West Coast Continuation…

…but more wastage could lie ahead.

So, some common sense at the Department for Transport has prevailed, they have extended Virgin Trains’ contract to run the West Coast Main Line trains, following the failure of the recent franchise bid.

As the CEO of rail watchdog Passenger Focus points out, this is generally good for the confidence of the travelling public, who were still convinced that they couldn’t book tickets for journeys post-Virgin in confidence.

But, they’ve only extended it for another 9-12 months. That isn’t long enough for a new specification and full franchise bid to be run.

So, why the short-term extension? Mainly because of EU Competition Law. Apparently, other operators need to be given a fair crack. This means a “short-term” WCML franchise will likely exist, which will run for around 2 to 3 years, while a new competition for the long term franchise is held.

There are legitimate concerns that the short term franchise will be financially unattractive, which implies it will require some sort of subsidy sweetener, some propping up by the taxpayer. It’s also not good for strategic development, as it favours short-term decision making, rather than a long-term vision. There’s also concerns such as uncertain futures for the employees.

How is this ridiculous short-term franchise beneficial for the passenger, the rail industry, and the taxpayer? We may as well go back to steam power and put shovelfuls of £50 notes in the fire. Thanks a lot, Brussels.

Is the Internet facing a “perfect storm”?

The Internet has become a massive part of our everyday lives. If you walk down a British high street, you can’t fail to notice people staring into their phones rather than looking where they are going! I did see a comment on TV this week that you have a 1-in-10 chance of tripping and falling over when walking along looking at your phone and messaging…

There are massive pushes for faster access in countries which already have widespread Internet adoption, both over fixed infrastructure (such as FTTC and FTTH) and wireless (LTE, aka 4G), which at times isn’t without controversy. In the UK, the incumbent, BT, is commonly (and sometimes unfairly) criticised for trying to sweat more and more out of it’s copper last mile infrastructure (the wires that go into people’s homes), while not doing enough to “future-proof” and enable remote areas by investing in fibre. There’s also been problems over the UK regulator’s decision to allow one mobile phone network get a head-start on it’s competitors in offering LTE/4G service ahead of them, using existing allocated radio frequencies (a process known as “spectrum refarming”).

Why do people care? Because the Internet helps foster growth and can reduce the costs of doing business, and it’s why the developing countries are working desperately hard to drive internet adoption, along the way having to manage the threats of “interfering” actors who either don’t fully understand or fear change.

However, a bigger threat could be facing the Internet, and it’s coming from multiple angles, technical and non-technical. A perfect storm?

  • IPv4 Resource Exhaustion
    • The existing addressing (numbering) scheme used by the Internet is running out
    • A secondary market for “spare” IPv4 resources is developing, IPv4 addresses will have a monetary value, driven by lack of IPv6 deployment
  • Slow IPv6 Adoption
  • Increasing Regulatory attention
    • On a national level, such as the French Regulator, ARCEP, wishing to collect details on all interconnects in France or involving French entities
    • On a regional level, such as ETNO pushing for regulation of interconnect through use of QoS – nicely de-constructed by my learned colleague Geoff Huston – possibly an attempt to retroactively fix a broken business model?
    • On a Global level through the ITU, who, having disregarded the Internet as “something for academics” and not relevant to public communications back in 1988, now want to update the International Telecommunication Regulations to extend these to who “controls the Internet” and how.

All of these things threaten some of the basic foundations of the Internet we have today:

  • The Internet is “open” – anyone can connect, it’s agnostic to the data which is run over it, and this allows people to innovate
  • The Internet is “transparent” – managed using a bottom-up process of policy making and protocol development which is open to all
  • The Internet is “cheap” – relatively speaking, Internet service is inexpensive

These challenges facing the Internet combine to break all of the above.

Close the system off, drive costs up, and make development and co-ordination an invite-only closed shop in which it’s expensive to participate.

Time and effort, and investing a little money (in deploying IPv6, in some regulatory efforts, and in checking your business model is still valid), are the main things which will head off this approaching storm.

