The Court of Justice of the European Union yesterday issued a press release stating that “According to Advocate General Cruz Villalón, a measure ordering an internet service provider to install a system for filtering and blocking electronic communications in order to protect intellectual property rights in principle infringes fundamental rights.”
In other words web blocking to try and prevent unlawful P2P downloading is wrong.
“Advocate General Cruz Villalón considers that the installation of that filtering and blocking system is a restriction on the right to respect for the privacy of communications and the right to protection of personal data, both of which are rights protected under the Charter of Fundamental Rights. By the same token, the deployment of such a system would restrict freedom of information, which is also protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights.”
This is an independent legal opinion and not a court judgement but I understand that the court normally adheres to the Advocate General’s line. This particular opinion is issued in relation to the Scarlet Sabam case which involves copyright infringement. In my mind this should also extend to other areas where calls have been made to introduce web blocking such as porn.
It will be interesting to see the reaction to this opinion in the UK. Communications minister Ed Vaizey has been in the press recently with his controversial initiative to see whether ISPs and RightsHolders would be able to find an acceptable way of blocking access to sites promoting P2P file sharing and copyright infringement.
The Asia Pacific Regional Registry APNIC has, as of today, begun to ration IPv4 addresses. Down to its last /8 block (around 16 million addresses) APNIC will now only be issuing existing users with /22 blocks of 1,024 addresses and is urging its customers to accelerate their adoption of IPv6.
European registry, RIPE, is expected to be down to its last /8 sometime this summer. In the UK around 60% of LIRs (Local Internet Registry) have yet to even apply for their allocation of IPv6 – check out the stats here.
Consultants Analysys Mason are conducting a study on behals of Ofcom into determining the location of Voice over IP callers making calls to emergency services. It is is easy to determine the location of a caller is in the old fixed line world because a phone number is recorded based on the location of a piece of copper “plugged” into the local telephone exchange.
This is not the case with VoIP. A VoIP number could be anywhere on the planet. Anywhere there is a connection to the IP network/internet that is. Ofcom recognises this and wants to understand whether there is a practical solution.
UK technical standards organisation NICC has published (Jan 2010) a potential solution to the problem though this is complex and also limited to VoIP users using UK ADSL connectivity.
This solution stems really from network architectures familiar to large telcos and my first reaction is that it is very expensive. One might ask what price a life? This is a reasonable question. We all have grannies and nobody wants ours to
You may or may not spot Timico in the press this week with the announcement of two new senior appointments. These are Fraser Anderson as Group Sales Director (below left) and Neil Armstrong as Marketing Director (below right).
These are exciting times to be around and these appointments represent two more signs of a business growing up. Everyone is in this game for different reasons. Some have lifestyle businesses, some trundle along in a mire not knowing where to go. I am here for the action and these two guys are here to take us to the next level.
If you want to find out more about each individual take a look at the Timico press release here. They both have very impressive track records.
It is very comforting to know that we can attract such high calibre individuals to the team.
PS I know I keep going on about these being exciting times but I’m sorry – you are just going to have to put up with me. Also I’ve just noticed they look remarkably similar. Note to self Neil is the one wearing specs 🙂
We have just had the first of the new season’s Timico Cake Competitions. This one was a Betty Crocker Cake mix competition.
So what’s special about a cake made from a shop bought standard kit do I hear you say? Well first of all it gave an opportunity for some people who don’t consider themselves to be skilled bakers to enter. Secondly you would be amazed at the variations you can get.
I have pictured all the cakes below for your delectation and delight. The winner was Jess Woods, pictured with me below. Jess’ cake was wonderfully gooey chocolate covered in M&Ms. Slices available at £1 a go with proceeds going to charity.
I have just been on the phone to my car insurance company to change the names of two of the kids! What I mean is I added them to the policy on Monday and the insurance company got both names wrong as well as not putting my wife’s full name on.
I had to call because I couldn’t risk the scenario of them having an “incident” and not being able to claim because of their details not being right.
This phone call took me 23 minutes and 35 seconds. This is a classic case for automation of the process. I was sat at the end of the phone waiting for someone at the other end to manually enter name corrections onto their (painfully slow) system.
