Tag: BT

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broadband Business ofcom

The Demise of Fixed Broadband

A lively time is being had today at the BT Wholesale ISP Forum. The ISP world is fast moving and with so many changes going on – the move from ADSL Max to 21CN, the introduction of Fibre To The Cabinet, Ethernet in the First Mile – there are always lots of things to talk about.

We had a market presentation given by John Kiernan of the BT Market Research department.  This was largely a regurgitation of this year’s Ofcom Market Report but he also spoke about the move away from fixed broadband to mobile broadband. During the debate from the floor someone mentioned that at the Broadband World Forum in Paris yesterday the talk (presumably by the wireless network operators) was that  wireless broadband was expected to kill off fixed broadband by 2012.

I can’t see this happening in the UK anytime soon although I’m sure that wireless broadband is going to have a big part to play – I use it myself on the move.  Consumers especially are getting more and more tied in to bundles that include their fixed line, TV and broadband. Also fibre brings the potential to provide much faster speeds than are being discussed with wireless broadband (and I know that someone will now tell me you can get Gigabit wireless).

What does concern me is the increase in the pollution of the airwaves which will come with more and more wireless.  I realise we are told it is safe but…

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broadband Business internet Regs

Stephen Timms MP to Become the New Communications Minister

Stephen Timms MP Digital Britain broadband

Stephen Timms brings significant telecommunications industry experience to his new Communications Minister role.

I understand that Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP is set to become the new Communications Minister, with responsibility for taking forward the recommendations of the Digital Britain broadband review. The position had been vacated when Lord Carter stepped down following the publication of the Review. It is likely that the role will change slightly, given that Mr Timms will sit jointly across the Department for Business and the Treasury, whereas Lord Carter’s position sat jointly across the Department for Business and the DCMS.

A former Internet Hero at the ISPAs, Stephen Timms brings significant experience to the role having worked in the telecommunications industry before entering Parliament and having previously served as a Minister with responsibility for e-Commerce at the DTI and BERR.

Whether the treasury connection will have any relevance remains to be seen.  I see one of the biggest challenges for this Government is going to be how it faces up to the need to invest massively in the Next Generation Access network (ie fibre).

Whilst I was on holiday I visited my in laws in Liverpool. Grandad had saved me an article from the local paper describing the outcry amongst Liverpudlian councillors when they found that BT’s initial £1,5m investment in Fibre To The Cabinet was not going to be gracing their fair city with it’s presence whilst favouring local rivals Manchester.  Nonsense I cried and reached for my BT FTTC broadband rollout map (never go anywhere without it).

To my surprise, he was right. All the dots identifying the initial (spring 2010) roll out sites come no closer than Altrincham. The good burghers of Liverpool should not feel that they have been singled out, because there will be huge swathes of the UK left out in the high speed broadband cold.  I don’t for a moment blame BT, although I’m sure that competition from Virgin will in due course give them a bit of a prod in the right direction.

This is why I say that the Government has a lot to do in this space, and why I wish Stephen Timms every success in his new role.

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Business scams

Phorm fails

I read on Monday that BT had abandoned Phorm. I didn’t consider this worth commenting on. Today I see that Talk Talk has also dropped the behavioural advertising company.

From a consumer’s perspective I say hooray. As an ISP I don’t have a big enough business to make the Phorm business model work so I haven’t had the moral dilemma myself.  Apparently BT has said it has nothing to do with the furore over privacy rights but I doubt that anyone believes this.

Phorm is now having to say that it is concentrating on faster moving markets such as Korea and talks about live trials with Korea Telecom.  All I can say is that for it to work Korea Telecom has to have a thicker skin than any western based ISP.  Perhaps there isn’t the same privacy rights activity  in Asia.

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broadband Business internet

Andy Murray Drives Broadband Network to a New High

Our broadband network usage hit a new high yesterday as Andy Murray wallopped Juan Carlos Ferrero in straight sets at Wimbledon.  The peak remained at a constant high between 4 and 5pm, at which point presumably everyone left the office and watched it at home because the network traffic dropped right off.

My understanding is that whilst an ISP’s network might well have been able to cope with the added traffic levels some problems were caused at  local exchange level where virtual paths were seeing congestion. The virtual path is the backhaul from exchange into the BT network and on to the internet, and in this case to the BBC website.

BT’s new 21CN network should be better placed to withstand this sort of traffic burst.

Expect another peak when “our Andy” plays in the semi final.  I feel as if I have known him all my life :-).

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broadband Business internet ofcom

Initial Take on Digital Britain Report

2Mbps Universal Service Obligation by 2012.
This is the minimum that people need to get into the game. In the report the government recognizes that whilst much of the country will shortly be getting access to faster broadband (aka BT 40Mbps Fibre To The Cabinet or 50Mbps Virgin cable) a significant chunk won’t, which will exacerbate the Digital Divide.

The Government is therefore looking to promote/fund the extension of this Next Generation Access network into these “excluded” areas. I have been saying that 2Mbps is not enough and it is good that the Government clearly recognizes this.

