with an oil tanker.

I remember when I worked for Mitel I was in  pub in Kanata and one of the Execs had a Blackberry that he was constantly referring to – a bit like how I am these days with my droid. What went through my mind was “hmm I need one of those”. It was more of a status symbol thing than me wanting to be able to read my emails when in the pub.

Timico gave me a Blackberry in the early days. It didn’t last long. Devices like the Nokia E65 and E71 soon overshadowed it. The E71 was a good phone. Not as good as my SGS4, or the S3 or the S2. It’s all progress innit?

I used to think that the future was all about phones replacing PCs. PCs sales are in decline. Phones and tablets on the up. Maybe I was right. Easy really. However in trying to decide where on earth this thought process (and thus the blog post) is going I’ve realised that phones are probably not the way forward either, at least in the form factor we see today.

The screen on my SGS4 is cracked – happened when it was in my pocket. The casing is chipped and dented – it isn’t an old phone, just not a very robust one. I occasionally leave it places and have to go back looking for it. It has to have access security to stop others using it when they shouldn’t and to protect my personal data.

Surely this is a form of device ripe for obsolescence. Although I poo poo’d the Samsung Gear smart watch maybe that is the form factor that will be where all the action is in future. It won’t be long before technology is such that we will have better processing power in the watch than we have in the handset today. If we want to type we should be able to dig out cheap portable screens/keyboards that hook up with the watch. These could even be disposable or so cheap that they are everywhere and you just have to pick one up and hook your phone.

A phone is less likely to be left somewhere and won’t suffer the same knocks as a handset.

There you go. Maybe people running big brands just need to get back to the basics of what influences people to buy something. Play in the forecastable tech developments and hey presto, you are still in business. Not as easy as that I know but it’s all that’s on offer this morning:)

Ciao.

Categories
Business datacentre

Timico gets Royal Visitor – Duke of Kent

Coat_of_Arms_of_Duke_of_KentJust had a bit of a Royal visit from the Duke of Kent. He came over specially for a butchers’ because he’d heard of our growth/work with apprentices/new datacentre/NOC/awards etc etc etc.

I was a bit disappointed to see that his car didn’t have a flag. The last time I came across the Duke was at the Farnborough Air Show where I was his guest for lunch. At the time I was on the Exec of the Parliamentary Space Committee. Lunch was on the roof of the Society of British Aerospace Companies pavilion – the spot where the Harrier jump jet used to bow to.

I was there with a group of British and French MPs – members of their respective Parliamentary interest groups. We had an extremely informative and enjoyable afternoon at the end of which we all piled into the Jaguar courtesy cars to go back to the bus for onward ferrying to Westminster. All that is except me. There was no room!

“No problem” said an able assistant. He whipped the flag off the Duke of Kent’s Bentley and drove me to the bus himself. All of which is why I was disappointed the flag wasn’t to be seen anywhere. I guess the Bentley will be knocking on a bit now and his 7 series will be far more comfortable…

Categories
Engineer internet

iOS7 release causes internet traffic to double

traffic growth on lonap network due to ios7 upgradeiOS7 caused a stir in more than one way last week. Twitter abounded with all sorts of comments regarding how slow the Apple servers were responding to download requests from excited fanbois eager to checkout the latest slightly iterative functionality of their new iOS. When the dust settled it seemed that the majority of people had been sorted.

Taking a look at the effect of iOS7 on networks comes up with some interesting results. The graph in the header pic above shows the traffic over the Lonap core before, during and after the flurry wave (ocean?) of downloading. Steady state is around 30Gbps or maybe slightly more. Once iOS started to hit the fan this doubled to around 60Gbps.

It’s good that networks such as Lonap can take the capacity hit.

The growth in traffic comes as no surprise when you consider the size of the download. This seems to have ranged from around 700MB to nearly a Gig depending on the device with 3GB of space needed on your phone for the install. I guess you wouldn’t want to be eating into your mobile data bundle with that.

Categories
4g Engineer mobile connectivity olympics

4G speed test results in London – comparison of O2, EE and Vodafone

4G4G test results in London – comparison of O2, EE and Vodafone on a road trip.

Competition in 4G has been a long time coming. It’s almost a year since EE launched their service and we now have the Vodafone and O2 4G networks running, at least in London. When I took part in the O2 4G trials in 2013 the results were spectacular (43Mbps in the Devonshire Arms pub off Oxford Street) if confined to a few places – O2 used 25 cell sites for these trials. The results were great partly because I doubt that there were that many people using the network given that we all had dongles and not phones. You had to have your laptop out which aside from my coverage experiment conducted from the top deck of a moving number 25 bus meant that you had to be in a static location.

Now I have three networks to play with: EE, Vodafone and O2. It would be natural to expect that having had longer to roll out their network the EE coverage would be better. However with more subscribers using the EE service would their speeds be as good as the relatively empty networks of the new kids on the block?

The 4G test tools to hand were a Samsung GalaxyS4 running O2, a Nokia Lumia 920 on Vodafone and a Huawei 4G Mobile WiFi E5776 (MiFi) loaned to be my EE. The tests were conducted over two separate trips and on each occasion I had a Twitter pal along for the ride: @flosoft and @UKTamo. We also used @UKTamo’s SGS3 LTE running on EE.

In one sense because I was using four different devices the test conditions were not going to survive academic scrutiny. However having to go to the effort of swapping SIMs every time I wanted to run a test just so that I could do like for like testing wasn’t going to be practical. What you get here therefore is a mix of experiences with some real results mixed with subjectivity. It should provide a feel for the 4G experience in London.

4G speed testing at McDonalds KingsX We started off in McDonalds in Kings Cross. Day one was not an unbridled success as for much of the day the only network I had working was EE.  Having only just provisioned them, the new 4G SIMs on the other two took a while to kick in. Before realising this I thought that maybe the S4 and Lumia 920 needed a firmware upgrade. @flosoft averaged around 5Mbps using the McDonalds WiFi to download the software for the Samsung whereas I was getting double that using the EE 4G MiFi for the Nokia. Nokia took well over half an hour to perform the actual upgrade after downloading the software but it had still finished the job before the WiFi based software download for the Samsung had ended, let alone start the installation.

This became a theme. During lunch at the Nag’s Head in Covent Garden hanging off the EE4G Huawei MiFi was a better experience than using the pub’s WiFi. This is despite the fact that my Galaxy S4 is set to backup media to Google+ when connected via WiFi. Because of this any speed testing and usage on the MiFi will have been degraded because of the background uploading yet the experience was still good. It suggests to me that as 4G becomes more ubiquitous, cost of data aside, public venues will need to upgrade their broadband service if they want people to continue their WiFi rather than a cellular service.