Whilst I was on the phone I also realised that the activation date of the policy was wrong.
If I had been able to log onto a portal to make these changes it would have saved both of us time and trouble – remember I almost certainly had to go through the same process and time on Monday when I first added the kids to the policy.
I have tried automated portals for insurance policies before and found that I always ended up wanting to ask a question so I would abort the process and make a phone call.
We have the same problem in the communications industry. The initial sales contact often needs human involvement because the products are not straightforward. It might be simple enough to order a broadband connection online but usually there are other products and services involved. Businesses don’t buy just broadband and when you buy something you want to be sure you are buying the right product. It’s a stage at which you need expert advice.
We are investing a huge amount of time and money in to this area. This is not a big bang process where one day you will come in and – wow – be amazed at the overnight change. There are many aspects of running the business that need to be accommodated.
The most important of these is customer support which is one of the first areas to be upgraded. I do expect though that when we have finished, if that can ever be the case when talking about continuous improvement, customers will find dealing with us a dream.
The goal is to avoid finding ourselves in the situation I have just described with the insurance company. Neither party ends up happy as we will have both had to waste time and money on a problem that I could have fixed on my own in 30 seconds had I had the tools to do it.
It’s coming along as you can see if you click on the header image. It always amazes me what one bloke can do when he has a few tools to help him. I guess it is the same in farming. Along came the industrial revolution and everyone left the fields to be replaced by machines.
Today has been spent entering industry awards. I assume it is the same in the farming business (to continue with the theme). “Why is your pint of milk better value than your competitors?” I suppose you can brush up your best cow and take her along and have something solid for the judges to evaluate:).
I have had to sit through some long hot tedious awards evenings, usually run by a magazine eager to reward its biggest advertisers. They can be useful to win though as we have found out when we got Highly Commended in the Best ITSP (Large Enterprise Category) at this year’s ITSPA Awards. Independent Awards can be quite prestigious.
I’m not going to tell you which awards these were today in case we don’t win – you will have to wait 🙂 – and my advice to you is to “drinka pinta milka day”. It will make you a winner.
I should think that by the time I put up the next photo of the new build the walls will be complete. Btw I have been asked if I can put up an artist’s impression of the new building but I’m sorry to say I don’t have one in electronic form. I will ask the builders if they have one.
Took my iPad to dinner last night to demo our new multi-tenant APN service (called Mobile Access Management). It was a little bit of a strange feeling waving the iPad3G in the air to show that the firewall was blocking youporn.com. I was demonstrating how an IT manager could apply internet access polices to mobile devices in the same way as they do for standard office based users.
The screenshot that comes up when a banned site is accessed looks like this. In this case it is our office Fortigate firewall but it could be any similar device. I did feel a little self conscious doing this demo because of course it will show up on our logs but hey, what he heck… 🙂
The header photo shows an iPad with an iPad2 laid on top of it (thanks to Chris Green). Click on any of the photos to enlarge. I have to say that not being an Apple fanboi I won’t be rushing out to buy one.
How does a business cope with the proliferation of personal mobile devices in the office? Not just mobiles, but laptops and tablet computers too? The problem is not new, but it is growing.
Not so long ago consumers would peer in through the smoked glass panoramic windows of business to admire and envy the tools that were available to those inside. Access to the internet was for most people above a certain age first experienced at work. Their first PC, first mobile phone, first email, first mobile email! The list is a long one.
Today’s workplace is totally different. Staff bring in the toys they use at home and often frown or laugh at their employer’s old fashioned proffering. IT departments now gaze back out through the self-same floor to ceiling windows with reverse envy and spend their time worrying about the security of their network.
A study of a small business
I recently did some work with a UK company on their communications and cloud strategy. The company provided 67 of their 115 employees with a mobile phone; 50 BlackBerrys and 17 mid-range Nokias.
30 staff also carried with them their own personal mobiles. Of the 30, eight people also received a company phone and actually used their own phones for business purposes in preference to those supplied by the employer. A further seven staff who were not given company mobiles used their own phones to pick up company email making a total of 15 out of 30 personal mobiles that were used for work purposes.
