Ask4 starts roll-out of 50Mbps product

Saturday 06 September 2008 15:10:38 by Andrew Ferguson

The battle for who can name their service as the fastest broadband service in the UK continues. Ask4 can provide a symmetric 25Mbps for £50 a month in a number of student halls and apartment blocks in the Leeds and Sheffield areas, but they are not standing still. Students living in The Pinnacles in Sheffield will have the option of a 50Mbps product.

Most UK broadband products favour the download side of the connection, the symmetric nature of the ask4 products means that even the 4Meg connection at £15 a month should trounce any cable broadband or ADSL2+ based connection in terms of upload speed. The 25Meg connection so long as contention does not become a major issue will also be a major boon to people who work from home and need to upload masses of content to corporate servers, or people who simply produce more web content than they consume.

The limited availability of the ask4 products, means that while they probably hold the crown of the fastest available consumer broadband product in the UK, that once Virgin Media rolls out its 50Mbps product it will still publicise that it has the fastest widely available UK broadband product.

City of London Police looks into Phorm

Saturday 06 September 2008 12:51:47 by Andrew Ferguson

In the week that Phorm has admitted that its next trial of its advertising system is taking longer than expected to start, the City of London police has been meeting with BT to ask questions about the earlier more covert trials that took place.

The future of Phorm would appear to hinge very much on the success of the next BT trial and deals with Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse who have reconfirmed their commitment to the trial the Phorm service according to the Financial Times. The Register takes it's usual irreverent view on matters with a news item titled 'Phorm: Our business is fine honest'.

The current economic downturn may possibly do more harm to Phorm than the various ongoing investigations as to what the service really does, and what it can see of users data and what potential may exist for abuse. If the trials do go ahead and the product rolls out, it will be interesting to see the reaction of companies who want to advertise their products. Going on the level of public opposition to advertising your product via the Phorm agency there may be a reluctance to be associated with something people view as an invasion of privacy.

August a quiet month for LLU

Saturday 06 September 2008 12:45:59 by Andrew Ferguson

The month of August 2008 saw a growth of 87,000 unbundled connections to bring the UK total to 4,961,000 lines. The rate of growth of LLU would appear to be slowing down, but seasonal factors rather than a slip in popularity may be to blame. Other factors such as providers having moved the bulk of the customers they wanted to onto LLU services may well explain the slow down. Wholesale line rental where you pay your telephone line rental to a provider other than BT, but still retain choice of broadband provider continues to increase in popularity with 5.01 million lines (4.87 million in July 2008), but Carrier Pre-selection (CPS) is continuing its decrease in popularity, falling to 5.05 million lines (5.74 million in July 2008).

As always the full Telecommunications Adjudicator report provides more detail on the ongoing interactions between the various communication providers. One area of contention being looked into is whether BT is being given undue access to allocated space and power within LLU exchanges, and the OTA2 is overseeing an audit with a report due in October.

Migrations is perhaps the most visible area of work for the OTA2 that impacts on the consumer, and the August report highlights that tag issues got worse that month. It would seem a combination of tag problems with two specific broadband providers (who go unnamed) and also an increase in complaints due to erroneous BT data were observed. The BT Wholesale tags team used to be one of the small areas of BT Wholesale visible to the consumer, but this was moved to be accessible only by broadband providers. The tag support desk may be further moved from BT Wholesale to Openreach in an effort to improve resolution of tag issues, though of course the perfect scenario is for tag issues to not occur.

Ofcom Consumer Panel talk Next Generation Broadband

Wednesday 03 September 2008 12:50:47 by Andrew Ferguson

Broadband in the UK has been a commercial reality for eight years, and the last couple of years has seen a slow move towards next generation services. ADSL2+ with up to 24Mbps speeds was a small step, and the Virgin Media upgrades to DceOCSIS 3.0 represent a large jump. Fibre services represent the commonly held dream of 100Mbps connections to the home, but wireless keeps poking its head in.