As an aside during the 2012 Olympics I spent a lot of time testing mobile connectivity in London and found that when walking around the cellular networks were far more useful than the hundreds of thousands of WiFi hotspots in town.

Will 4G render public WiFi networks obsolete I wonder?

Roaming around central London saw very variable results with all three networks working on 4G. Handsets would switch between 3G and 4G by just turning a corner and 4G performance when in a low signal strength area felt not to be as good as 3G in the same circumstance. In theory 4G should be no different to 3G in this respect – maybe it just needs a bit more playing with.

4G speed testing on a number 73 busSat on the Number 73 bus between Kings Cross and Oxford Circus the EE network had more consistent 4G coverage than Vodafone – see the video. EE averaged 18Mbps on this route with only a couple of results dropping below 10Mbps to 5Mbps and 8Mbps.

Following on from the Nags Head lunch experience indoor coverage seemed better than I had been expecting. When my Vodafone 4G kicked in I managed to get 65.85Mbps at the back vodafone 4G speed test resultsof the Pop Up Brittain shop on Piccadilly. We saw 48.62Mbps down and 43.31Mbps upload with EE in a 2nd Floor Office in Castle Lane near Victoria which was the best combined performance. I was getting around 10Mbps down with both O2 and Vodafone at this location.EE 4G speed test results 48Mbps castle lane London

Vodafone and O2 are sharing cell sites so where you got 4G with one you would naturally expect the other to be present. This was by and large the case though sometimes one network would have better performance than the other at these locations which might be explained by traffic volumes.

We used speedtest.net for the testing and when comparing different networks it was important to be using the same server. For EE performance at one location rose dramatically when we switched away from the Yoda in Covent GardenVodafone London speedtest server – no dirty work on the go here I’m sure:). It was also funny that when I stood next to Yoda between Covent Garden Station and the Piazza I got a very poor Vodafone signal – the force was obviously elsewhere unless he wasn’t the real Yoda (Vodafone uses Yoda from the Star Wars movies for advertising purposes).

The fastest download seen was 73Mbps on O2 at South Kensington tube station. Sat at the Champagne Bar in Paddington I was regularly getting 58Mbps on Vodafone – indoors again (video here). The EE MiFi in this environment didn’t perform so well. Indoors in Paddington Station might be a poor EE coverage area but my guess is that there were too many WiFi enabled devices in the area and the MiFi struggled with the noise.

Overall I didn’t see quite the same peak speeds on EE compared with O2 and Vodafone. The fact that there are far more people on the EE network would explain this. As you might expect EE did seem to have better overall coverage, though this coverage was far from ubiquitous. There seemed to be pretty good 4G from all three networks in the main tourist and commuter hotspots – Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus (video here) and major train stations for example.

One additional data point is that I had to plug both the Nokia and Samsung phones in to charge by around 2pm after a day’s testing. I was carrying two Powergen Mobile Juice Pack 6000s especially for this purpose. Whether that tells you anything about battery life when using 4G I’m not sure considering I was hammering the phones. It probably does.

Overall it’s exciting to see three networks up and running now albeit only in London. It won’t be long before competition sees coverage improve everywhere – although it isn’t advertised I could get 4G from all three networks on the platform at Slough Railway Station.

Even the slower 4G speeds were pretty fast compared to 3G. I have to believe that with 4G the mobile networks have finally moved into the 21st century.

4G is definitely going to drive usage. I used almost 2GBytes in two days of testing with O2 – I’m on an 8GB package. I suspect the real issue is how quickly the networks will want to drive usage/fill their capacity. They will be able to control this with pricing. However although the mobile operators are desperate to move away from selling on price I can’t see them being able to do so long term. The market will have its way…

More speed test screenshots here from O2, Vodafone and EE. Thanks to @flosoft and to @UKTamo for their able assistance especially for the photos and screenshots of the test results. Thanks to EE for the loan of the Huawei MiFi – it’s a great piece of kit. I was hoping to be able to publish a comprehensive database of the tests but unfortunately the speedtest.net app only kept a certain number of results and the Windows 8 Phone version didn’t even seem to allow you to export the data. Ah well.

Other 4G posts:

4G as a fixed broadband replacement service here.

EE 4G mobile broadband roadmap here.

Google Hangouts over 4G here.

Categories
Engineer phones

Comparison of Samsung firmware load versus the base Android version

Bumped into Florian Jensen (@flosoft) whilst out and about in London doing some 4G speed testing. He has a Samsung Galaxy S3 which he had rooted with CarbonRom based on Android 4.3. He wanted to increase the phone’s performance and improve battery life.

I was surprised to see that there is a very noticeable improvement in speed. The SGS3 running CarbonRom was faster than the SGS4 which has a more powerful processor (s) running Samsung’s firmware. We did some videos yesterday that illustrate this. You can read Flo’s post on what he did here. Unless you are a serious geek (which I realise that quite a few of you are 🙂 )I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing it yourself.

Categories
Business net neutrality ofcom Regs

Net Neutrality – Pete Farmer speaks

PortcullisOpen Internet & Net Neutrality – both are terms that are meaningless to many and equally emotive and commercially crucial to many others.

As with many things in life, there’s a spectrum of what this means. At one end, there’s a threat to civil liberties, commercial strategies, intellectual property and safeguarding against illegal content. At the other end, there’s (for want of a better phrase) a type of technological anarchy whereby there are ideological demands that all packets of data should be equal regardless of the content, legality, source or otherwise.

ITSPA’s members all operate in the VoIP space to some degree, so the subject of throttling (sorry, I think the marketing term is “traffic shaping”), blocking etc is both emotive and important to their businesses; so I think it is worthwhile explaining what I think the average VoIP provider means by Net Neutrality.

The first qualifier is that we always talk about legal content. What is legal and not legal varies by jurisdiction and is defined by various legislatures around the world; we would not necessarily expect any definition of an open internet to include illegal content.

We would also say that prioritisation of some services is an important

Continue reading “Net Neutrality – Pete Farmer speaks”
Categories
broadband Business voip

VoIP for a home office

home office setup

home office setupVoIP for home office suddenly got better with superfast broadband.

I find it very productive to work from home occasionally. I have an Avaya phone in the conservatory – hangs off our Genband A2 SIP platform. I guess not every conservatory is Cat5 cabled. My patch panel and switch are in the attic but I won’t win any prizes for the quality of the cabling (it’s a good job I don’t do the cabling for Timico).

What really makes it work is the FTTC connection.  VoIP is rock solid over FTTC as I may have mentioned. Last week I had a conference call with a journalist called Jessica Twentyman (@jtwentyman). Her profile says she lives in Portugal but her CLI was an 0207. I didn’t think anything of it but at the end of the chat I asked her whether she was actually working out of London.