IPv6 is very much in vogue at the moment. test-ipv6.com is a useful site you can visit that tells you how prepared you/your connection/your ISP are for IPv6.
I’ve run some tests on two connections for you to compare the results. One is IPv4 only and the other dual stack IPv4/IPv6. The difference is self explanatory.
The site itself will tell you that the most important test is the Dual Stack DNS. If this one fails or takes too long then you will have problems once people start rolling out IPv6 only sites. Clicking on each image will bring up a larger version. Both sets of tests come from Timico connections – the one on the left is dual stack and the other IPv4 only. Also click on the header of this posts if you want to see more of the successful test results.
Normally I don’t notice the weather, being Welsh and having grown up on the Isle of Man. Also although I have a panoramic view over the car park in the office I only notice what it is like outside when I have to draw the blinds.
I do notice the light evenings though because apart from their uplifting effect when leaving work I get dragged into playing rugby with the kids in the back garden (also cricket, football and blind man’s buff for some unknown reason – I think they like the control aspect of it).
This time of year is a good time to take stock of the year ahead. The first quarter is done and dusted. We won’t know yet but it looks as if it will have been a good one.
There is a lot happening this year. Last year we threw a lot of money at the core network and this year it will be more. The data centre is also a big commitment but the building is starting to take shape. We are also undergoing a big business transformation as we invest time and money into systems that will give our customers a world class experience.
The internet industry is such a fast moving game that it involves continuous investment and improvement. You have to pay to play, as they say.
Although we seem to be continuously surrounded by bad news items: earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear disasters, revolutions there is so much exciting stuff happening and it is worth keeping focused. The revolution in the mobile internet world, social networking, the move to the cloud. These all represent enormous business opportunities.
Following the success of the Move over IPv4 Bring on IPv6 event last week I am going to be organising some other, perhaps even more highly focused, evening “activities” around relevant hot topics.
Watch this space for more news.
PS sorry about this waffle – it is Friday afternoon and it’s been another busy week in paradise. Have a good weekend 🙂
It’s a while since I covered the Digital Economy Act, its ramifications and repercussions but last week saw the court hearings take place for the BT/TalkTalk Judicial Review. I was somewhat mistaken in the belief that we might also hear the output of the JR last week but this is not so. The judge needs to go away and deliberate in the way learned people deliberate (this is either hand on chin looking thoughtfully into the distance or chin on chest looking down at interlocked fingers).
The media is already saying that the DEAct implementation is going to be subject to long delays – it already is – we have been waiting for the publication of the Code of Practice for months now. What has been going on in the meantime is further lobbying by Rights Holders to try and get ISPs to block access to websites that promote or support copyright infringement.
Initially this was seen as strange because the DEAct already provides for this to be looked at in the event that the three strikes mechanisms isn’t seen to be working. Cake and eat it springs to mind.
With hindsight it looks as if this was an insurance policy on the part of the RHs in case the DEAct was thrown out in court or subject to delays.
Ed Vaizey has already met with ISPs and RHs in round table meetings to digital content and piracy, the second time being on 23 February 2011. No agreements were made and I believe this is a very long way off. A further meeting is being held next week.
Blocking is likely to be expensive, ineffective, have unintended consequences (eg innocent websites being blocked), seen as censorship, stifle the open growth of the internet ecology and require huge involvement of the judiciary – I certainly would not be happy with ISPs or Rights Holders taking ownership of choosing which sites to block.
Come on guys. Lets try and see a bit of sense here.
This is the official video of the song “The Day The Routers Died” sung by Gary Feldman at Last week’s “Move over IPv4 Bring on IPv6” event in Covent Garden, London
Euphoric from the success of bringonipv6.com we hit the town in London last night. Adrian Kennard of AAISP had brought along his “internet in a box” as a laugh.
For those of you not in the know the TV programme “IT Crowd” have a box with a flashing LED light on top of it that they tell their manager is “the internet”.
So we went out to a pub with an identical copy of this box. Plonking it on the bar we asked the barmaid if she knew what it was. The completely unprompted response was “it’s the internet”. Result!!!
