Category: Business

Business

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Apps Business UC voip

Calliflower

Well I have been bowled over by an application that I saw today for the first time on Facebook. I was responding to an invite of an old friend Carl Ford to attend an online conference call on Alec Saunders’ Squawkbox. The subject was “deploying globally, regulated locally”.

Regulatory stuff isn’t really what turns me on but the exciting bit was the Calliflower application that was being used to host the call. This an online conferencing app that can be buried in facebook. You use the web interface to see who is online, their pictures and put your hand up when you want to say something.

The great thing was that you could also use your facebook interface to send IMs to people on the call and to write wall posts in real time.

This is a great example of what is coming along in the web2.0/voip2.0 world. The application wasn’t perfect. You either called in using Truphone or Skype or used a paid for number in the USA or France. However as an example of what can be done it was brilliant.

Immediately after the call I set up my own call (in seconds) and had a play with it with a colleague Dean Bruce. You could even press a record button and download the conference to your pc when it had all ended.

Now I’m not quite sure yet how this is going to be monetised and there are quite a few missing features compared with some commercial “Meet Me” and collaboration services such as those provided by Cisco/Webex and Nortel. Integration with your company systems, video and collaboration to name but a few.

However Dean and I walked away from the office in quite a state of excitement. It must have been because I was going home for my tea :-).  Check it out on http://apps.facebook.com/calliflower/.

If you aren’t in facebook go to http://www.calliflower.com/Index.html.

Categories
Business hosting

CoLocation rack support

Companies with their own colocated racks might want to consider getting their set up audited, particularly if the rack has been managed by a third party.

Timico engineers went to Docklands yesterday to perform such an audit for a customer. Their rack was intended to be set up with a fully resilient server architecture. In fact, although, there were two redundant switches in the rack the ethernet connections from each server were connected into the same switch. Each switch had a single power supply. It is easy to see that a problem with a single power feed could have resulted in a total outage for this customer.

Our audit report will include the proposal that the equipment should be distributed across two locations to provide a genuine level of resiliency. Of course Timico could provide this.

Categories
broadband Business

ISPA

I am please to be able to tell you that yesterday I was elected to the council of the UK’s Internet Service Providers’ Association at their Annual General Meeting. You might ask why do I bother when I am already on the Council of ITSPA (Internet Telephony Service Providers Association).

Well I’ll tell you. There is so much change happening in the internet world that it is important to keep in touch with what is going on, both in the VoIP and ISP fields. As a growing player in this market Timico has a lot to say and to contribute to the debate. It is an opportunuity to influence and lead.

The AGM, which was held at the Liberal Club in Westminster, was followed by a reception which must have had in attendance in excess of 200 individuals all involved in the provision of internet services in the UK. These are not all just straight bandwidth providers. They include content providers, equipment providers, end user organisations and analysts. The event was a great forum to meet people and discuss what is going on in the industry.

I look forward to being able to provide ISP insights in future blog posts from a position near to the action.

Categories
Business engineering

BT Wholesale Showcase at the Cabinet War Rooms

Went to the BT Wholesale Showcase at the Cabinet War Rooms in London yesterday afternoon. For those of you who don’t know this is the bunker where Winston Churchill and his government held court during times of danger in World War 2.

 

The room where the showcase was held was lined with a wall of original power control equipment. This mainly consisted of dials and levers and was a huge contrast to the technology in everyday use today. What is more astounding is the fact that I was born only 16 years after they stopped using the rooms. We have seen more technological progress in my one relatively short lifetime (so far) than in the rest of history. When I was growing up it was said that 95% of the physicists that ever lived were still alive.

 

As for the BT event it was somewhat crowded but it was good to see that they have an active programme to engage with their wholesale customers. It was also a great opportunity to network with industry peers. BT seems also to have a very competent and professional Sales Director in Karen Murray. It is often difficult to get things moving with an organisation the size of BT but they are responding to competition and saying the right things in the wholesale space.

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Business events UC voip

The ITSPA AGM and Summer Reception

The annual ITSPA bash went ahead yesterday. Numbers were down a little, I suspect because of the encroachment of the holiday period. However once the formal proceedings were over we had a great set of panel debates and a talk from VoIPWatch blogger Andy Abramson.

 

I was down to moderate the Unified Communications panel. However due to illness I was stitched up with moderating the SME panel as well. This worked out ok because I was in two minds in the first place which one to go for. Timico’s sweet spot is SME but the sexy market leading stuff is Unified Comms (for the SME market in Timico’s caseJ ).

 

Interestingly of the fifty or so attendees the four panellists (Steve Mackenzie of ICU Global, Andy Abramson, Andrew Penn of Siemens Enterprise, Tony Cocks of Microsoft) and myself represented 5/6 of the organisations in the room involved with UC. I therefore invited Mark Owen of Nortel up to the stage to fill a spare chair and take part in the debate.

