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ISPA, the Internet Service Providers’ Association, has announced the finalists for the 2010 Internet Hero and Internet Villain awards. Among the finalists are Lords Mandelson and Clement Jones, Tom Watson MP and the campaigning group 38 Degrees.
The highly-prized Internet Hero award is bestowed upon an organisation or individual who has made a significant
I am very pleased to announce that Timico Tech Support Engineer Faye Hemingway has won the First Annual Carrot Cake Bake-off. All entries were of a very high standard with Highly Commended Certificates being awarded to Sian Steen, Verity Rushby and the Will Curtis/Fiona Dickinson team.
Pictured below is me congratulating Faye on her success and also the judges at work.
Thanks to everyone who took part. The entries were sold off after the competition with the proceeds going to a local charity.
I had to stare at this for a bit to understand it. In a Written Declaration the European Parliament has called on the Member States to coordinate a European early warning system involving their public authorities, based on the existing system for food safety, as a means of tackling paedophilia and sex offending.
They are also talking about applying the Data Retention Directive (Directive 2006/24/EC) to search engines.
Final part of an interview recorded for BT for their FTTC launch.
Part 4 of an interview recorded for BT for their FTTC launch.
Announcing the Timico Carrot Cake Competition. Entries need to be submitted to me during Monday morning. Judging will take place at 1pm on Monday in the Tech area on the first floor. Entry is free.
The cake must have been baked by the entrant who must in turn be a Timico employee (apologies to readers re this – if there is sufficient demand I will conduct an “Open Carrot Cake Competition” at a later date). Fake entries from M&S etc will result in naming and shaming of the entrant.
The winner will be awarded the title of Timico Carrot Cake Cook of the Year 2010 and will receive vouchers entitling them to 1 year’s unlimited viewing of Trefor.net.
Judging will be by a top panel of gastronomes renowned for their carrot cake tasting skills. For security purposes the names of the judges will not be revealed until just before the tasting.
Happy baking and good luck to all entrants. Results will be posted here on Monday. You read it first on trefor.net.
All work and no play…
I’ve been tracking the run down of the IPv4 address pool. This morning another two /8s have been allocated and the number remaining has dropped to 6% of the total.
Nov 16 2009 10% – dropped through 400,000,000 mark
Jan 20th 9%
Feb 25th 8%
May 10th 7%
June 2nd 6%
I make no comment here other than it is getting peculiarly exciting. We have effectively used up 5% of the address pool in 7 months.
Part 3 of an interview recorded for BT for their FTTC launch
Mandelson’s Uncertainty Principle states that the costs to an ISP of processing a Copyright Infringement Report can only be known when that ISP knows how many CIRs it is going to have to process and that Rights Holders will not disclose this number until they know the costs.
If it was as simple as that we might be able to come to some arrangement but of course it isn’t.
The BIS consultation on Costs under the Digital Economy Act is not scheduled until October 2010. Work is going on now to prepare for this and yesterday Ofcom held a meeting with ISPs to take on board their views on the subject.
The BP oilspill crisis only really hit home today when someone showed me this map of the spill overlaid onto the UK. The area is huge.
Check out this website to move the overlay to where you live. It includes live streaming from BP. I’ve captured it today so that you can check out the growth with time (macabre I know).
Part 2 of an interview recorded for BT as part of their FTTC launch.
I woke up this morning to a fault on my broadband line. OK this kind of thing happens. There is a BT engineer coming tomorrow morning to fix it. Fine.
It does however bring home how reliant we are on the internet. I found out in bed at 6.30 am that that the “internet wasn’t working” (after I had been down to make the tea!). My wife’s instant reaction was “OMG what if I get any emails from potential eBay buyers asking questions about my sales items”.
“Don’t worry” I said, “in an emergency you can use my phone”.
I woke up this morning to a fault on my broadband line. OK this kind of thing happens. There is a BT engineer coming tomorrow morning to fix it. Fine.
It does however bring home how reliant we are on the internet. I found out in bed at 6.30 am that that the “internet wasn’t working” (after I had been down to make the tea!). My wife’s instant reaction was “OMG what if I get any emails from potential eBay buyers asking questions about my sales items”.
“Don’t worry” I said, “in an emergency you can use my phone”.
Just ploughing through the 73 pages of the Ofcom Draft Code of Practice for the Digital Economy Act.
There isn’t much time for the industry to respond here and I’m certainly not in a position to give it a comprehensive review after 10 minutes of scan-through reading.
A few points do immediately jump out of the page at me though.
First in a series of videos recorded by BT as part of their launch of FTTC.
BT Wholesale looks like getting into the Content Delivery business with a service known as Content Connect.
You might wonder what this means and be saying to yourself “the BBC is a content provider, BT ain’t”. Well content delivery and content provision are not the same thing and the problem for ISPs is that the delivery of content is very inefficient over broadband networks.
If a hundred people watch the same TV programme online the way the world currently stands is that that programme will be streamed 100 times over an ISPs “backbone”. This is made worse because you, the consumer of internet bandwidth, want more and more content. All the time.