The funding for the rural Next Gen broadband access is likely to come from a complex variety of sources. It includes a new tax levied of 50 pence on every copper phone line. I assume it includes Virgin cable connections to keep the playing field level. This will have to be passed on to customers so the immediate effect is a rise in the cost of broadband. It will also add to the overheads of the ISP which has to collect it.

The funding collected will be available on a competitive tender basis. I would expect the Government to somehow identify specific projects for funding and make the moneys available for competitive bids. Otherwise someone with BT with the massive resources available to put specific projects together would cream all the cash.

Music Piracy
Two things to say here. The Government recognizes that access to legal means of downloading music needs to improve which reinforces what the ISP industry has been saying (note the many blog posts on this subject).

Secondly the Government also wants a more graduated approach to punishing illegal downloaders. The three strikes and you are out approach has been replaced much to everyone’s relief.

We now appear to be looking at a scenario whereby the ISP would send a letter to the end user informing them that they have been identified as offenders. The next step would be to throttle the bandwidth available to users indulging in this activity or block P2P. The final resort would be legal action.

A cautionary note here. Most ISPs cannot easily block P2P. Only those big consumer players typically have the kit that can do it. Are we looking at the same scenario as the Data Retention Act where the Government only expects an ISP to follow the law only if specifically asked. In this case the ISP would have to be funded to do it.

There is also a fairly significant onus on Ofcom to make all this happen which is going to be an interesting play. I imagine it will take no small level of resource which probably doesn’t currently exist.

All in all I think this is a good report.  There were always going to be difficulties with putting together a document with such a wide remit and I’m sure that as we get time to digest it other questions will arise.  However Lord Carter should be able to move on to his fresh challenges with a reasonable sense of satisfaction.

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broadband Business internet

BBC Claims BT is Throttling iPlayer

The BBC has an article online regarding the fact that BT is broadband throttling the iPlayer traffic of customers taking “Option1”.  Option1 appears to be BT’s cheapest broadband package at 8Mbps with a 10GB download limit.

I’m afraid that it is a fact of life that ISPs cannot afford to keep providing the services they do at the prices they do without some element of constraint over what consumers can download.

BT’s website does have a long list of caveats for its broadband service. They are quite open about the fact that they “network traffic manage” P2P and video streaming between their peak hours of 5pm and midnight although you might argue that the fair usage policy has become quite a complex one for people to understand.  Also whilst openly promoting the fact that users can watch online TV they fail to mention that only the lowest quality iPlayer setting is accommodated at these peak times.

The problem is about to get worse as higher speed 21CN connections become more prevalent and trials about to begin on 40Mbps services using Fibre To The Cabinet. Customers will expect to be able to get high quality video streaming  with these services.  Indeed video and likely HD video, will be one of the drivers for uptake of faster broadband.

Note whilst checking out the BT website I observed that the company sells its 10GB download limit as the equivalent of 2,500 music file downloads, 14 videos or 25 hours of streaming iPlayer a month.

This riles the music industry no end.  Does anyone believe that consumers download 2,500 “paid for” music files?  Is BT inadvertently helping to promote illegal P2P filesharing here?

Categories
broadband Business

21CN trials successfully completed

Yesterday I signed off our ADSL2+ service for production. As one of a small number of ISPs selected by BT for the trials we have been careful not to rush too quickly into using the 21CN network. As it was new we felt it was important to make sure that the customer experience matched our own business quality requirements.

After a few hundred trial connections we have been getting more of a feel for the actual performance capabilities of the network.

ADSL2+ is marketed by some ISPs as a 24Mbps technology but in fact it is unlikely that customers will achieve such high connection speeds as the actual speed achieved is very dependent on the customer’s distance from the exchange and the quality of their line. Because of this, we are promoting our offering as an “up to 16Mbps” service. As with existing ADSL connections, users experience a range of speeds. The highest we have seen so far is 19Mbps so there is a chance that people could get a faster connection than advertised.

Transparency for business customers is very important, as is responsive and professional support. I am extremely proud of the technical service levels which we provide free of charge to customers. Timico operates exclusively in the UK with its own in-house staff, rather than outsourcing customer support functions to UK or overseas contractors.

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Business voip

Newark Telephone Exchange Loss of Service

The Newark telephone exchange suffered an outage today and quite a number of analog lines and ADSLs were down as a result. Fortunately Timico has a network strategy that incorporates multiple types of connectivity specifically to provide resilience when outages like this happen.

It did prompt me to check out how often BT has problems at an exchange and I found that in the last seven days there were nineteen major service outages. Anywhere  technology is involved is bound to lead to things going wrong.  If you extrapolate the last week’s outages to a whole year then you get a figure of nine hundred and eighty eight which says that approximately one in six of the UK’s telephone exchanges has a problem in any given year.

