Categories
broadband End User

Broadband Week on trefor.net

Broadband week on trefor.net brings a totally international set of posts that includes contributions from Australia, South Africa and Rochdale.

Broadband Week has, in all, over 15 contributors who have written material that covers a very diverse set of subjects. Editorially we do not ask specific contributors to write on particular subjects unless they can’t think of one themselves. This is our way of trying to achieve a wide coverage of broadband-related subjects on the site.

Guest contributors are invited because in general they are interesting people. We have CTOs, CEOs, Sales Directors, online comparison specialists, regulatory managers, University Professors, entrepreneurs, students, start-ups, community projects, small ISPs, large ISPs, multi-tenant broadband specialists and rear admirals1. Some are people I’ve know for a long time and some I’ve only recently bumped into. By and large, the posts are written by the named person themselves and not the “marketing” department. We don’t accept blatant sales pitches.

Although broadband technology is mass market it still arouses high emotions. This is particularly the case from those who can’t get access to it. This situation is set to continue as even with the Government funded BDUK (Broadband Delivery UK) project many households are being left out of the roll out. Something guaranteed to continue inflaming the senses of a highly vocal minority.

Broadband is with each passing year becoming more and more essential to our way of life and despite being a mature consumer technology always seems to surprise us with new issues.

If the electricity and water supplies were switched off tomorrow the nation would come to grinding halt. The time is surely not so far off where the same would apply were the same to happen to broadband networks. Our growing use of “the cloud” is predicated on the availability of broadband.

trefor.net as a business could not exist without it, even taking away the fact that much of what we do and talk about is related to internet connectivity. Our systems depend on cloud tech: virtual servers, Platforms As A Service (e.g., FreeAgent accounting software) and Google Apps. I have even, at the ripe old age of ahem £$%^^&* started to see the attraction of Spotify where before I have always wanted to purchase physical copies of music that I listen to.

My wife uses eBay WhatsApp, Google Calendar, gmail and now — and you’d better believe this — Snapchat!!! All this points towards broadband being mission critical to our lives and one deserving of regular coverage on trefor.net. This week, being Broadband Week on the site, means that regular coverage is very much what you are going to get.

I hope you will enjoy reading the Broadband Week posts, and please feel free to comment on anything that arouses your interest. We have also, as of last week, rolled out a new unique template on the site. This is an evolving, living entity which will gradually change over the next few weeks to what we hope will be an useful and interesting resource. Look out also for new specialist affiliate sites that we will be introducing during the course of the year.

1 Only joking.

Categories
broadband End User ofcom

Fit Broadband Policy

Is broadband fit for purpose, writes Lindsey Annison

Some years ago a few of us touted the notion that broadband could become an election issue on the next hustings. And it sort of did, although not to the extent that many of us at grassroots without a connection would have liked. It triggered some hastily written speeches for Party Conferences, though, and some grandiose promises which of course have never been implemented.

As we run up to the next election (<groan> Have the last lot even achieved anything yet?!), perhaps it is time to bite the bullet and consider some of the aspects of broadband that seriously need to be taken on board by those campaigning on the hustings, and also by those who have desks in Whitehall and Westminster, etc. (Could it be they all work from home these days? Doubtful, but it’d be nice to think that at least a few know the difficulties of teleworking in modern day Britain.)

Philip Virgo’s rather canny A Confucian view of UK broadband, spectrum and cybersecurity can be found on his Computer Weekly blog this week, and as we can but hope that the powers-that-be can actually find a free moment to read I would like to expound a little on the piece’s first section, to start educating our potential candidates for those doorstep meetings they shall soon be starting. Last week at TechQT the three considerations Virgo mentions were covered — transmission, capacity and protection — and Martin Geddes finally nailed it (in his inimitable style) to being a simple question that any person can ask and answer:  Is my broadband fit for purpose?

rosetteEven the most non-techie person can assess whether or not the connection that they are paying for (or are using for free in a hotspot) is FIT FOR PURPOSE. It either works to do what you are endeavoring to, or it doesn’t. Simples.

Waiving wayleaves may seem like a simple solution to one problem, and the arguments given by Philip Virgo’s Confucius contributor covers some of the reasons why this is so. However, it goes beyond wayleaves to my old bugbear, fibre tax. We have made it nearly impossible for new entrants to enter a level playing field should they wish to play the fibre game.  Aidan Pauls’ slide show on the UK VOA fibre tax illustrates just how problematic the issue is, and though it may be from 2010, sadly nothing notable has changed since 2000.

