A few weeks ago, I wondered why a number of posts on my blog which had been quiet for a while saw some renewed interest – the series on regional peering suddenly saw a significant growth in readership – when I received word that there was group forming in Manchester to discuss the subject, instigated by Manchester co-lo operator m247 and involving (my former employer) the largest UK IXP, LINX.
Now it started to make sense…
Continue reading “A new regional peering initiative for the UK?”
Some of you may be aware of the Google Fibre project which is an experimental project to build a high-speed FTTH network to the communities in Kansas City. They chose Kansas City from a number of different communities who responded to Google’s “beauty contest” for this pilot, because they had to pick just one and felt that it would have the greatest effect and be the best community to work with.
Like many other Community Broadband projects, Google point out that what the large incumbent telcos sell as “high speed internet” is seldom “high speed” at all, and is commonly sub 4Mb/sec. Google estimate that during the pilot, the cost of works for lighting up each subscriber premises may be as much as $8000 – though this is cheaper than the £10000 that it’s rumoured to cost to deploy high speed broadband to a rural subscriber in the UK.
So, this got me thinking, what could Google potentially bring to the UK with a similar sort of project?
It strikes me that one of the ways that Google could help the most is by facilitating the existing community benefit-based FTTC/FTTH groups to build networks in their communities, which right now can be frustrated by lack of access to public money from the super-fast broadband deployment fund (aka BDUK).
A significant amount of BDUK money is going to BT as the incumbent, or needs complex joint-venture constructs (such as Digital Region – though that was not a BDUK-funded project), because these organisations firstly have whole departments dedicated to handling the paperwork required to bid for the public funding, and secondly because they have a sufficiently high turnover to bid for a sufficient amount of public money to deliver the project. These are hurdles to community led companies, who will most likely just drown in the paperwork to bid for the funding, may not have all the necessary expertise either on staff or under contract, and likely don’t have the necessary turnover to support the application for the funding.
Meanwhile, the House of Lords Communications Select Commitee have issued this request for evidence (.pdf) in respect of an inquiry into whether the Government’s Super-fast Broadband strategy (and the BDUK funding) is going to be able to repair “digital divides” (and prevent new ones), deliver enough bandwidth where it’s needed, provide enough of a competitive market place in broadband delivery (such as a competitive wholesale fibre market), and generally “do enough”.
Could this be where Google enters stage left? As opposed to running the project in it’s entirety, they partner up – managing things such as the funding bid process on behalf of the communities, possibly acting as some sort of guarantor in place of turnover, as well as providing technical knowhow and leveraging their buying power and contacts?
This would at least give an alternative route to super-fast broadband. Right now, BT are winning a lot of the County Council led regional/rural fast broadband deployment projects, sometimes because they are the only organisation able to submit a compliant bid.
It remains to be seen if the money will benefit the real not-spots, or just prop-up otherwise marginal BT FTTC roll outs. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve no axe to grind with BT, but is the current situation, with little or no competition, ultimately beneficial to the communities that the awarded funding is purporting to benefit?
This is certainly one of the questions the House of Lords enquiry is looking to answer.
Interesting BBC News article on the Bristol Pound today.
The Bristol Pound is a localised currency intended to stop the net outflow of cash from Bristol – the idea being that if you paid for a product or service with a Bristol Pound as opposed to a normal Pound Sterling, the trader is required to spend that money as a Bristol Pound themselves – either to pay a local employee, or a local supplier, you get the general idea.
The thinking is that in a recession and in the face of rising globalisation, when a normal Pound is spent in Bristol, a large percentage of it (or even worse, all of it) is exported from Bristol, going into the pockets of people outside of the region. By keeping the money local, it’s an attempt to create a virtuous effect of doing business in the local area, benefitting local businesses and people.
I make no secret I’m a big fan of local reinvestment – I’ve touched on this when writing about localised fast broadband projects such as co-operative ones like B4RN (which might actually achieve this) and large gold-plated schemes like DigitalRegion (which isn’t doing too well at the moment, as a locally-based South Yorkshire DR reseller – Ripwire – has gone bump over the weekend).
