First in a series of videos recorded by BT as part of their launch of FTTC.
Tag: Timico
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.
Richard Baxter of Neos Networks bravely took up the challenge of playing the NetOps guitar when visiting the Timico office last week. Watched by colleague Gary Waterman he entertained the Tech Support teams with a virtuoso performance of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, or at least I think it was 🙂
This was such a successful event that I’m thinking of creating a new guest guitar spot on trefor.net. Don’t get me wrong. It doesn’t mean that all suppliers have to entertain the team in the same way in order to get the business. But it might help…
Anyone else wanting to appear in front of a particularly uncritical audience should get in touch. Next time we will have the audio recording facilities lined up and post it on YouTube.
In case anyone is interested we are doing a VoIP shootout at Comms Business’ Convergence Summit North in Manchester tomorrow. This is a high speed high pressure job where you turn up, plug your kit in and expect it to work first time making phone calls.
It’s actually quite good fun, if somewhat pressure filled – the last time they did it two out of six contestants didn’t manage to get a call up and running.
Anyone interested in watching should turn up at 14.45. You will need to be quick on the draw to get a good seat. Details can be found here.
Note it’s quite unusual to get a VoIP installation that doesn’t go fairly smoothly these days. Service Providers have got their act together, especially when it comes to understanding which bits of kit (routers, firewalls etc) can cause problems. There is always the exception to the rule of course but as long as the installer knows what he is doing it is rarely anything that can’t be sorted.
In case anyone is interested we are doing a VoIP shootout at Comms Business’ Convergence Summit North in Manchester tomorrow. This is a high speed high pressure job where you turn up, plug your kit in and expect it to work first time making phone calls.
It’s actually quite good fun, if somewhat pressure filled – the last time they did it two out of six contestants didn’t manage to get a call up and running.
Anyone interested in watching should turn up at 14.45. You will need to be quick on the draw to get a good seat. Details can be found here.
Note it’s quite unusual to get a VoIP installation that doesn’t go fairly smoothly these days. Service Providers have got their act together, especially when it comes to understanding which bits of kit (routers, firewalls etc) can cause problems. There is always the exception to the rule of course but as long as the installer knows what he is doing it is rarely anything that can’t be sorted.
I have been raving about the Kodak zi8 but now enter the GoPro HD HERO stage left. This is a headcam that Ben, our head of NetOps, has bought this month to go snowboarding. Instead of holiday snaps he wants memories in 1080p HD on YouTube that all his mates can watch when he gets back. Black runs, off piste (on piste) etc etc etc.
This short 60 second video is a paltry 44MBytes. It’s a bandwidth bandit though because who knows how many fans
The question is being asked “what are ISPs doing about voice?” This is particularly relevant as the market consolidates and B2B ISPs not only seek economies of scale but additional sources of revenues.
Timico was founded as a fully converged ISP from the outset. Early on we had to decide whether to simply white label services from other ISPs and ITSPs or do “get into manufacturing” and do it all ourselves.
At the outset there were no real white label VoIP options. You had to do it yourself. However there were plenty of ISPs providing Virtual ISP services.
FMC is really the nirvana where all networks finally converge. We are already experiencing it with internet connectivity – I keep up to date with facebook, twitter (and, ahem, of course work and email) via the internet connection on my mobile phone. We use both WiFi and 3G/GPRS to do this and whilst service can be intermittent it does work and is reasonably ubiquitous.
Convergence of voice over fixed and mobile networks is really the final piece of the jigsaw. Since Timico started selling VoIP services around 5 years ago we have been looking at FMC solutions. These have all been based on WiFi for the mobile piece.
Timico top performing salesperson Jo Barker shows off her new Audi R8. I’m told it does over 200mph but Jo assures me that she has set the cruise control to never go over 70mph.
Personally a car is no use to me if you can’t get a set of golf clubs in it – doesn’t look very practical to me!
Great day out meeting the Network Operation team at NewNet HQ in Fareham. In making this acquisition Timico will look to maximise the benefits to both businesses and just as importantly, to their customers.
This is the first of many get-togethers planned with the NewNet team to extract these benefits. Today we just discussed each others’ networks and looked at potential quick wins in terms of improvements and cost savings.
I’ll post separately on progress with these improvements as they happen. In fact I’m planning on making this a diary of this process so that readers can effectively watch it happening from the comfort of their browsers.