Whilst this is not a definitive number in my mind it is good enough to tell me that a business needs to have a disaster recovery/contingency plan to cater for network outages.  We mustr be unlucky in Newark because last summer we had another outage.  That time our ISDN lines were down for the afternoon.  Allegedly some equipment was switched off to prevent the exchange from over heating on a hot day!

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Business internet

Digital Britain Summit

At this morning’s Digital Britain Summit in London BT Chief Executive Ian Livingstone argued that there is not enough demand for fibre to the home to justify the cost of rolling it out universally.  He is quoted as saying “Of course a Ferrari is faster than a Ford, but most people are happy with a Ford.”

It has to be said that this is in huge contrast to his predecessor Ben Verwaayen who took the bold move of investing in a countrywide rollout of ADSL despite the apparent lack of a business case for it. The upshot of that move is the highly competitive broadband market we have today.

Of  course, in Ian Livingstone’s defence, the costs are likely to be somewhat different for a fibre network roll out that that of ADSL.  However it is highly blinkered to have made that statement.  The applications and the uses will come.  When they built the M25 around London the need for additional lanes was not anticipated but the traffic came…

I think the Government needs to bit the bullet here and make the investment in fibre to areas of the country that don’t otherwise fit with BT/NTL’s ROI requirements.  They should make this network available to all on a wholesale basis.  It will assist with the economic recovery and provide the country with a serious, strategic capability in next generation technology.

What’s more, whilst the Digital Britain report talks about a Universal Service Obligation of 2Mbps to every household in the UK I think this is very shortsighted.  We should be thinking of 1Gbps.

As a footnote to this post I’d like to comment on the very short notice (only 2 – 3 days) provided to attendees for today’s meeting. I’m not a naturally suspicious bloke but I wonder whether there was a hidden reason for this.

My thanks to Chris Williams from The Register for the article about this

Categories
Business internet ofcom

EU threatens to sue UK over Phorm

EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding has issued a statement threatening to sue the UK over their stance concerning behavioural advertising and Phorm.  I covered this last October – Ofcom was saying it was OK for ISPs to use Phorm provided they were transparent about it despite the fact that the EU was saying it was illegal.

In the UK the use of Phorm is being driven by BT, other ISPs having stepped back, afraid of the negative publicity. The reality is that the whole industry would jump at the opportunity to make more money out of advertising, at least the consumer ISPs who have the volume subscriber bases.

Although there are huge privacy issues involved I think the momentum is beginning to gather to the extent that the use of behavioural advertising is bound to grow.  Facebook, for example, must already use this form of database mining because when I visit Facebook, as I am wont to do,  I often see adverts for golf and guitar related subjects – those being two of my stated interests.  Google is also talking about selling advertising based on a given user’s recorded web searching habits.

The UK Government has two months to respond.  The EU press release can be read here.

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Business internet security

European Commission forecasts 193 Billion Euro cost of cyber attacks on networks

I note that the as cyber attacks on networks become more sophisticated the EC has forecast a 10% – 20% probability that telecoms networks will suffer a major breakdown within the next 10 years.  They have also estimated a potential global cost of 193 billion Euros as a consequence of such a breakdown.

To mitigate against such a scenario the EC is establishing a Public-Private Partnership for Resilience which “will help businesses share information with public authorities to ensure that adequate and consistent levels of preventive detection, emergency and recovery measures are in place in all Member states”.

I’m all in favour of this kind of thing though somewhat sceptical about its likely efficacy.  Industry is more likely in my mind to sort out its own shop through the likes of the IETF and LINX et al.

That said I do think that Government is goingto have to become far more deeply involved than it is in the internet space.  We are seeing it starting to happen and the Digital Britain Report (final report due out in early May which is light speed as far as Government is concerned) is part of this. 

It is easy to see that the potential cost of telecom network disruption could be huge.  I don’t know what the likely cost of last week’s BT fibre break in London is going to be but  just the costs of managing customer complaints would have been significant let alone the costs of the disruption to traffic. 

I missed out on a few news items to comment on last week due to being on holiday.  It’s good to be back though 🙂 .

Categories
Business internet

Russian Billionaire Pays For BT Exchange To Be Moved

Russian oil magnate Vladimir Lotsadoshski has paid BT an undisclosed sum to move the Mornington Crescent telephone exchange closer to his home.

The London based billionaire was getting fed up with the speed of his broadband connection. BT had told him it was down to the distance of his house from the exchange. Having just spent £100m on his new pad overlooking Regents Park he decided it would be easier to move the exchange rather than move house.

The Mornington Crescent exchange has been moved to a derelict plot of land near Camden Market. Lotsadoshski is reported as being extremely pleased with the speeds he is now getting on his ADSL line and is now able to watch Russian soaps online in full screen mode.

Unfortunately the move has resulted in a barrage of complaints from other BT customers who are now further from the new exchange than they had been before and whose ADSL speeds have dramatically slowed down.

Apparently BT has made so much money on the deal that it could afford to lose a few customers and the BT stock price rose 10% this morning with the news. The old BT exhange has been turned into a luxury hotel.