As a regulator, Ofcom is over-populated with ex-Telco employees and is toothless. Well, not so much toothless, but it is as if they are putting their dentures back in after a night’s sleep whenever circumstances require they react to current events of the day/week/month or year in a timely fashion. And that needs to change, and fast, if Britain is to catch up with other nations. Plenty of information is out there regarding developments, lessons learnt, what has been tried and tested, etc., so maybe the Ofcom guys and gals just need to get out more?!

Listen to the voters!  Too often our candidates fail to do enough of this simple and essential task, and thus many of those who will be walking the pavements with their pretty rosettes are not sufficiently well-informed. And because they are not well-informed they assume that the constituents are in a similar boat, which is simply not the case. At the very least, the average householder can answer the Is my broadband fit for purpose? question. Enough “No.” responses, offered hand-in-hand with the odd constituent who pipes up to tell a prospective parliamentary candidate exactly how and why this is causing problems with life/work/play, and the message just might make its way back to the Houses in #thatlondon.

Can but hope.  Toodlepip till next time.

Related posts:

Categories
broadband Business

RightMove, wrong data?

Broadband speed data used by Estate Agents to sell houses needs keeping up to date.

To an ever-increasing number of us, broadband is pretty darn important. So much so, that access to it (or not) can affect major life decisions. Such as where to have a coffee, or even which house to buy or rent.

If you are trying to run a business from home, broadband is essential. If you are a farmer, you need a decent connection for all the online cow passport, animal movement, SFP etc forms. If you are of school age, you need to study and upload homework. If you are isolated, it can give you access to friends, family, and the world generally. Basically, it is the 4th utility which many of us cannot live without and many people are catching up with this reality.

Categories
Engineer engineering H/W

New toys for the boys Cisco ASR1002

Cisco ASR1002

To keep engineers happy you have to give them toys to play with. In our game it is fairly straightforward because the network is always evolving. It’s all about continuous upgrade.

The “problem” at Timico is driven by two factors:

  1. the need to keep moving with the times
  2. the need to add extra capacity

In a world where the broadband market has been fairly stagnant or at best slow moving for a number of years, certainly in terms of total numbers of subscribers, our broadband customer base seems to be growing in step functions. A strong driver for this is that we deal with businesses that often have many sites that need connecting – sometimes thousands. We aren’t therefore driven by the need to continuously bomb the price and and more into the bundle such as TV.

Our customers are of course interested in price but they also want a management wrap.  Network uptime is more important to them than price because downtime means loss of cash.

So the ASR1002 in the pic is one of a number that will be integrated into the network as LNSs (Layer 2 Network Servers). Each can cope with 64k users. We won’t be pushing them hard. We are after reliability and don’t want to cram as many users as possible onto each one.

That’s all. Funny what you pick up when walking around the office innit?

Categories
4g broadband Business mobile connectivity net neutrality

4G adoption in UK businesses

4g for business offers backup facility for superfast broadband

Why should business use 4G?

Yesterday I sat on a panel discussing 4G at the Convergence Summit South trade show in Sandown Park. The audience was largely resellers of communications services. What you would traditionally call a PBX reseller.

In terms of expectations of what 4G would do for this channel it would appear that it was very much a case of wait and see. There are some sceptics who go as far as to that “4G is just a faster version of 3G and won’t really have any specific applications and uses”.

Well I think they are wrong. 4G may well be “just a faster bearer” but it is going to open up opportunities in the communications market that weren’t there before.

For example Timico does a lot of good business selling 3G cellular back up solutions for broadband lines used to carry credit card transactional data. This type of application doesn’t need the bandwidth capabilities that 4G can offer (although 4G’s faster ping times could have a role to play here).

This type of back up application is not used nearly as much to back up ADSL lines to offices. 3G just isn’t good enough for this other than as a very basic means of accessing the internet. If you rely on your broadband for VoIP then it ain’t going to be any use over 3G, as much as anything because half the networks block VoIP (note to self to do net neutrality update post).

Now something is happening in the communications market in the UK and that is FTTC, Fibre to the Cabinet, fibre broadband, call it what you will. The superior speeds of FTTC make a huge difference to how businesses and indeed consumers use the internet. They are starting to make use of online resources like they have never before.

Witness the aggressive promotion of the Samsung Chromebook. Not only did I get 100GB of free Drive storage (ok only for two years by which time Google hopes I’m hooked enough to buy more) but I also get a free Galaxy phone. When I got my Samsung Galaxy S4 they gave me two years of free 50GB Dropbox which I am very much starting to use.