Early days for the Bristol Pound yet – they are still inviting suggestions for who should be on their money – obviously the legendary engineer Brunel, who had such an influence on the city, should feature, but what about one of Bristol’s famous fictional sons, like Casualty’s Charlie Fairhead? Or is the irony of the BBC moving the Casualty production from Bristol to Cardiff a bit too much?
It was revealed this week that Digital Region, the centrally funded (to the tune of £90m – mostly public money) superfast broadband initiative in South Yorkshire is facing tough times, in particular a £9.2m loss on a revenue of only £167k (which only just pays the last CEO’s £100k salary – they are currently seeking a new CEO, one assumes to manage a turnaround).
The Yorkshire Post article goes on to explain another £4m of public funds have been ringfenced as a “security”, and that the four participating councils, already under budget pressure from Central Government austerity, may need to as much as £500k per year to secure the operations of Digital Region if the loan can’t be repaid. Is that throwing good money after bad, or is the situation redeemable?
This highlights my belief that these large centrally funded uber-projects contain a more significant risk of failure, and not of delivering the right product. The larger organisations that are able to bid and win such projects can come with higher overheads compared to the smaller community projects such as those serving areas with poor existing broadband service, who have a relatively captive and supportive market, and benefit from a tighter focus – for instance Rutland Telecom’s pioneering FTTC with unbundled sub-loop in Lyddington, which is using the same basic FTTC tech as DR is using, but on a smaller scale and in relative isolation.
The larger scale of the Digital Region deployment obviously needed a much bigger income to support the aggressive build and provisioning costs, along with what looks like a complex structure, and now that revenue hasn’t been realised. As can be seen on the DR website, and highlighted on the ThinkBroadband article, very few ISPs use the DR infrastructure to deliver service and is maybe one of the reasons they aren’t making their targets.
You have to ask yourself why this is? Continue reading “Regional Broadband – The Hidden Danger of Uber-projects”
Or “Why it’s easy to pick fault with Virgin Group companies“.
You may have noticed that I’ve recently been airing my opinion – or is it pent-up frustration – on the service that Virgin Trains provides on the UK’s West Coast Mainline out of Euston station in London. I long ago gave up trying to interact with their customer relations department about their failure to deliver either a promised element of their product, or sometimes what should be just their basic service – a comfortable journey from A to B.
It got me thinking about the wider point of why people seem easily dissatisfied with a service, and specifically Virgin Group as a whole, trains, planes, phones, tv, internet access, etc. A couple of quick searches, especially on social media, and it’s easy to find people going full tilt hating on Virgin Trains, dishing out brickbats to Virgin Media about busted broadband, or flying off the handle about the run-down (thankfully soon to be updated) Gatwick fleet on Virgin Atlantic.
The crux I’ve arrived at is that the Virgin brand tends to overpromise through it’s marketing and brand image and therefore sets itself up to underdeliver and disappoint.
Let’s look at the key connotations of the Virgin brand: Continue reading “What is it with the Virgin Brand?”
If you happened to be bored on a plane sometime in 2010, there’s a high likelihood you’ll have seen the film Up In The Air, and some of you may even relate to it. I remember that United Airlines even had the film doctored to remove much of the obvious product placement for competitor American Airlines from the film!
At the time, I was doing between 75k and 100k miles in flight each year, and while I wasn’t living the somewhat empty, itinerant existance of George Clooney’s character, I was almost certainly doing more travelling than most so-called “Traveller families” were travelling in the UK.
It meant that I could certainly relate to the film, the lead character’s pursuit of miles and elite status, and the benefits of choosing the correct airport security lane. I expect a lot of people reading this post (“Hi, Internet meeting circuit!”) can also relate to this.
I still never got down to living entirely out of a single roll-aboard case for more than a few days at a time though.