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Business datacentre security

Security Tightened at London Datacentres for G20 Summit

Security is already pretty tight at our London datacentres.  This coming week will see security stepped up further as the G20 Summit takes place in town.  I’m not going to go into any details but at least BT are less likely to have any 21CN line cards stolen next week.

I’ve also had a number of meetings rescheduled from next week due to “security concerns”

Categories
Business internet ofcom

Ofcom gives BT green light for fibre investment

Ofcom effectively gave BT the go ahead today for a £1.5Bn investment in a fibre network to provide up to 100Mbps internet access to homes in certain areas. By removing any regulatory barriers that might constrain BT from charging free market pricing for the fibre services Ofcom has set an environment that makes the BT business case for the investment workable.

BT has been involved in a high profile lobbying excercise to get this decision since around the time of the Caio Report last year.

I welcome this move though many people in smaller metropolitan and rural areas unlikely to get access to the service will view it as another step towards widening the digital divide.

Categories
Business internet media piracy

ISP and Music industries meet at UK Summit

At the board room of the Performing Rights Society in London today the great and the good of the UK Music industry met with representatives from the mainstream ISP community for an open discussion on how to handle illegal P2P music downloading.

Organisations represented included UK Music,  BAC&S, PPL, PRS, MMF, MPA, MU, MCPS, MPG, Timico, ISPA, O2, Orange, AOL, Yahoo, BT, GlobalMix, LINX, Playlouder and KCom. I’m sure I’ve missed some out and you will have to work out for yourselves what some of the acronyms stand for.

I was essentially there on behalf of the Internet Service Providers’ Association to represent the smaller ISP community who have been left out of the talks up until now. Whilst the “big six” largest ISPs probably represent over 90% of the market the other ISPs, of which there are easily in excess of 300, do represent a “significant other”.

As much as anything the meeting was a “getting to know each others’ perspective” session but a few points in particular stuck in my mind.

  1. We were not allowed to discuss commercial issues and there was a lawyer sat in the corner who interrupted whenever the conversation moved towards this area – the concern being that nobody wanted the meeting to be seen as price fixing. I understand that any initiatives up until now have failed because the Music Industry can’t agree on prices that will allow ISPs to make money out of offering legal music download services. 
  2. It was suggested by yours truly that to make the whole business model work there needed to be a wholesale provider that would make it easier for smaller businesses to participate.  This wholesale provider would have sorted out the rats nest of copyright and licensing issues. Some larger ISPs had 5 corporate lawyers in a department exclusively dedicated to this area. What hope the rest of us!

There is clearly some way to go to get to a working solution although there was general agreement around the table that  everybody wanted to help.

ISPs present were asked whether P2P traffic caused problems for them on their network. I stated that typically B2B ISPs did not throttle P2P traffic  and customers were provided with a high quality experierience for which they paid a premium.

In the consumer space customers seem not prepared to pay for quality and thus in order to try and preserve a reasonable experience for “ordinary” applications such as browsing and email  it is often standard practice for ISPs to throttle P2P traffic. In fact in fairness some ISPs publish these policies on their website. This touched a nerve with one Tier 1 ISP who avoided the word throttling using, instead,  “traffic management” as a less contentious phrase.

Categories
Business internet

Ethernet Competition Warming Up Globally In 2009

Traditionally high speed fibre links have been expensive because often the fibre had to be physically run for long distances, normally back to a connection in one of the dense metropolitan areas, and often all the way to London. The need for repeater stations adds to this cost.

In the UK the model has changed. Now network providers are rolling out Points Of Presence locally around the country with a preinstalled backhaul to London. It normally has to be London because typically this is where connections to other carriers and the internet are located.

This means that now, instead of long connections with high installation costs businesses can install lower cost local fibre connections, provided they are within 25km of an enabled POP.

From my perspective there are two main players in this game.

BT Openreach will, by April, have 600 Ethernet enabled 21CN exchanges and notionally 1,100 by the end of the year. BT is however playing catchup with NTL which owns most of the UK’s cable TV infrastructure. NTL some time ago woke up to the fact that it wasn’t using this existing fibre in the ground to best effect and is now selling leased line connectivity at much lower costs than was available even last summer. 

If you don’t understand the relevance of this, fibre connections are far more reliable than ADSL and come with better Service Level Assurances. As companies rely more and more on web based hosted services and applications they need better service uptimes.

The competition is great and is very much to the benefit of UK business. I am now quite often seeing zero up front cost quotations go out the door which is likely to prove a great help to businesses struggling to find capex in the recession.

PS the Global Warming bits in the post title was purely an attention getter 🙂 . Actually I don’t really mean “globally”, I mean in the UK and although there are some countries ahead of us in this game in Europe and the Far East there are others, notably the USA that lag behind.

We are still a long way from getting fibre to the home but the environment for businesses is definately improving.

Categories
Business internet

Anti-P2P Piracy Regulation Likely To Be Imposed On ISPs?