It should be interesting for people to see what goes on “under the bonnet (hood)” of an ISP.
The photo is of the NewNet network operations team with some of the Timico crowd at the meeting in Fareham today.
Iam pleased to announce sponsorship of the first Digital Dales Colloquium of 2010. Entitled “Making the Final Third Happen”, the meeting will take place at Timico’s Newark Headquarters on Friday February 26th.
Digital Dales events are key get-togethers for stakeholders in rural community broadband projects. They attract a wide range of participants including MPs, the media (including the BBC), equipment vendors, service providers, local authorities, community leaders and of course end users.
With the Digital Economy Bill currently very much in the news, and a March 1st meeting scheduled between the Broadband Stakeholders Group and the Valuation Office Agency to discuss Property Tax this February meeting is very timely. Rates on fibre connections are seen as a major obstacle to making rural broadband an economic proposition.
Also on the agenda will be a progress report on the FTTC Virgin Media trials in Cornwall, an overview of ongoing projects in the USA, a proposal by Dr Charles Trotman of the Countryside Landowners Association on collaborative approaches to the Rural Broadband problem, and feedback from Lindsey Annison on innovative funding options.
The sponsorship of the Digital Dales Colloquium is very much part of Timico as a service provider living up to our social responsibility. No one organisation is going to solve the problem of the “Digital Divide” but if we can all make a contribution then it will make a difference.
Check out more details on the Colloquium including how to sign up here.
I don’t generally use this blog as a vehicle to promote my employer, Timico. On this occasion though we have hit the news with the acquisition of Fareham based ISP NewNet.
“Uhuh” do I hear you say? Well there are a few points worth making.
Firstly there is an ongoing consolidation happening in the maturing ISP industry. We are seeing it at the top level, most recently with Carphone Warehouse’s purchase of Tiscali, and also in what might be termed as the Tier2 level in which Timico now operates.
Many companies in the mid size space have already been gobbled up by the biggies on their way to building market share: plus.net, bulldog, pipex et al spring to mind.
A void has to some extent appeared in the market for provision of quality ISP services to UK businesses. Many of those who used to do it are now part of big corporations where low cost is the most important issue, not customer service. Some have stayed independent, Zen being the obvious name that springs to mind, but their number is dwindling.
The challenge for ISPs addressing the business market is how to be able to sustain the necessary investment in infrastructure (eg MPLS, 10GigE, storage/cloud) and also to maintain the high levels of support demanded by a business customer whose internet connection has become mission critical.
Most ISPs in the UK today are still small operators whose idea of 24×7 operation is to give out the mobile number of the owner to a customer, or simply not to offer the service. This is neither scalable nor in the main satisfactory.
The Timico acquisition of NewNet makes great sense all round. Both companies have the same customer focussed culture, focussing on high levels of service. NewNet considerably extends the Timico capability in terms of co-location and hosting. Timico brings to NewNet a range of fixed line and mobile services and the combined entity is very much greater than sum of the parts.
All exciting stuff and more, I’m sure, anon.
Somewhat a digression from my normal postings but a worthwhile one. Timico VoIP operations engineer Wayne Mills-Kidals is taking part in the 2010 Mongol Rally.
This is a race from the UK to Mongolia and takes him through Europe, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Kyrgystan, Russia, and no doubt a few more countries until he finally arrives at Ulan Batar four weeks (hopefully) later.
He doesn’t go until the summer but is looking for sponsors – the purpose of the trip is to raise money for the Christina Noble Children’s foundation. Anyone interested can check him out on his by-jimny website.
As an aside Wayne was born with a network connection in his mouth instead of a silver spoon. We will be able to follow his progress online – more anon.
When Santa has finished for the day (night) he goes in for some well deserved relaxation. In this case Timico was pleased to be able to offer him a massage. We had a team of therapists, masseuses and beauticians in yesterday to give the staff a bit of a Christmas treat and luckily for Santa it happened on the same day as his visit. It’s a tough old game.
Note part of his outfit visible on the chair.
When Santa has finished for the day (night) he goes in for some well deserved relaxation. In this case Timico was pleased to be able to offer him a massage. We had a team of therapists, masseuses and beauticians in yesterday to give the staff a bit of a Christmas treat and luckily for Santa it happened on the same day as his visit. It’s a tough old game.
Note part of his outfit visible on the chair.