Of course this was a huge responsibility. Having just left a party to celebrate “the end of the internet as we know it” imagine the furore had we actually gone and “lost” the internet due to carelessness in a bar. Brings back memories of the FA Cup…
Thanks to Adrian for the photo – click to see more of it.
We have moved over IPv4 and brought on IPv6. Last night’s event at the London Transport Museum turned out to be a raging success.
300 or so people queued around the Piazza at Covent Garden to get in. Many more were watching the IPv6 twitter hashtag which had 1,235,715 impressions with exposure to 250,000 people. That’s a huge reach. Thanks to @lesanto for his most professional help here.
I’m not going to try and relive the whole evening in a blog post but I will be publishing videos of the event as soon as the film comes back from Boots the Chemist (only joking – but this high quality video takes a lot of rendering).
Photos are available here thanks to @Paul_Clarke. They are worth a look – this isn’t point and shoot stuff – it is art.
I’ll be thanking all the sponsors and speakers individually but you can see who they are on the event website.
I’m sorry for those of you who couldn’t get tickets or make it to this sold out event – you missed a cracker. More anon.
We will all be familiar with bits (0/1) and bytes (8 bits). You may even know that 4 bits is a nibble or a single Hexadecimal digit which makes a byte two Hexadecimal digits. IPv4 is a 32 bit addressing system with four time three lots of decimal characters.
Where is all this going do I hear you ask? This basic first year engineering degree primer!
Well tonight’s event is about IPv6, a 128 bit addressing system which has four blocks of four Hexadecimal characters. It looks like this 2001:1A20:1006:1001::/64.
Seeing as IPv6 is going to become commonplace there is now an ongoing discussion to come up with a name for those 16bit, 2 Byte, 4 x Hex character blocks. The currently proposed batch of names are presented below for your delectation.
These are all worthy proposals in an Internet Draft (click on the link to see the contributors names) which expires/due for next edit on 6th April. None of them stick with me though I do like Chazwazza because it is a cool name not because I think it works in this instance.
The Timico engineering team has started to use the word “chomp” to represent two bytes or the 4 Hex character block in IPv6.
Chomp is clearly in the mould of bit, nibble and byte and I would be grateful if you could chew this one over with a view to supporting the idea – we are submitting it as a suggestion when the above Draft expires.
Gave a talk on the evolution of retail technology into the cloud at the Retail Business Technology Expo at Earl’s Court yesterday. It was a joint presentation with my friend Umar Bajwa, Head of IT at the Murphy Oil Corporation (Murco) in the UK.
Afterwards we walked around the exhibits and it was a real pleasure to be with someone as knowledgeable as Umar (pictured right) in the retail technology space.
A few things struck me. Talking with the exhibitors they were happy with the way the show was going. Plenty of leads which means plenty of retailers out there looking at investing for growth in their business.
Secondly was the number of exhibit stands offering booze. Engineers in the internet space like to party but they do it after hours (and into the wee small hours – not me of course who cant take the pace anymore) but retailers seem to go at it all day!!
empty beer bottles littered stands at Retail Business Technology Expo
Wine, beers and even champagne seemed to be flowing pretty freely. I did come away with a bag of pick and mix sweets for the kids.
Finally, and the real purpose of this post, was the realization that mobile technology and smartphones and tablets in particular were starting to permeate this world. It is odd that in a retail environment that is primarily interested in cutting costs as low as they can go people seem to think nothing of spending £500 on a tablet for the shop.
I asked one exhibitor what shops do about the security of these devices. “What do you do to stop them being stolen?” “We don’t” came the reply. “We just sell them another tablet when the other one gets nicked”!!
And people will steal these things. Umar Bajwa was able to relate stories of people walking into fuel retailers, leaning over the counter and stealing the card processing terminal. “They are trying to figure out how the terminals work so they can come back and steal credit card information” .
This is going to be an issue that the retail industry will have to get to grips with if smart phones and tabs are going be commonplace tools for this market. I am particularly interested in this subject – how to manage your diverse mobile estate. If anyone wants to engage in a dialogue on or offline please get in touch.