The UK Government has stirred up the industry today with a press release by the Department of Business, Enterprise And Regulatory Reform (BERR) that intimates it’s intention to regulate ISPs into assisting the music industry to combat illegal downloading.

BERR is saying that last year’s consultation with stakeholders (ISPs and music industry) showed that there is no consensus on how to address the problem and the suggestion is that it sees regulation as being necessary. The whole subject matter, however, is riddled with complexity.

In 2008 the music industry, under a new representative body known as UK Music, run by former pop star  Feargal Sharkey, began discussions with what are known as the “Big Six” ISPs. These are the large branded ISPs that actually represent the majority of the consumer broadband customers in the UK. These discussions were held in private and the rest of the industry has not been party to what was actually being said. My understanding is that the discussions centred purely around enforcement and have not gone particularly well.

The problems centre around being able to prove who is doing the downloading and what is being downloaded – most ISPs can’t tell and have no interest – this surely is a privacy issue. Then there are the costs of policing and finally the fact that none of the ISPs want to lose customers.

At the ISP Conference in London last November I sat on a panel with Feargal Sharkey to discuss this whole issue. At that time we arranged to meet again in the New Year so that the other , smaller, UK ISPs, represented by the ISP Association of which I am a council member could participate in the discussion. That meeting is scheduled for 9th February. So the position taken by BERR is in my view somewhat premature as discussions between stakeholders do not yet appear to me to have  finished.

The nature of talks now is centred around licensing and revenue models. There have been some high profile announcements recently where some big consumer ISPs have severed their contractual relationships with music content providers. This is being done because the existing business models do not work. For example music streaming is licensed on a per stream basis. As the number of streams grow ISPs have to increase their capacity to measure and account for them and the cost of doing so soon outweighs the income derived from selling access to the music. 

So they have to look for an alternative. The strong rumour is that a big UK ISP has already negotiated a deal whereby it can sell unlimited access to music for a fixed monthly fee per subscriber (word on the street is that this is  BT though there has been no offical acknowledgement of this fact).

The meeting on the 9th February is likely to centre around how other ISPs can adopt the same model to everyone’s mutual benefit. From the ISP industry perspective it makes more sense to make music easy to access legally than to drag everyone into complex legal processes which will only benefit lawyers in the long run.

BERR is also now saying that this subject area is also now going to be taken under the wing of the Digital Britain Review, the interim report for which is due out at the end of this month. I am not convinced that this interim report will show much progress. The likelihood is that another consultation will happen in the summer with a target date for legislation in the autumn.

This timetable, I believe, does not really provide enough time for sensible consideration of the legislation and if I were the Government would not want to be getting into an unpopular debate with industry in the run up to the election. There is a feeling on the ISP streets that the government is now looking to come up with some good news stories to take them through 2009 and into a notional spring General Election in 2010.

Time will tell, and soon enough. I will continue to report and comment on this subject. This post is a little longer than usual but there is a lot to talk about.

Categories
Business UC voip

Timico Strikes Gold At ITSPA Awards

I’m thrilled to report that Timico won the Best Unified ITSP at the ITSPA Awards at the House of Commons last night. This was for an ITSP who is also an ISP. It’s an exciting finish to what has been a very exciting year for us and is the icing on the cake after the 4th place in the Sunday Times Techtrack.

The event was jointly hosted by MPs Ian Taylor and Derek Wyatt, Chair of the All Party Communications Group and took place in the salubrious surroundings of the Members Dining Room at the House of Commons.

Other winners were BT for the consumer award, Gradwell.com for the business ITSP, AQL for innovation, and Cisco for best hardware.

The Cisco win is also significant because Timico Group company KeConnect is Cisco’s partner of choice for SIP trunks and this provides a nice filip for the partnership going into the new year.

Finally the VoIP personality award was won by Eli Katz for his tireless service to the industry since founding ITSPA four years ago. This came as a total surprise to him as we had decided at the Council meeting not to have this category 🙂

Once I get hold of some photos I’ll do another post – I know how you are all dying to see them.

Categories
Business fun stuff

A day in the life

Life is rich. If yours isn’t you should seriously think about doing something about it. I was wondering what to write about today out of the many things that are going on. In the end I thought I’d just rattle off a list of things I was involved in during the day because I believe it illustrates the point of those opening three words.

Got in and made a cup of tea. Then spent time discussing a contract we are about to sign with BT. Checked up on progress of our 21CN trial orders. Sat with tech support discussing a Virtual Machine project we are looking at. Discussions with our new Business Development Director who starts in January (more on him in due course I’m sure). Meeting with Cisco to discuss marketing plans for the Cisco Small Business portfolio for 2009. Lunch with Cisco. Meeting with Nortel to discuss hosted VoIP propositions. Drop Nortel off at station. Arrange tech meeting to discuss SPAM strategy for 2009. Conference call with VoIP Operations Manager to discuss specific customer technical issue. Home to take kids to cubs. Catch up chat with CEO. Go to school prize giving evening (son Tom won prize for English  and yes of course I am proud of him). Chat with headmaster congratulating him on chosing son as prizewinner. Home. Kiss wife. Do emails and write blog post.