Turns out she was using Skype-in and still very much in Portugal. The call quality was astonishingly good considering I’ve had a few quite tinny Skype calls in my time1. The difference is that she has a fibre connection where she lives. This just goes to show what a difference the quality of the underlying bearer  connection makes. I’ve had other calls with journos where they have been using their mobile phone and it doesn’t always make for an easy conversation – you are straining to hear what the person is saying rather than focussing on what to say.

As FTTC/FTTP gets more into people’s homes and businesses it can only be a matter of time before we all upgrade to using better quality voice codecs such as G722. If the bandwidth is there we might as well use it. Of course the call quality may well improve but the quality of what is said will still be down to you 🙂

Ciao…

1 I even heard John Humphrys once on Radio4 talking to someone in New Zealand using Skype and the call disappeared completely half way through the interview.

Categories
End User mobile connectivity wearable

Le Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch est arrivee

It’s 07.11. I’m on a train again, headed to London again. I’m wearing shorts. It’s going to be 30 degrees Centigrade. In front of me is a copy of The Times. I very rarely read “the paper” these days. Only when it’s shoved in front of me as a freebie.

The headlines in the paper say “Obama calls on the world to fight Syria ‘barbarism’”. I’m sure you will have noticed that the news rarely covers good news. Only when “our Andy” wins a major or when there is a royal baby (etc). We also get an occasional “hottest summer since 1976”. Not very often, any of them.

Yesterday we also heard about Samsung’s new Galaxy Gear smartwatch. I don’t wear a watch. Not since my early twenties. They always used to break or go wrong on me and even in those days there was usually a clock somewhere that you could see to tell the time – PC or car dash.

The last time I owned a watch was when I was on my way to visit a customer in Stanmore. I was in a company pool car and blow me down if the clock on the dashboard was broken. It must have been an old car – I worked for Marconi Electronic Devices. Don’t know if that says anything.

No problem I said to myself. I’ll turn the radio on and keep time that way. Now the meeting was at 10.30 and at 10am they started an hour long programme so I wouldn’t know the time at the half hour. Hmm.  I wanted to be punctual but did not have the resources to make it so other than maybe being sat in reception for too long.

No problemo. I’ll stop at a passing garage and by a cheapo watch. Unfortunately the cheapest watch was about £15. I’d been expecting a sub fiver piece of junk that I could ditch when I’d finished the meeting. A £15 piece of junk (as it turned out to be) was a different thing. In those days you could buy a pint for 50 pence. That watch represented 30 pints!

I bought the watch and made it to the meeting on time. Two weeks later the watch stopped working/broke/something like that. It got thrown away and I have never worn a watch since.

This is a long way of saying that I am unlikely to wear the Samsung Galaxy Gear. The question I suppose is whether such devices will take off. My bet is that they will, despite me not wearing one (:) ). I ask myself will people look a little daft holding a watch up to their ear? Will they be self-conscious doing it? Is that any different to holding a phone to your ear?

Maybe of you have the watch bit on the inside of your wrist then it will be exactly the same gesture. It will look as if you are just scratching your head when actually you are on the phone. Could work though not for me as I don’t want anything on my wrist. Maybe a watch pinned to my lapel would do the job – bit like a nurse’s watch. It would get around the problem of not wanting something on my wrist.

However how would I make a phone call? I could use my phone I suppose or have the lapel device on in speaker mode with perhaps only a low range so that only I could hear it. Probably won’t work that last bit.

There must be a market for a device that stops people being buried in their small screen all the time. Something that is always there and noticeable without staring at your hand.

Musings over. If you already wear a watch then you might find the Samsung Galaxy Gear ok. It’s another drop of tech news on the unstoppable tide.

It’s now 7.49 and the train has stopped at Newark Northgate. All is quiet and I’m on the way to London, wearing shorts. You will have to wait a day or two to find out why. Catch ya later.

PS don’t ask me why I wrote the title in French. It has no bearing to the rest of the post and just came out that way. Ohohiho!

Categories
Business mobile connectivity phones

I see Microsoft are going to buy the Nokia handset business

I found out about 5am this morning via Twitter (under the bedsheets!). Between 5am and the time I got up, around 7.30ish is was being retweeted by all and sundry and Rory CJ was talking about it on the BBC Radio4 Today programme.

By the time I left for work I felt it was old news and had already been done to death. The line of discussion was “Will Stephen Elop be the next Microsoft CEO?” Tbh that isn’t really news and the BBC was certainly unable to do any more than anyone else which was just pure speculation.

Whether Microsoft makes a go of the handset business is neither here nor there in my mind. I’m not really bothered. I’d say it will take them years to catch up with Apple and Samsung/Google if  they can do it at all.

What I think is worth a moment of reflection is the passing of Nokia as a mobile handset vendor. The brand must now inevitably fade away. In my business life I have had very few different vendors’ models of mobile phone (though that is starting to change with what feels to be an unsustainable pace of new product intros) and for most of that time my phone was a Nokia.

Nokia represented quality and had the best User Interface.  Although  I still own a Nokia, a Lumia 920 handset it is very much my secondary phone. I don’t like the UI or the weight of it. I only got it to try out Windows8. The last Nokia phone I can claim to have been happy with was the N97, a while ago now, it seems.

There are always examples around of major multinational companies with big market leads that fail to move with the times. Microsoft is in one of those periods now of trying to reinvent itself. It isn’t there yet.

In the meantime Nokia has failed to keep up and is now going through the mobile phone equivalent of the death roll. Stand back and watch from a safe distance.  RIP the Nokia mobile phone.

Categories
Apps Business Cloud mobile apps storage backup & dr

When automatic backups work

bread_smallI’ve been having some problems with the “Gallery” app on my Samsung Galaxy S4. Actually I wasn’t sure whether it was the app or the hardware that was giving me the problem. Sometimes a photo would come out as a 1GB file (ish) and sometimes when copying files from the phone to the PC the process would stall and I’d get “file format not recognised” or some simlar message.

The problem happened to me again last week and it prompted me to change the SD card to rule out that as the cause. In the process of doing so I lost a few photos I had taken that morning. Not a big deal really though this problem did result in the loss of some photos and videos I took of the kids on the first day of the Ashes series at Trent Bridge so it was something worth sorting out.

Yesterday we had a family day out at Skegness and last night I noted that the pics I had taken had been automatically uploaded to Google+. Cool. I went on Google+ to share the photos with the wider family. To my very pleasant surprise the photos I’d taken the other morning but had lost were on Google+.

That’s what I call a result.  The loaf of bread, if you’re wondering, is one of the lost photos. It was baked by my very talented wife Anne and didn’t last very long at all:).

Note that the instant upload function on Google+ works far better since I got my fast FTTC connection. The upload is the difference. I don’t know whether that photo would have uploaded quickly enough with my old ADSL connection.

