Categories
broadband Business ofcom

A Plea from a Staffordshire Broadband Enthusiast


Hello Tref,

My name is Scott Wakefield. I am a broadband enthusiast and I live in Brocton, Stafford. I have recently come along your website to understand that you have connections with BT, and potentially other companies. Brocton is somewhat a rural area and as you would expect, BT do not care for our community. After ruthless complaining and many letters, emails and phone calls, neither BT, Virgin Media, Stafford Borough Council, Staffordshire County Council, the ISPA or Ofcom will do anything about it.

My area receives on average between 0.05Mbps – 0.17Kbps (50Kbps – 170Kbps) which is staggeringly slow. When I called up Virgin Media (whom is my current ISP as I switched from BT since a BT engineer thought I was being capped), I was guaranteed that I would receive “the slowest would be of 0.5 and the maximum would be 2.4Mbps”

Continue reading “A Plea from a Staffordshire Broadband Enthusiast”
Categories
Business dns internet scams security surveillance & privacy

Nominet – judge and jury of the world wide web?

We, the world, are still finding our feet on the internet, or more accurately the world wide web. The www is a great place to be and at the same time full of pitfalls and nasties. Much like real, physical life really. I taught my kids not to take sweeties from strangers – that applies on or offline.  In recent years I’ve added “don’t click on links you aren’t sure of” and probably a few other words of advice specific to tinterweb.

That’s a piece of wisdom relating to the www that had he but known it shows Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in action. Survival of the fittest and all that.

It isn’t just the consumer that is still trying to understand the landscape of the www. Government is, business is, as I said we all are.

The good folks at .uk registry Nominet are also trying to understand where they fit into all this. Nominet has come under scrutiny in recent years over its corporate governance.

Continue reading “Nominet – judge and jury of the world wide web?”
Categories
Apps Engineer media olympics

2012 – Summer of Sports on Steroids – BBC estimates more than 2x Football World Cup traffic levels

growth in BBC iPlayer coverage of Olympics2012 or as the BBC puts it “Summer of Sports on Steroids” 1 is going to be another milestone year for the ISP industry with the UK playing host to the Olympic games and another record anticipated for internet traffic levels. On Wednesday at the ISPA conference we had Jane Weedon, Controller of Business Development at the BBC talking about their preparations for the games.

The coverage in 2012 is going to be comprehensive with pretty much 100% of the sport available to watch as it happens – up to 27 simultaneous channels at the peak towards the end of the second week. This will have grown from perhaps 15-20% of coverage at the Sydney games 35% in Athens and 65% in Beijing (click on the header photo for graphic illustration).

The peak traffic during the South Africa Football World Cup hit 450Gbps with everyone going online to watch the EnglandiPlayer traffic levels during Football World Cup v Slovenia match. For perspective this year so far iPlayer traffic has peaked atiplayer traffic levels in 2011 220Gbps.

So look out ISPs.

The forecasting of traffic levels for these games is in reality going to be very difficult. On the higher demand side the games are on home territory and will appeal to a wider demographic than the Football World Cup. To counter this device proliferation may lead to the streaming being distributed over a wider range of media – 3G mobiles and tablets, public WiFi zones, offices providing big TV screens and the fact that many folk may well take the two weeks of the games off on holiday.

Medals success for Team GB is also going to be an influencing factor.

The Beeb has gone into significant detail in estimating demand on a session by session basis and has come up with a forecast of  10 x the traffic levels for London as they saw in Beijing. That’s 1Terabits a second 2  at the peak in streams averaging 1Mbps.

That’s enough Olympic bits for the moment but there is so much interest in this subject looking ahead I’m going  to be looking out for more Olympic stories to share.

1 Steroids is perhaps an unfortunate word to use in this context

2  Nobody is going to hold them to this forecast but it certainly gives us all an indication of what to expect

Categories
broadband Business

Industry Says UK Will Not Have “Best Superfast Broadband Network in Europe by 2015” #ISPAUK #digitalbritain

Ask an audience question regarding UK superfast broadband, get a response. And an unhoped for response at that.