Major sporting and political events such as the Friday post election coverage have millions of people watching online using their PCs. They even watch on their PC whilst watching different coverage on the TV in front of them.
BT Content Connect is, I have to assume, a product that allows ISPs to satisfy their customers’ content watching needs in a far more efficient way than is the norm today. I imagine that this means BT hosting content servers deep in the network so that it doesn’t have to touch an ISP’s pipe.
When I have more info on this I will report back. In the meantime click here for BT’s online spiel.
I’ve just posted a list of BT Ethernet enabled exchanges. This is likely to be of interest to businesses looking to see whether they can get hold of either Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) or Metropolitan fibre Ethernet connecivity.
The initial list contains exchanges enabled as of the end of 2009 with a list of those that go live this year below.
If anyone wants more info on this just mail me at [email protected]
The next Ofcom stakeholder meeting on the Digital Economy Act (DEAct) is taking place next Tuesday June 1 at 3pm at Ofcom. The meeting will be looking at Ofcom’s work in relation to cost sharing under the statutory instrument, on which BIS is currently consulting.
The DEAct was heavily weighted in favour of rights holders and we should be seriously concerned that the Code of Practice does not adopt a similar bias.
ISPs are intermediaries that pass packets of information over their networks. ISPs neither benefit from, nor
The government published the final coalition agreement this week. The government proposes to:
End the storage of internet and email records without good reason;
This is good. The cost to industry was going to be enormous to do this. This might well also affect the government’s thinking in respect of the Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP). IMP is a whole different can of beans whereby ISPs were going to potentially be asked for all sorts of interception and tracking involvement by the Big Brothers.
Section 8 of the Digital Economy Act requires Ofcom to report on the provision of lawful services, education and information campaigns, levels of copyright infringement and legal proceedings against infringers.
By January of 2011 the regulator must have set up an independent monitoring system so that there is data available to measure the success or otherwise of the Act.
Ofcom is proposing that monitoring should consist of three types of input: collation of existing data (eg existing industry reports, ISP traffic data and existing consumer research), consumer research and direct measurement of activity on file sharing networks.
Independant partners will be commissioned for the consumer market research and the direct measurement work with the tendering process beginning in June.
The market research will be conducted 4 times a year on samples of 5,000 persons each time. It will be interesting to see how accurate this research is. Will people tell the truth? I guess it will just be a contribution to the overall dataset.
The baseline data needs to be in place for the start of next year.
You might be interested in reading my latest guest post over at broadbandgenie.
Today two Timico group companies have obtained a total of six nominations in the ISPA awards. Timico is finalist in both the Best Business Fixed Broadband and Best Internet Telephony categories. NewNet is finalist for Best Business Fixed Broadband, Best Consumer Fixed Broadband, Best Dedicated Hosting and Best Shared Hosting.
6 years ago Timico was founded with the ambition to become the first choice Communications Provider for business in the UK. Lofty ambitions and hopefully this endorsement shows that we are heading in the right direction.
The awards are in London on the 8th July. See you there. I’m the guy in the dinner suit.
Mayor of London Boris Johnson has promised full WiFi coverage of London in time for the 2012 Olympic games. It would be ironic if the Olympic Games WiFi coverage was shut down because someone had been caught indulging in online copyright infringement. As Mayor will he be the one having to turn up in court?
Sometimes when someone is making a statement you just have to sit up and take notice. In this case LINX69 sponsors Prolabs have impressed by giving us hardware.com branded 4GB USB memory sticks. The new bar has been set.
Coincidentally I recently did a screen on all my kids’ USB sticks checking for viruses. They produced 14 of them for scanning ranging from 128MB (virtually useless these days) to a few 500MBs. One memory stick had a virus. Beware.
Anyway if any other vendors want an obective assessment of their marketing freebies you know where to send them:-).
Day1 of LINX69 had networking equipment vendor Brocade giving an interesting talk about the rollout timescales for the 100GigE standard.
The 100Gig standard has taken 5 years from initial ideas to fruition with ratification being expected in June 2010. Coincidentally the 40Gig standard will have taken the same amount of time with a parallel development aimed at the server market.
40Gig kit reuses some 10Gig elements which is what should allow it to fit in the appropriate part of the price/performance curve.
Whilst a number of vendors have announced 100Gig products it remains to be seen how rapidly some of these will be rolled out and adopted. During the last wave of network upgrades (1Gig to 10Gig) many equipment vendors had their fingers burned as industry uptake took a lot longer than anticipated. Nortel, for example had apparently predicted 2 million 10Gig port shipments by 2002 but actually took another 7 years to hit that volume. Somewhat symptomatic of the problems the Nortel business found themselves in methinks.
The upshot is that vendors are unlikely to rush out 100Gig products.
We expect of course that next gen technologies result in lower per port costs. Currently this is not the case for 100Gig due to high optics and component costs. Based on historical trends these are expected to drop in 2011/2012. For the moment 100Gig is therefore very much one for the early adopter.