All this is driving the market towards using more and more of the cloud.

Now businesses when they start to rely more on cloud services are not going to be happy if their internet connection goes down. These things do happen, regularly.

With an increasing availability of 4G it is going to be a no-brainer for  business to have a 4G backup for its FTTC connection. The speeds, assuming you can get coverage, are pretty much identical. In fact 4G is likely to give a better uplink speed than FTTC.

4G networks do not (currently) block VoIP applications such as Skype and have latencies that are going to be able to support other real time applications. I can’t see 4G replacing FTTC in a business connection because of the cost of bandwith.

This may not apply for certain demographics in the consumer market. The only reason we have a phone line in our house is because it supports our data connection. The only people that phone it are scammers from Indian call centres and anti social pariahs trying to sell me PPI miss-selling compensation.

For a single person leaving home, saving on the cost of a phone line and broadband might well be enough to offset the additional bandwidth costs of a 4G subscription. I digress.

The upshot is that I think that the combination of FTTC and 4G is going to be a real driver for sales of mobile subscriptions and that the resellers sat in that room listening to the panel discussion should all be thinking of how they can add mobile into their portfolio. If you like think of it in terms of increasing ARPU for broadband sales.

On a similar but different note I met with EE last week for a chinwag on life, the universe and 4G. I had been pretty critical about the EE efforts to sell 4G (see post here). However soon after I wrote that post their subscriber uptake rocketed and I think they may well have now reached a million subs.

It would seem that this increase in interest is due to a combination of market reach (ie more people can now get 4G), growing awareness due to the continued marketing effort and more people coming up to contract renewal. The entry of the O2 and Vodafone into the market will also help by creating even more market awareness.

This same dynamic is going to happen in the business comms market. There will come a time where 4G is generally available, more or less, to all businesses and they will start to use it.

Obvious really. Ciao.

PS if you want to talk more about this drop me a line.

PPS I was driving past Coventry earlier this week and noticed an O2 4G signal on my phone. Hey Coventry, it’s on it’s way to you next 🙂

Categories
Business internet mobile connectivity Net

Trains to get faster internet connectivity #networkrail

Internet access on trains to be upgraded by 2014

My auntie told me today that the rail network is upgrading its wireless internet access or at least it will have done by 2019. I’ve mentioned the rubbish connectivity on trains more than once – here and here for example. I’m a bit of an expert because I spend so much time on the train between the office in Newark and London.

Apparently we are going to get 50Megs which is a big uplift on the pathetic 2 Meg we have to share out amongst the whole train today.

The BBC news item tells us that apparently “A new fibre optic network should be capable of handling up to 192,000 gigabit per second (Gbit/s) of data once the upgrade is complete in June 2014.” Pretty advanced stuff a 192Terabit per second network (no quibbling over definitions of what is a Terabit please).  I wonder which router they are going to use? Perhaps someone from Network Rail could get in touch and I’ll do a blog post on the subject.

Internet access on trains. Can’t wait. Ciao bebe.

Categories
broadband Business internet Regs

Rural broadband roll out slips by 2 years – National Audit Office #BDUK

Rural broadband roll out schedule slips

The National Audit Office Last Week spilled the beans that the rural broadband roll out schedule for the BDUK funded superfast broadband project was going to slip 2 years to 2017.

This is not good news. It’s not good news for the rural communities that desperately need faster internet access and it’s not good news for the government which has repeatedly reaffirmed its commitment that the UK would have the “best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015”.

For those of us involved with this BDUK rollout it has been clear for some time that a 2015 completion was not achievable. Lincolnshire, which was one of the earlier counties to place its contract with BT already has a delivery completion date that ends in March 2016. Counties that are later in the contract placement cycle should expect to see 2017 on their schedules.

The slippages look to me to be down to a combination of red tape and resource. Red tape everywhere you look at it and resource constraints at BT. I’m told that Lincolnshire’s BDUK contract with BT slipped by 3 months as it got close to placement because BT couldn’t assign enough staff to the project (this could quite possibly have been because the delays caused by the red tape had knock on effects from elsewhere in the rollout pipeline).

The other comment made by the NAO relates to the fact that BT’s contribution to the pot would appear to currently be only 23% of the total as opposed to the matched investment that was trumpeted before this project started. Both BT and DCMS have vociferously denied that BT will come up short saying that not all of the projects have been committed to yet.