More pics from the show below including one of excellent the jazz trio from the after show champagne party – I told you they large it up in retail 🙂
I’ve been taking pictures of the new datacentre build every day I have been in the office. This is the latest – weather is a bit grotty but the forecast is bright:).
It is shooting up. After all the builders will want to get it finished and we want to get it filled.
If you click on the image on the right you get a larger version.
Introductory speech Ed Vaizey MP, Minister for Communication, Culture and the Creative Industries
IPv4 retrospective UK internet pioneer Prof Peter Kirstein UCL
IPv6 scene setting Simon McCalla, IT Director, Nominet
IPv6 Panel Debate “Should industry worry about IPv6?”
Adrian Kennard, MD AAISP, Andy Davidson, VP EMEA Hurricane Electric, Jim Reid, Director, 6UK, Cisco Technical Staff Member
Ceremonials
Local handover of final IPv4 address block from IANA to RIPE – Leo Vegoda, IANA, Nigel Titley, Chairman RIPE NCC
Celebrity star guest – we are keeping the identity of this guest quiet but this will be a great finale.
Party time
Over 300 guests have signed up but thanks to the generosity of the sponsors we can still accommodate a few more. Drop me a line if you want to come and I will get your tickets sorted. Otherwise if you know the registration password you can do it yourselves at www.bringonipv6.com.
Cloud Equipment Market Will Grow From $110Bn in 2009 to $217Bn in 2014.
2009, according to a Cisco sponsored report by Forrester Research Inc, saw a significant uplift of sales of equipment into the cloud services sector despite the global recession. Figures show significantly greater growth in equipment sales that support next generation managed services as opposed to traditional Customer Premises Equipment.
2009 market growth
Their forecast for this market is that sales will grow from $110Bn in 2009 to $217Bn in 2014, a CAGR of 15%. It is all very exciting, I guess, unless that is you are stuck selling on premises equipment in which case you probably need to start thinking of career alternatives.
This information came from the Cisco Managed services seminar at the Tower of London last week. What struck me was the huge number of elements that make up the big cloud services picture. I counted 62 different technology areas that Cisco claim make up the whole market. These include areas such as Computing as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service. The range is mind boggling.
This isn’t something that an ISP can undertake on a broad scale, at least not during the initial development stages of this market. You have to cherry pick your offerings.
Forrester have segmented the market into Unified Comms, Metro Ethernet, Security, Managed VPN (MPLS I assume) and Data Center . This may help. Timico plays in all these market segments to greater or lesser degrees which is somewhat reassuring.
In my mind you have to ignore the buzzwords and get on with satisfying what your customers need. In many cases customers will already have a good idea but there will be many more looking for guidance.
The case for Virtualization, which is a big part of the infrastructure play when it comes to talking about managed services and the cloud, is very strong.
I looked at one specific example of a company that had 217 machines/servers occupying 9 racks. On average each server has 500GB of storage (an assumption on my part but a reasonable one) but a memory utilisation of only 30 – 40%. That’s a usage of only 43TB out of a total available of 108TB (plenty of rounding here).
If this server estate could be distilled onto a robust Storage Area Network that represents a huge potential cost saving, just taking disk space into consideration. More memory is saved because these systems typically recognise which operating systems are being used by the Virtual Machines and do not replicate multiple instances of such software.
What’s more aggregated processing power = better individual VM performance. In other words the processor capacity available to any single machine is far greater than it previously had access to on a single server. This inevitably results in performance efficiencies. The bandwidth story is the same. An individual stand alone server is likely to be served by a maximum of 1Gbps whereas a VM will probably get 10Gbps.
The example I looked at will result in 217 VMs on single 8U blade centre with a capacity 32 servers though we won’t need all 32 for this specific customer.
As Cisco has suggested the market is undergoing a big change right now. One that requires significant investment in infrastructure. I suspect that many familiar names will fail to make it through. It will be interesting to see who emerges into the clear skies beyond the cloud 🙂
Charts are courtesy of Cisco with Data from Forrester Research Inc.
At the Cisco Manged Services Seminar yesterday at the Tower of London Chris Lewis, GVP International Telecoms and Networking, IDC introduced the concept of the domestic CIO. This was new to me (ok I’m probably behind the times) but it certainly struck a chord.