Santa made it to Timico early this year – some vids below include him meeting some of the staff – they have all been good boys and girls in 2009.
Santa visits the sales floor
Santa visits the Network Operations team
At Leicester Tigers’ Welford Road rugby ground on Thursday Timico launched “Meet Me Now”, a brand new Web Collaboration and video conferencing service with Presence and IM.
I missed it due to ITSPA prize awarding duties at the House of Commons. I also had to miss out on a long planned trip to watch the annual Oxford v Cambridge varsity match at Twickenham which was also on the same day. You might say that this was very poor diary management!
I’m told that all events went really well. I can vouch for the ITSPA one of course because I was there. Timico was a finalist in two categories (SMB and Enterprise).
Anyway this is not the point of this blog post. We have been reviewing the year at Timico HQ today. The business has grown. Considering the market conditions in 2009 and that the interim results of some of our competitors show shrinkage this has to be taken as extremely positive news.
Next year is I believe going to be another tough one for business. We ain’t though this recession yet. This means that customers are still going to be looking for cost savings and productivity improvements. More so probably.
In 2009 Timico very much saw a trend towards home/distributed working. This, for example, saw one hosted VoIP customer shut their office and set their six employees working from home. There was no disruption to their comms as a result – they were on hosted VoIP.
Clearly for 2010 a product that makes it easier for people to work from home makes a lot of sense. Enter “Meet Me Now”.
Meet Me Now is a multimedia Meet Me Voice Video and Web Collaboration service. It can be used in stand alone mode or for customers using the Timico VoIP For Business service it can also be integrated with your existing voice communications.
Our (home working) sales force has been playing with Meet Me Now for some months and using the service the channel team in particular can sit at home churning through 8 or 10 online Business Partner meetings in a day. It is hugely productive and in fact has encouraged a high number of channel partners to take up the product from day 1. They have already seen the power.
There’s also been a lot of talk about “The Cloud” in 2009. For ease of support reasons home worker solutions are largely going to be “cloudy” if that is the right adjective and certainly this is the case for Meet Me Now.
Quite exciting really. Semi sales pitch over.
I’ve removed the live feed because the conference is over and I can only have one twitter stream – I need it for other uses.
You can check out what was in it by searching twitter for #Timico.
Met with O2/Be last week to discuss their LLU broadband play. O2 has been winning awards for their consumer broadband service. They have an ADSL2+ solution that already supports Annex M.
For the uninitiated Annex M allows a service provider to trade some downloading speed on a broadband service in exchange for a faster (up to 2.5Mpbs!?) upload.
O2/Be have unbundled around 1,240 exchanges and so have one of the largest LLU footprints in the UK. They also claim to have 500,000 customers so in understanding the options for the provision of broadband service in the UK they are one of the companies that need looking at.
A complex web is being woven in the UK broadband landscape. Clearly O2 is serious. When they bought Be the LLU estate numbered no more than 30 or so exchanges. A lot of cash has been expended to turn it into the figure it is today.
O2 is telling the world it wants a seat at the table and is willing to put up a stake. It does have a different approach to Carphone Warehouse, the leading LLU player in terms of size, in that it only offers the broadband connectivity. Currently O2 relies on Openreach for the underlying analogue line.
Having looked at the economics of LLU myself it makes a lot more sense if you are taking the voice path as well as the ADSL. There are other benefits with LLU in that an ISP can tailor its own services and thus offer a differentiation in a crowded market. It still needs subscriber numbers to make it pay and at the consumer end it is unlikely that the service provider will want to offer too many variants – simplicity of broadband service means lower costs to sell, provision and support.
This brings me on to another point and that is that BT is now introducing FTTC which at 40Mbps down and 5Mbps up blows all the LLU operators ADSL2+ offerings out of the water, at least in terms of speed. There are then only two players in the game – BT and Virgin with their cable proposition. Other players will have to line up behind one of these two as a wholesale customer and note that Virgin does not yet have a wholesale proposition.
Now FTTC is in its early days of rollout but the footprint is likely to be the same Market 3 footprint as the unbundled exchanges, ie the densely populated parts of the country that make business sense.
So I think for the moment that LLU players have a market window that is probably no more than two years for their unbundled services. Two years will scream past, if the past five at Timico are anything to go by.