My own sources tell me that BT has seen a lower take up of superfast broadband in Cornwall than it had planned. This has allegedly affected the ROI model and consequently the amount of money that BT deems sensible to throw into the pot for subsequent rural rollouts.

You do need to look at this in two ways. Firstly the “Cornwall” model only worked in the first place because the EU funding brought the time to recoup BT’s investment down to 13 years (or so I’m told). A lower take up would push this time out further. You might take the view that 13+ years is a very long time to see a return on investment nowadays. However you might also think that this is a long term infrastructure investment for which BT will reap the benefits for decades to come and what difference does a year or two here and there make.

It would also appear from the NAO website that in June 2013, the government revised its target, and now aims to secure delivery of the rural broadband programme by December 2016, as well as 95 per cent superfast coverage by 2017. I missed that one. They kept it very quiet. The last time I heard was that they weren’t officially allowing County Councils to place contracts that extended beyond 1015 because of the need to have spent the funding by then but that they were giving an unofficial wink that it would be ok for them to do so.

I refer you to a post what I wrote1 in November 2011 saying there wasn’t much confidence in the industry that the government target (best superfast broadband in Europe by 2015) was in any way achievable.

The object here is not to gloat. In fact I’m not sure what the object is. Perhaps I’ll finish with some observations.

Firstly nobody should underestimate the importance of the UK having a fantastic broadband network. The competitiveness of UK PLC in the 21st century depends on it. This applies to both rural and urban areas. I’m pretty certain that the political classes understand this.

The red tape associated with dealing with any public source of funding is very thick and difficult to cut through. It is so in order to protect the hard earned (and seemingly easily taken from us) money that we hand over to the taxman from being ill spent.

Governments and the permanent administrative staff who toil on our behalf do not have a good track record in spending this money wisely when major projects are concerned. Who expects the HS2 high speed rail project to come in on budget? Certainly not the Mayor of London.

I don’t have the answer when it comes to red tape.

It has seemed for some time now that what is being done with the BDUK rollout is handing back a monopoly to BT. Realistically there is no one else in the game. Does it matter as long as the network gets rolled out? Some of this is down to the environment established by BDUK. Again we have to remember that the government does have a duty of care to ensure that the cash is wisely spent. Part of this is ensuring that critical national infrastructure, as is the broadband network, is in safe hands. In this case “safe hands” has been interpreted to mean “big network operator” which seems therefore to have locked everyone but BT out of the game.

It may well be that the economics of the countryside mean there is only room for one infrastructure supplier. There is healthy competition between BT and Virgin in more populated areas. There is now definitely no competition in rural areas.

I would like you to consider the following points for discussion:

The government splits off the rural bits of the Openreach network. BT can keep the bits that compete with Virgin.

This network is run in the same way as Network Rail. Perhaps its management could be periodically put out to tender.

The government (us) funds a complete fibre rollout to all communities (Fibre to the Premises or FTTP) covered by this network.

The money for this comes from the scrapping of the HS2 project which sounds as if it could be hugely more expensive than is currently budgeted and in many people’s view a waste of time.

The fact that we were never going to achieve a 2015 date for “the best superfast broadband network in Europe” is almost a moot point. You can understand why politicians like to make statements that puts them in a good light. Although the will was still there I think they realised early on that it was a mistake so make this statement as the focus changed to “what constitutes the best superfast broadband network” together with some b”!!5&*t about putting together a scorecard to measure it. I haven’t heard anything about the scorecard in some time.

None of the political bluster really matters. At the end of the day the only sensible objective is for the UK to have a complete fibre to the premises network and to have this sooner rather than later. We can’t use traditional business case benefit methodologies to find out if this makes sense. I’m sure that this is how they worked out the ROI for HS2. Nobody really understands what benefits will accrue from a universal fibre network. This therefore requires a leap of faith on the part of the government and unfortunately this is a risk they are unlikely to take.

I realise that handing part of a private company back to what would effectively be public ownership sounds counter intuitive. People have criticised BT’s costs. Whatever people say about BT’s cost and overhead base it is difficult to imagine a scenario where a publicly owned company without a profit motive would do better.  BT does actually maintain that its cost per metre benchmarks very well against similar networks in other countries and I wouldn’t want to argue the point.

It could be a bullet we should bite. Service provision could be provided by BT, Virgin, Timico or any other ISP who cared to do the business. It would just be a matter of buying wholesale bandwidth off the new company and sending out a router. It would provide for a properly competitive market.

Government intervention is the only way this is going to happen and would have the added benefit of consigning the utterly pathetic 2Mbps Universal Service Obligation (or whatever it is called these days) to the recycle bin.