Categories
End User online safety piracy

Credit card – phone line scam from a friend of my sisters on Facebook

pirate_flag_thumbCredit card-phone line scam from a friend of my sisters on Facebook. I’ve just reposted it verbatim as it says everything it needs to say. It does make you wonder what on earth can be done to stop these. If everyone had an intelligent line that allowed you to block number withheld calls that might go some way towards sorting it though scammers would just start using a fake CLI.

An alternative might be to have a voice rec asking you who you wanted to talk to. Anything other than Tref, Anne etc would just go straight to voicemail. Schools should cover this sort of thing in lessons. It goes along with safe internet use.

Anyway the Facebook post is repeated below – the author stated that she wanted it sharing:

 

“Received a phone call from BT, informing me that he was disconnecting me because of an unpaid bill. He demanded payment immediately of £31.00 or it would be £ 118.00 to re-connect at a later date. The guy wasn’t even fazed when I told him I was with Virgin Media, allegedly VM have to pay BT a percentage for line rental! I asked the guy’s name – he gave me the very ‘English’ John Peacock with a very ‘African’ accent – & phone number -0800 0800 152.

Obviously the fellow realized I didn’t believe his story, so offered to demonstrate that he was from BT. I asked how & he told me to hang up & try phoning someone – he would disconnect my phone to prevent this. AND HE DID !! My phone was dead – no engaged tone, nothing – until he phoned me again.

Very pleased with himself, he asked if that was enough proof that he was with BT. I asked how the payment was to be made & he said credit card, there & then. I said that I didn’t know how he’d done it, but I had absolutely no intention of paying him, I didn’t believe his name or that he worked for BT.

He hung up. I dialed 1471 – number withheld I phoned his fictitious 0800 number – not recognized. So I phoned the police to let them know. I wasn’t the first! It’s only just started apparently, but it is escalating. Their advice was to let as many people as possible know of this scam.

The fact that the phone does go off would probably convince some people it’s real, so please make as many friends & family aware of this. How is it done? This is good but not that clever. He gave the wrong number – it should have been 0800 800 152 which takes you through to BT Business.

The cutting off of the line is very simple, he stays on the line with the mute button on and you can’t dial out – but he can hear you trying. (This is because the person who initiates a call is the one to terminate it). When you stop trying he cuts off and immediately calls back. You could almost be convinced!

The sad thing is that it is so simple that it will certainly fool many. By the way this is not about getting the cash as this would not get past merchant services – it is all about getting the credit card details which include the security number, to be used for larger purchases.”

The end – for now…

Categories
End User scams

+447456700496 – another accursed intrusive PPI text

I’m sure I’ve signed my mobile up with the Telephone Preference Service but I just got another sms from +447456700496:

“We have been trying to contact you regarding your PPI claim, we now have details of how much you are due, just reply POST and we will posts you a pack out”

Either they are lying or they know that I am due nothing whatsoever in which case you wonder why they would go to the effort of sending me a “pack”.

The power of the www suggests to me that this number is owned by Gladstone Brookes and looking at their website there is indeed a section to fill in to start your PPI miss-sold claim.

I do wonder what sort of individual runs this sort of operation. I also wonder whether, in the light of what I said re the TPS, there is any comeback against them for sending me a text. I will enquire & let you know.

Categories
Apps Engineer mobile connectivity olympics

Funky Cisco stadium WiFi technology at The Barclay Centre

Cisco engineer & pal Stuart Clark sent me this link to a really cool stadium WiFi network deployment at The Barclay Centre. You will all of course know that the Barclay Centre is home to the Brooklyn Nets basketball team (c’mon now – don’t tell me you’ve never heard of ’em).

The Cisco Connected Stadium WiFi Solution (for once they have a product name that tells it like it is) enables stadia to allow “visitors to keep up with box scores and player stats in real time. And for patrons who hate those long lines at half time, concessions can be ordered with the swipe of a finger from any seat in the house.” as the blurb puts it. All this from your phone.

I like this. Stadium technology is not straight forward as you will recall from the stuff  I wrote about preparations for the Olympics, ahem sorry London 2012 Olympics. The Cisco spiel uses lots of good phrases such as

  • 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks to the core or distribution switches
  • Access switches that have 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE) as minimum or 802.3at PoE+ ports
    (recommended) for powering access points
  • radio resource management
  • self healing, self optimising wireless networks

I can’t find any data that tells me how to go about designing a network for, say Wembley or Twickenham which would have a lot more punters sat in their seats than a basketball arena. I presume it is doable.

What I really like is the fact that the accompanying app allows you to order hot dogs etc from your seat. I can see huge benefits should they ever implement this at Sincil Bank, the home of my local side Lincoln City (up the Imps). The queue for burgers and pies at half time is massive-ish and it often takes the whole of the half time break for you to get served.

I can see problems though. At Sincil Bank you can sit anywhere in the stand your ticket is valid for, unless that specific seat is reserved by a season ticket holder (so most of them are free). The person delivering the hot dog/pie/burger/chips would have to wander around the stand looking for you, probably shouting your name and trying to make him or herself heard over the din of the tannoy announcing the winner of the raffle. The hot dog/pie/burger/chips could well have gone cold in the meantime.

I’m sure there must be a solution for this – it’s probably in a Cisco Application Note somewhere.

As I write I can think of lots of useful addons to the app, assuming they aren’t already featured. Sports such as snooker and tennis will have their own plugins – after all you can’t expect your order of champagne, strawberries and cream to be delivered to Centre court at Wimbledon whilst the game is in play. The same applies for snooker – you’d have to wait for the bit in between frames or when the players nip out for a toilet break which happens on an ad-hoc basis so the delivery scheduling would have to be able to accommodate this – easy small deliveries in between frames, larger more complicated ones during comfort breaks.

Anyway you get the drift. I can even envisage social media hookups so that fans can comment on the game in real time from within the app. I’d better stop. Got stuff to do. Ciao…

Categories
End User fun stuff

It was 25 years ago last week

Had my Silver Wedding Anniversary Bash over the Bank Holiday weekend. A great time was had by all. Lots of people turned up to find out how Anne has managed to put up with me for all that time.

It’s made me think of what technology was available in 1988. Mobile phones existed. They were analogue and for the most part had to be plumbed in to the car battery to work. I had one when I was working as a Field Applications Engineer. I recall turning up outside Anne’s house in London and calling her from the car. It was an uber impressive thing to be able to do in those days (from my red Cavalier SRi).

When we got married her Uncle Harry did the wedding video. We watched it again for the first time in 25 years last week. Had to convert it from VHS to mp4 which we did after an appeal on twitter resulted in @ClivePetty bringing the kit around to the house the weekend before. Thanks Clive. There was no such thing as editing a video in those days, at least not by a layman. It came out raw and unexpurgated.