Coming back to O2/Be their play thus far has been very much into the consumer market. They look to be a solid player and I have heard good things about them from peers in the ISP community. Their sortie into the business market is through an L2TP play with relative newcomer Fluidata. I have nothing to say against Fluidata, not having worked with them but they are small and O2, if it is serious at the wholesale, game will want to do it in-house.
What their long term strategy is though is a difficult one to call. Owned by Telefonica they should have the deep pockets to play. Play what though? When there are likely to be only two players and one of them is BT then you either have to be satisfied with being a reseller of BT or Virgin or you buy one of them. I can’t see the regulator letting O2 buy BT, it would be ironic if they did.
They might let them buy Virgin though. And then where does that leave Vodafone, a business that is only dabbling in broadband at the moment…
The UK communications industry has never been as exciting a place to be as it is now. Any informed comment/feedback to this post will be read with interest.
There has been a land grab for broadband over the last few years with some high profile industry consolidations aimed purely at growing market share and bulking up what has long become a commoditised ADSL business.
Whilst the ADSL growth has not stopped at Timico we are seeing a trend of businesses installing leased lines as well as broadband. Companies are becoming increasingly reliant on the internet and IP communications to run their business critical applications. Down time costs them money and leased lines are more reliable than ADSL because there are fewer areas where things can go wrong.
Also the cost of leased lines have dropped significantly in many areas of the country as UK PLC grows its infrastructure. Going for higher bandwidth and reliability that comes with the technology is no longer as cost prohibitive as it used to be.
It is an exciting time to be around for a communications provider. I’m finding that the more leased lines we sell the better we get at doing so which in turn means we sell more. Hooray!
We are just in the process of installing a 1 Gigabit Ethernet fibre link to the Timico Headquarters in Newark. The process is in massive contrast to our friends in Wennington, Lanacashire who have had to get a digger out and become experts at diy fibre laying.
In our case this first Gig link will go into existing ducts. See photo below.
This 1Gig link is actually the first of two diversely routed fibre connections that we are putting in to increase resilience to the site. I’m goingto follow the upgrade together with developments in our colo offering in pictures on the blog.
The photo does bring a wry smile. The fibre, if you can make out the colour is lilac. The blue is the thin rope that is used to pull the fibre through the ducts – in theory this is left in place underground in all ducts for this very purpose. It makes me think of the tin can and string telephone analogy. The string can carry a single conversation. The fibre, as it stands, could carry around simultaneous 20,000 calls.
Lastly I did struggle with the title for this post. “You light up my life”, “let there be light” and “trip the light fantastic” all sprang to mind. Take your pick :-).
We are currently looking for ISP first line tech support engineers and ADSL/IP provisioning staff to join our expanding teams in Newark.
Timico is bucking the recessionary trend with a growing managed networks business. If 21CN, IP, VoIP, MPLS, co-location, Virtual Machines sound exciting then take a look at these jobs. Please contact Timico if you are interested. Experience would be great. Technogeeks with a professional attitude and a friendly nature are ideal.
This is clearly a job ad. I’m not really interested in flowering up the jobs, “great career potential” etc but I will say that our first tech support engineer now runs several tech support teams and has team leaders reporting into him.
This is a foot on the first rung that could progress you into Network Operations, Tech Solutions/Network Design, Technical Sales or any other of the many disciplines in the fast moving communications world. If you are good the sky’s the limit.
In 2008 Timico was 4th in the Sunday Times/Microsoft Techtrack 100 table of the fastest growing private companies in the tech sector. We also won the ITSPA award for the Best Unified VoIP Solution.
If you can get in quick you might make it in time for our Summer Barbecue:-). Work hard play hard.
I woke up Friday morning to a BBC news report claiming that a report had found that there were 7 million people in the UK indulging in illegal file sharing. This was based on a report by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property and one which I have been looking forward to reading.
The report does in fact make very interesting reading though even the executive summary is fourteen pages long so I’m not going to replicate it all here. This then is the executive summary of the executive summary with bits left out.
Between 44% (USA) and 79% (Eastern Europe) of internet traffic is taken up with illegal file sharing. As a B2B ISP Timico does not see this level of P2P though I can understand why consumer ISPs invest heavily in packet shaping technology.
Up to 7 million people are illegalling downloading music and movies. With only 2.3 million full time students this must mean that non students are also doing it.
A large number of people assume that they can get such material for free and that they won’t get caught. This is changing basic assumptions about the idea of ownership, sharing and copying content and that new business models are needed.