Discuss.

1 Some of my writing has been influenced by the plays of Mr Ernest Wise.

Categories
broadband Business

Reliable broadband…Just How Important is It? – #godigital2013

Importance of reliable broadband – video interview

Pinched this off YouTube – it’s a quickfire interview I did at the onlincolnshire #godigital2013 conference

I’m talking about how mission critical reliable broadband is these days and how you plan for problems.

You know it makes sense…

PS In the vid I’m wearing my new sports jacket – Harris Tweed. As the winter continues it vicious bite it makes a lorra lorra sense

Categories
broadband Business

BT only game in rural town

Rural broadband providers drop out of BDUK competition leaving BT only game in village.

I hear that Fujitsu has withdrawn from the race for the BDUK funding. It always seemed strange to me that Fujitsu would be chasing the contracts in the first place. Someone like Virgin maybe companies with an established network and pedigree in the UK.

Its a shame for rural areas that Virgin didn’t see any economic sense in pursuing the farming market.

Unfortunately we are heading back to a BT monopoly for many areas of the country. The shame is that this doesn’t make it efficient for me and you, the taxpayer that is handing their cash to BT to “service” rural communities. There is no incentive for BT to cut costs.

Categories
broadband Business

#FTTC video outtakes #broadband #fibre

Broadband video case study – the outtakes

Just browsing through some bits of video left on the cutting room floor after we finished the FTTC case study. Thought a couple or three might be of interest.

The first one was taken with a GoPro camera positioned inside the cabinet filming the door opening and the Openreach engineer coming in to do some work. In this one you can see one of the cameramen filming the cab from the outside.

Bit like the David Attenborough nature stuff where at the end of the programme they show you how they did the filming. Nothing particularly dramatic such as a close encounter with a shark or a yeti. We were however filming outside a school and a very concerned headmaster did come out so see what was going on. He went away though I sensed that he would have been happier if he had shooed us away.

The second film is a short one taken from the outside with the open cabinet so that you can see the workings. No GoPro camera inside this time – obv we had to do multiple takes to get all the different angles in.

The third is one I took of the BT crowd in my conservatory. Of course you only see me in the case study but in actual fact there was a huge support team including the outside catering van, make up artists, continuity, clapperboy, director, producer, personal masseuse etc – you get the drift. I couldn’t fit them all in the conservatory so you get four.

Some of them will be at my Xmas bash so if you are coming to that you will be able to chat with them in person. Not often you get the chance to meet the people behind the movie eh?

Some of you have asked for a video showing the process of the installation. I didn’t get any of that off the production team but I will ask. Bear with…

Categories
broadband Business

Superfast broadband video case study by Timico and Openreach

Superfast broadband video case study

Never before seen footage of the inside of the Davies household now viewable on tinterweb.”

This is it, the video you’ve all been waiting for. Well I have anyway. A few weeks ago we shot some footage around and about Lincoln and chez Davies for a video case study of a Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) aka superfast fibre broadband installation.

Get your popcorn and fizzy drinks ready and settle in to your favourite armchair to watch this much anticipated movie. I don’t have an agent yet but if any major studios are interested in talking then you know how to get hold of me.

That’s all folks 🙂

Link to what BT has on their website http://www.btplc.com/ngb/News/Timico.htm

Categories
Business internet mobile connectivity net neutrality

Broadband Stakeholders Group Open Internet Code of Practice

The Broadband Stakeholders Group today released an “Open Internet Code of Practice”. This is a voluntary CoP promoting net neutrality.

Specifically:

  • users should be able to access all legal content
  • there should be no discrimination against content providers on the basis of commercial rivalry; and
  • traffic management policies should be clear and transparent

I’m not going to delve into the detail of the BSG announcement which is available here. What I am going to do is name the current signatories who are all in the main consumer service providers:

  • BE, BT, BskyB, KCOM, O2, Plusnet, TalkTalk, Tesco Mobile, Three

The significance of this list is in who is not on it, particularly the mobile operators. You can work out who they are yourselves. Some of them are already known to block the use of Over The Top VoIP services (eg Timico’s own VoIP, Skype et al) on their mobile networks which of course goes against the principles of the CoP being announced today.

Whatever their reasons for not signing these mobile networks will have to change their positioning as 4G gets rolled out. The bandwidth requirement for VoIP  services will be relatively small compared with that required for general use on 4G networks so the “lack of capacity” argument should not work.