Tomorrow is another day, another blog post. Friday is a day off to take the kids to the Lincoln Christmas Market. Check it out here. They get hundreds of thousands of visitors each year (or so I’m told). We live slap bang in the middle of the action so it is difficult to ignore. One of the kids’ school shuts down for the duration because access to it is impossible. The parents run a cafe which raises around £10,000 each year for the school PTA funds. Thats one heck of a lot of teas and coffees at a pound each. 

Categories
Business internet

21CN Line Speed Expectations

A busy time at the end of this week with ISPA Council meeting followed by lunch, a trip to the CRN Awards dinner (more food!) and today lunch with a supplier (aaargh!!). The Christmas run in seems to start earlier each year!

 

Timico is about to start its 21CN ADSL2+ trial in earnest. Initial line tests on the trialists suggest an average expected performance of around 8Mbps. Interestingly talking to others in the industry at the CRN Awards their experience, limited as it may be at what is still a relatively early stage of the 21CN rollout, the average speeds are turning out to be nearer 12Mbps.

 

This does suggest that BT is being very conservative in setting expectations of 21CN performance. I can’t really blame them. The technology is in theory capable of reaching 24Mbps but in practice very few people will actually get this speed.  

 

I will certainly report back on the real world performance as the data comes in.

Categories
Business voip

BT's Policy Regarding Number Porting – Cease And Reprovide

When, as is increasingly the case, a customer wants to move his telephone number to a VoIP service the underlying analogue line is ceased. ie it stops working.

If that customer wants to use the (VoIP) number over his broadband connection then he has a problem because the broadband connection stops working because the line has been ceased. He has to wait for a new underlying number to be provided which ain’t a quick process. This is a very anticompetitive scenario because it makes it hard for an end user to reuse a number if it is their only line.

A year ago the industry asked BT to change their process so that the line could immediately have a new number to keep the broadband working. Nothing seems to have happened here so the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association is taking up the cause and will be lobbying BT.

I’ll keep readers posted here because this does seem to me to be an issue that is preventing a free market from working.

Categories
Business voip

BT’s Policy Regarding Number Porting – Cease And Reprovide

When, as is increasingly the case, a customer wants to move his telephone number to a VoIP service the underlying analogue line is ceased. ie it stops working.

If that customer wants to use the (VoIP) number over his broadband connection then he has a problem because the broadband connection stops working because the line has been ceased. He has to wait for a new underlying number to be provided which ain’t a quick process. This is a very anticompetitive scenario because it makes it hard for an end user to reuse a number if it is their only line.

A year ago the industry asked BT to change their process so that the line could immediately have a new number to keep the broadband working. Nothing seems to have happened here so the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association is taking up the cause and will be lobbying BT.

I’ll keep readers posted here because this does seem to me to be an issue that is preventing a free market from working.

Categories
broadband Business internet

AT&T Trials Usage-Based Charging and BT Hikes Bandwidth Costs

AT&T has announced a trial in the USA for usage based broadband charging for its customers in Reno, Nevada.  This follows on from a similar trial in June by Time Warner Cable and also a 250GB cap on usage placed by Comcast on its customers. The move towards metered charging is I believe inexorable.

We are in for interesting times here in the UK. BT has just hiked it’s ADSL bandwidth costs to service providers. This will make ADSL more expensive in the UK. Whether this price rise gets passed on to end users remains to be seen. It certainly makes life more difficult for service providers who were already likely to move to usage based charging.

Of course BT increasingly has more competition in the guise of companies installing their own kit in BT exchanges – what’s known as Local Loop Unbundling. This competition is largely in the consumer space with broadband sometimes being packaged as a “free” element of a deal that might include line rental, minutes and, in some cases, TV. The level of service that this “free” broadband brings is unlikely to cut the mustard with most businesses.

So what does this mean?

  • In the first instance a quality broadband connection is likely to get more expensive. Most LLU players don’t have a wholesale offering that B2B service providers could resell.
  • Secondly broadband customers in rural areas are likely going to have to pay more for their connectivity because the LLU operators don’t provide broadband in these “uneconomic” areas. This will exacerbate the so called “digital divide”, already a hot topic in the light of the high anticipated cost of rolling out Next Generation Access to rural areas.

BT recently removed the installation costs associated with (some) new connections to their ADSL network. On the face of it this latest move looks like they have simply shifted these costs onto the line rental. The country would certainly benefit from more competition in the wholesale space.