The Ofcom Consumer Panel which does not necessarily have to toe the Ofcom line has spoken out on Next Generation Broadband (above 25Mbps is the baseline definition they use) and its worries about what may happen if a purely commercial roll-out is allowed to happen. The basic concern is roughly the same as existed with the ADSL roll-outs in 2001/2002, that many communities would be left behind. Many people view broadband as an essential but the availability figures mask a situation where plenty of communities have no broadband still, or one that is slow or unreliable. Areas like Ewhurst in Surrey are a long way from what one would call rural isolation, but it still has properties with no ADSL available, or very poor speeds and is the result of purely commerical led approaches. If fibre is the main choice for next-gen services, then the problem of being just feet from a fibre but not able to connect to it will be even more frustrating.

As an example of the difficulties involved in even getting reasonable first generation broadband, Ewhurst is a brilliant example, residents seem willing to raise money to help with the roll-out, but no-one appears to be listening since in the big financial picture they are but a raindrop falling into an ocean.

So what is the Ofcom Consumer Panel suggesting, in the first instance someone needs to do some work to identify the areas where commercial roll-outs are not likely to happen, and then address this rapidly. It is also asking those in charge of the purse strings to consider that while people may not be hammering at the door now for access to services like Telemedicine it may only be a few years down the road where visits to the GP surgery are much rarer than today, and given that transport costs are only likely to rise people may snap up any chance to save on travel costs.

Any subsidised approach to avoiding a digital divide needs to be careful to ensure it does not back a technology dead-end, or end up subsidising an unsustainable business model.

If the current commercial roll-outs continue we are likely to simply see the same old pattern, of lots of differing solutions across the UK, with the company with the deepest pockets slowly buying up struggling firms, or pricing others out of the market, resulting in just one or two firms holding the information infrastructure to ransom. It is this sort of commercial approach that has resulted in Virgin Media having a static coverage of the UK at around 50% of households. Some may consider that broadband is an utility and needs to be handled as such, but looking at the gas, water and electricity industries utilities are not always such a roaring success for the consumer.

ITV to spend more on video over broadband content

Wednesday 03 September 2008 12:15:16 by Andrew Ferguson

ITV has plans to be generating £150m of revenue from online sources by 2012. To this end it is increasing the amount it spends on online video to bring viewers to its website, interestingly some of the video content is produced exclusively for consumption online.

A three minute web video entitled 'The Gloryhunter' was the channels first made-for-broadband sports commission, and averaged 500 views per day for the first 20 days it was online. This is just behind the numbers viewing more mainstream shows such as The X Factor and Coronation Street via the ITV website.

New Media Age quotes some consumer research from the firm Essential that consumers preferred to watch long-form video on-demand through TV sets rather than laptops or PCs. Hardly rocket science, watching a 45 minute show in a comfy armchair with reasonable sound, or sat on a spare chair listening to tinny computer speakers and others crowded around to see it on the small screen.

One further conclusion from the research seems to be that consumers want a single stop shop for on-demand video, rather than having to go to the various TV stations sites. The fact that file sharing services have content from a myriad of places available through one interface is one of the things that keeps people using them, even when the content is available free via fully legal channels. What is not mentioned, and people often raise as another reason for using file sharing services is that they often offer better quality video, and the lack of DRM (Digital Rights Management) means people can download it and play the material on a wide variety of devices.

Ofcom grants H2O Networks street works powers

Wednesday 03 September 2008 10:48:10 by Andrew Ferguson

While the H2O Networks fibre via the sewer scheme reduces the amount of digging and work involved in rolling out a fibre network, it still requires some ducting to hook up individual premises. For low volume roll-out such as providing fibre connections to businesses this was not much of an issue, but with the plans to fibre up Bournemouth and Dundee as Fibre Cities under way, greater powers to carry out street works would simplify things.

Ofcom has now rubber stamped approval for H2O Networks to have street works powers which puts them on a level footing with other telecommunications companies. As deals are struck with Internet Service Providers we should start to see details of retail products emerge, the price and speed of services will be governed largely by the cost of getting the vast of amounts data a fibre network can consume and produce out onto the Internet.

Usage limits around the world

Tuesday 02 September 2008 18:53:19 by Andrew Ferguson

The Register has published a commentary piece on the implications of the FCC order to Comcast that it cannot use traffic shaping. The initial response from Comcast a US based cable broadband operator is to implement a montly 250GB usage cap on its products.