4G is a fairly major inflection point for mobile networks. I don’t have any forecasts but during the life of the 4G (LTE) technology we should see the mobile business model transition from being minutes driven to data driven.

I suspect that growth in “data bundle” income may not offset any reduction in voice minutes revenues so the mobile operators are going to have to work out how to find cash from elsewhere. This may come from advertising, financial micro payments, device and personal security and I’m sure many more that I haven’t thought of.

For the moment I’ll leave you to figure out for yourselves why the non-signatories have not stepped up to the plate. I can’t see how they can stay away for too long. It isn’t the actual signature but the principle of how they treat their customers who will end up voting with their feet.

Categories
broadband Business

Planning issues holding up really important FTTC connection.

Fibre broadband planning issues hold up my install

I realise that most of you aren’t the least bit interested in my own ambitions to get fibre broadband. From the number of comments I get on the subject most people are more concerned with when they will get it themselves. Fair enough. Thought I’d share my own fibre broadband planning story.

I was due to be connected by the end of March 2012. Then it slipped to end of June.  The end of June is this coming Saturday. My cabinet, which is only a hundred metres or so from my house, looks decidedly lonely. It wants a friend.

I am often asked if I can find out what is happening with someone’s particular cab. It’s doable but not worth the effort in most cases. Openreach would get so many enquiries they would never get any work done.

In my case I have made an exception (only because someone offered to do the work for me) and asked what is happening. Will I wake up later this week to the sound of pneumatic drills and the sigh of white Openreach vans hugging the kerb near my house? Only in my dreams, and therefore by definition before I wake up:).

It looks like my cab is being held up in the planning permission process. Sigh. If I get any more info I’ll let you know because whether you are interested or not I will want to get it off my chest.

Note added at some point in the future. Check out the progress with this update. It’s now been in for a couple of years and has been a rocky ride though I wouldn’t be without. It has revolutionised internet usage in our house.

So long and thanks for all the fibre broadband.

Ciao amigos…

Categories
broadband Business

Cumbrian Broadband Hiccups – Will the Rest of the Country Catch a Cold? #BDUK #digitalbritain

Cumbrian broadband – BDUK

Cumbria is the region leading the charge in the implementation of superfast broadband to rural areas using government funding via BDUK.

Cumbria has just rejected the bids made by BT and Fujitsu and asked them to retwrite the proposals. Neither bid apparently met the criteria laid down by the Cumbrian authorities.

This should be noted with concern by other Local Authorities around the country, all of whom are trying to get to grips with how to spend the government money in their own areas. The reason for the concern is that the model for how much the rollout should cost, and therefore the amount of money apportioned to each area was developed by BDUK using a subcontractor.

If this model turns out to be wrong then we could be facing the “Cumbrian” situation in every county. Delays and shortfalls in meeting targets are bad news all round.

The BBC coverage on the Cumbrian broadband situation is here.

You should also follow Ian Grant’s coverage here – he is very close to this stuff.

Categories
broadband Engineer

Monthly ADSL Usage Trend and Prediction for 2015

monthly adsl usage is on the increaseIt might interest you to see my monthly ADSL usage over themonthly adsl usage trend at the Davies house last four years or so, reported in GigaBytes per month. There is a very clear upward trend – over 500% growth from the low point in April 09 to Jan 12.

There would have been a technology upgrade from ADSLMax to ADSL2+ – quite possibly around mid 09 which would explain the jump but I can’t remember exactly.

The average household usage is around 17GB a month so us Davies’ are clearly heavy users. Our oldest, Tom went to University in October 2010 but this doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect. In fact there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason why one month his heavier than another. it’s just the general trend that tells us that I should expect to be using 150GB a month by sometime in 2015.

My broadband connection by 2015 is likely to be at least 100Mbps so I will have bandwidth available that would sustain large amount of data transfer. I suspect that reality will be higher than this. We as a family will begin to use even more services so I am going to predict 200GigaBytes a month. I’d also like to bet that my mobile data usage will be in the tens of GigaBytes compared with the very low single digit GigaBytes at the moment.

Any insights happily discussed.

 

Categories
broadband End User

Leeks, Daffodils, and Lincolnshire Broadband – Happy St. David’s Day

a typical rural Lincolnshire scene - we have no time for the internet and other new fangled stuffI’m missing tricks here. Yesterday I came into the office with the intention of writing something highly entertaining yet informative around the subject of February 29th – leap day as it seems to have been labelled on Twitter. Instead RaspberryPi came along and hijacked the slot. Fair enough, though I did follow the Twitter deliberations of one female friend as she mulled out loud the prospect of proposing marriage to her partner. It didn’t happen. She is content with waiting another 4 years 🙂

Today is March 1st. St David’s Day or Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant as we say in the principality. It is also a beautiful spring day though there are no daffodils out in the garden yet for me to have wantonly torn the heads off to wear into work. Also my wife didn’t like the idea of my nicking a leek – she has been tending to them with loving care all winter and they are destined for the table.