 

Categories
broadband Business internet

AT&T Trials Usage Based Charging and BT Hikes Bandwidth Costs

AT&T has announced a trial in the USA for usage based broadband charging for its customers in Reno, Nevada.  This follows on from a similar trial in June by Time Warner Cable and also a 250GB cap on usage placed by Comcast on its customers. The move towards metered charging is I believe inexorable. We are in for interesting times here in the UK. BT has just hiked it’s ADSL bandwidth costs to service providers. This will make ADSL more expensive in the UK. Whether this price rise gets passed on to end users remains to be seen. It certainly makes life more difficult for service providers who were already likely to move to usage based charging. Of course BT increasingly has more competition in the guise of companies installing their own kit in BT exchanges – what’s known as Local Loop Unbundling. This competition is largely in the consumer space with broadband sometimes being packaged as a “free” element of a deal that might include line rental, minutes and, in some cases, TV. The level of service that this “free” broadband brings is unlikely to cut the mustard with most businesses. So what does this mean?

  • In the first instance a quality broadband connection is likely to get more expensive. Most LLU players don’t have a wholesale offering that B2B service providers could resell.
  • Secondly broadband customers in rural areas are likely going to have to pay more for their connectivity because the LLU operators don’t provide broadband in these “uneconomic” areas. This will exacerbate the so called “digital divide”, already a hot topic in the light of the high anticipated cost of rolling out Next Generation Access to rural areas.

BT recently removed the installation costs associated with (some) new connections to their ADSL network. On the face of it this latest move looks like they have simply shifted these costs onto the line rental. The country would certainly benefit from more competition in the wholesale space.

Categories
Business internet ofcom

Ofcom And Behavioural Marketing

If you are a tecchie you will already know about Phorm and already have formed your own views. If you are not the whole storm may have passed you by. That Phorm storm however is still a blowin’ strong.

Phorm is a system that allows an ISP to monitor the internet browsing behaviour of its customers and to thereafter provide targeted advertising based on your surfing history. The pitch from an ISP to its customers is that it will make advertising, which is going to happen anyway, more relevant and that noone could possibly object to this. The ISP benefits from enhanced click through revenues.

The objection from some consumers is that it invades privacy. It opens the door to potential problems. For example one member of the family secretly looks at pornography whilst everyone else is out of the house. Phorm recognises this and starts pushing adverts for pornography to that computer which is also being used by the kids during the day. Not good.

In principle the government is saying it is not illegal provided consumers are informed as to what they are signing up for and privacy is respected. In actual fact during early trials of the system in 2006 and 2007 by BT customers were allegedly not informed of what was happening and this is potentially being seen as illegal by the EC.

BT seems to have actually started using Phorm in a new trial under a service banner called Webwise. It is based on an opt-in policy but no mention is made, naturally, of the controversy surrounding the technology.

Yesterday a meeting was held between Ofcom and various representatives of Government and the ISP industry to discuss the subject. Present were most of the major consumer ISPs, BERR and Phorm itself. The Government doesn’t really want to get involved here and wants industry to draw up it’s own voluntary Code of Practice. “Helpfully” it has also provided an example of such a Code.

Industry, I sense, is steeling itself for another bout of legislation. It doesn’t really want to get further embroiled in red tape/codes of practice and certainly the ISPA has not begun working on one.

This certainly is an interesting industry. As a member of the ISPA Council I need to look at the subject from the perspective of the ISP membership.  Consumer ISPs will be interested in whether they can upside their margins during tough times, and who can blame them. As a director of a Business to Business ISP I have no interest in Phorm. We provide uncomplicated quality connectivity to our customers without the additional unwanted addons (plenty of wanted addons though 🙂 ). As a consumer I might or might not like the idea of Phorm.

I’ll keep you posted.

Categories
Business internet

Staggercast

Shakespeare used to introduce a few hundred new words in each of his plays, many of which were never heard of again, odsbodkins!

It’s the same these days in the technology business. Staggercast is the means whereby subscribers can preregister their interest in a TV programme. This programme is then downloaded in advance ready for local delivery at the published time.  This allows content delivery over an IP network but avoids the over use of a connection at peak times of day.

This was one of the options being discussed by Simon Orme, BT’s new GM for Content Delivery. In London today Orme presented the Consult21 meeting with an overview of the BT trial plans for multicast using PTA. Notionally this will allow ISPs to deliver TV over DSL at much more economic rates.

Don’t get too excited though. This is very much experimental engineering work with no immediate plans to productise. The idea is that an ISP would be able to add premium rate TV as a bundled product. It would also provide a low cost delivery vehicle for small regional TV channels as the focus of the established media moves to national and global content. 

What is clear is that this is one of the early steps BT is taking in preparing itself for the business case challenge that is Fibre To The Home.

The BT FTTH trials were also discussed. They seem to have gone well with the 50 BT employees given 100Mbps internet access and ordered to stay at home all day and play online games. Gaming is one of the few current uses of internet technology that benefits from really high speed access. The faster you are on the draw the better.

Whether Staggercast enters the Oxford English Dictionary remains to be seen. What is clear is that both in the fiercely competitive field of online gaming and in the international competitive broadband stakes he who has the fastest connection will be the winner.