 

The fact that there were no other ITSPA members claiming to offer UC services is interesting. They are either offering straight dial tone products as is the case with the likes of Tesco and Orange Home (they may disagree with me) or are in the PBX replacement business.

 

There is an argument that says that the business market doesn’t want UC. However my take on this is that demand for UC is just about to take off as environmental and financial pressures come to the fore.

 

Key takes from the day?

 

Some big SIP trunk deals happening –  one company was spending £50k a month on call traffic with one ITSP.

 

Microsoft is launching a hosted version of OCS and is looking to locate one of its servers in Ireland. This is a direct service being launched by Microsoft. Not a partner play. Obviously the concern is that Microsoft’s marketing dollars can heavily influence their market share here. However after some debate the team came to the conclusion that this is an opportunity. Microsoft will make the market but a substantial number of customers will not want to deal with the big behemoth.

 

Also when it comes to selling communications to the SME market, which is a substantial chunk of the opportunity in the hosted space, customers like the direct touch. They need the confidence of knowing that they can trust their supplier and know who to call when they have a problem. Accessing support via an anonymous call centre won’t work for everyone. 

Categories
Business voip

Webinar on Linksys LVS2.0

The Linksys LVS2.0 is a voice system (ie PBX) for small offices. It’s pretty amazing how compact and low cost these systems have become. This one is being sold through KeConnect channels into the small business market.  Timico subsidiary KeConnect has partnered with Linksys to jointly offer a solution to their combined channels which number between 1,500 and 2,000 resellers specializing in the small business market.

Linksys will provide the system and KeConnect the communications. KeConnect was the first company to offer support for SIP Trunks for the Linksys product in the UK.

For the uninitiated a SIP Trunk is effectively a telephone line that runs over an IP connection such as ADSL. The beauty of a SIP Trunk is that you can run multiple calls/lines over a single broadband connection. The underlying analogue line can of course only support one call at a time.

A SIP Trunk can be used for both inbound and outbound calls. The LVS2.0 allows the use of both traditional analogue lines and SIP Trunks thereby giving small businesses a level of resiliency in their communications that they haven’t seen before.

Linksys is of course a Cisco brand and the LVS2.0 represents part of Cisco’s push into the SMB market. The Timico Group also supports Nortel and Avaya PBXs and has its own hosted Unified Communications service that is ideal for distributed offices and remote workers.

The Webinar takes place on Monday 14th July at 3pm via Webex. Anyone interested in attending should leave a comment and I’ll send them the login and access details. I won’t publish the comment.

In my bit of the Webinar I’ll be talking about best practice for SIP Trunks.

For more information on the LVS2.0 click here.

For more information on KeConnect click here.

 

Categories
broadband Business ofcom

Ofcom Eases Up on Returns on Investment for Next Generation Broadband

broadband churn Broadband Technology Pipe

In my post “Who pays for next generation broadband” I mentioned that BT were complaining that the regulatory environment in the UK positively discouraged investment in a high speed broadband network (read fibre) because it did not allow a return on investment commensurate with the risks involved.

Well Ofcom head Ed Richards seems to have made an about turn on this in a speech he made to the “Intellect Conference 2008” on 3rd July.

I’ve pasted an extract here:

“Our position is clear. Ofcom favours a regulatory environment for the next generation of networks and access that both allows and encourages operators to make risky investments, to innovate for the benefit of consumers and, if the risks pay off, for the benefit of their shareholders too.

We are very clear that if operators are going to make investments in new infrastructure, investment that is inherently more risky than developing the existing infrastructure, then they need to know that the regulatory framework will allow them to make and keep a rate of return that is commensurate with the risks they are taking.”

I can’t imagine that anyone will be unhappy about this though we still have to see someone stepping up to the plate with the requisite investment. UK PLC does need to be looking beyond 21CN for the IP connectivity that will allow the true exploitation of the promise of the internet.

Categories
Business competitions video

Video competition

Following on from a post I made in June regarding Polycom putting over a hundred videos on YouTube I have started exploring this myself.

The video at end of this post is my first post on YouTube (timicocto) where I have uploaded details of a video competition that we are running at Timico in July. The hope is that we will get some good material to post on the company website.

Ultimately we will be looking at broadcasting live and this is a step towards that goal.

I’ll report back on how it went when it is all over and done. Sorry – the competition is open to company employees only.

 

 

Categories
Business UC voip

Text to speech

Check this out. Pretty clever stuff. It shows you how text to speech technology has progressed and would fit in nicely in a vendor’s Unified Communications solution.

http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php?sitepal

Categories
Apps broadband Business

Consumer ISP Versus Business ISP: The Facts

The broadband ISP community has been coming in for some bad press recently with high profile stories of

 

  • bandwidth capping and throttling,
  • the use of deep packet inspection to manage and shape traffic,
  • complaints to the ASA by BT regarding deception of customers by Virgin
  • complaints from the ISP industry about who pays for the bandwidth for users of  iPlayer and other internet based video streams
  • complaints on user forums about speeds throttled back to less than that of dial up at peak periods

The B2B broadband ISP community has not generally been suffering from these complaints. They arise in consumer-oriented networks from the need to cram as many customers in as possible in order to meet low price expectations. Whilst a B2B ISP still suffers from the general rise in internet bandwidth usage (currently running at around 3 – 4% a month) it cannot impose the consumer bandwidth management methods described above because a business’ internet connection is normally too important to mess with. For example when throughout drops (as it will with too many users on a network) so do VPNs therefore you have to maintain high quality throughput.