There are so many aspects of life in the office that are now present at home. In the Davies household we have 8 active SIMs supporting 5 smartphones, an iPad, a dongle and a battered old Nokia that my wife uses (her decision). Some of these SIMS are pay as you go and some are contract. We have a mix of Vodafone, O2 and Orange. This isn’t necessarily an efficient way of working. If this was a business scenario we would harmonize onto a single network and group bundle. We would also have managed backups of the directories.
7 out of the 8 mobile devices also support wifi as do the 2 laptops, 4 desktop PCs and the XBox. In an ideal world we would have a home password management system, changing the password on a regular basis.
When it comes to passwords we use them for online banking, shopping with M&S, eBay, Tesco online, EastCoast trains, Superbreak, Lastminute.com, iTunes, Travelodge. We also have passwords for Twitter, Facebook, gmail, telegraph online, guardian.co.uk and I’m sure many other portals I’ve forgotten about and some I’ve never heard of. How do we keep track of them all?
I operate a calendar that synchronizes on my phone, iPad and laptop. My wife uses a paper calendar on the kitchen wall that doesn’t synch with mine other than via an ad hoc manual process known in the Davies household as “diarising”. This does sometime lead to clashes – “OMG who’s going to pick so and so up from the friend’s party” or “we can’t already be going out because we have just been invited somewhere else for dinner”. Plenty of room for improvement here.
Then there’s the IT support, “the internet isn’t working”, “yes it is I’m on it”, “why isn’t my document printing”, “we have run out of ink”, “can I have your credit card number please dad” !!!
Chris Lewis was right. I need a Domestic CIO. I don’t want to do it. Interested parties should apply in line through the usual channels. Hours 24x7x365 (no you can’t have Christmas Day off – that is one of the busiest days of the year for a Domestic CIO). Salary on application.
PS the Tower of London is a great day out for the family. Have your PA coordinate a trip there or mention it to your Domestic CIO.
I watched the news of the Japanese earthquake on iPlayer on my iPad. I watched it in bed, whilst having breakfast and then whilst in the shower (the iPad wasn’t in the actual shower cubicle). Coming out of the shower room I bumped into one of the kids who said he had been watching it his room on his PC.
On my way in I listened to it on the car radio and then the iPad 3G connection kicked and the video started in my bag in the boot (actually in the Jeep it is called a “trunk”). This was a bit disconcerting. The newsreader said that people on Japan had been standing in the streets in Tokyo watching the news streaming on their mobile handsets.
Coming into the office by 9am the video bandwidth usage on our network had doubled over the norm and I have iPlayer playing in the corner of the room. We live in a totally connected world.
Our thoughts must go out to the people affected by the Earthquake. It is unbelievably amazing to be able to watch the destruction happening in real time broadcast live from a camera in a helicopter.
In November the Prime Minister David Cameron announced an independent review of how the Intellectual Property framework supports growth and innovation. Chaired by Professor Ian Hargreaves the review will report in April 2011 with evidence due by March 4th. The Hargreaves review aims to identify barriers to growth within the regulatory framework protecting IP in the UK.
With this review in mind the Digital Economy All Party Political Group (DEAPPG) met at the House of Commons last night for a panel debate chaired by Lord Lucas. The panel was
Martin Weatherall MP (background in the Rights Holders industry)
Jeff Lynne (Coalition for the Digital Economy)
Saskia Walzel (Consumer Focus and the evening’s sponsor)
I am pleased nay thrilled to report back from last night’s ITSPA Awards that Timico received the Highly Commended Award for Best ITSP (Large Enterprise).
The ITSPA Awards were held at the top of the BT Tower (Post office Tower to those over a certain age) which is a wonderful venue and all thanks to BT for hosting.
A couple of years back Timico won the best Unified Communications Award. Last night was a particular milestone for us as we have been expanding our horizons to work with larger businesses and this Award really reflects a lot of hard work that has gone into developing our proposition for that market.