126 people registered for the ISPA conference at 1 New Change, St Paul’s today. A broad representation of the ISP industry. Most of them were there for my session entitled “Making the UK the best place in Europe for broadband by 2015”.

The discussion was wide ranging including statements such as:
It will be 2025 before the UK has a competitive fibre network
The government shouldn’t be spending any money on subsidising rural broadband
The government should spend more money on subsidising rural broadband
The uk should do its best by 2015 (?!)

Most interestingly in a vote to finish off the session I asked the audience “who thinks the uk will have the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015?” aka the government objective.

Only one person, from BT, put their hands up (and there were at least 5 BT employees in the audience). Turning the question around as a check I asked who thought that the UK would not have the best superfast broadband network by 2015. Most hands went up.

I think the debate and the political rhetoric needs to change to reflect this.

PS the conference was held at the offices of K&LGates. They have wonderful views over St Paul’s cathedral. I have some photos but these will have to wait until I get back to my laptop. The iPad isn’t a good tool for putting photos into blogs.

Categories
broken gear Engineer internet

Broken internet

“The internet is broken”. Uh? This is a common complaint a) from my wife who isn’t particularly technology savvy and b) from people whose broadband connection has gone down for whatever reason.

Yesterday this complaint, slightly tongue in cheek, came from our development engineering team. US network operator Level3 had a problem with a bug in it’s Juniper routers. This affected access to quite a few websites worldwide and is certainly likely to have hit more than a few ISPs. Word is that this was BGP related and leads to the need to reboot the Juniper kit. In fact a number of ISPs issued emergency maintenance window alerts last night so that they could upgrade to newer versions of their Junos operating system.

Most of the time you can live with a bug – design around it perhaps.I’m sure the problem will get sorted. My observations here though relate to the

Continue reading “Broken internet”
Categories
broadband Business

When is a Spade Not a Spade? When it’s a Superspade! #BT

BT's new spade for digging through Tarmac and reducing the cost of civil engineeringNo surface is too tough for superspade. Grass and soil it doesn’t even notice. This baby likes to flex its muscles by digging up tarmac. In fact it is so soft on your hands that labourers using it are often mistaken for office workers (until they ask for four sugars in their tea and give the game away).

Most people have a whinge about BT somewhere in their portfolio of anecdotes. Last week I found myself in the slightlyBT's new spade for digging through Tarmac and reducing the cost of civil engineering unusual position of heaping praise on the company! Now I’m adding more positive comments!

BT Group has announced a series of innovations that on the face of it are largely aimed at reducing the cost of digging in fibre. These include:

  • a new spade that can cut through tarmac eliminating the need for a separate “civils “team
  • micro-trenching for faster deployment in environmentally sensitive areas
  • a mini DSLAM to provide cost effective coverage for low density areas and multi-tenant dwelling units (ie blocks of flats)
  • conductive concrete – a cost effective option for meeting electrical safety needs and which lowers civils costs
  • a polymer based plinth that allows faster, lower cost all-weather deployment and which is environmentally friendly and
  • a power supply infrastructure that removes the need for a meter installation visit and reduces deployment time by two weeks.

I can almost hear the deep intakes of breath and the look of amazement on your faces as you read this. I’m not sure whether your incredulity is down to not believing that BT could innovate in this space or whether you think that these developments are not particularly significant.

Well actually whilst each of these innovations may seem trivial what they collectively do is send out a signal that BT is trying to do something about the aspect of it’s business that is often criticised as being one of the barriers to cost effective fibre broadband rollout (FTTC & FTTP) and that is the cost of digging trenches.

When the Caio Report came out in 2009 it quoted a figure of £29Bn as the cost of rolling out fibre to every home in the UK. Of this something like £24Bn was supposedly the civil engineering cost.