None of the guests would have had a mobile phone, an email address or an internet connection. Internet? Wossat? All the invitations would have been sent out in the post and the venue for the bash selected after physically driving around all the options to find out which dates were available.

The map telling people how to get from the Church to the Hotel was printed out on sheets of A4 with handwritten instructions. No Sat Nav.

The wedding photos are kept in an Album in the cupboard. We don’t have the negatives. Probably many of the guests have never seen them.  I’m not sure we have seen any other photos from our wedding. Sharing was too difficult. The inventor of Facebook might have been born, but only just.

We had typists at work and I once remember faxing a large US Government Contract proposal to our New York office and having to refax individual pages once they had been amended. It took too long to fax the whole contract again.

Moore’s Law was first described in 1965. By 1988 whilst people would be able to use it to forecast things like the memory size on a computer it isn’t something that would have been in the minds of most. Even businesses would have very few PCs around. Certainly the average household wouldn’t have had one. They were too expensive and there wasn’t much you could do with them.

I’m going to stop here. I’m not sure all this “showing my age” business fits with my life philosophy – and after all I’m only a kid.

Having seen all the developments in tech in the interim 25 years it’s quite exciting to think about what might be coming along over the next quarter of a century. Read all about it on trefor.net 🙂

Categories
Business Cloud datacentre social networking

First #bloggade a big success

We held the first #bloggade at the Timico datacentre in Newark yesterday. A bloggade is as you may know the collective noun for a group of bloggers.

This first event was highly successful covering a range of blog related subjects:

1 The type of infrastructure used to host blogs (led by Timico hosting tech guru Michael Green) followrd by a guided tour of the Tiico NOC and datacenre.
2 A lengthy discussion on Search Engine Optimisation for your blog conducted by @phil_kelsey of Spiral Media and @mattdrussell of WebbHostingBuzz.
3 A general discussion about plug ins and which ones worked for people.

There was a great level of audience participation and a definite interest in holding another event, sometime in the run up to Christmas perhaps.

For a bit of fun we decided to have a go and see if we could get #bloggade to trend on twitter. Despite our intensive efforts it didn’t seem to be working. Then one of the bloggers suggested that if we tweeted that members of the currently in the news boy band “One Direction” had turned uo for #bloggade it might go viral. We did this and at the latest count have had a grand total of two retweets from (pre-pubescent?) OD fans. 🙂

Gotta say I’d never heard of em before this week!!!

Big thanks to all who came especially @mattdrussell whose original idea this was together with @phil_kelsey @jangles and @AndrewGrill for their major contributions.

All in all considering we organised this from scratch to execution in 4 weeks I have to say it was a great success.

Catch ya later.

PS this post was typed by thumb on my Galaxy s4 en route to a customer meeting in London.  I’d be amazed if the formatting is spot on – I’ll make any necessary adjustments when I get back to laptop land.

Categories
Business events internet peering

Joint Lonap/ISPA bash

Lonap and ISPA are having a bit of a bash in September. If you are a member of either org or not a member and but in the internet industry and potentially a member, we want to see you there.

It’s on 24th September at the Phoenix Artist Club in London. Check out the details here.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

#LINX82 – visible signs of growth of the internet

Sat in the LINX82 meeting. If you’ve never been, these LINX meetings are where the people who run the internet in the UK get together to chat – about the nuts and bolts of the internet.

Today we are discussing the Open IX developmental standard, getting an update on the US exchange, following the Manchester IX update yesterday. Traditionally an ISP’s connectivity to the rest of the internet is a mix of peering, where one network connects directly to another through a mutual not for profit internet peering exchange such as LINX or LONAP (both of which Timico is a member of) or  using a commercial provider of international connectivity called transit.

Peering is cheaper and over time represents a growing proportion of internet traffic.

LINX, which is the London Internet EXchange is expanding – to Manchester and the USA. I have been in two minds about this. Each of these regional exchanges are mutually independent – connecting in Manchester or the USA doesn’t mean you can peer with someone connecting at LINX in London.  So in one sense I had initially to ask myself why an organisation that set its stall out as a London exchange would want to also be elsewhere.

The LINX argument for its own regional expansion is that if it is to continue its growth in London it needs to be seen to be more of a Global player and the first choice for new members looking for a first connection in Europe. LINX competes with the likes of  AMS-IX (Amsterdam) and DEC-IX (Frankfurt) in this respect, both of who have been establishing bases overseas outside their original locations.

The long term trend is forecast to be towards more and more regional peering.  If you are in one city and want to connect to someone else in the same place why haul the traffic back to a hub such as in London that might be hundreds of miles away? You do need a critical mass of traffic for regional peering to be economic but the growth in the use of the internet is such that  the business case is beginning to become valid for more locations.

On balance, personally knowing the board of Directors at LINX and although I was originally sceptical, I have gone with the flow regarding this expansion. The numbers coming out of LINX certainly show real growth continuing to happen.

In the last three months LINX membership has grown from 469 to 477 companies and its connected capacity from 6.792 Tbps to 6.999 Tbps. This is a huge capability. Peak traffic remains at 1.618 Tbps. LINX is undoubtedly a major global presence on the internet to the point that the exchange has already connected its first 100Gbps port.

The internet industry. It’s an exciting place to be.

Categories
End User internet online safety

Government surveillance and the issue of personal privacy

The whole issue of government surveillance seems to have reached a crescendo over the last few days. It makes you wonder what the whole Draft Communications Data Bill was all about if “they” can already see everything.

I don’t even know whether encrypted communications are particularly secure anymore. I thought they were but does government secretly have the capability to do really advanced tech that is not in the public domain. Quite probably. We expect it of our own side and hope that we are better than the opposition (whoever they are) – the James Bond movie Skyfall confirmed that it goes on 🙂

I don’t know what to think about the whole privacy thing anymore though. Every online platform seems to know an awful lot about us. Tesco knows the intimate details of my lifestyle from what I buy from it. Google knows absolutely everything about what I’m doing with all my waking hours.

The old joke about a bloke having an affair with his secretary after work and then rubbing snooker chalk on his collar so that his wife would think he’d been playing with his mates doesn’t work any more. She just needs to follow his movements online, or have the difficult conversation about why he switched his phone off for an hour (5mins? 🙂 ) on his way home from work1 .

The Domesday scenario here is that all this information is opened for all to see, accidentally of otherwise. Worst case is that our bank accounts could be emptied.

Aside from ferociously safeguarding your bank password details, though it seems that crooks use back door techniques for breaking into accounts these days rather than brute force password hacks, it seems to me that we need to up the profile of the whole issue of security of our own personal data.