So here we are pinching and punching into March and I have no idea how to weave the fact into a technical blog post.

In other news yesterday

Categories
broadband Engineer

Superfast Broadband: Pat on the Back for BT #FTTC

It’s fast moving this new web based world of ours. Some of it is faster moving than others.  This morning I woke up to the news (in the twitter stream – thanks to @ruskin147) that BT was looking to pull forward the rollout plans for “superfast” broadband. To do this the company is taking on an additional 520 engineers and bringing forward £300m of spend.

Competition is great. Clearly Virgin, with its 100Mbps service, is forcing the pace here. BT is saying that by 2014 it will be serving two thirds of the population with download speeds of 70 – 100Mbps.

I realise that I have occasionally been known to be a critic of those responsible for our national broadband infrastructure. On this occasion I’m going to hold back and say to BT:  Well done. This is a good decision. Keep it coming.

Categories
broadband Business

Some BDUK money should be used to educate rural broadband champions #DEAPPG #DigitalBritain #finalthirdfirst


BDUK broadband money needs partly to be spent  on education.

Much has been written on the subject of rural broadband and the digital divide and yesterday it all hit the news again as the Government published details of which areas will get how much money towards taking “broadband to all”.

This ranges between zero if you (are lucky enough to?) live in densely populated London to £31million if you live in Devon.

I’m not going to repeat stuff previously written on this other than to say I see the government is caught between a rock and a hard place – the few organisations able to deliver scale are unlikely to deliver what’s best and more over cost effective for the longer term prosperity of UK plc.  I don’t however see an alternative strongly waving a flag saying “this is how it should be done”.

There are islands of hope – for example B4RN.  However B4RN is lucky enough to have someone local called Barry Forde driving the project that really understands what he is talking about.

I listened to BF and a council official being interviewed on Radio 5 Live yesterday afternoon. Not only did the presenters not know what they were talking about but neither did the council official. How can we expect local authorities to create projects in their regions if they don’t understand the issues facing them? The outcome is that councils resort to accepting the friendly arm round the shoulder from a incumbent whose goal in life is not to help them but to take as much of their money as they can.

It would make sense to me for some of the BDUK broadband cash to be used to fund independently provided educational programmes for people wanting to champion local broadband network projects. At least then they would be able to make informed decisions about what to do with the money.

PS I realise it is a game but I do wish the Government would drop this PR spiel about having the “best superfast broadband network in Europe by the end of this parliament”. Who is kidding who?

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broadband Business

Pigeon Versus Broadband – Rare Video Footage

This rare video footage was uncovered from the archives this lunchtime when I was looking for some photos to send to the Skegness Standard who want to cover yesterday’s Rory and Tref pigeon versus broadband race.

You will note the firm but fair grip that must be excercised on the racing pigeon prior to launch.

Catch that pigeon! #trefandrory #roryandtref

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broadband Business

Pigeon vs broadband trailer on the BBC

Audio of a trailer intereview I did with the BBC last night talking about the rerun of the South African broadband versus pigeon race but in the UK this Thursday.

Update 17.20 15th Sept

There is a fair bit of media interest in this event with live radio interviews for BC Humberside and BBC Lincolnshire for tomorrow’s breakfast shows, mid morning and drivetime on BBC Lincolnshire as well as extensive  TV coverage on Look North. The BBC main news website is also covering the event.

Look out for the  rory&tref  hashtag on twitter during the day.  Rory and Tref are the two pigeons that will be carrying the microSD cards (Rory Stewart is the MP for Penrith).  Check out the Cumbrian Rural Broadband event he is organising here.

On a side note we will know the exact time of arrival of the pigeons back in the loft because they will be RF ID tagged. I am expecting a convincing  avian victory.

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broadband Business

The BT Broadband Interviews – Part 3 – Drivers

Part 3 of an interview recorded for BT for their FTTC launch

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broadband Business internet

The BT Broadband Interviews – Part 1 – Markets

First in a series of videos recorded by BT as part of their launch of FTTC.

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broadband Business

What Makes SMBs Churn Their Broadband Suppliers?