Usage caps and traffic shaping are nothing new in the UK, and while some providers seem ashamed to admit they use traffic shaping or do not provide any information on what users can expect, the free market means that consumers have a freedom of choice. A major difference in the UK is even most rural areas of the UK have a choice of retail providers with various packages, e.g. PAYG, shaped, metered or some combination of these.

The item on The Register suggests perhaps one side effect of this net neutrality stance, may be that protocols that would benefit from a priority boost such as VoIP will not benefit, and a neutral stance may hold back such emerging applications. What is revealing is that even a fibre provider in Japan (NTT) has adopted an admittedly large cap on the amount of traffic uploaded of 900GB per month. In the US, Time-Warner is experimenting with metered pricing, and Frontier communications has a regime where a GigaByte of data can cost $4.

In the UK we await providers such as BT Total and the Tiscali group publishing more information on their traffic management and fair use policies. They do of course still have three months to comply. Part of the Ofcom voluntary code was for providers to provide clearer information on traffic management and even email users as approaching or crossing a FUP (fair use policy) barrier. BT Total in its previous BT Openworld guise was involved in traffic management techniques back when UK ADSL was a fairly new game. Very little about how BT run their Ellacoya devices which control the traffic is in the public domain, but a similar system of splitting capacity between different types of traffic is believed to be in place to what they had in 2001.

While the voluntary code should make the market and what each provider gets up to a bit clearer, the voluntary nature means we may find some just opting out of certain parts.

Do you suffer discomgoogolation?

Tuesday 02 September 2008 13:24:14 by Andrew Ferguson

A survey on behalf of 118118 by YouGov which questioned 2,100 Britons in easy July 2008 suggests that 44% of us admit to rising stress levels when unable to go online. A new word has arisen to describe this situation, discomgoogolation, which is based on discombobulate which means to confuse or frustrate.

Psychologist Dr David Lewis, has apparently done some research into the area observing heart rates and brainwave activity, which all indicate stress levels rise once Internet access is lost. More on the survey can be read over at uk.reuters.com.

In cases where the lack of Internet access is due to a broadband fault, a rise in stress levels may be the result of not just losing access to information at our fingertips, or worries of not being able to check our bank accounts but also the hassles many people go through when trying to get a fault fixed via their broadband provider. How many times can someone who can patently see the DSL access light on their ADSL hardware is showing no ADSL connection put up with being told to clear their computers cookies or browser cache?

Somewhat worrying information in the survey is that over half of those surveyed use web between one and four hours a day, and some 19% spent more time online than with their family. Whether this actually reflects a reduction of interaction between family members is hard to judge, as TV viewing which is the other main evening activity can often result in little or no interaction between people. Alternatively where people used to sneak off down the pub for a few hours they now go and hide in the spare room for a few hours each evening.

Ben Verwaayen appointed CEO at Alcatel-Lucent

Tuesday 02 September 2008 11:37:04 by Andrew Ferguson

After some six years at the helm of the BT Group, Ben Verwaayen left in June 2008. Alcatel-Lucent has now announced Mr Verwaayen as the company’s chief executive officer and given him a seat on the Board of Directors. Alcatel-Lucent operates in some 130 countries and has some 77,000 employees.

Joining Alcatel-Lucent is a bit of a full circle as Ben Verwaayen had been with Lucent Technologies in the US from September 1997 to February 2002 when he joined BT.

"Alcatel-Lucent has a lot to offer: technological excellence, leading market positions worldwide, in developed as well as emerging countries and a strong customer focus. The company operates in a quickly changing market and therefore is evolving. I'm truly delighted to become the CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, leading a company with vast assets and great talents, while recognizing the difficulties and challenges ahead. I am committed to building significant and sustainable value for our shareholders, customers and employees."

Ben Verwaayen commenting on his appointment

One in nine broadband users breaking law

Friday 29 August 2008 13:36:55 by Andrew Ferguson

The Daily Mirror has picked up on a poll carried by moneysupermarket.com which suggests that one in nine people have 'hijacked' someone else's Wi-Fi connection (i.e. used it without permission) and that something like one in six households are running an insecure wireless network.

