Tag: TalkTalk

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Engineer fun stuff internet

TalkTalk break records for downloads with 557GB per sec on New Year’s Day

Trefor DaviesTalkTalk is a highly successful provider of communications services – broadband, phone lines etc. I noted an entry in the Twitter stream this morning that showed they had seen record traffic levels on New Year’s Day – people upgrading firmware on new gadgets, using the gadgets etc.

We know this because TalkTalk CTO Clive Dorsman blogged about their network peaking at 557GB per second of traffic – that’s around 4.45Terabits per second which is impressively massive and three times to peak usage seen on the LINX network. I can only dream of having that amount of capacity at Timico.

Clive goes on to sell TalkTalk broadband services in his post. That’s OK. I occasionally chuck in a reference to a Timico service (great value & service etc – check it out here). “TalkTalk Superfast Fibre Broadband … costs £10 per month for up to 38MB or £15 for up to 76MB, allowing downloads up to eight times faster than the UK average.”

The only tiny element of doubt I have about all this is that I don’t believe that FTTC speeds of 76 Megabytes are available. In fact the TalkTalk product pages correctly quote speeds of 76 Megabits per second.

I suspect that Clive’s post was written by a PR person new to the tech game. I guess these things happen. I’m sure we are all guilty of the occasional cock up.

Btw this is only a bit of fun but I attach a screenshot of the post here for reference in anticipation of the corrections to the TalkTalk blog and the pursuant challenge for me to provide evidence. Also if the real number is 4.45Terabits per second – as I said that is massively impressive.

Categories
broadband Engineer

TalkTalk Ethernet Exchanges Added to List

Another quick update just to say I’ve now added the Talk Talk Business Ethernet and EFM exchanges to the lists in the Ethernet section of the blog. Also a statement from Virgin Media on the subject.

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Business piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Don’t block me #DEAct #DEAPPG

It’s a while since I covered the Digital Economy Act, its ramifications and repercussions but last week saw the court hearings take place for the BT/TalkTalk Judicial Review. I was somewhat mistaken in the belief that we might also hear the output of the JR last week but this is not so. The judge needs to go away and deliberate in the way learned people deliberate (this is either hand on chin looking thoughtfully into the distance or chin on chest looking down at interlocked fingers).

The media is already saying that the DEAct implementation is going to be subject to long delays – it already is – we have been waiting for the publication of the Code of Practice for months now. What has been going on in the meantime is further lobbying by Rights Holders to try and get ISPs to block access to websites that promote or support copyright infringement.

Initially this was seen as strange because the DEAct already provides for this to be looked at in the event that the three strikes mechanisms isn’t seen to be working. Cake and eat it springs to mind.

With hindsight it looks as if this was an insurance policy on the part of the RHs in case the DEAct was thrown out in court or subject to delays.

Ed Vaizey has already met with ISPs and RHs in round table meetings to digital content and piracy, the second time being on 23 February 2011. No agreements were made and I believe this is a very long way off. A further meeting is being held next week.

Blocking is likely to be expensive, ineffective, have unintended consequences (eg innocent websites being blocked), seen as censorship, stifle the open growth of the internet ecology and require huge involvement of the judiciary – I certainly would not be happy with ISPs or Rights Holders taking ownership of choosing which sites to block.

Come on guys. Lets try and see a bit of sense here.

Categories
Business piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

@edvaizey answers to @tom_watson questions – take note @Marthalanefox #DEAct #deappg

portcullisYou have to be particularly interested in a topic to read Hansard, the report of parliamentary proceedings. Twitter has made it a lot easier, albeit hit and miss – you typically have to catch the tweet in the stream as it happens.

This week Ed Vaizey gave some answers to questions put by ISPA Internet Hero Tom Watson MP. Specifically Mr Vaizey said that the impact assessment on the DEAct suggested that the additional costs that would have to be applied to consumers broadband lines would have a relatively small but permanent effect of reducing demand for broadband connection by between 10,000-40,000. All assuming that the ISPs would pass on the full costs to their customers.

There are a few observations to make here.

Firstly the obvious one is that this goes against another government policy of trying to promote digital inclusion. Might the government now want to subsidise 10,000 – 40,000 broadband connections to offset the fact that they will not now be able to afford broadband. I wonder whether Martha Lane Fox, the government’s own Digital Inclusion Champion has any comments to make here?

The second point concerns the numbers used in the Impact Assessment itself. There is very little confidence within the ISP industry that the government got this right.

The Impact Assessment assumes that the total annual cost to all ISPs is between £30m and £50m. TalkTalk and BT have been suggesting that the annualized costs to their companies along are considerably higher than the total assumed for the whole industry.

The Impact Assessment clearly needs reviewing. Broadband expansion has been largely down to big cost reductions by ISPs in a very competitive market place. There is a clear relationship between broadband penetration and cost of the service. It has long since got to the point where consumer ISPs especially have had to expand their value proposition away from pure internet access because in itself this service had become unprofitable.