The chart below shows the timeline between adoption of the standard for each technology. Considering that it takes 5 years to develop a standard and looking at the 2002 dot com bubble bursting date that the 10Gig standard was ratified it is perhaps no surprise that 100Gig was delayed.
ISPA Secretariat met with Campbell Cowie and Chris Rowsell from Ofcom this afternoon to discuss the ongoing work surrounding the DE Act.
Ofcom explained that the Code will look at four areas: process – how a Copyright Infringement Report (CIR) is generated and sent and the notification process; appeals for consumers; dispute resolution between ISPs and RHs; and costs, which BIS will be focusing on.
The Code is due to be published within the next ‘couple of weeks’, though no date has been set. As Ofcom did not anticipate industry to come together and produce an effective code as per the DE Bill/Act, it had been planning what a Code may look like for some time and had not relied on one side of the debate to influence the content.
Due to the short timescales Ofcom has been working to, the Code will be instructional rather than setting out line-by-line what is required. For example, instead of dictating a standard approach for a CIR, those affected will have to tell Ofcom how they will go about it and Ofcom will then approve it or recommend changes.
The Code will initially be limited to ISPs with around 400,000 subscribers – currently 7 ISPs – and not including mobile broadband, but the long-term ambition is to target those ISPs with copyright infringing consumers. So downloaders who migrate to an ISP not included in the soft launch of the Code will eventually be covered as Ofcom follows the traffic. Ofcom has also been tasked with analysing the level of copyright infringement and barriers to innovative and emerging business models and report back to the Secretary of State, and would be actively seeking views on this.
My thanks to the ISPA Secretariat for this feedback.
ISPA Secretariat met with Campbell Cowie and Chris Rowsell from Ofcom this afternoon to discuss the ongoing work surrounding the DE Act.
Ofcom explained that the Code will look at four areas: process – how a Copyright Infringement Report (CIR) is generated and sent and the notification process; appeals for consumers; dispute resolution between ISPs and RHs; and costs, which BIS will be focusing on.
The Code is due to be published within the next ‘couple of weeks’, though no date has been set. As Ofcom did not anticipate industry to come together and produce an effective code as per the DE Bill/Act, it had been planning what a Code may look like for some time and had not relied on one side of the debate to influence the content.
Due to the short timescales Ofcom has been working to, the Code will be instructional rather than setting out line-by-line what is required. For example, instead of dictating a standard approach for a CIR, those affected will have to tell Ofcom how they will go about it and Ofcom will then approve it or recommend changes.
The Code will initially be limited to ISPs with around 400,000 subscribers – currently 7 ISPs – and not including mobile broadband, but the long-term ambition is to target those ISPs with copyright infringing consumers. So downloaders who migrate to an ISP not included in the soft launch of the Code will eventually be covered as Ofcom follows the traffic. Ofcom has also been tasked with analysing the level of copyright infringement and barriers to innovative and emerging business models and report back to the Secretary of State, and would be actively seeking views on this.
My thanks to the ISPA Secretariat for this feedback.
An interesting question posed during the Board Election Hustings at LINX69 today was “is LINX getting too big?”
For the uninitiated the London Internet Exchange is a membership owned Internet Exchange where network operators peer with other network operators. This means that they pass traffic between each other free of charge. There is a cost for this – running the “exchange” involves buying and maintaining expensive bits of kit that all members connect to.
This cost however is far lower than the alternative of buying access to internet sites around the world from a commercial supplier – something known as internet transit. LINX membership in theory gives you access to around 70% of all internet routes.
LINX is growing rapidly. The organisation has 357 members with 22 new applications in 2010 to date. Network operators want to join because as LINX grows the benefits also grow.
The question at the hustings is valid though. The problem is that the internet was designed as a robust network able to withstand problems at any given single point. If those networks comprising the internet increasingly connect at a single place then this obviously counter intuitive to the way the internet is meant to work.
Now LINX does operate a very robust network – effectively two networks based on two different vendor equipments. It is becoming an increasingly attractive place to peer.
I can’t tell you what the right answer is. ISPs just need to make sure they have alternatives.
Ofcom seems to have gone very quiet since the initial flurry of consultation meetings following the passing of the Digital Economy Act. This is somewhat concerning in my mind. Ofcom has to produce a draft Code of Practice by the end of May.
The DEAct is such a contentious subject that the last thing we want is to find that this CoP is not objective and is bisassed towards one set of stakeholders over another. It is a lot easier to get changes made before the initial draft than afterwards.
It is also hugely important for Ofcom to remain transparent here and it would make sense to me for the regulator to be asked to identify how many contacts and inputs have been had with each set of stakeholders during the compilation of the draft CoP.
Ofcom responsibilites in respect of the DEAct can be found here. There is one meeting planned for 20th May to present these duties. Doesn’t seem to be to do with the CoP subject matter.
For some strange reason as I travel down to LINX69 in London the on train wifi is directing me to Google’s Swedish website. It would be interesting to find out whether this is down to the service provider network being used by EastCoast Trains or something happening in the Google network itself.
I guess someone at LINX69 would be able to find out.