Looking at it simplistically you can see that halving the cost of the civil engineering effort has a massive effect on the total cost of the network roll out with, presumably, a knock-on positive effect on the business case.

I have no idea how the announcements herein will affect the overall costs for BT. Only time will tell. For now at least the messaging is right.

Categories
Business gaming internet Net ofcom social networking UC voip

The Demographics of Communications

TV watching in decline amongst younger demographicIt’s a bit of a dank dismal day here in the shires and I have the office aircon on “heat”. Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind this weather – it reminds me of my childhood and in particular of wet Sunday afternoons spent watching the black and white cowboy film on BBC2, maybe playing a game of Monopoly and then the excitement of Songs of Praise with Harry Secombe after tea. The highlight of the day was the comedy on Radio 4 at 6.30 or 7pm.

I’m not sure why I’ve “gone nostalgic” all of a sudden especially when those Sunday afternoons were really boring and often used to lead to rows amongst us kids.

These days our kids still argue despite having an incredible range of things to do on a Sunday. After the F1 there’s the XBox and, well more Xbox. Then there’s the Xbox!

Reality is that other than the Simpsons the kids only watch TV when one of their parents decides

Continue reading “The Demographics of Communications”
Categories
Business Cloud datacentre

Hey presto – we have a car park

car park at the new Timico data centreFunny how we get excited by little things. The other day I came into the office in the afternoon and they had started putting down the Tarmac for the carpark.  Like lightning I whipped out my trusty phone Galaxy S2 and took a photo.Car park at the new Timico data centre in Newark

Today I got up from our fortnightly management meeting and hey presto, someone had painted white lines on the Tarmac. It’s very odd but somehow this makes it all look real. Note no executive parking spots.  The early engineer gets the space nearest the door:)

To my knowledge this is also the first UK data centre to provide a kennel for the guard dogs. I am happy to be corrected here. This key piece of infrastructure arrives on 28th November and I’m sure there will be a photo shoot. Get down Shep!

Categories
broadband Business

The Timico Chilli Eating Champion Lays Down His Asbestos Gauntlet or What has a Chilli Got to Do with FTTC?

Naga Bhut Jolokia & FTTCWe breed ’em hard at Timico.  Inset is a photo of Timico engineer Gareth Bryan1 who during long weeks out on the road doing customer installs developed a penchant for hot food. Rather than sit in his room at the Marriot/Holiday Inn/Thistle  Travelodge he would seek out the nearest curry house and experiment with his passion for Indian food. AfterTimico, Naga Bhut Jolokia & FTTC months of this he has built up an immunity to your everyday vindaloo.

Now promoted to third line tech support and in the office a lot more he no longer has the same opportunities to indulge during the evenings and been driven to experiment with home cooking.

Gareth, who today passed his CCNA exam with flying colours (well done mate),  is holding a small packet of Dried Naga Bhut Jolokia chillies grown in India and supposedly 4,000 times hotter than Tabasco sauce.  In other words absolutely lethal. So lethal in fact that Diane our Health And Safety person has made him sign them into the Timico dangerous deliveries and noxious substances book2.

They smell disgusting – using asbestos protected nostrils I

Continue reading “The Timico Chilli Eating Champion Lays Down His Asbestos Gauntlet or What has a Chilli Got to Do with FTTC?”
Categories
broadband Business

Who Wants to Trial the 80Meg FTTC Broadband? #digitalbritain

BT is looking for a few good people to trial their 80/20 FTTC broadband product. Interested?

The title says it all. BT has announced the schedule for the 80Meg down 20Meg up Fibre To The Cabinet product and we will be looking for trialists.

The first stage of the process involves a change to the DSLAM profile.  This activity is already underway and should be completed by January. The new frequencies that allow FTTC broadband to run faster will also be programmed in to the Openreach OSS system by January to allow the line checker to work at the higher speed.