 

The response of the B2B ISP is to increase the overall ADSL bandwidth available and bear the cost. At the end of the day the cost has to be passed on to the customer otherwise the ISP doesn’t stay in business and the customer doesn’t have an internet connection. Business customers are likely to less sensitive to changes in costs (we aren’t talking about big numbers here anyway) recognizing that they get a better service at the end of the day.

 

Whilst I can only speak for Timico, Twang.net and KeConnect the business customer pays for what he gets but at the end of the day he gets a much better service than the consumer.

Categories
Business events

ITSPA Summer Bash

 If you want to come to this event let me know or contact the Secretariat

ITSPA SUMMER FORUM

 

Hosted by ITSPA Member BT

 

Wednesday 9th July 2008 

 

BT Auditorium

81 Newgate Street

London EC1A 7AJ

(near St Paul’s Tube Station)

 

1pm – Registration & Refreshment

 

1.30pm-ITSPA AGM (members only)

 

INDUSTRY FORUM

 

2.30pm – Keynote Interview with Andy Abramson

 

3pm – ‘SME’s & VoIP’

Interactive Panel Discussion

 

3:45pm – Break

 

4pm – Regulatory Update / Q&A

including discussion about the impending 999 deadline in September

 

4:45pm –  ‘Unified Communications and Convergence: The Facts & Fiction’

Interactive Panel Discussion

 

5:30pm – Drinks + Canapés

 

Please RSVP to Phil or Brett at the ITSPA Secretariat as soon as possible to confirm your place: [email protected] or 020 7340 1422

Categories
broadband Business

ASA Upholds BT Complaint about Virgin Broadband Service

Virgin has been told off by the Advertising Standards Agency for not telling the truth regarding the speed of its broadband service. Its the consumer versus business ISP proposition again. Virgin didn’t tell users that it caps the broadband service of some users at peak times. I’m sure that Virgin will “get them back” sometime soon :-).

Full story is available on the BBC website.

Categories
Business datacentre

Looking in on Microsoft’s Internet Strategy

In spending over $2Bn on network infrastructure, Microsoft is showing just how seriously it is taking internet business. And opening windows into its internet strategy.

I happened to be reading the New York Times today – as you do. The specific article revealed that Microsoft’s share price has dropped 5% – simply because Microsoft President Steve Ballmer mentioned that he thought technology stocks were overvalued – oops.

The main intent of the article was to look at Microsoft’s internet strategy. Its attempt to buy Yahoo has been high profile. However, what is slowly emerging is its other plans in the general area of “internet”.

Microsoft is moving into the Software as a Service (SaaS) game, which I’m certain means online based versions of the type of application that business buys today and sticks on a server in the corner of the office.  Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint, for example. It likely means much more, though. Another interview on the web by Om Malik with Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft VP of Global Foundation Services (!!??) revealed some of the extent of the Microsoft investment in this area.

Two years ago Microsoft was said to be spending $2Bn on its network infrastructure. Some of today’s facts are absolutely astounding:

  • The company is adding 10,000 servers a month to its network.
  • New data centers being planned/under construction are equivalent of over 15 US football fields of data centre space (sounds a lot but it is probably the same as five rounders pitches J ).
  • Plans to cut of 30% to 40% in data-centre power costs company-wide over the next two years. (not buying it’s electricity from my UK supplier then – mine has just jumped UP about 150%)
  • Current network backbone runs at about 100 gigabits per second, but soon Microsoft plans to bump it to 500 Gigabits. For comparison BT21CN connectivity being offered to ISPs is based on 1gigabits rising to 10gigabits although I’m sure that their backbone must be faster than that.
  • Building out its own Content Delivery Network – 99 nodes on a 100 gigabit per second backbone.
  • For Microsoft, total data grows ten times every three years. The data in near future will soon approach 100s of petabytes.
  • Their datacentre opened in Quincy, Washington opened in April 2007 and when complete will consume 48 megawatts of energy. Microsoft can tap up to 72 MW of energy coming from hydro-electric power.
  • In San Antonio, Texas two further datacentres are planned for opening in September 2008 covering  447,000 square feet on 44 acres.

These facts and figures are just beyond comprehension for us mere mortals and are an indication of how serious the internet business is becoming.

By the way did you know that Microsoft owns Expedia, the travel site. I didn’t.

