Outsourcing a telephone service

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

This year we outsourced our email service. We threw out our  internal mail servers (based on Postfix, Cyrus IMAP and MailScanner) and moved to Google Apps Premier. It has all worked very well and I am very happy with the decision — well worth the £33 per user per year.

What I want to do next year is get rid of the telephone exchange in my office. When we moved into our office we inherited a Panasonic switch and a collection of their feature phones. It hangs off a couple of ISDN-2 lines and works but costs more than it is worth. I feel that if in the 21st century I can out source my 20th century communication system I should be able to outsource my 19th century communication system as well.

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Britain’s scandalous upload speeds

Friday, July 31st, 2009

A letter to The Times this morning makes a spectacularly good point about British broadband. While the mainstream media has (rightly) been roasting the broadband providers for delivering only half the download speed advertised on the tin, “the real scandal is… that the upload speed may be only a thirtieth of this [headline download speed] figure”.

The Times’ correspondent is bang on the money. Ofcom’s broadband speed report claims that: “overall the average upload speed received by UK consumers is 0.43Mbits/sec, less than 10% of the average download speed”.

While that sounds a little sunnier than The Times man suggests, the report goes on to state that “even consumers on higher speed packages (20Mbits/sec cable and 16-24Mbits/sec DSL packages) receive an average of less than 0.7Mbit/s.”

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Why BT might have finished off Phorm

Monday, July 6th, 2009

For months we’ve been wondering who would be the first ISP to take the plunge with Phorm’s technology: now BT’s decision has helped push Phorm off the edge of the cliff.

Make no mistake: BT’s decision to drop Phorm is a cataclysmic blow for the advertising firm (as reflected by the sharp drop in its share price this morning). In one stroke, it’s lost the UK’s single biggest ISP and its closest ally.

Phorm’s three UK ISP partners – BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk – have been playing a cowardly game of chicken over the past 18 months. The service has attracted so much negative publicity that all three have sat on the fence, hoping that one of the others would be brave enough to roll out the service, so they could judge just how much of a PR disaster it would be.

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Why BT’s not the biggest broadband choker

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

The BBC is getting positively hot under the collar about BT’s “iPlayer throttling”. It’s nice to see the big broadcasters finally paying attention to the hidden chokes applied to our broadband connections, although readers of the Smash Your Broadband Limits feature on the cover of this month’s PC Pro would already have been well aware that BT Option 1 customers were restricted to only 896Kbits/sec for streaming video.

BT Option 1 isn’t the worst service when it comes to strangling connections, however. Not by a long chalk. Take BT-owned PlusNet example. Its “Unlimited” account offers a maximum bandwidth of only 256Kbits/sec from download sites during peak hours (6pm-11pm) while peer-to-peer traffic is granted a paltry maximum of 128Kbits/sec from 6pm-10pm. Try downloading a 1.5GB HD show from iPlayer during peak hours on that connection and it will probably arrive a couple of hours after you’ve gone to bed.

Other ISPs pull similar ruses (you can find out what your ISP is up to in this month’s mag). Perhaps now the BBC has taken an interest, we’ll get a frank and open debate about the murky practice of traffic shaping.

Is BT losing its bottle on Phorm?

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Is BT really committed to an unholy matrimony with behavioural advertising service Phorm? Or is the country’s biggest broadband provider beginning to lose its nerve?

Last week BT turned down an invitation to defend Phorm and its like at the House of Commons, using the excuse that it was “too close” to the technology. Presumably, BT will be gracefully bowing out every time broadband is discussed at Government level in the future… 

Today, when asked to comment on Phorm’s claim that making the service opt-out would be enough to pacify the data watchdogs, BT could hardly be less committal. Just look at the obsfucation, in the following, verbatim comment from a BT spokesman.

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Lib Dems were wrong to gag Phorm

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

It’s not often I find myself defending Phorm, but at the House of Commons today the behavioural advertising service was genuinely hard done by.

Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Miller invited a hand-picked panel of internet experts and politicians to a roundtable discussion entitled: The Internet Threat: Who needs privacy when we can have relevant ads?  A title that makes its stance on behavioural advertising pretty damned clear. And there were only two companies mentioned in the press release: BT and Phorm.

