Categories
Business social networking travel UC

Why would you want to commute to work?

Scene around Victoria Railway Station in Laandan. Have these people not heard of Google Hangout or Lync or Skype or any number of other collaboration & voip services? It can’t be that necessary for them to be in the office. Wtf? Lol! This isn’t a one off scene. It’s like this every time I go […]

Categories
Business servers

My name is Andy and I work for Tesco

Walking to the station this morning en route to an ITSPA meeting in Town I noticed a young suit staring into his phone. As I got closer I saw that his name was Andy and that he worked for Tesco. His name was displayed on a badge on his lapel. I’m not sure what font […]

Categories
internet mobile connectivity net neutrality ofcom Regs

Net Neutrality update

Regular readers will remember my piece for Trefor.Net last September, where I defined what the average VoIP telco wants from an open internet. I know this article had a readership of at least one, because I saw someone brandishing a print out in Ofcom. Yay me! Anyway, things have moved on. We had Ed Richards, […]

Categories
End User fun stuff nuisance calls and messages ofcom online safety Regs social networking

TripAdvisor

I’m not a lawyer. This is something of which I am proud. Nor am I a chartered accountant, this is something of which I am equally proud. People that are in Regulatory Affairs (telecoms or otherwise) often individually present a real Heinz 57 of backgrounds, abilities and skills. As far as I am aware, no-one leaves school thinking […]

Categories
End User H/W wearable

I bought an Osprey

Bought an Osprey laptop bag last night. From a new GO Outdoors camping superstore in Lincoln. Officially opening next weekend but I was passing… My old laptop bag is over ten years old. It has airbags – bought during my globe trotting days when laptops had hard drives.  Good laptop bags had airbags inside them […]

trefor.net events

Upcoming trefor.net events – workshops, dinners and themed weeks Check out the trefor.net events calendar to see what’s coming up. These events and themed weeks include opportunities to take part by contributing guest posts, coming along to an event or sponsoring an event. Themed weeks are online events but often coincide with physical meetups, usually […]

Categories
Business net neutrality ofcom piracy Regs

The Copyright Enforcement Enigma

When I was on a panel at the Eight Parliament and Internet Conference last year, I was approached afterwards by an academic – Monica Horten. We had a chat about a few things regulatory (notably ITSPA’s work in the field of Net Neutrality) and she mentioned she had written a book on copyright, called the […]

Categories
Business gadgets voip voip hardware

Android DECT VoIP phone from Gigaset and the all new R630 waterproof handset

Android DECT VoIP phone by Gigaset is impressive piece of kit Probably spent more time on the Gigaset stand than any other. Party because I kept bumping into people I know there and partly because they had a couple of great products being demo’d. The first video is a demo of an Android DECT VoIP […]

Categories
End User webrtc

uber cool WebRTC app – appear.in

Sat in the lobby of the Hilton Metropole yesterday waiting for UC Exec Dinner special guest Alan Johnston when I hear a voice from afar. “Hey Tref wot you doing here?”. It was Nominet’s Ray Bellis up on the balcony. He popped down and we chewed the fat for a while. Explaining why I was […]

Categories
Business business applications

How intelligent are your employees? Do they need managing? Shirley

The question is whether this van belongs to a company that manages intelligent employees or is it into managing employees intelligently? I’m not sure. Were I the thinking man I could look it up on their website – address prominently displayed (and proudly no doubt) on their van. Nah. There is a supplementary question and […]

Categories
Business ofcom Regs

The Single Market

At the recent Eighth Parliament and Internet Conference, at which I was privileged enough to be speaking on a panel extolling the virtues of an open internet for ITSPA, one of the preceding presentations had been by the European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (that mouthful is colloquially abridged to “DG […]

Categories
Business mobile connectivity ofcom Regs

Orange avoids banana skin – Ts & Cs changed to allow VoIP

EE subsidiary Orange appears to have avoided a slippery situation by amending its terms and condition for mobile internet use The pic below is a screenshot of a YouTube video ad published by EE on July 31st 2013 to push Orange PAYG mobile. It majors on the fact that you get “a shed load of […]

Categories
Business internet Regs

ISPA Conference – unbelievably great offer (etc)

Have I got a deal for you. The highlight of the annual conference season that is the ISPA Conference is fast approaching. I am chairing a session. Last year I chaired a session (can’t remember what on – I don’t dwell in the past) and caught the 07.20 from Lincoln to Kings X which was […]

Categories
Business net neutrality ofcom Regs

Net Neutrality – Pete Farmer speaks

Open Internet & Net Neutrality – both are terms that are meaningless to many and equally emotive and commercially crucial to many others. As with many things in life, there’s a spectrum of what this means. At one end, there’s a threat to civil liberties, commercial strategies, intellectual property and safeguarding against illegal content. At […]

Categories
End User nuisance calls and messages piracy

08452865284 nuisance call

Just in an ITSPA council meeting and rejected a call from 08452865284. This was a bit of a result as a quick google shows people complaining about answering a call from that number and getting a recorded message. You may have noticed me posting more stuff like this. I’m going to do it every time I […]