In early January there will be a limited technical trial with up to 150 existing customers followed by a wider trial with no restriction on numbers between Jan 28th and the end of March 2012. The only caveat here, apart from the usual guarantees that there are no guarantees, is that users participating in the trials must be able to get a minimum downstream speed of 15Mbit/s and a minimum upstream speed of 5Mbit/s on their existing FTTC.

Note the availability checker will only be able to show product variants of up to 40Mbps until the formal launch later in 2012.  It’s certainly an exciting week for FTTC news.

Note also it is quite possible that we are entering the domain of inadequate wifi performance on individual routers. Whether yours can handle 80Megs is something to consider.

Anyway if you are interested in testing the 80/20 FTTC broadband product drop me a line on [email protected] (obviously your cabinet has to be FTTC enabled!) and I will get back to you as soon as we have more info.

If you want to find out more about FTTC check out the resources here  . Commercials here.

Categories
End User fun stuff

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah @ the #dentist

areas of life that need technologyI am currently on hold to the dentist trying to rearrange a dental appointment for one of the kids. This is with a national chain. What I really want to be able to do is go online and alter the date to an available slot earlier in the same day.

As it is I am now three minutes into the call listening to some bland violin music with occasional platitudes apologising for the delay.

The last time I took the kid there we arrived ten minutes early only to be told that we were actually forty minutes early. Whoever had written the letter for the appointment had made a mistake including calling him Miss J Davies. Harrumph. The dentist  was also running late so we were in that waiting room for an hour looking at magnolia paint, posters selling toothbrushes and flicking through copies of “Country Homes”1 from 2009.

Continue reading “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah @ the #dentist”
Categories
broadband Business

BT FTTC Schedule Updates

Seeing as we had all the news about BT pulling forward the FTTC exchange rollout dates this morning I thought I’d provide updated copies of the schedule. Not as much as some would like for the future ones but the info will come

Anyway here we have:

Exchanges Accepting orders now

Exchanges Coming soon and

Future Exchanges

The files download separately as XL spreadsheets. Mine goes live in March next year.

Thought you would also be interested to see a note I got from BT Wholesale last week:

We are pleased to announce that we will soon be inviting all Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) customers to a trial of the upcoming WBC FTTC 80Mbit/s downstream 20Mbit/s upstream product option.

Faster FTTC is on its way.

Categories
Business video voip voip hardware

I have seen the light, opened the door and been let in by ProTalk

Protalk SIP based door entry systemI love it when our engineers come up to me and say “want to see something interesting?”. Today one of our top VoIP engineers showed me the ProTalk IP (SIP) antivandal door entry unit.  This is a rock solid door entry system controlled by SIP video phone.

Pressing the button initiates a sip call to the number / call group of your choice, sets up a video call upon being answeredProTalk SIP door entry system from ProVu and allows the operator to open the door remotely by keying in a prearranged number.  The system will in theory work with any SIP video phone – we have tested it with the SNOM 8xx series and a number of soft clients.

It should even work on mobile SIP clients – any SIP phone that can generate a DTMF tone. At Timico it is being tested as part of the security for the new data centre but it is easy to imagine it being used in many application areas.

I could even envisage using it at home – kids forget their key and you not in the house? They push the button and you answer on your smart phone and let them in.

ProTalk is a product of ProVu communications in Huddersfield.  They are good lads and worth taking a look at.

Isn’t technology marvelous!

Categories
broadband Engineer

Superfast Broadband: Pat on the Back for BT #FTTC

It’s fast moving this new web based world of ours. Some of it is faster moving than others.  This morning I woke up to the news (in the twitter stream – thanks to @ruskin147) that BT was looking to pull forward the rollout plans for “superfast” broadband. To do this the company is taking on an additional 520 engineers and bringing forward £300m of spend.

Competition is great. Clearly Virgin, with its 100Mbps service, is forcing the pace here. BT is saying that by 2014 it will be serving two thirds of the population with download speeds of 70 – 100Mbps.