It would not surprise me to see a new Impact Assessment based on real costs showing a massively higher number of people that would be excluded from the broadband market.
I guess we will have to wait until after the Judicial Review to see what happens. In the meantime, c’mon Martha get your boxing gloves on. There is a fight going on here.

Link to Hansard – includes some other DEAct related questions from Tom Watson.

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Business piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

BT and TalkTalk granted Judicial Review on Digital Economy Act & DCMS launch inquiry #DEAct

BT and TalkTalk were today granted a Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act at the High Court. A judge will now scrutinise whether the act is legal and justifiable on privacy and mere conduit grounds.

Also announced today by the Culture, Media & Sport Select Committee is an inquiry into protecting copyright online and the effectiveness of the DEAct. The call for evidence has asked for comments on a number of questions including:

• Whether the new framework has captured the right balance between supporting creative work online and the rights of subscribers and ISPs.
• Whether the notification process is fair and proportionate.
• The extent to which the associated costs might hinder the operation of the Act.
• At what point, if at all, consideration should be given to introducing the additional technical measures allowed for under the Act.
• Intellectual Property and barriers to new internet-based business models, including information access, the costs of obtaining permissions from existing rights-holders, and “fair use.”

This is good news. I am afraid we have to ask ourselves why this was not gone into during the initial parliamentary process running up to the passing of the Act.

The deadline for response is Wednesday, January 5.

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Business piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

BT TalkTalk judicial review results expected this week #DEAct

Andrew Heaney of TalkTalk tells me that they are in theory expecting to hear the result of the Judicial Review into the Digital Economy Act  this Thursday.  He didn’t seem hugely optimistic that this date would actually be met.  I guess considering the obscene haste with which the DEBill/DEAct was rushed through we should reasonably expect the judge to take his time on this one and make sure he gets it right.

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Business Regs surveillance & privacy

UK Music piling on lobbying – DEAct consultations delayed

The consultation on the Initial Obligations Code required as part of the Digital Economy Act has been delayed. Originally due out at the end of July it missed this date and because it has to be issued whilst parliament is sitting was not therefore published during the summer break.

This is currently slipping week by week presumably whilst the government tries to make its mind up regarding the content.  I am also told that potentially the Cost Sharing part of the DEAct might need to be referred to the European Commission which would mean a three month delay. It looks likely that the launch of the Code of Practice which has to be done in January 2011 will be a softly softly low key affair. I can’t imagine that the CoP will be in a usable state at that time.

Continue reading “UK Music piling on lobbying – DEAct consultations delayed”
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Business internet piracy Regs

BT TalkTalk ISPAs Judicial Reviews and Feargal Sharkey

Much in the news yesterday was the request from BT and TalkTalk for a judicial review into the Digital Economy Act. Nobody I spoke to from the ISP industry had any further details of this other than to say that Sky and Virgin were notably absent from the story line.

This is likely to be because the latter two are far more closely aligned to the content provision industry with BT and TalkTalk being really just (or largely in the case of BT) connectivity providers.

People should not get too excited at the prospect of a Judicial Review. This is just a process of checking to see that the legal process was followed. Did it receive the required number of readings in Parliament? etc.etc

Continue reading “BT TalkTalk ISPAs Judicial Reviews and Feargal Sharkey”
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Business internet media video

BBC piles the pressure on ISPs with internet TV

Channel 4 and Talk Talk have joined Project  Canvas, the BBC’s set top box standardisation effort that already includes the BBC, ITV, BT, Five.

The end goal is to connect the internet to your TV and allow programmes to be streamed over your broadband connection.  The BBC press announcement doesn’t go into schedules but it does talk about offering services that include:

Linear TV (eg Freeview, Freesat) with HD and storage (pause, rewind, record)
Video-on-demand services (eg BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 40D)
Other internet-based content or services (eg Flickr, Amazon, NHS Direct)

My only point in regurgitating this BBC news is that the time is not so very far away when consumers will have to start factoring the cost of all this downloading.  What is perceived to be a free TV programme is effectively going to become Pay As You Go and the cost of an hour’s watching will be something known to all. I can see kids being given an allocation by their parents just in the same way that they have pre paid mobile phones.

As a footnote my kids have been trying to persuade me to buy them a new 42″ flatscreen LCD TV for the “den”.  I’ve beaten off the assault by saying that we don’t actually have a source of HD video other than their own laptops and PCs.  Even this line of defence looks as if it will only be shortlived.

More TV related stuff:

Sony 4K Ultra HD TV

TV detector vans – the truth

Boring TV & better things to do.

Categories
Business piracy

TalkTalk pr campaign against Mandelson Digital Britain stance

Carphone Warehouse’s consumer ISP TalkTalk seems to have stolen a march on its rivals with a PR campaign against the Government’s stance on Music Piracy.  This is where Lord Mandelson wants to disconnect persistent illegal downloaders from the internet.

TalkTalk has done a great job with the campaign website, also available via the domain name dontdisconnect.us.

It must be said that this is a sterling effort on their part to even up the balance on the huge lobbying campaign conducted by the music industry on this subject.

Categories
Business scams

Phorm fails

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

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

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