Categories
Business datacentre

Microsoft's Internet Strategy

I happened to be reading the New York Times today – as you do. The specific article revealed that Microsoft’s share price has dropped 5% – simply because Microsoft President Steve Ballmer mentioned that he thought technology stocks were overvalued – oops.

The main intent of the article was to look at Microsoft’s internet strategy. Its attempt to buy Yahoo has been high profile. However what is slowly emerging is its other plans in the general area of “internet”.

MIcrsoft is moving into the Software as a Service game which I’m certain means online based versions of the type of application that business buys today and sticks on a server in the corner of the office.  Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint for example.

It likely means much more however. Another interview on the web by Om Malik with Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft VP of Global Foundation Services (!!??) revealed some of the extent of the Microsoft investment in this area.

Two years ago Microsoft was said to be spending $2Bn on its network infrastructure. Some of today’s facts are absolutely astounding:

The company is adding 10,000 servers a month to its network.

New data centers being planned/under construction are equivalent of over 15 US football fields of data centre space (sounds a lot but it is probably the same as five rounders pitches J ).

Plans to cut of 30% to 40% in data-centre power costs company-wide over the next two years. (not buying it’s electricity from my UK supplier then – mine has just jumped UP about 150%)

Current network backbone runs at about 100 gigabits per second, but soon Microsoft plans to bump it to 500 Gigabits. For comparison BT21CN connectivity being offered to ISPs is based on 1gigabits rising to 10gigabits although I’m sure that their backbone must be faster than that.

Building out its own Content Delivery Network – 99 nodes on a 100 gigabit per second backbone.

For Microsoft, total data grows ten times every three years. The data in near future will soon approach 100s of petabytes.

Their datacentre opened in Quincy, Washington opened in April 2007 and when complete will consume 48 megawatts of energy. Microsoft can tap up to 72 MW of energy coming from hydro-electric power.

 

In San Antonio Texas two further datacentres are planned for opening in September 2008 covering  447,000 square feet on 44 acres.

 

These numbers are just beyond comprehension for us mere mortals and are an indication of how serious the internet business is becoming.

 

By the way did you know that Microsoft owns Expedia, the travel site. I didn’t.

 

Categories
Apps Business mobile connectivity

Mobile handset wars

I have always been a fan of Nokia handsets for business use. However I have recently been a little concerned that in the longer term the writing might be on the wall. What with developments in the iphone world and more competition potentially coming from a google open mobile platform.

Nokia has just announced that it is purchasing outright rights to the Symbian operating system. The company intends to make Symbian freely  available as open source which might do something to stop the potential rot. We can only wait and see.

The developer community for iphone will I’m sure come up with thousands of applications in a very short space of time. How many of these will be particularly useful is another thing. Again we can only wait and see, or at least wait and see how many of them will be useful to business. The issue really  for me is is how many useful applications will now come out of the woodwork for Nokia handsets.

I did come across an application on the Nokia website which I consider to be supercool (excuse my naievity if readers think this is all old hat). This is a barcode generating application that allows Nokia handsets to be used as barcode scanners.

 nokia bar code

It took me seconds to generate this barcode and upload it to the blog. There have to be many uses of this in business and Nokia has made it easy. There is a prize for anyone who can tell me what the barcode says. Leave a comment if you have the answer.

Use this link to see more. http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/create.jsp

Categories
Business fun stuff

Listening to the voice of the customer

Timico lives or dies by the quality of the service it provides its customers. The continuous improvement to the service levels is something built in to framework of the business.

 

Monday morning is “Voice of The Customer” morning where complaints and feedback from customers received during the previous week are looked at by senior management.

 

You might argue that a business with its house in order should not receive any complaints. However with somewhere in the region of 10,000 businesses entrusting the care of their communications to us there is potentially always going to be someone with a problem – typically “my phone line hasn’t been working for three days” or “something has gone wrong with my broadband”but it can be more serious.

 

We look at whether there could have been a better way to service the customer with the problem or whether there is an improvement that could be made to our process. If necessary a director level member of staff will own the communications back to that customer.

 

In fact the contact details of each Timico board member are available on the website so that customers can reach senior people directly if they believe that the system has let them down for any reason.

 

Happily there are weeks where no specific complaints have been received and the occasion is used to talk about general ways of improving the service.

 

Categories
Business voip

The challenge of businesses operating over multiple sites.

The outsourcing of support functions is traditionally done by businesses because it is cheaper to do so than have the skills in house. For a small business with only a few persons it usually doesn’t make sense to have an IT department and in any case a single IT person is unlikely to have the time to learn all the skills needed in today’s complex technological environment.

 

Some technology vendors pitch their products only at larger enterprise customers because the complexities of what they are offering demands a skilled IT department. The rapidly changing pace of communications technology now even leads to large FTSE 100 organisations outsourcing support and management of IT networks.

 

The case for partnering with a company that can handle all aspects of a business’ communications technology needs is made even stronger when a company is operating across multiple locations, helped to no small degree by the continually increasing costs of travelling to these sites.