I realise that I have occasionally been known to be a critic of those responsible for our national broadband infrastructure. On this occasion I’m going to hold back and say to BT:  Well done. This is a good decision. Keep it coming.

Continue reading “Superfast Broadband: Pat on the Back for BT #FTTC”

Categories
Cloud datacentre Engineer

Data centre finishing touches featuring Tim and Neil

Timico Marketing Director Neil Armstrong savours a duck kebab in food tasting - prep for Timico Data Centre opening partyracks in the new Timico data centreIt won’t be long inside an empty rack in the Timico data centre now before we actually move in to the new data centre and start kitting it out. The racks are going in as I write and the header photo shows Marketing Director Neil Armstrong working his way through a full sample buffet in preparation for the big opening night in January. His attention to detail means that he has to taste every dish.  Hollow legs that man and not an inch of excess weight on him!

Pictured below is Timico chairman Tim Radford trying to find his way out of the maze of racks.

Tim Radford inspects a row of racks in the Timico data centre

Categories
Engineer internet

GigaOm roadmap conference looks great

It has always been the case that all the action in the tech industry has been in the USA. Today in the screaming plasma1 suspended between Silicon Valley and San Fransisco this is more than ever the case.

Next month GigaOm has organised a conference in San Francisco that illustrates my point.  Take a look at the schedule. The breadth of the content squeezed into one day is mind blowing. Am I alone in wondering how the brain can keep up with it all?  There is a live stream which in my mind will be well worth tuning in to if you can though nothing can replace actually being there.

It dismays me somewhat that you can’t get this quality of event in the UK. Even if we tried we wouldn’t get the same speakers.

I’ve pasted the schedule below. Not particularly original of me but lets you have a quick glance at what’s going on.

1 white heat doesn’t adequately describe it.

Continue reading “GigaOm roadmap conference looks great”
Categories
competitions End User

Caption competition – demise of the Bb Trumpet

tarmac being laid on the carpark of the new Timico data centre in NewarkAs we approach the final days of the Timico data centre build the lads are putting down the tarmac in the car park. This is quite convenient as I happened to be in need of a steam roller – assuming that’s what they still call them despite the absence of steam. If you can’t get the video below to work then there’s a link here to the original YouTube location.

Here are a few other photos mapping the before and after. There’s a prize of the best caption for the “after” shot – entries left as comments please 🙂

site manager Nigel has a word with the driver of the roller Site manager Nigel has a word with the driver of the roller. In case you were wondering my 14 year old plays the trumpet.  He found this in a skip at his school and decided it would go well on his bedroom wall in a slightly altered stateBb Trumpet on my desk at the Timico offices

Bb Trumpet after a tussle with the rollerJust to finish off an artistic view of the air conditioning fans outside the data centre:)

fans line up outside the Timico Newark Data centre

Categories
Business Regs surveillance & privacy

Newsbin2 court ruling means BT has to ask permission to perform maintenance on network

The High Court this morning ruled that BT would have to block Newzbin2 within 14 days and pay its own costs.  The ruling can be read here.

It’s an interesting read and seems to run roughshod over BT – there seem to be no guarantees that the same order would be made against other ISPs which puts BT at a competitive disadvantage.

Seems crazy, but BT also now needs to seek authorisation from the movie studios when it wants to perform maintenance on their Cleanfeed filtering system, if the studios don’t reply quickly, then BT can apply to the courts to be allowed to do this – extract from the ruling below:

Continue reading “Newsbin2 court ruling means BT has to ask permission to perform maintenance on network”
Categories
End User mobile connectivity phones

Lumia is light – a new dawn for Nokia?

Nokia World in London October 2011Nokia CEO Stephen Elop launches Lumia smart phones at Nokia World Just finished watching the NokiaWorld webcast.  I don’t watch many of these but last week I also happened to dip into the RIM event and it must be said that there is a world of difference between the two. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop appears to be one of the better front men of the big mobile and platform providers though the language he used was very carefully chosen and was filled with sentences that seemed to me to be the product of long days in the marketing department meeting room.