An independent film maker, Gabriel Leigh, has decided to make a feature-length documentary about the real frequent flyers, the people who really are “Up In The Air”, all the time, and often for no apparent reason. The film maker is appealing for backing on Kickstarter to raise the money to make the project.
Of course, the real irony would be if he can manage to fly to all the places he needs to when making the film using redeemed miles, rather than paying for a ticket!
Here’s a 20 minute taster of when he initially explored the phenomenon of the FlyerTalker and mileage runner.
One thing which really struck me about this short video was the chap in Tokyo, when he compared the airport to a city and a city to the airport. Everyone just going about their business, speaking their own language, doing their own stuff, in their own world, rarely interacting?
While it’s a true comparison for the mega-airports like Schiphol, DFW, Frankfurt and Heathrow, do we want our cities, our homes, our environments in which we live every day to become as impersonal as an airport? I don’t doubt for a moment that it is happening, but can’t help feeling I think that would be a sad state of affairs in the evolution of the city in the long term.
Those of you who ran networks in the 1990s (possibly even in the early 2000s) will remember the excitement you had joining your first Internet exchange, plugging in that shiny new cable to your router interface, and setting up your first peerings.
Back then, you may also remember that in the rapidly growing Internet of the day, it was common courtesy to let your peers know that you’ve taken on a new customer, or acquired some new address space, so they could update their configs – particularly any filtering they were doing on the routes exchanged with you, which were often quite small and maintained manually, except for the largest providers.
Your message would go something like this:
Continue reading “Please accept new prefixes XYZ behind ASfoo – make it stop!”
I’ve sort of wanted to write things about the frankly worrying SOPA bill in the US Senate and PIPA bill going through the US House of Representatives at the moment, but the fact is, others are doing a perfectly good job writing about it elsewhere, and why the hell should I waste even more precious bits repeating the good stuff they have already said.
So, I’ll quickly roll-up what I think are interesting articles:
I’ll add more as I find/read them and think they are worth linking to. There are a lot of articles and opinions out there, as you can imagine, and I’m now just adding to the melee, I suppose.
But, the most worrying thing I find is that what is being proposed is effectively the same type of DNS doctoring and blackholing that other “less liberal” Governments (China, for instance) have been known to use to block access to things like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
“Oh, but we’ll only use it for blocking X”, they say. Question is, does the existance of the mechanism to do this constitute an invitation for it to be used for blocking other things in the fullness of time? Are we going to end up with domains being injected into the feed of “bad things” because it hosts something that arbitrarily earned some sort of “dislike” from those who have control?
Paging George Orwell, to a courtesy telephone, please.
Following in the wake of the moan about Virgin Trains, a good item regarding the re-franchising of rail services was broadcast in today’s BBC Radio 4 consumer affairs programme, “You and Yours”.
Here’s a BBC iPlayer link to the article – may not work outside the UK, and will expire in the fullness of time.
Tony Miles, a contributor to the rail industry magazine, Modern Railways, explained that the Government will be re-letting a number of UK passenger railway franchises in the coming years, and that a number of European state-owned railway companies are not only showing interest in UK rail franchises, but are already proving successful in winning them, such as the impending takeover of services out of Liverpool Street by Abellio, the International commercial arm of the Dutch railway company, NS, who already operate services in the North of England under a JV with Serco (Northern Rail and Merseyrail).
The Europeans are interested in grabbing a slice of the British pie for two main reasons, firstly because there is some money to be made, and secondly because the privatisation, franchising or deregulation of their home markets is proceeding at a slow pace.
Continue reading “Rail Re-franchising: Be careful what you wish for!”
Following on from Why the Virgin Trains Pendolino is fail…, someone asked me what was actually wrong with the onboard 1st Class service. They didn’t share my negative impression of it, and had experienced, by all accounts, some enjoyable breakfasts. I think they have been incredibly fortunate, compared to my personal experience.
Firstly, there’s the token “weekend” 1st Class service… Continue reading “What’s wrong with VT’s at-seat 1st Class Service?”
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