Most ITSPs in the UK plant themselves firmly in the SMB space. Timico is able to play in a bigger market because unlike many ITSPs we are a fairly substantial ISP in our own right and an established MPLS networking business brings with it many opportunities to service the voice requirements of larger customers using our Genband A2 VoIP platform. The Genband platform coincidentally also won an award last night for best VoIP infrastructure.
The winners of the Large Enterprise Category were Virgin Media Business. We’ll beat them next year 🙂
Details of other ITSPA Awards cateorgy winners can be found here.
The Google transparency report should be of interest to readers. It shows Google traffic levels to/from a given country. If you click on the link it shows that traffic out of Libya ground to a halt on Thursday evening.
I am somewhat surprised it has taken the Gadaffi regime this long to kill the traffic – assuming that is what has happened.
The first tranche of tickets has all but sold out for this event. If when you register there are no more spaces don’t worry – just get your name on the waiting list. I’ve been able to secure additional sponsorship and expect to be able to increase the number of partygoers.
The demand for tickets has been amazing and I think reflects the fact that there is a lot of interest in both celebrating the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool (the end of the internet as we know it) and wanting to see what progress is being made re IPv6 implementation.
I am also pleased to say that we have a special star guest signed up for the event. I’m keeping his/her identity a secret for the moment but it will be worth the wait 🙂
I am just waiting for confirmation of one more panelist in the IPv6 debate before publishing the final lineup.
More anon. Click on the icon in the right hand column of this blog to go to the event website.
I’ve just been preparing a talk I’m giving on behalf of the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association (ITSPA) at UC Expo in London on Tuesday. When I was asked to do this talk a few months ago I proposed the title “SMB – the forgotten majority of UC?”
The title held an element of provocation intended to attract punters to hear me speak. However when I dug in to the market numbers on the face of it this is very much the case. SMB represents roughly 15.% of the total market for Unified Communications equipment. This is despite the fact that his sector represents over 50% of the PBX market and, according to the EU, 99% of all businesses in Europe.
I guess this is down to two factors. Firstly most UC vendors provide the functionality as part of a bolt on to big PBX systems, presumably as part of their added value sell. A small business might not necessarily have the expertise or be able to afford to implement UC. A vendor may also not be able to afford the cost of selling these systems in to SMBs.
Secondly when I looked into some old market research into the use of individual components of UC, (Instant Messaging, presence, Unifed Messaging, collaboration , conferencing etc) the benefits of these functions when used by a business were expressed in time savings and moreover the bigger the business the greater the compound benefit.
So by and large UC remains the domain of big business.
There is no real reason why this should be the case. Many of the features mentioned above are openly available as low or zero cost somewhere on the internet. Some even have an element of integration, which is how UC is sold to bigger companies. Skype for example has integrated voice, video, IM and an element of conferencing. There are very few service providers that provide a true UC experience on a hosted basis (Timico is one). An experience that matches the functionality of expensive systems bought by large enterprises.
In fact ITSPA dropped the UC category from its Awards because Timico was the only service provider entering in that category (bit of a shame 🙂 ). Timico today does a lot of business with companies with between 250 and 500 staff but when we started selling VoIP we were firmly in the game of selling mainly to small business. As small business owners become more internet savvy I think their responsiveness towards the use of technologies such as Instant Messaging is changing. This has been recognised by the likes of Cisco who have been introducing new products into this space, albeit at the upper end of the spectrum.
Because UC market share statistics are gathered largely from traditional voice equipment vendors I doubt that the true level of penetration of UC features into the SMB market is known. The fact is that due to the cost of selling to SMBs UC services for this market will have to be cloud based and not based on a piece of kit in the corner of the office. I would expect that over the next few years, as SMBs grow comfortable with outsourcing services into the cloud, we should see a change in the penetration of UC into this market which will redress the balance of market segmentation to be more along the lines of the PBX market. This has to be a large opportunity.
There was a lot of talk this morning about Ofcom ‘s research announcement that
“Average download speeds remain less than half of ‘up to’ speeds advertised by some Internet Service Providers (ISPs), particularly for broadband delivered via a phone line. “
Ofcom is recommending that if speeds are used in broadband advertising they should be based on a Typical Speeds Range (TSR), so consumers have a clearer idea of what speeds to expect.