Categories
Business internet travel

Rubbish connectivity on train

Sat on the train and can’t get anything done. Some bloke behind me talking very loudly on his phone. Keeps ringing up to try to invite “CEO”s to a dinner in a month or so. He is a former CEO apparently. None of the people he is trying to reach are in and he only […]

Categories
Engineer webrtc

Web RTC workshop – get yer tickets ere

If you work in the Unified Communications industry you need to know about Web RTC. You can either Google it or come along to ITSPA’s Web RTC workshop at the Google Campus on 14th May to find out more. This workshop is intended to provide a fairly detailed drill down into the workings of WebRTC and […]

Categories
Engineer fun stuff ofcom

And the hot news is…

Normally I’m fending off ideas for blog posts. This last couple of weeks I’ve been wading through a soup of Awards Entries which take yonks to write, especially when they limit you to writing your life story in 250 words. Bit of an  exaggeration but those of you who have to do that sort of […]

Categories
Engineer nuisance calls and messages ofcom voip

Nuisance calls

At last week’s ITSPA Council meeting we discussed nuisance calls. This post on on the subject was written by Pete Farmer, writing in a personal capacity. Pete is the Commercial and Regulatory Manager for Gamma  a wholesale supplier of telecoms services. Pete is a colleague on the ITSPA Council  and chairs their Regulatory Committee. His contact […]

Categories
Engineer mobile connectivity voip voip hardware

Timico mobile VoIP app now available on Apple App Store

I started to look at mobile VoIP clients a good 8 or 9 years ago. At the time the handsets were near enough useless – battery life was rubbish and the processors lacked the oomph to properly run a SIP user agent. The advent of the modern day smart phone has changed all this, together […]

Categories
Business media virtualisation

The last post!? Hell no:)

It’s Friday, the last day of term. Maybe the last day ever as we await our fate and for the Mayan prediction of apocalypse to kick in. I sit here contemplating this fate, reflecting on a life that has passed by at blurred speeds governed by a constant of Einsteinian proportions. I have a cup of […]

Categories
Business UC voip

Low winter sun, inbound sales leads and Unified Communications

On my way in this morning I had to stop off to take this photo. It was a misty morning and the sun was barely visible. V atmospheric. We are coming up to the winter solstice and despite the short days I actually like this time of year, far more so than January and February. I […]

Categories
Archived Business

Timico is the most innovative business yay

On Friday night we won the award for “Excellence in Innovation” presented by the Nottinghamshire & Derbyshire Chambers of Commerce. Yay. A good night was had by all. The photos tell it all. Click on the header pic to see more of what me, Kirsty, Kate and Faye are up to. The bloke behind Neil […]

Categories
Engineer voip webrtc

That Alexander Graham Bell moment and WebRTC @IPCortex

I gave a talk at IPCortex’s 10th birthday party bash yesterday. Was really impressed with Rob Pickering’s WebRTC demo. He made a call from a Yealink VoIP phone hanging off the IPCortex PBX to a browser based client, also registered with the PBX. Then I called the browser client’s DDI from my mobile – surely […]

Categories
End User fun stuff

In the interest of balance – it is chucking it down

It was only yesterday that I waxed lyrical about the British summer, cricket, olympics et al. Well there are as we all know two aspects to our summer. One is as described yesterday. The other is the reality of today. This is the reality of rain stop play, of umbrellas and Cliff Richard singing on […]

Categories
End User mobile connectivity phones

what price a taxi? – charge what you like courtesy of Vodafone

Never before in the field of trefor.net blogging have I devoted such a large header photo to a post. According to Scott, my style guru and graphic designer the header is meant to be quite thin giving a tantalising glimpse of what lies within and tempting people to either click to see a bigger image […]

Categories
datacentre End User

photos from the surreal world of a CTO

The smartphone revolution continues. Probably the biggest single game changer has been  the incorporation of the digital camera. We all have memories  of photos taken during major world events, the Arab spring, the London riots and no doubt the coming London Olympics. Photos of the mundane can be just as interesting and unexpected. I offer […]

Categories
End User online safety

Louis Vuitton sells handbags but follow that link at your peril

Louis Vuitton sells handbags. He also features very prominently in the comment spam caught by good old Akismet on this blog. I haven’t clicked on any of the links offered – domain names such as “limpidity” seem to  be selling Louis’ stuff online – soft and flexible handbags for soft and gullible people perhaps? I […]

Categories
End User phones

Retro moments – Apple MessagePad2000

After yesterday’s ministerial round table on IPv6 I chaired an ITSPA meeting on Number Portability. Tim Ward from Neustar wowed us all by unveiling his Apple MessagePad2000. There were few of us in the meeting old enough to remember it. This museum piece is based on the Apple Newton platform first released in 1993. Tim’s […]

Categories
Business Cloud datacentre

A data centre’s progress – drinka pinta milka day

It’s coming along as you can see if you click on the header image. It always amazes me what one bloke can do when he has a few tools to help him. I guess it is the same in farming. Along came the industrial revolution and everyone left the fields to be replaced by machines. […]