The law takes a dim view of borrowing someone else's Wi-Fi connection unless you have permission to do so with a few cases making it into the news. Interestingly while the article in the Mirror suggests half of those who had borrowed a connection had looked at a person's emails the original article by MoneySupermarket is less sensationalist by revealing that actually around half of those borrowing a connection use it to check their own email.

If you have a wireless router, there are several things you can do to improve security and stop others abusing your Internet connection:

• If you never use the router's wireless function, disable it in the routers web interface.
• If going away on holiday, switching off the wireless router saves electricity and removes the risk of the network being hacked.
• Any form of wireless encryption is better than none, so while WPA2 and WPA are the best protection, the older WEP encryption levels while less secure will slow down people if they are trying to hack onto your system, or they will move onto an easier target. However, WEP is inherently insecure and you should use it with caution.
• Never use an easy to guess security key such as a family name, or the address of the property. Never use such a phrase as the 'SSID' either.
• Make sure your computers all run a software firewall. This helps protect your computer if someone breaks onto the wireless network.
• Keep anti-virus software up to date.

The www.getsafeonline.org website covers online security in an easy to follow manner and as always our forums are a good place to ask questions about the areas that have you confused.

Olympics caused Internet spike

Friday 29 August 2008 12:37:39 by Andrew Ferguson

With many millions more people connected to broadband and the time differences for the 2008 Olympics it is no surprise to see that people were switching to online viewing to catch up with their favourite sports. One would normally expect broadband usage to drop off during August with millions heading off for their annual holidays, but broadband providers are reporting significant spikes in usage.

Timico broadband usage graph for August 2008
( click image to enlarge )

Timico has highlighted the 24% increase in usage they observed during the Olympics. In addition to having Quality of Service (QoS) measures in place, the provider had anticipated a rise in usage and had ordered extra capacity in time so that the rise in demand was met.

Plusnet is another provider that has gone on the record with details of what they saw in terms of usage during the Olympics. In their community blog item, Dave Tomlinson discusses the amount of traffic they saw. With the traffic monitoring and management systems Plusnet have in place they are able to identify BBC iPlayer traffic, and suggest that the the normal iPlayer usage for Plusnet is around 300Mbps, with shows like Doctor Who spiking to 500Mbps. The Olympics however created a spike of 950Mbps. In terms of viewers this is a drop in the ocean compared to those using traditional TV representing only around 2,000 viewers but use of broadband to catch-up on TV content is only likely to increase.

The National Grid has had years of learning to cope with oddities like the surge in power as people switch kettles on as the EastEnders credits run. The advantage they have is that hydro-electric stations can be brought online to feed power into the grid very quickly. For broadband providers there is generally no quick fix as usage patterns have to be predicted weeks or months in advance. For providers using unbundled networks the situation is often simpler as ensuring there is always lots of spare capacity is cheaper, and in some cases providers have built networks to cope with many millions of users but only have a fraction of that on their network. For providers using BT Wholesale IPStream products the bumpy road towards WBC and WMBC with support for ADSL2+ will offer the chance to take spikes in traffic but with a cost penalty.

UK broadband infrastructure is some years away from being able to support millions watching the same show all at slightly different start times. This problem is not just a UK one, the basic premise of consumer broadband worldwide is that it is cheap because it is a shared medium and relies on not too many downloading/streaming at the same time. The old fashioned video recorder largely replaced by the personal video recorder (PVR) is still a very efficient way of catching up on TV, where the online services work is for times when you forget to set the PVR to record a show. When a popular TV show can have its audience measured in millions, one must question the amount of money being invested in online catch-up services, and whether it would be better spent on producing better content, or improving the quality of the picture broadcast to millions.

BBC tweaks obscure Adobe setting to fix iPlayer streaming

Thursday 28 August 2008 14:57:04 by Andrew Ferguson

It has taken a while but a solution to the problems of version 1.x BT Home Hubs locking up when streaming video from the BBC iPlayer has been found according to The Register.