Categories
Business internet

BT Slips IP Stream Connect By Over a Year

BT made public yesterday the fact that its IP Stream Connect product would not now be available until Q2 09. That’s fiscal Q2. ie September 09.  This is a huge slip considering that last November the industry was being told not to order any more ATM based central pipes and to expect to have migrated all their 20CN IP Stream traffic over to a 21CN Hostlink connection.

For the uninitiated IP Stream is the technology used by BT for most of their ADSL connections. The connections to the BT ADSL network from Timico and other ISPs use ATM. The relevance for ISPs that are BT customers, and that’s most of the ISPs in the UK, is that they will have to keep ordering old style ATM pipes.

The issue here is that these connections are expensive to install and had minimum contract terms of 12 months. This could be crippling as ISPs typically depreciate the capital spend on a BT Central over 5 years. Also they could be ordering a pipe that they might only need for three months whilst they waited for IP Stream Connect to go live whilst being tied in to a 12 month contract.

Using 21CN hostlinks offer a multitude of benefits, not least of which are improved quality and customer experience.

Fortunately BT has  responded to the stinging criticism of the ISP community, me included, and come up with more favourable contract terms.

Whilst large consumer ISPs have been heavily cricised for their not totally transparent bandwidth capping and throttling polices these are the practical results of dropping their prices to unsustainable levels. In other words you get what you pay for. It is already difficult enough for the industry to keep its prices low in the face of increased usage from applications such as iPlayer and YouTube without being burdened with more costs.

Hopefully we will now have weathered this BT induced storm.

Categories
broadband Business

BT in the News for Throttling Broadband

BT has made the headlines again for throttling all peer to peer traffic. www.samknows.com has just produced a report on the subject.

People perhaps don’t realise that P2P isn’t just used for downloading (often illegal) media from the internet. P2P is often the most efficient way of moving large amounts of data from one location to another and as such is an essential business tool. Timico doesn’t throttle any of it’s traffic.

This suggests to me that the UK is moving more to a two tier ISP market. Tiers are usually based on the size of an ISP – the big ones are Tier 1, medium sized are Tier 2 etc.  I would suggest that in future the Tier  classification should be based on the quality of the customer experience. Tier 1 = good, Tier 2 = not so good.

I’ll leave you to decide which one BT fits into but I would have to say that Timico would certainly fit into the former.

Categories
Apps Business UC voip

Ribbit & BT – Unified Communications

BT has bought a company called Ribbit based in Silicon Valley, California. Why is this interesting or significant to the UK business community? Maybe it isn’t.

However there is a chance that in the UK we will see the effects of this acquisition in the next year or two. Ribbit provides the hooks to make voice calls from different applications. In itself this isn’t anything special – Timico could do the same thing using it’s Nortel 5200 platform given the time and inclination.

Ribbit has tried to make it easy for 3rd party developers to do so and as a company whose sole reason for existence seems to have been to do this then one must assume that they would be doing a good job of it.

I think my one observation relates to what BT expects to do with the platform. It seems to me that Ribbit is set up as an applicaton for a wide community. I suspect BT might just use it to develop their own embedded voice applications. This to me would be a lost opportunity. Here BT has the chance to position itself at the centre of a Web2.0/VoIP2.0 world in the UK but it needs to keep Ribbit open to all to do so.

In the world of voice, at least in business voice and Unified Communications, it is also important to keep the activity and platform UK centred when selling to UK parties. This is why I believe that a Webex service with a voice platform based in the USA will never have a huge market reach in the UK. The same applies for the apparent efforts of Microsoft with hosted OCS.

Timico is based in the UK, offers UK services and telephone numbers, and I believe will be going head to head with Microsoft and Cisco in this space. Of course in other areas we will be partnering them. Interesting times…

Categories
Apps Business UC voip

Ribbit & BT – Unified Communications

BT has bought a company called Ribbit based in Silicon Valley, California. Why is this interesting or significant to the UK business community? Maybe it isn’t.

However there is a chance that in the UK we will see the effects of this acquisition in the next year or two. Ribbit provides the hooks to make voice calls from different applications. In itself this isn’t anything special – Timico could do the same thing using it’s Nortel 5200 platform given the time and inclination.

Ribbit has tried to make it easy for 3rd party developers to do so and as a company whose sole reason for existence seems to have been to do this then one must assume that they would be doing a good job of it.

I think my one observation relates to what BT expects to do with the platform. It seems to me that Ribbit is set up as an applicaton for a wide community. I suspect BT might just use it to develop their own embedded voice applications. This to me would be a lost opportunity. Here BT has the chance to position itself at the centre of a Web2.0/VoIP2.0 world in the UK but it needs to keep Ribbit open to all to do so.

In the world of voice, at least in business voice and Unified Communications, it is also important to keep the activity and platform UK centred when selling to UK parties. This is why I believe that a Webex service with a voice platform based in the USA will never have a huge market reach in the UK. The same applies for the apparent efforts of Microsoft with hosted OCS.

Timico is based in the UK, offers UK services and telephone numbers, and I believe will be going head to head with Microsoft and Cisco in this space. Of course in other areas we will be partnering them. Interesting times…