 

Multiple locations needn’t what might be described as branch offices. They could just be the company sales force working from their home office. The problems are the same.

 

A home worker having problems with his or her broadband connection is potentially going to consume just as much of an IT person’s time as if it were a major IP connection coming into the corporate headquarters building. Is it actually a broadband problem or is the analogue line faulty?  Is it a router problem?  Has the micro-filter stopped working?

 

The list of problems that could happen is a long one and not just limited to broadband. Here is a typical but not exhaustive list of the standard type of problem encountered by the Timico Technical Support Team in its day to day support of remote locations and networks.

 

  • What about when a mobile phone stops working or someone has bought a new car and needs their mobile car kit changing over, or they are having network problems with their mobile data card? What do you do?
  • Email stops working – is the vpn connection running properly? Has a setting been changed on the corporate firewall? Is remote (or corporate) IP connection running slow and therefore dropping VPN sessions? This leads on to other network latency issues such as access to corporate applications such as billing and CRM platforms running slowly.
  • Is the security at the remote site as good as the one at the main office? For example are they running an insecure wireless LAN? Is the remote virus checking software up to date? Are you opening up the corporate network to security holes by allowing remote users with less stringent internet access policies to connect in to the HQ?
  • What happens when there is a problem with a remote PC? Printer? local network?
  • Are you incurring call charges for site to site communications (you shouldn’t be)? Can you dial by extension user to user on different sites (you should be able to)?
  • Business continuity at each site – what happens if a certain functions at remote site go down? Is your phone system covered by a maintenance contract? Is it the phone system or the phone line that is actually broken?

 Got any hair left?

 

These problems affect all business but the more sites a business have the greater is the level of complexity that is introduced. The sensible solution is to find a partner that can help deal with any problem that comes your way.

 

This doesn’t mean that someone is going to be spending all their time travelling. The only sensible approach to support is to be set up to be able to do it remotely. This means having access to a professional suite of network monitoring and diagnostic tools. It also means having access to multiple skill sets of people who have seen these problems before, many times, and know how to go about fixing them.

 

Enter Timico stage right…

Categories
broadband Business security voip

Supernode Discovery

I am quite excited because I think I might have discovered a Supernode. A Skype Supernode that is.

 

Skype doesn’t have it’s own network infrastructure. Instead as a peer to peer technology it takes data from Skype clients around the world and identifies which users have plenty of bandwidth and processing power available. This user then becomes a Supernode which handles some of the Skype network signalling functions.

 

Being a broadband Supernode is not at all super as what you are effectively doing is  letting other Skype users use the broadband bandwidth that you are paying for yourself.

 

This customer was complaining that his quad bonded ADSL was underperforming. He was right. He was getting 1Mbps instead of his normal 9Mbps. We sent an engineer onsite and found that the customer had taken it upon himself to do some internal rewiring and had laid the ADSL cables on top of his ring main power cable. The interference from the main was causing the poor performance.

 

We moved the cables away from the main and hey presto the original high speed returned.

 

As part of the debug process we did some traffic sniffing on his network and found serious levels of peer to peer packets which turned out to be Skype.

 

I’m not saying that Skype in this case caused his broadband connectivity to slow down but business users should be aware of the problem. It should also be noted that Skype traffic is encrypted, at least the IM part. This means that virus scanners can’t pick up potential problem packets coming into the corporate network. Look out sensitive competitive information! Don’t keep your bank details on the network!

Categories
Business UC video voip

More petrol woes

Sorry if I keep mentioning this subject but businesses are seriously getitng hit with the price of petrol and it isn’t just transport firms.

I sat opposite a company sales director on the train to London this morning who said that his petrol costs had doubled in the last year. He was now having to micromanage the sales calls of his team so that the most efficient routes were used to minimise the travel costs. He was even about to sell his Porsche!!! :-).

In case you were wondering I was on the way to Wimbledon. My youngest son won two centre court tickets in the ballot at his tennis club and yes we had an absolutely fantastic time. Not a cheap day out though with Wimbledon towels retailing at £24 a pop (x two for bonding purposes).

The keywords you need  to know are Venus Williams, Rapahel Nadal and Andy Murray. A great tennis day out.

Categories
broadband Business ofcom

Who Pays for Next Generation Broadband?

Interesting enough debate at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in London today with the latest Telecommunications Executive Networking bash. The subject was Next Generation (NGN) broadband and specifically who is going to pay for it.

 

The debate was prompted by the BT position that the UK regulator OFCOM does not allow the company to make return on investment to justify spending money on an NGN network.

 

Panelists included Andrew Heaney from Carphone Warehouse, Kip Meek from the Broadband Stakeholders’ Group and David Campbell, Director of NGA at Openreach. It is actually a complex and highly politically charged subject when you take into consideration that BT (Openreach) has Universal Service Obligations.