The stock response from ISPs is that every line is different and by announcing an “up to “ speed they cover all the bases and customers are appraised of the actual expected speed of their line before they sign up.
This is an interesting one. I work for an ISP but I am also a consumer. I see no reason why ISPs should not be able to give greater prominence to typical speeds rather than the “best you can possible expect”. We should being straight and honest with our customers – not hyping things up and raising expectations that can’t be met (you can tell I’m not a marketing person here 🙂 ).
ISPS have made some concession to the fact that if a technology (eg ADSL2+) can theoretically do 24Mbps most people are not going to get that speed. A 24Meg line is therefore often described as an “up to 20Meg” line (not universally as the Ofcom data in the table inset shows). My “up to 20Meg line only does 11Meg. It is disappointing but I understand the game. Not everybody does, though you do wonder whether most people care.
Most people do care about the quality of their experience though and in the absence of any other suitable metric typical speeds are a good enough representation of this.
The survey results do make interesting reading. Firstly the Virgin results which are based on cable modem technology and not ADSL are consistently better – their typical numbers are consistently close to the “up to” numbers. That’s a technology thing.
If you look at the ADSL providers with similar technologies I’m not sure that there is much to differentiate them. The thing that is holding back these ISPs from quoting typical speeds is that these speeds would be significantly slower than those of Virgin. Not good for a marketing director’s pulse.
I sympathize with these ISPs but at the end of the day my consumer head still thinks it would be right to quote the typical speeds and not the “up to”. Or at least both sets of numbers.
I can’t see this happening voluntarily. It would only take one ISP to break ranks for all the others to have to follow.
All I can say is bring on Fibre ToThe Premises where 100Meg will be 100Meg, give or take a wavelength. I really hope that my home town of Lincoln skips Fibre to the Cabinet and goes straight to FTTP.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to blow your own trumpet on occasion and I am please to say that this time I can use the full register of that particular instrument. Timico has been shortlisted for best Internet Telephony Service Provider in both SME (Small and Medium sized Enterprise) and Large Enterprise categories at the annual ITSPA Awards.
This is very pleasing as it fairly reflects the evolving nature of our business. A large percentage of our customers, as business demographics might suggest, are indeed SMBs. SMBs have represented the heartland of the hosted VoIP industry during its formative years.
Large Enterprises have traditionally opted for big PABX solutions, quite possible hosted. As Timico has grown we have won more and more business from the Enterprise sector and have found that this is an area of the market very willing to embrace hosted VoIP but also to mix and match premises based PBX and hosted using SIP trunks as the unifying factor.
The biggest influencing factors here have been a combination of the maturing technology and the reduced cost of bandwidth across Wide Area Networks.
The Awards are at the BT Tower next Monday evening and are usually a great opportunity to network. Good luck to all the other finalists 🙂
Ofcom is currently consulting on changes to EU law applicable to Communications Providers that in theory will force providers to port numbers within 24 hours of being asked.
Sounds great but fixed line providers have been chucked a get out clause that adds that a subscriber line has to be ‘ready for service’ before being appropriate to port.
This means business as usual for the likes of BT whose archaic manual porting system requires a complete overhaul anjd which often leaves business custoemrs in the lurch.
Coincidentally the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association, ITSPA has recently commissioned an independent report outlining the options for the UK Communications industry in respect of number porting. It isn’t just a technical issue. There are contractual bottlenecks as well with each CP having to independently negotiate separate porting contracts with every other CP.
I will share the output when I get is sometime in March. In the meantime Ofcom seems content to let sleeping dogs lie and accept that as long as the letter of the EU law is met, (but not the spirit) then that is all fine and handy. This might make Ofcom’s life easier but is a disservice to UK business that has to put up with lengthy delays with porting their telephone numbers.
Details of the Ofcom consultation, scheduled to last 6 weeks, are available here. Interestingly CPs are also required to offered disabled access to Emergency Services via sms text service. I will need to investigate this further but if applicable to ITSPS this is certainly something very new for them to get to grips with.
The new laws have to be in place by 25th May 2011.