She further loaded the dice by picking a selection of renowned Phorm critics including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who’s spoken out against Phorm and its like in the past; Dr Richard Clayton and  Nicholas Bohm from the Foundation for Information Policy Research, the organisation that branded BT’s secret Phorm trials “illegal”; and Jim Killock from the Open Rights Group.

Nothing wrong with that, and the credentials of the panel are beyond dispute. But for some reason, Baroness Miller wasn’t prepared to give Phorm a seat at the table, relegating its CEO Kent Ertugrul and various flunkies to the back of the room with us journalists. BT were invited to speak, but declined.

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Is BT boss losing his bottle?

Friday, November 14th, 2008

“This is a bold step by BT and we need others to be just as bold,” – BT chief Ian Livingston, announcing the company’s £1.5bn fibre broadband rollout in July.

“I have to tell you there are some shareholders who say ‘you know something, don’t do that, don’t do a whole lot of other things. That leaves you with a lot more cash and cash today is worth a lot more than cash in a few years’ time. I personally believe if it is the right thing to do as a 20-year decision it is the right thing to do. But we need to have the environment in which our shareholders feel there is a good chance of us making a return. If we cannot have that environment this is not the time to be taking on sure-fire losses.” – BT chief Ian Livingston quoted in The Guardian today.

Not looking quite so bold now, is he? 

A broadband cap I actually like

Monday, October 20th, 2008

When it comes to mobile broadband, it’s easy to get bogged down in specs such as download speeds and data caps. But sometimes it’s the things that are never mentioned on the spec sheets that make the difference.

Here, for example, are two mobile broadband dongles from O2 (left) and BT (click here to read about BT’s new mobile broadband service). One causes me endless hassle on the train journey into work of a morning, while the other is painless. The difference? That little white piece of string that keeps the BT dongle’s cap connected to its body. 

Something as innocuous as a cap retainer might sound utterly trivial, but I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve ended up on my hands and knees, picking my way through the half-eaten bag of Doritos and discarded newspapers under the train table, trying to find the AWOL O2 cap. It doesn’t even fit on the other end of the stick!

The BT cap, meanwhile, remains firmly anchored to the stick, no matter how many hard-disk threatening bumps the train encounters.  How much does that little piece of string add to the cost of the device? A tiny fraction of sod all. How much difference does it my mobile broadband “experience”? A pretty sizeable one.

iPlate boosts broadband connections by 60%

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

BT was quietly confident earlier this year when it told me that a £10 device would significantly increase the speed of many people’s broadband connections – and judging by our tests, it’s absolutely right.

The iPlate (or interstitial plate, as its mother would call it) has boosted the speed of my home ADSL connection by a staggering 63%. Before I connected the easy-to-install device over the weekend, the actual throughput of my ADSL Max connection was averaging around 1.9Mb/sec, according to repeated tests at Speedtest.net. Now, that same speed test is reporting an average download speed of 3.1Mb/sec. All for doing nothing more than spending 10 minutes undoing a couple of screws and popping the plate in my master phone socket.

I should explain, for those that now rush to Broadbandbuyer.co.uk (who supplied our iPlates) and order an iPlate for themselves, that the speed increase didn’t happen instantly. In fact, straight after I’d installed the iPlate I rushed on to Speedtest.net and was crestfallen to find it had made absolutely bugger all difference to my download speed. However, I did notice whilst rifling my router’s settings that my modem’s synch speed – the maximum theoretical speed your physical connection can achieve – had risen from a paltry 2Mb/sec to a far healthier 3.6Mb/sec.

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Comedian solves BT’s broadband problems

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Dave Gorman is a very funny man. However, he’s lost his sense of humour over his faltering BT broadband connection, which disappeared down a black hole three days ago.

“I’m not a violent man but right now I would cheerfully hurt someone from BT,” Gorman writes on his blog. “In fact my sense of proportion has diminished to the point where I can’t work out if it would be in particularly bad taste to suggest that running Kris Marshall over again would be, well, satisfying. Probably.
Still, if he will advertise BT’s services…”

However, what piqued my interest was his superb suggestion of ISPs providing mobile broadband dongles to people whose landlines have given up the ghost: a courtesy connection in the same way garages provide a courtesy car when your runaround is being repaired.

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