 

In short the assembled masses, the great and the good of the UK Telecommunications industry, concluded that they wanted an NGN network to be privately funded.

 

A few interesting points came out of the meeting. Of the two hundred or more attendees the majority of them were equipment vendors. There can’t have been more than ten or fifteen hands up from ISPs. I’d have thought that the ISP community would have been more interested than this turnout suggests. Perhaps this is because there are few (if any) ISPs who could afford even to consider investing £12 billion in a high speed broadband network. No one is going to be able to do it alone.

 

There seemed also to me to be a level of ignorance as to why a high speed (100Mbps) network might be wanted. What applications would drive this they were asking?  In my experience at Timico once people get given higher speed access they find ways of using it. The move from 2Mbps ADSL to 8Mbps (up to J ) ADSL Max prompted a large increase in average usage per tail.

 

Andrew Heaney could see that a NGN would be required but that this wasn’t going to be for some time to come. He intimated that he would be looking to begin looking at such a network in a 2 – 4 year timeframe. He also suggested that traffic was doubling every two years. This is slightly slower growth than others in the industry are forecasting.

 

Whilst the chicken and the egg come into this calculation to some extent my rough back of a beer mat calculation goes like this.  Traffic doubling every 2 years is the same as being given double the download bandwidth in the same timeframe. On this basis the arrival in 2008 of (up to) 24Mbps  should prompt the need for 48 Mbps in 2010 and 96Mbps in 2012. This isn’t particularly scientific but it does provide a rough guide to the way that market demand could go.

 

There isn’t a plan on the table today for 96Mbps but 50Mbps is available now from Virgin. If anything would be geared to make the board of BT press the investment button for Next Generation broadband it would be seeing their market share going to Virgin.

 

Practically everyone in the room said they would be prepared to pay the additional £8 a month for NGN broadband that the £12bn investment is supposed to mean. Of course this is easy for a room full of well paid company directors to decide, The Openreach position is that the value in the market has disappeared and that consumers have been lead to expect faster broadband for less money.

 

We shall see. Interesting times ahead.

Categories
Business UC voip

Control

 

It is important to be in control of your lives. Technology can help. For example with my Unified Communications service I can dictate who can reach me and when they can reach me.

 

I can specify for example that during family mealtimes the phone always goes to voicemail. Moreover this voicemail message can be caller dependant. ie the message you leave for your wife can be different to the one heard by work colleagues.

 

The greeting could even inform the caller that you are having a meal and give them the option of leaving a message or pressing a button to continue with the call. Clearly, armed with the information that you are eating, the caller can in this case decide whether his call is important enough to disturb you.

 

I’m sure that there will also be times when you absolutely would not want to be disturbed and this too is an option on the same system. You are in control.

 

Sometimes though it is better to exercise the ultimate control and that is done by pressing the “off” button.

 

This is what I did yesterday when I took the kids to the Lincolnshire Show. This is the annual agricultural festival that is the highpoint of the social calendar in Lincolnshire. If you have never been you should try it.

 

The Lincolnshire Showground is blessed with a natural off button. In other words there is no mobile phone coverage worth shaking a stick (or a handset) at.

 

No calls. No emails. All this happened on the day following the night of a major network capacity upgrade. It might have been a nervous time. Engineers don’t like change because it introduces risk. The Network Operations team were in control. The upgrade was perfectly planned and perfectly executed.

 

Not that the Lincolnshire Show was devoid of technology. The picture below shows one of the earlier innovations to hit the county.

 tref with traction

This second picture is nothing to do with technology.

It’s about good beer. As long as you stay in control …

Categories
broadband Business

Internet Bandwidth Usage Doubles Every 18 Months

According to AT&T  their ADSL network bandwidth consumption is doubling every 18 months.

 

This type of statistic makes life interesting for UK ISPs who currently have to order bandwidth in large increments. This means that effectively they have to order a pipe for only a few users once capacity is reached on their existing infrastructure. What’s more they have to do this three months in advance of when they think the capacity will be required which makes it very difficult to respond quickly when usage trends increment with step functions as new drivers such as BBC iplayer enter the scene.

 

A consumer ISP will squeeze this capacity to the limit because of the incremental costs involved. Business oriented ISPs have to take the hit because the services they offer have to be of a better quality.

 

The advent of BT’s 21CN network later this year will make life a little easier though not necessarily any cheaper for the ISP community. ISPs will connect to the 21CN via an Ethernet based HostLink – typically either 1Gb or 10Gb. The up front connection charges for Ethernet products are much lower than for the legacy ATM circuits currently used to link DSL tails to an ISPs network.

 

The ISP will then pay for bandwidth used on this link rather than having to pay for the cost of the whole pipe. They will be able to order incremental bandwidth capacity with only two weeks notice.

 

21CN will bring additional benefits in that high speed Ethernet circuits should (eventually) be available almost on a country wide basis with far more cost effective pricing than is currently available.