Nokia today launched the Lumia range of smart phones. In Elop’s words “Lumia is light – a new dawn for Nokia”. This is the “big one”. The one that has to work and which has several shirts and a house riding on it.

Based on the Windows Phone OS the Lumia has 6 times more marketing budget

Continue reading “Lumia is light – a new dawn for Nokia?”
Categories
Apps Cloud End User xaas

Computing As A Service – family bundle #CAAS #Tesco #Acer #Microsoft

I know I said I might well have bought my last laptop for the family but my wife’s 10 year old PC is spinning the last few thousand rotations of its hard drive and software is starting to malfunction.  So she is getting our daughter’s 7 year old perfectly good machine and we are buying the final year 6th form girl a laptop.

The Tesco website has an Acer 5742 for £399. It has an Intel Core i3, a 750gig hard drive and 4 gigs of RAM.  The crunch though is the copy of Microsoft Office 2010 home and business £204.22. She ain’t getting that.

It’s a graphic illustration that the money isn’t in the hardware but in the software. You do also have to wonder

Continue reading “Computing As A Service – family bundle #CAAS #Tesco #Acer #Microsoft”
Categories
Business internet

UK drops to 25th in league table of internet connection speeds, 15th in Europe – Akamai @edvaizey

Flicking, as one does, through the Akamai State of the Internet Report for Q2 2011 I note that the average internet connection speed for the UK in the second quarter was 5Mbps1.

The good news is that this is up 9% from the previous quarter and 28% year on year.

Unfortunately the bad news is that the UK is not keeping pace with its competitors. I last looked at these stats in January 2011. In Q3 2010 the UK was placed 17th globally for average internet connection speed with 11 European countries ahead of us.

In Q2’11 we are down to 25th globally with 15 other European countries ahead of us. 14 European countries had a higher year on year growth than the UK.

Now I’m sure someone from DCMS2 will come out of the woodwork with some other indicators that show how the UK is going  to have the best  superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015. I don’t think we really need to spend time arguing this one. Perhaps someone could just explain to me how we are going to do it. The Akamai stats suggest that we are going backwards not forwards.

1 I know I’m a couple of weeks late with this one but I was all at sea when the report came out and I’ve only just read it. Also I’m not sure how many commentators have really looked at the relative progress within Europe – from what I can see they have mainly chosen to comment on the gap between advertised speeds and reality.

2 Department of Culture Media and Sports – responsible for “the internet” within government.

Categories
broadband Engineer

Busman’s Holiday Touring FTTC Broadband Cabinets and FTTP Update

A little rugby, a FTTC broadband cabinet or two, all in a Sunday’s walk.

leaning against an FTTC cabinet in Leamington SpaOn Sunday morning I was walking with a couple of my kids from our hotel in Leamington Spa to my oldest son’s flat, where we went to watch the Rugby World Cup final. To my utter delight, I came across a  FTTC broadband cabinet and insisted we stop for a photo opportunity.

My kids are used to this kind of thing, and weren’t overly embarrassed when people passed by wondering what the attraction was with a metal green cabinet when there was a beautiful park and greenhouse in Jephson Gardens a mere stones throw away across the river Leam. My daughter, though, did once move to the back of the crowd when I stopped in front of everyone to take a photo of a Grandstream SIP phone during a guided tour of Southampton University student accommodation.fttc cab dslam label

There was no doubt that it was a FTTC broadband cabinet – there was a small yellow label on it containing the words DSLAM. Anyway we continued on our way to the flat to watch the rugby which finished with, from a Welshman’s perspective, a highly satisfactory narrow victory for the All Blacks. This was despite the fact that France probably had the best of much of the game, and the ref ignoring what seemed to be a number of high tackles, where in my view France should have been awarded penalties.