The problem was not limited to BBC iPlayer content, but any site that streams Flash video (YouTube avoids this problem by using progressive downloads for its video) and affected a number of ADSL routers based around Thomson hardware. The solution appears to have been not a change to the routers firmware, but by tweaking an obscure undocumented setting in the Adobe software. The fix has not been fully deployed yet, apparently it is working its way through the BBC's back-end systems.

BBC radio stations are available to listen to online, and only recently have these been absorbed into the iPlayer systems. This has resulted in the previous option of using Windows Media Player or Real Player reducing to requiring people to have Real Player installed. Alas a number of people have commented on the streams failing to work, or switching to low bit rate options on connections that otherwise streamed the content flawlessly. Others with these problems can be seen on the BBC's own iPlayer messageboards at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbiplayer.

24% of those in the UK without internet access do not want it

Thursday 28 August 2008 13:14:42 by Andrew Ferguson

The Office of National Statistics has published its 2008 Internet Access, Households and Individuals report, which reveals that some 65 per cent of UK households have Internet access, and 86% use a broadband connection. This figure is showing a steady rise year on year since records started in 2002, but research into the 35% without Internet access reveals that many may not want or need Internet access at home. The full report can be downloaded as a PDF document from www.statistcs.gov.uk.

It could be said that Internet access is an essential of modern life and for some people it is. There is a danger that some may feel the need to convert people to the Internet which goes against the grain of what many see as the freedom of the Internet. Certainly as local councils and health authorities embrace online services to reduce costs and just maybe improve services, they need to ensure that those unable to go online are not disadvantaged. The reasons given by those without Internet access at home are listed below:

• Don't need Internet 34%
• Don't want Internet 24%
• Equipment costs are too high 15%
• Lack of skills 15%
• Access costs are too high 11%
• Have access to Internet elsewhere 10%

The report looks into what we as a nation use our Internet connections for, and it is no surprise to see 87% of us send and receive emails, and 49% use it for Internet banking. Where we do all of this is mainly in the home (90%) but hotspots (Wi-Fi) has shown a three point jump from 2% to 5% for the places where people access the Internet. Looking at what people actually do with their connections is interesting and the tables for advanced services are reproduced below.

The tables above show the diverse nature of what we all do with our broadband connections, and how hard it is to define average Internet usage. For example someone who just reads email and a bit of online news may struggle to use up 1GB (gigabyte) of data allowance in a month, but someone listening to web radio all day every day may use up 7GB. Someone watching movies could be managing anything from 20GB to 100's of GB in the month.

For many people the Internet has replaced the high street travel agent, and some 48% of us who have made a purchase over the Internet have purchased accommodation, a holiday or travel. The figures for how much we spend online has been relatively static over the last three years, with 22% spending more than £500 which suggests the real money may not be in selling us the basic connections, but all the goods and services we subsequently purchase.

TalkTalk adds free mobile dongle to its armoury

Wednesday 27 August 2008 15:14:07 by Andrew Ferguson

Summer promotions are well under way, and mobile broadband has now been added to the bundle offerings from TalkTalk. The 'free' TalkTalk broadband that is available when you take their Talk Global Evening & Weekend calls and line rental package includes the option of a free mobile broadband dongle until 31st October 2008.

The line rental and calls package works out at £13.75 per month for three months, rising to £16.99 per month thereafter (in areas where TalkTalk has unbundled the exchange). The mobile broadband dongle will be charged at £49.99 when you take up the promotion in store, but this amount is refunded in the second billing month.

The dongle does not include any usage allowance since it is a simple Pay As You Go product from 3. To use the dongle a £10 (1GB), £15 (3GB) or £25 (7GB) top-up needs to be purchased. These top-ups are valid for 30 days and are covered in detail on the 3 website.

This offer is only available in Carphone Warehouse shops in the high street, but details of the broadband and telephone packages can be found on www.talktalk.co.uk.

AAISP ADSL2+ launch delayed by an &

Wednesday 27 August 2008 13:20:05 by Sebastien Lahtinen

Niche ISP Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) and one of the first trialists of the ADSL2+ product from BT Wholesale has had to delay its final launch for over two weeks now due to a problem with BT Wholesale systems dealing with the company's name. A&A as the company is frequently referred to, has the '&' ampersand character and BT's XML ordering interface appears not to support this, a rather basic XML error. A&A have apparently asked BT if they could represent the company using the word "and" instead to work around the issue, but so far they have been unable to come to a solution.