 

Incidentally the top five per cent AT&Ts DSL customers consume 46 per cent of its traffic, and the top 1 per cent accounts for 21 per cent all bandwidth. It is easy to see that the industry is going to have to move to an usage based charging model as being the only fair way of doing business.

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Business travel

Business travel costs being cut

More indicators pointing towards businesses cutting down on their travel spend with a boom in the low cost hotel market.

See this link from the Daily Telegraph for more

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Business UC voip

Nortel SMB Certification

I am proud to announce that Timico today gained it’s Nortel SMB certification. Okay okay so what? The point is that Communications Providers and System Integrators selling a manufacturer’s product into traditional Enterprise markets will have a list of certifications as long as your arm. However none of these businesses will particularly be interested in selling into the SMB market (sorry – small and medium sized businesses).

When you have to pay expensive engineering resources to be around to install kit the money in the deal has to be there to make it worth the effort and traditionally this means selling to bigger customers.

The poor old small business, whose market segment incidentally represents the vast majority of the market, has had to exist on an adhoc basis relying on a variety of local small engineering shops to satisfy their miscellaneous technical needs.

It is unusal for a CP to hang its hat on the small business because of the cost of reaching this customer. However the traditional Enterprise equipment vendors are beginning to wake up to the opportunities in this market and I have already commented on the Cisco play via the “Linksys by Cisco” brand.

Clearly Nortel also see the merits of selling to the SMB and this latest award to Timico is a reflection of the understanding that both companies have that a professional approach to these customers is essential. The SMB is now able to source its communications and networking products from a known and trusted entitity that is called Timico.

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Business video voip

WWF, VC, HD @wembley

You might ask yourself what WWF has to do with VC and HD? In fact you are probably wondering what the acronyms actually stand for and what have they got to do with Wembley.

 

We are talking World Wide Fund for nature, Video Conferencing and High Definition. (I knew that do I hear you say 🙂 ) and all three were being discussed at a Polycom seminar held looking down at the magnificence that is  the pitch at Wembley Stadium.

 

WWF is launching a programme to help businesses cut the number of flights by 1 in 5 and as a leader in the VC game Polycom found it expedient to have representatives along to make a presentation.

 

Obviously Polycom is using Global Warming and the need to reduce carbon footprints as a sales tool for its VC systems but the cynics amongst you should not poo poo this as it is a perfectly valid/nay sensible thing to do. VC does help cut down on business travel and thus helps save the planet as well as reducing costs.

 

One of the reasons I attended was to hear what Polycom was doing with Microsoft on OCS. Turns out they make some of the handsets and are producing a couple of VC products (HDX4000 and HDX8000) that integrate with OCS (more details anon I’m sure).

 

What really interested we was the fact that Microsoft has 11,000 staff working on rich media collaboration, apparently more than the rest of the industry put together. One of the OCS phones doesn’t even have a keypad. Microsoft is saying that you only need your desktop. The Polycom perspective on this is that businesses haven’t gone for desktop VC because of the difficulty of maintaining dispersed resources. It’s hard to see Microsoft getting this wrong.

 

A number of OCS case studies were presented. Gibson guitars reduced calling costs by 75% using OCS.  Prodavka reduced phone costs by 50%

 

There were lots of other interesting facts being bandied around:

 

  • China is the second biggest market for VC behind the USA
  • The biggest issue facing adoption of VC is the ability to reserve resources. ie room booking
  • The average HD system cost is $8k cf $200k for telepresence.
  • In 2008 there will be 1500 telepresence systems sold worldwide. By 2012 this is expected to grow to 17,000.
  • Interoperability between different vendor systems is still an issue
  • 1 long haul flight is equivalent of 12 months driving from a carbon footprint perspective
  • Air travel is the fastest growing contributor of CO2 – 3% today, 25% by 2030
  • The fastest ways of reducing CO2 generation include power saving data centres, extending networks to home workers and increased usage of collaboration and content sharing tools (video and voice conferencing) as alternative to travel.
  • The M4 motorway at Slough is operating at 150% capacity
  • The average traffic speed in London is 8 mph – no increase since the horse and cart !
  • PWC avoided 1.1 million miles of travel through use of VC resulting in the saving of 198kg of CO2
  • BT has claimed £238m benefit to their business by use of VC – £100m based on travel cost benefits and the rest based on productivity improvements including reduced staff sickness
  • Nortel has saved $60k a week on travel due to telepresence with 10 systems worldwide
  • A Yougov survey in 2007 said 37% of face to face meetings were deemed unnecessary
  • If European companies cut travel by 20% there would be a saving of 22m tons of CO2 a year

Finally Polycom played some impressive videos including http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4H0BR_8wy8

 

Categories
broadband Business voip

It’s funny who you meet on a cruise

Yesterday’s post on fuel prices turns out to have been quite timely because today our CEO Chris came back into the office with a spring in his step.