The other satisfactory result would have been a storming 70 point victory for New Zealand. No sour grapes at all here 🙂

Just to finish off with some BT FTTP tidbits, I note that as of last week there are now 35,020 premises that can gain access to FTTP. There has been a steep increase in the numbers being provisioned over the last few weeks, helped by the use of overhead cables rather than underground ducts to access the cabs.

This won’t mean much to the the general public as BT’s marketing seeks not to distinguish between FTTP and FTTP, with a harmonised product set due to be announced at some point. More on this schedule as I get the info.

Categories
End User gadgets

Typing can be bad for your health if you use a keyboard #Microsoft

Microsoft health warning on keyboardDoing my usual plugging in the laptop routine this morning I noticed a label attached to the Microsoft keyboard with a health warning.  It was one of those Alice In Wonderland type moments. Something like the time when Alice spotted a cup with a label saying “drink me”.

I’ve had the Microsoft keyboard a few months ago but only today noticed the label1 . This directed me to read a health warning under the keyboard and blow me down there it is as bold as you like on a 2″ by 3″ label (that’s 5cm x 7.5cm to European readers).

I take these warnings seriously and immediately gave myself a mental once over to make sure that I had no symptoms ofanother Microsoft keyboard health warning hand, arm, shoulder or neck discomfort that might be ascribed to a poor posture when typing at the Microsoft keyboard. To my horror I found I was suffering from all the problems warned of on the label.   These are however more likely caused by a lifetime of bodily neglect rather than the Microsoft keyboard itself.

Anyway there isn’t much point to this post other than it starts off another busy week.

All the best.

1  Editor’s  note –  I’m not sure there was anything to suggest that Alice herself had only just noticed the cup and that it had been there in front of her very eyes for months.

PS I am far more likely to have problems with what I type than how I type 🙂 I also wondered whether the twinge in my knee might also be down to using the keyboard but decided probably not.

Categories
End User mobile connectivity phones

Ice cream sandwiches, fruit and toiletries – a review of the Samsung Nexus?

stay cool with an Ice Cream Sandwich from Google?When I was a kid the summers were always unbearably hot (and it always snowed at Christmas). We would turn on the hosepipe in the back garden, fill the paddling pool and splash about showering each other with jets of water. Sometimes the ice cream van would come round and hearing the music we would all run outside and line up to choose a cooling treat.

Usually I’d go for a “wafer”. The man in the van would cut a slice off a block of ice cream and sandwich it between two wafers. Then I would lick the ice cream in the middle until it got smaller and smaller and the wafer got soggier and soggier and I eventually had to eat the lot.

They stopped selling wafers for some reason. Health and safety probably or some commercial packaging business case that said it wasn’t economic. I don’t know.

Now I was excited to hear that they were bringing back the Ice Cream Sandwich. Ooo I thought.

Continue reading “Ice cream sandwiches, fruit and toiletries – a review of the Samsung Nexus?”
Categories
Engineer media

The thirst for information – Colonel Gadaffi and semantic metadata

illustration of semantic metadata in use by BBC with articles regarding Colonel GadaffiSomeone told me in the office that “they had killed Gadaffi”. Unusual to not hear it first on Twitter but I wasn’t looking, I’m too busy.

Back at my desk I looked at the Telegraph website. Then I went to the Guardian, Sky News and as if I hadn’t seen enough of the same stuff, the BBC news website. We thirst for information these days.

The BBC website, like all of them, had the item as its main news.  Colonel Gadaffi “killed”: Latest updates. Below this were links to “Gadaffi’s Quixotic and brutal rule, The Muammar Gadaffi story and His Life in pictures.

It was only then that I realised I was looking at “semantic metadata” in action.