The report also does suggest that industry, ISPs included, need to play their part but recognises the difficult situation that ISPs are in. If consumers get clamped down on will this change the way they behave generally in using the internet?
All this is good reading in the run up to the publication of the Digital Britain Report in a couple of weeks time. Although I hope I am wrong I increasingly get the feeling that Digital Britain is not really going to come up with any kind of solution to this problem.
Both the exec summary and the full version of the SABIP report can be found here.
Timico isn’t big enough (yet) to be a market bellweather. However there is a feelgood factor about the place which I hope is replicated elsewhere in UKPLC – I fear this is not the case everywhere.
This morning we had our usual monthly board meeting followed by the Annual General Meeting, which as you might guess is annual and not monthly 🙂 . This was attended by a good number of our investors.
Timico is lucky to have very friendly investors and I am pleased to say the feedback was hugely encouraging. Our shareholders are all friends and family but that doesn’t mean they aren’t financially sophisticated individuals. Pretty much all of them are successful businessmen and women. It’s great to be given a pat on the back and told that “you are all doing very well”.
I also learned a new word today. Apparently I’m a technosnob. I’m not quite sure what a technosnob is but I think I’m ok with it. If it means that we are only satified with being the best technically then I am definately ok with it. If it means we win lots of corporate managed networks business, which we are doing, then technosnob is the way to go.
Picked this up on my travels. It’s a YouTube video posted by Ofcom giving advice on how to minimise your phone bills whilst abroad. You might wonder why, as a mobile service provider, I am pointing you towards a site that will help you to cut your mobile bills.
Actually the philosophy at Timico is that our relationship with customers is a long term one and is based on mutual trust. This includes making sure that the customer gets the best value out of the services we provide. Ad over – enjoy the video.
PS if anyone does want advice on cutting communications costs whilst travelling abroad please do get in touch. Our customers also use their VoIP accounts from their hotel rooms which makes calling home cheap and allows them to keep in touch with their business (spouses permitting).
PPS it is good to see Ofcom embracing this modern internet/YouTube thing .
Categories
Cisco on acquisition trail
I see that Cisco is notionally on the acquisition trail which doesn’t come as a surprise. It is a good time to be cash rich.
It wouldn’t surprise me either to find out that Cisco has been sniffing around the Nortel Carrier Division. It would be a great fit. I don’t think it will be too long before we find out.
We haven’t really seen consolidation happen on the big scale in the tech world yet this turndown. Timico has picked up some ADSL customers from defunct ISPs and may yet pick up a business or two.
Tiscali has been trying to be “consolidated” for a while now but is struggling to make it happen! It should only be a matter of time one way or another.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
I don’t know about the rest of you but by the time Christmas Day comes along I’m going to be partied out. It all started with the ITSPA Awards at the House of Commons on Thursday last week followed by lunch with customer Foxtons on the Friday.
Monday I had dinner with KeConnect MD Robert Kemp in Ipswich, lunch with NTL on Tuesday at Cafe Bleu in Newark. Last night it was the Timico management bash at the Olive Branch in Clipsham. Tomorrow night it is the Twang.net party at Monty’s in Newbury.
Then Monday it is the Timico staff party at Belton Woods near Grantham. Tuesday night it’s The Wig And Mitre in Lincoln. I’m assuming that Santa has already sorted out what presents to bring the kids because I certainly haven’t had time to do it.
I have to say that I am looking forward to the period of austerity that this time of credit crunch and financial uncertainty merits and will be joining the queue for discounted lettuce at the reduced section in Tesco’s on the 2nd January.
Businesses cannot succeed with an “us and them” attitude. We live in such a complex environment that in order to be successful you have to have friends who are pulling your way.
At Timico we work with through both a direct sales orgainsations and through business partners. At the end of the year we have a bit of a celebration. This year our best selling partners were treated to a conference and lunch at Timico Towers.
The conference was informative and entertaining and the lunch was top notch. The photo below shows some of the individuals involved.
Businesses cannot succeed with an “us and them” attitude. We live in such a complex environment that in order to be successful you have to have friends who are pulling your way.
At Timico we work with through both a direct sales orgainsations and through business partners. At the end of the year we have a bit of a celebration. This year our best selling partners were treated to a conference and lunch at Timico Towers.
The conference was informative and entertaining and the lunch was top notch. The photo below shows some of the individuals involved.