A recent survey by Ipsos MORI found that 31% of Small and Medium Sized businesses cited that the reason for churning their broadband suppliers was poor customer service. 15% of them said it was the cost of calling their ISP for support.

This represents a huge opportunity for companies like Timico whose whole raison d’etre is to provide good quality support for business. Before Timico (BT! – now that’s an interesting thought!) my business had a hosting account with a large name brand ISP. Their people were good enough but I would often be sat in a queue for half an hour trying to get through to them at 10 pence a minute which I hugely resented.

This is why our customer support teams have to answer the phone within three rings, and we measure it. It is also the reason that out of a staff count of around 130, 38 of them are technically qualified. The support teams do not use voicemail – they have to answer the phone.

That last statement might sound a little dictatorial but believe me it isn’t and none of the staff feel it is. Theirs is a work hard play hard envirnment where effort is rewarded, as it can be in a fast growing business. Right that’s enough of the broadcast 🙂

Categories
broadband End User internet

How to Get Faster Broadband — Move to Spain

If you want to get faster broadband move to somewhere like Spain. Aha do I hear you say? Just the excuse you have been waiting for to make the move to a place in the sun? A bit drastic I’d say especially when I explain that the reason you might get faster broadband in Spain is because it almost certainly rains less there than in the good old UK.

It’s very interesting what snippets you pick up at Timico. Today, whilst gazing out the window at yet another downpour, I quizzed the tech support team as to whether there were any hot topics occupying their time. “Broadband” they responded. “We always get more broadband calls when it is raining”.

This took me somewhat by surprise but I checked it out and it is true. If you are a long way from your telephone exchange a bit of wind and rain can cause higher than normal noise on your copper cable, usually due to imperfect connections at the telegraph pole. That’s electrical noise – not something audible to mortals. It isn’t something easily diagnosed and ground based connections and leased lines do not suffer the same problem.

This noise can result in a temporary slowing of your broadband. Hence if you want faster broadband speed move somewhere where it doesn’t rain as much.

You heard it first on trefor.net.

PS if you do need tips on where to relocate the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.

Categories
broadband End User olympics

The Olympic Effect

Readers might be interested to know that the Olympic opening ceremony stimulated an increase of almost 10% in internet usage last Friday afternoon.

It will also be interesting to hear whether the consumer ADSL customer community will have seen any changes in the performance of their connection as their ISPs begin throttling to cope.

Categories
broadband Business

Leased Line Business on the Up

Despite the advent of faster (ish) broadband the demand for leased lines is on the up. At least that is a trend we are seeing at Timico. This is evidenced by the statistic that in one day last week we received 32 (that’s thirty two) requests to quote for a leased line from our existing customer base.

You might argue that 32 quotes from a base of ten thousand or so businesses is not much but I’m telling you it is. That is the annualised equivalent of 8,320 leased lines in one working year, assuming no one takes a holiday but doesn’t work weekends.

Now we don’t get that number of RFQs every day, it would be great if we did. Also this is a recent statistic so they will not yet all have turned into orders although I’m sure that a significant proportion will do so.

It does point to a growing demand though. Businesses’ need for stable higher bandwidth is on the up as they have more and more internet (or at least Internet Protocol running on private networks) based communications that they rely on. With the best will in the world broadband (ADSL) is not going to give the same degree of reilability as a leased line, but there again it is significantly cheaper.

One huge opportunity for TImico is the massive installed base of BT leased lines. I read somewhere recently that this amounted to around 118,000 installations. Most of these leased lines will likely be 2Mbps connections that have been installed for donkeys years and are now well out of contract.

You can bet your bottom dollar that BT will not have mentioned that IP bandwidth costs have plummeted in the same timeframe. The chances are the typical BT leased line customer is still paying the same for the service that he or she was five years ago. This represents a serious opportunity for fast growing outfits like Timico.

If anyone out there needs advice on their leased line needs just drop me  line or leave a comment and I’ll sort out an independant assessment.

Categories
broadband Business

BT Superfast Broadband

Just heard on the BBC news that BT has announced that it will be investing in a superfast broadband network/fibre rollout. It won’t have universal coverage but up to a million homes should be able to get fibre to the home. The rollout is expected to be complete by 2012 (subject no doubt to the usual BT schedule slippages)

You will recall that in a recent post I forecast that according to the trend in internet traffic growth we would need 96Mbps by 2012. Interestingly this is what the BT announcement gives.

Note unusually I heard it on the Beeb but it hasn’t appeared in any of the usual online rags yet. 

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
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
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.