I can’t see how we can stop people/organisations from collecting this data but if they lose it or expose it for others to see then the penalties need to be suitably robust. The world needs to fast track a move to an online security conscious culture.

1 On Sunday I nipped out to the pub for a swift one before dinner and forgot my phone. When I got home there was a text message from my wife asking which pub I was in! Nothing was mentioned though.  I did feel an element of freedom being out without the mobile phone but was also conscious that the clock in the window of acceptability was ticking away.

Categories
Business spam

Louis Vuitton spam

Just emptied around 1,600 spam comments – good ole Akismet. Lots of it is for Louis Vuitton stuff.

I’ve never thought about buying anything from Louis Vuitton. Paying more than twenty quid for any sort of bag seems excessive to me. I was in a taxi in London on Friday and we passed the Louis Vuitton store. The driver said that apparently they just spent £60m on a shop refit! Shows how much profit there is in handbags.

Just took a look at their site – they do a lovely line in men’s clutch bags from £590 though you can pay a lot more. It’s not about the money though is it? 🙂

Categories
broken gear End User phones

50% of smartphones have broken screen

50% of smartphones have a broken screen. This is based on an extensive survey of the six phones in the Davies family.

The sceptics amongst you will say huh, what kind of sample size is that? My response is that we are just a normal family & I’d like to bet that pretty much most of you out there have had a screen go on their phone at some stage or other.

My kids use protective cases for their phones and despite this one of them has just had a crack in their screen. He hadn’t dropped the phone or bashed it in anyway to his knowledge. This isn’t good enough. Glass tech needs to improve.

It might be interesting to conduct a little survey here. How many of you have had a screen break on their phone at some stage? This isn’t a scientific survey but it will be interesting to see the results. I might also ask people to let me know if they have never had a screen break.

Let’s see what the results look like – answers as comments please.

Ciao…

Categories
broadband Business datacentre

Calling OnLincolnshire businesses #godigital2013 opportunity to visit the cloud

superfast broadband used to access cloud

an original picture of a cloudSuperfast broadband Lincolnshire – can your business afford to be without?

If you are a business in Lincolnshire you might well have noticed the noise that was created back in March with the announcement of the Superfast Broadband contract with BT. Well network rollout has been moving along and there is soon going to come a time when some of you will have to decide what to do with your shiny new broadband connection.

On Thursday 26th September Timico is holding an event at our Newark datacentre. A datacentre is basically where all the internet action happens. The types of service that you will access as a  business using your superfast broadband are all “manufactured” in one. You might have heard of the term “cloud” in respect of accessing online services. Well the Newark datacentre is part of the cloud.

The Timico event registration starts at 4.30 and will have three seminars/workshops covering

  1. what you can do with the datacentre/cloud,
  2. taking advantage of your superfast broadband with emerging phone technology (inc hands on demos)
  3. what you can do with online marketing and social media.

We will finish at 7.15. If you are a business about to get superfast broadband for the first time, attending this event will be time well spent at the end of your business day. It isn’t restricted to Lincolnshire businesses. Anyone can come.

To register your interest you can drop an email to [email protected] or get in touch with [email protected]. Sandra runs our business “centre of excellence” and is a top source of information in this space.

The Timico datacentre is at the Brunel Business Park, in Newark. Bit more spiel here.

Superfast broadband Lincolnshire – how will your business use it?

Categories
Engineer internet ofcom

Ofcom slow news – 98% of tablet owners use them to connect to the internet

August is normally a deadly quiet month. Almost to the extent that it would be very easy to say I might as well take the whole month off. This year seems to be different. We are rushed off our feet. It’s all good stuff. I’m not complaining. Just saying that we are very busy.

August is also normally a very quiet news month. The media resorts to headlines such as “Boy’s ice cream melts before he could finish it” and other riveting slow news day reports. The one bit of news that you could set your watch by every year in August is the Ofcom Communications Market Report. This year it came out when I was on holiday in North Wales and observing radio silence so I’ve only just noticed it. On that basis whatever I might say on the subject has possibly already been said.

Notwithstanding that the Ofcom CMR usually has some nuggets worth looking at. The first that stands out is the headline saying:

“Total UK revenues from telecoms, TV, radio, and post fell for the fourth successive year in 2012.  These services generated £59.5bn in revenues during the year, a £0.1bn (0.2%) fall compared to 2011 as a £0.7bn fall in telecoms revenues was offset by increasing TV, radio and post revenues.”

This is interesting because our use of the internet is growing massively. This might lead you to naturally conclude that the revenues for businesses operating in that market are growing. Certainly this is true for Timico.

It is clear though that for the industry as a whole the model is changing. Old fashioned lines of business are changing. ISDN is being replaced by SIP trunks – telephony by VoIP. The cost of minutes has plummeted largely to a fixed monthly fee per subscriber. Broadband prices are also at rock bottom, particularly for consumers. The government is right when it says we have one of the most competitive markets in the world.

This is also true for mobile and whilst people might whinge about mobile prices the mobile operators are struggling with their gross margins. These large telcos are still seen as fat organisations paying fat salaries and there is probably some way to go on the cost cutting side before mobile markets reach the bottom.

Everyone in the game is trying to modernise their business model. The money must still be there. It is just going elsewhere. One clue is in the growth in TV, radio and post revenues. People must be using their internet connection to spend money. In our house we probably watch more TV over the internet that on the actual TV itself. Including the advertising. We also buy a lot more stuff over the internet than we used to, hence the rise in postal revenues. It’s mostly not downloaded. It comes in a van.

As the world moves more “onto the internet” the one thing that is becoming more and more important is the integrity and the quality of the internet connection. This is particularly true for businesses who are increasingly growing to depend on revenues that rely in one way or another on connectivity to make them happen. For example if you own an ecommerce site then every minute of downtime means lost revenues. Similarly in the physical retail world, most payments are processed using broadband connections. Lose the connection and lose the lolly.

However people might be spending their cash this represents a huge opportunity for the telco that can respond to change. They just have to look up and look forward and not dwell on what was.

One final note. Ofcom bless em do have a way of stating the bleedin obvious. They tell us that nearly all (98%) tablet owners say they use their tablets to connect to the internet. One wonders what the other 2% use their tablets for?!

Gotta go. Busy busy busy.

Categories
End User internet

I bought a barbecue

bbqWe used to have an Australian Gas Barbecue. It was great. My wife isn’t a big fan of barbecues because you never know how long the charcoal is going to take to get to the right temperature for cooking. With 4 kids to feed this was important. It was an expensive piece of kit but did a terrific job, passed scrutiny with Mrs Davies and we used to use it pretty often during the summer.

Unfortunately it eventually rusted away and the price of spare parts was such that I could almost have bough a new one instead so we left it to rot around the back of the playhouse at the bottom of the garden. It was taken to the tip last year.