 

He had just returned from the IT Directors’ Forum on board the cruise liner Aurora. I’ve been pulling his leg on this for some time making sure that he had his yachting cap cleaned and his blazer pressed. However the purpose of his trip was serious. This was to brush shoulders with company IT Directors who might be target markets for Timico services.

 

He was pushing home worker solutions. Timico subsidiary Twang.net is a provider of communications services to the home worker communities of a number of FTSE 250 companies.

 

The point is that having pitched our home worker proposition to some of the 240 senior executives attending the event he came away with 35 strong expressions of interest. This highlights that business really is beginning to recognise the modern day forces affecting the performance of their workforce. More people are being allowed to work from home for some of the time and with the costs of moving around this trend is only going to continue.

Categories
broadband Business voip

It’s Funny Who You Meet on a Cruise

broadband churn Broadband Technology Pipe

Yesterday’s post on fuel prices turns out to have been quite timely because today our CEO Chris came back into the office with a spring in his step.

 

He had just returned from the IT Directors’ Forum on board the cruise liner Aurora. I’ve been pulling his leg on this for some time making sure that he had his yachting cap cleaned and his blazer pressed. However the purpose of his trip was serious. This was to brush shoulders with company IT Directors who might be target markets for Timico services.

 

He was pushing home worker solutions. Timico subsidiary Twang.net is a provider of communications services to the home worker communities of a number of FTSE 250 companies.

 

The point is that having pitched our home worker broadband proposition to some of the 240 senior executives attending the event he came away with 35 strong expressions of interest. This highlights that business really is beginning to recognise the modern day forces affecting the performance of their workforce. More people are being allowed to work from home for some of the time and with the costs of moving around this trend is only going to continue.

Categories
Business security voip

SPIT and SPAM

One of the problems facing the VoIP industry is of course SPIT. SPIT is the SPAM of the Internet Telephony industry. Robot diallers are a huge problem in North America and I have a friend who always listens to who is leaving an answer phone message before picking up the call. A high proportion of calls are from computers.

 

In the IP world it is even easier to make huge volumes of VoIP calls from a computer, particularly because there is potentially no cost involved. The model here is the same as for SPAM which is of course essentially free of charge.

 

The interesting dilemma is that whilst a SPAM filter can monitor and email for particular types of content this is not possible in Internet Telephony where a call has to be set up and answered before the callee knows who is speaking to them.

 

We therefore have to employ more sophisticated techniques in spotting this type of traffic and in general an ITSP will monitor the call traffic on its network to identify unusual patterns. For example if a specific caller is making multiple calls inside an unreasonable short space of time then it cannot be a human making the call. Alternatively if calls to many different end users are going unanswered then this too is unusual behaviour and is likely to be a computer.

 

The level of SPIT facing an ITSP has not yet reached the proportions of SPAM which can be over 90 percent of all incoming emails (if you are receiving a high level of SPAM you need to change to a professional anti SPAM service). It is however certainly something that a serious ITSP takes seriously.

Categories
Business video voip

Will petrol price itself out of the market?

I had my first £80 tank of petrol today. It seems to me that now is the time to start investing in public transport stocks.

I also has to be time to look at ways that a business can cut down on its travel spending and Unified Communications and online collaboration is the way forward. We recently had an architect approach us for a video conferencing solution so that his business could conduct video conferences with their London office. Historically they took the train and spent the day in the office. Travel time was 2 1/2 hours each way for the two Lincoln based partners. That’s ten man hours (at whatever the going rate is for an architect) plus over two hundred pounds for the trainfare.

The video conferencing solution used was Timico VoIP for Business which cost them £10 a month per site plus a few hundred pounds for high spec telephone handsets. The broadband connectivity was already in place at each end. The service will have paid for itself on it’s first day of use. That’s a serious rate of return. 

Categories
Apps Business storage backup & dr

Voodoo Engineering and Knowledge Base Software

No “black magic” shaman under employ can beat the benefits of information sharing via knowledge base software.

One of our sys admins when asked what he did to fix a technical problem would always say “voodoo”, giving the impression that it was all black magic. This might have raised a laugh, but in actual fact it wasn’t very helpful as he kept the fixes to himself and engineers around him did not learn from him. That engineer is no longer with us, and in the meantime we have adopted Microsoft Sharepoint.

Basically a wiki or information source, Sharepoint is very easy to upload data to and serves as an intranet for small and medium sized businesses. We use it as a knowledge base. Whenever someone comes across a technical problem that is likely to reoccur, the person involved in its resolution creates a page on the wiki. Others can easily navigate to this page and also search for specific subjects. Documents can be uploaded using Windows Explorer or any other file manager, so that the support site has grown very quickly to become a rich store of information tat includes vendor manuals and guides as well as self-generated material.

The same principle can, of course, be extended to any department in the company requiring document storage. The beauty of it is that the storage can be located anywhere and not just at the company’s premises so that it can form part of a company DR plan with very little effort.