"We are working with BT and we hope this will be resolved soon. We expect to launch our ADSL2+ offerings during September along with a new website and tariffs. It is crazy something as simple as our company name is causing such a delay!"

Adrian Kennard (Director), AAISP

"We are experiencing some XML issues during the ordering process but are working closely with Andrews & Arnold to resolve this issue as soon as possible."

BT Wholesale Spokesman

The author ironically notes that he made a similar error in the past when writing the RSS feed for the old ADSLguide.org.uk website (which resulted in errors if a news item had an ampersand in its title), but in defence points out he is not a programmer by trade ;)

Businesses lose out as broadband falls over

Wednesday 27 August 2008 12:15:35 by Andrew Ferguson

The BBC has highlighted a broadband problem that is affecting businesses in the town of Penrhyndeudraeth, Gwynedd. This latest incident started on 18th August, and is the third problem for the area since November 2007.

It is not clear whether there is a total loss of broadband in the town, or whether just some are affected. It is entirely possible that the exchange based DSLAM has some faulty line cards meaning some ADSL lines will still be working, or that the fault lies outside the exchange. Given that the fault has been ongoing for a week, the suggestion is that it needs something more than a simple reset.

In the cases of businesses, while it may sound a glib response, ensuring you have some form of backup connection is very important, for many small businesses a dial-up or mobile broadband connection would allow important emails to be received and sent, or perhaps have a reciprocal arrangement to share a broadband connection with a company on another exchange. For consumers when it is your own connection, borrowing the neighbours or visiting a Wi-Fi hotspot is the simplest answer.

We have asked BT Wholesale for more information on the problem, and those affected still should report problems via their broadband provider. Alas given the small size of Penrhyndeudraeth it is likely that the various LLU providers will never make an appearance, so people are stuck with the BT Wholesale based offerings.

American Airlines launch aircraft based mobile broadband service

Thursday 21 August 2008 16:02:33 by John Hunt

Internet in the air is making a comeback after various trials over the years. This time it is American Airlines who are launching a service, although again it is a three to six month trial. The service will be available on American's Boeing 767-200 fleet on non-stop flights between New York and San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles or New York and Miami.

Access is via WiFi on the plane which connects to Aircell's air-to-ground (ATG) broadband system which works once the aircraft has reached 10,000 feet. Users will be able to do all the usual Internet activity although VoIP is not available. The service costs $12.95 on flights longer than three hours. Delta Airlines also announced earlier this month that they were rolling the system out to more than 330 of their domestic aircraft fleet.

It is definitely encouraging to see airlines embracing Internet access in the air even if it is limited to domestic flights at the moment. In a similar vein, Ofcom consulted last year on the use of mobile phones onboard aircraft and Air France started trials with onair to offer mobile services in April.

T-Mobile join the free laptop with mobile broadband bundles

Thursday 21 August 2008 15:09:55 by John Hunt

T-Mobile is the latest to join the 'free laptop with mobile broadband' clan with a new 24 month plan that gets you a laptop, free USB mobile broadband modem, 200 texts per month and unlimited mobile Internet access for £30/month. Also included is access to T-Mobile WiFi hotspots. The laptop is an Acer TravelMate 5320 worth £350.

Users now have to choose between the offers available. Orange announced a laptop deal earlier this week that costs £25 per month and comes with an Asus Eee PC 900. Three also started mobile broadband with a laptop this month which also starts at £30 for one of three HP laptops. Vodafone are expected to follow suit soon.

One thing that may tempt users towards T-Mobile is the included hot spot access which allows users access to T-Mobile WiFi hotspots to supplement the mobile broadband service. Although marketed as unlimited, users should be sure to check the small print as the laptop bundle has a fair usage policy of 3GB (gigabytes) per month. T-Mobile won't charge you more if you go over, but may restrict your usage. Orange also bundle 3GB but charge 1.46p per MB (megabyte) if you go over the 3GB cap (and up to £6.46 per MB if roaming). Three include a 5GB monthly allowance and charge 10p per MB when exceeding the usage.