To replace it we bought a stainless steel charcoal barbecue that turned into a fire pit once you had finished cooking. This, like its gas predecessor is also a great piece of kit. We have had marvellous evenings sat outside drinking beer and strumming the ole geetar. The wood smoke keeps the mozzies away – I’m particularly prone to being bitten by insects. They love me.

The downside of this charcoal barbecue is of course that it doesn’t get used as often for reasons you already know. That’s life Jim.

Now I have a big wedding anniversary coming up later this month and we will have 80 or so guests coming to lunch. In our back garden. We are pushing the boat out – barrel of TT Landlord, some posh pop and a barbecue (dress code – Hawaiian shirts). Unfortunately our charcoal barbecue is not big enough to cook for 80 people in a timely manner.

I’ve used this as an excuse to invest in a new gas barbecue. A Weber. Comes with a warranty for all parts and has “Flavoriser®” bars. Other than the fact that it needs assembling I am a happy Tref. Our guests shall have sausages 🙂

When you buy an expensive piece of kit you don’t do it without significant online research first. I feel I already know our barbecue in intimate detail  even though it doesn’t get delivered until next week.

The problem I now have, and this is really the point of the post, is that having made my buying decision and paid for the product Google is still bombarding me with ads for Weber barbecues. I no longer need these ads. There needs to be a box for me to tick telling Google and their paying advertisers that they are wasting their time. Someone else now has my money (B&Q).

I realise such a mechanism would be open to abuse – people who haven’t yet bought their barbecue might also tick the box thus denying sellers of Weber barbecues the opportunity to get their pitch across. This I feel is a risk worth taking. The feature is clearly a winner. It is surely just a matter of time.

I’ll finish off this technologically tenuous post by letting you know that the old charcoal barbecue will still get used, mostly as a fire pit I imagine. Anyone in Lincoln over August Bank Holiday weekend should listen out for sounds of a guitar and strains of cumbaya emanating from a back garden. It’ll be me.

Video below is of the barbecue betting its annual clean.

Categories
Business online safety spam

spam blocking strategies

Trefor DaviesI am pretty aggressive in protecting my gmail account from unwanted email. The Timico mail is beyond redemption after years of attending trade shows although my strategy of signing up as The Reverend or Lord Trefor Davies seems to be working. Any mail or phone calls I get for one of those titles gets shoved straight in the bin.

The main problem I have with my trefor.net/gmail account is people wanting to sell me SEO or web development services. Often these emails come with elaborate messaging in the footer telling me that this is absolutely not spam and that they provide an unsubscribe function. However they usually can’t be bothered to find out my name and address the email as Hi. On this basis I tell Google that they are spammers. It gives me pleasure.

I’ve started to add similar emails to my block list on my Microsoft Exchange account. This morning someone I have never heard of from a company I have never heard from invited me to hook up on LinkedIn. I ignored it. This afternoon that same person has sent me a generic mailer addressed to “Hi”. If he went to the effort of looking me up on LinkedIn he might as well have gone that extra step and added my name into the email!

Ciao baby…

Categories
End User internet social networking

Google Author Ranking

Acting on advice I recently signed up for Google Author Ranking. Google is apparently changing the way it rates content for SEO purposes by looking for quality original content. One of the ways Google determines original content is by linking that content with a specific author.

Having gone through what appeared to be a hit and miss process in establishing the “Authorship” (you will notice a Google+ link at the bottom right of the main page of this blog) I’ve suddenly started to get a lot more Google Alerts highlighting mentions of my name. These links can be quite old but that doesn’t matter. It’s a sign that the Google system knows it’s me being mentioned in online articles.

So it does, at a very cursory glance, seem that getting signed up for Google Author Ranking is worthwhile. There is a long dialogue going on about what Google is trying to achieve in evolving its methods of search ratings. Not the least of the debating points is the idea that Google is trying to increase monetisation of its search product at the expense of traditional PR Agencies – check out this ZDNet article here.

Now I am a Google fan. I use a lot of the company’s products. However this does make you wonder whether the company is using its significant market power in an anti competitive way. Google is certainly being very clever.

One the one hand who can argue with changes that improve the quality of your search results. On the other hand tying people more and more to the Google ecosystem is in the long run likely to lead to less choice and a more costly product.  The market is too complicated and global for anyone to regulate against this as we did in the UK for example with the old BT monopoly of the communications market (we also seem slowly to be regressing to the old monopolistic state in the UK).

I’m not sure anyone would be able to articulate how you would make changes to a Google monopoly in any case. In the meantime I think we just have to get on and figure out how best we live in the Google world. What are we going to do? Stop trying to get online visibility just because we think Google is trying to make even more money out of us?

That’s all folks.

Categories
Cloud datacentre End User social networking

We interrupt this vacation with a public service blog #bloggade

Trefor Davies (@tref/Timico/trefor.net), Matt Russell (@mattdrussell/WebHostingBuzz), Neville Hobson (@jangles/Neville Hobson/For Immediate Release) and Andrew Grill (@AndrewGrill/Kred) cordially invite you to Bloggade, Newark, 21st August.

Bloggade, the collective noun for a gathering of bloggers, is a meeting of minds where you will learn tips and tricks about blogging and WordPress.

The focus of this first Bloggade is on the underlying technology that powers many WordPress blogs. You’ll experience a tour of Timico’s £5m Midlands datacentre that opened in 2012, and see at first hand the technology that powers the web including many WordPress blogs hosted with WebHostingBuzz at the datacentre.

We have round table discussions planned on WordPress hosting, hardware, search engine optimization and more, all addressing the topics from a non-technical perspective, but in the true round table spirit – anything and everything to do with WordPress is up for discussion.

Bring your questions, comments and experiences!

After the discussion, we’ll migrate to a top class local pub where light snacks and drinks will be provided courtesy of Timico. We hope to continue the WordPress-oriented discussion and share tips/success stories/ideas.

Agenda:

12.30 Arrive at the Timico Newark Datacentre – intros & coffee

13.00 Blogger round table – hardware, servers, hosting and more including a look at the latest WordPress release 3.6

14.00 Data centre tour

14.30 Blogger round table – SEO and how to your WordPress blog a highly effective business tool

15.15 Panel discussion – experiences and best practices for getting the most from the WordPress content management system

16.00 Migrate to pub for light refreshments (pub name/location tbc)

18.00 Refreshments finish, event ends.

Tickets, which are totally free of charge, can be found here

Travel Guidelines

The event is being held at the Timico Datacentre in Newark, NG24 2AG. If you are driving then you should come directly to that location where there is ample secure parking.  If you are coming by train – Timico’s HQ (NG24 2TN) in Newark is a 15 minute walk from Newark Northgate railway station (1hr 20mins from Kings X). This is an easy walk alogn a footpath that runs parallel to the railway line or a 2 minute taxi ride. The Datacentre and HQ buildings are next to each other.