Continue reading “The thirst for information – Colonel Gadaffi and semantic metadata”
Categories
Business mobile connectivity Net phones

Roll up, roll up, get yer acronyms here #MAM #MDM #CoIT #BYOD #MPLS #VoIP

Being a progressive high technology company we have a department that is dedicated to coming up with new acronyms. Ok that’s not an entirely fair description of the marketing department – engineering also does it 🙂

We have been upping the ante on mobile products in the last year or so.  The mobile world is rapidly moving on from merely the selling of phones, minutes and handsets (plus BlackBerry of course which has been an added value sell for years).

Unless you have been in a cocoon for the last six months (and you might)

Continue reading “Roll up, roll up, get yer acronyms here #MAM #MDM #CoIT #BYOD #MPLS #VoIP”
Categories
Archived Business

If you know anyone that might fit the bill please put them in touch #telesales #jobs in Newark please retweet

If you live within striking distance of Newark – Lincoln, Nottingham, Mansfield Grantham etc and are looking for a job in telesales then I have the job for you!

We are hiring. This is a new team.  In fact this is the first of many teams in a growing area of the business and so could represent a great career opportunity for ambitious individuals. There will be money making opportunities.

There will also be promotion opportunities. This is a classical way in to a future in account management, business development, marketing, operations, in fact you could be a future Managing Director. Everyone has to start somewhere.

If you know anyone that might fit the bill please put them in touch – details on the website here.

Categories
Engineer internet online safety security

Vint Cerf, Internet 2, Project Phoenix, Twitter, BYOD & #ITDF

Jonathan Radford our CFO is one of the least techy guys you could hope to meet.  He is often also the source of ideas for this “technical” blog because technology now reaches absolutely everyone on this planet one way or another.

Today he came up for a chat about Internet 2 and Project Phoenix and left me with a newspaper clipping from the FT (I said he wasn’t a techy – anyone else would have sent me a link). The point is though that the technology related article interested him because he could understand its implications for him personally.

The article concerned internet pioneer Vint Cerf’s comments re the need to start again with internet security. The internet is an open network currently running on the basis of trust. Starting again Cerf says he “would have put a much stronger focus on authenticity or authentication” and quoted Ori Eisen’s Project Phoenix as an example of the way forward (see original FT article for more on this).

You only have to note the recent spate of

Continue reading “Vint Cerf, Internet 2, Project Phoenix, Twitter, BYOD & #ITDF”
Categories
Business mobile connectivity Net

Communications links for IT Directors all at sea

communications aboard Aurora uses Maritime Telecommunications NetworkI didn’t felt at all claustrophobic during my time on board the Aurora for the IT Directors Forum. This is partly because there is plenty of space but also because the schedule was so packed it didn’t give you time to think about such things.

I did manage to squeeze in a chat with the guy that ran the internet cafe. There is WiFi all over the ship but it isn’t something you would want to use for casual internet access because a) at around £100 an hour  it is expensive and b) there is only 750kbps to service the whole ship – that’s 2,100 passengers when full.

In order to preserve some quality of customer experience the Aurora limits the number of simultaneous users to 32.  At the time of writing I can’t get on so

Continue reading “Communications links for IT Directors all at sea”
Categories
competitions End User

It’s all about focus – 4000 throws a month & who am I with – this week’s grand prize giveaway?

Olympic medalists in panel aboard Aurora for ITDFIt’s an idyllic life, the cruising game. You board at misty Southampton and wake up the next day to the splash of the anchor running out in the calm waters of an exotic island in the stream. A stroll out onto the balcony of your cabin reveals Guernsey on the starboard bow. Not Antigua or Barbados perhaps but hey…

On this occasion the location is academic, a backdrop to the serious business of the IT Directors Forum on board the liner Aurora where I am giving some talks entitled “The State of the Internet” and chairing some debates on Consumerisation of the Workplace. More on these anon.

On the first evening we were treated to a panel session with Kelly Sotherton, Sally Gunnell, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, Daley Thompson and Steve Cram. Good entertainment with the Olympics coming up.

The one thing that really stuck in my mind

Continue reading “It’s all about focus – 4000 throws a month & who am I with – this week’s grand prize giveaway?”