There are trains every half hour or so from Kings Cross – the 11.08 will get you in at 12.30 which should be perfect timing unless you wanted to get there earlier and take in a little of “Historic Newark” beforehand.

Categories
competitions End User

Royal baby name competition winners

And the winner is… Well 27 of you got one of the names right and 4 of you got two of them. If nobody got it completely right I was going to pick one “innovative” winner but this doesn’t seem fair considering the 4 “2 namers” and I’m not about to buy 4 bottles of champagne. I’m going to give everyone a fabulous Timico mug (assuming we have enough otherwise it’s first come first serve)  and the top four will also get some other stuff that I can find in the marketing cabinet. You will have to let me have an address to send these things to (tref at trefor dot net).

Alternatively if the top four would like to write a guest post on a subject of their choosing then that would be perfectly acceptable – keep it clean – the editor’s (ie me) decision is final. Let me know.

I’m on holiday for two weeks after this Friday so delivery might be slightly delayed unless I can persuade someone do do the fulfilment for me in my absence.

It’s been a great competition and a big thanks to everyone for entering. Also it’s such a relief that we won’t have to worry about the royal succession for  long time now innit? 🙂 Old Henry VIII would be v jealous if he weren’t dead.

The list of people with at least one right guess is provided below. If you think your name should be on it by all means let me know. I’m only human you know:)

Dantiumpro: Alexander Harold George Windsor
The fishing Gardener: George , Philip, Louis, William,
paul h: Louis George Philip Arthur
Mike P: David George Richard Louis Wales
maggie fawcett: George
Matt Benson: Henry George James
harry singh: George Charles Windsor
Kate b: George Arthur
Phil Veale: Philip, George and Andrew.
Alistair: James George
Jayne: Henry George Edward
Victoria: Galbraith George William
craig: George
Sam Trendall: George Richard Samuel Windsor
Lucy Knighton: James George William Windsor
Emma H: George William Richard Windsor
Erica ward: Frederick Alexander
Rob Pickering: Louis Charles
Brian Sentance: Charles Louis
Gary Hough: George, Michael, Edward Windsor
hansk: George William Charles
chris: Arthur George Henry Philip Windsor
Andrew Ellis: George
Kate B: George Charles Edward James
Beverley: James Charles Louis William
Liz Cowley: Edward James George
Ewan: George Charles Mountbatten Windsor
Annette Sames: Peter Louis William. Windsor.
Faye: George, with Charles, Richard and James
Michael Green: George Reginald
Lee: George William Charles Windsor

Categories
Engineer security

Is Huawei in your network a national security concern?

I am reminded that yesterday’s post on how would Huawei spy on your network has an additional dimension in the UK in that a significant chunk of BT’s 21CN infrastructure is based on the Chinese vendor’s kit. I hadn’t noticed that this hit the headlines a couple of months ago.

The BT Huawei deal would have been based on very attractive commercials spread over the lifetime of the contract. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on its wisdom from a national security perspective. I don’t have any details to suppose there is a risk other than what I already covered yesterday and then I couldn’t assess the level of risk. That’s somebody’s job.

One wonders whether the powers that be might be might at this very moment be redrawing rules of engagement for secure national networks roll-outs. I can’t imagine that UK defence networks touch any part of 21CN anyway. They will be totally separate. Won’t they?

Access to non defence networks that are strategic could also be a problem. For example how are all our power stations connected? The telecommunications infrastructure itself? Imagine if nobody could make a phone call or send an email for a week? How about the oil refineries? No oil = everywhere grinds to a halt. I’m sure you can come up with other scenarios.

I dunno.

PS takes me a while to catch up with the news, I know.

Categories
End User internet security voip

How to tell if a phone call is going to be a scammer

Most people have picked up scam phone call at sometime in their recent short lives. I’ve noticed that they all have similar characteristics in that when you pick up the phone there is always a second or two of silence followed by a foreign voice saying “can I speak to Mr Davies please?” (replace Davies with your own name obv). It’s down to the latency over the internet.

It’s also because they are using some cheapo poor quality VoIP service. Thinking about it, their conversion rate would be much higher if they spent a bit more cash on better quality comms. The quality of their internet access is particularly important although in their case it might not make that much difference as I suspect the packets are traversing the internet for most of their journey. A good quality VoIP provider will hardly touch the internet, if at all.

I’ve adopted the practice, upon hearing the noisy silence before the attempt at a con, of being very familiar “I thought it was you. I wondered when you were going to call”. This tends to confuse them momentarily. All these scammers sound the same to me anyway. It’s probably the bad line but it might always be the same person. Would explain how they always seem to know my name.

That’s how you tell it’s a scammer. It’s all about the noisy silence before they realise you’ve answered the phone.

A public service blog post from trefor.net

Categories
End User internet online safety security

The return of the “virus on your Microsoft PC” scam #speedytechies @TeamViewer

The “you have a virus on your Microsoft PC” scam is back. I thought they had locked up the people responsible and this was dead. Like everything related to the internet crime – spam, botnets they always find a way back.

I got home from work on Friday and took a call from Anna of http://speedytechies.com/. They apparently have thousands of staff servicing thousands of customers every day despite the fact that the website is only around 3 months old. Pretty impressive business growth.

Either that or Anna is lying and she doesn’t work for speedytechies. She sounded as if she was from India or maybe the Philippines – that general part of the world anyway.

http://speedytechies.com/ is owned by a small business based at a residential address in Houston Texas. You can easily find out lots of info about the business and its owner by shelling out a few dollars to an online resource that does this kind of thing. Not worth it because the chances are the scammer has nothing to do with this guy. Slightly suspicious that the website is only 3 months old though.

Anna wanted me to go to www.teamviewer.com so that she could take over my laptop to check out the virus. www.teamviewer.com looks like a legit site though it would be interesting to audit their list of paying customers to get a trail back to the scammers.

Anna gave me a phone number to call back if I had a problem: 18007137734. The line with Anna was not great so it might be wrong and don’t know where it terminates as I’ve not tried ringing it. Her line quality kept disappearing so she was probably using Skype or some similar OTT service.

I guess it would be possible to trace where Anna was calling from and compile a list of times that her ilk had tried the scam. It isn’t easy though for a punter and it would take a concerted effort from a number of stakeholders. It would be easier if the whole world was VoIP but it isn’t. Also the level of individual harm that will probably accrue from a single incident is not worth the effort it would take. This would have to be coordinated on a wide scale to build up a body of evidence for cross border efforts/cooperation to kick in.

That’s all for now. Ciao.