Adopting IPv6 should just be a (stay in) business decision. It’s something operational and technical that a business is in control of.

But, the regulatory aspect is tougher, unless you are big enough to be able to afford your own lobbyists. Fortunately, if you live in the UK, it’s not reached “write to your MP time”, not just yet. The UK’s position remains one of “light touch” regulation, largely letting the industry self-regulate itself through market forces, and this is being advocated to the ITU. There’s also some very bright, talented and respected people trying to get the message through that it’s economically advantageous not to make the Internet a closed top-down operated system.

Nevertheless, the challenges remain very much real. We live in interesting times.

Seasonal ADSL retraining: Interleaves on the line?

While I was away at the RIPE 65 meeting in Amsterdam last week, my home DSL went down. I suspected that the router and the exchange equipment had got into some crazy state where packets are massively errored, but sync isn’t lost, so there’s no retraining. The only way of recovering is to bounce the adsl interface on the router, either in software, or unplugging from the phone line. Occasionally, since moving, this happens, and seems to be related to the weather, which had been very wet and windy at the start of the week.

Since moving, I live toward the edge of the coverage of my exchange, the line length is estimated to be about 4km, and it has to get across a EM noise ridden town centre and an electrified railway line or two to get here. Both of which are potential factors that influence one’s line speed. It’s delivered overhead from the nearby pole on a dropwire, while the rest is UG, though that shouldn’t have any significant issue.

Initially, syncing at around 5Mb with Interleaving, but retraining several times a day the line eventually settled down to run stable without Interleave at around the 3Mbit mark, which is okay for most things other than TV streaming, but we’re not a Netflix kind of household, so don’t really mind.

My unfailingly patient girlfriend (who also needed to use the internet connection) reset the line, things retrained, and we were off again.

However, when I got home, I found the performance seemed a bit slow, so I checked the router. The line speed had dropped to sub 2.5Mb/sec, with Interleave on.

After a couple of retrains over the last few days, the speed has crept back up and following an “invasive line test” via BT.com, which forces a drop and regotiate it’s now syncing again at 3M, but still with Interleave – which is no great loss to me as I’m not a huge online gamer these days.

(Now realising that’s a way of forcing a remote reset when it’s got into a heavily errored state but hasn’t lost sync. Handy when I’m away and there’s no-one in to pull the plug.)

So, this is not the first time I’ve had fun with the line since moving. During the recent spell of hot weather, things would run fine until there was a sudden cooling, such as rapid cloud cover or a heavy shower, at which point the connection would drop and need to be nudged to renegotiate.

It’s got me wondering if the line is affected by a dry joint or degraded cable somewhere along the way.

Doing a ‘17070’ and quiet line test, it’s got a faint “shushing” noise, rather than total silence, and I did just notice what seemed to be “crosstalk” of ringing current (a faint “click-click, click-click”) for a few seconds.

Not sure whether to argue the toss with BT to get them out to give the line the once over (but risk having an indifferent BTO engineer make it worse rather than better), or just give in and go FTTC, despite the fact I’m 3 months into a 1 yr tenancy and FTTC has 1 yr minimum term and can’t cope with you moving house (yet!).

Update, 5/10/12:

Had a chat with my old man about this. He’s a retired BT engineer, so generally knows his stuff about copper plant. Agreed with the likelihood of it being a dry joint and/or the possibility of their being other dry joints in the same cab/DP with a shared earth, given that the “click-click” of ringing current is sometimes audible over a quiet line test.

His suggestion: Phone BT until they are sick to death of you and keep asking for either the joints on your existing routing to be re-made, or a new routing to be provided.

West Coast Rail Franchise hits the buffer stops

BBC Breakfast journalist Susannah Reid: “Well, this is all very embarrassing for you.”

Transport Secretary, Patrick McLaughlin: “Yes”

Late last night, the UK Government brought a stop to the controversial Inter City West Coast rail franchise, which had been awarded to First Group, displacing the incumbent franchisee Virgin Trains.

Not only was there criticism that the DfT had awarded the franchise to First largely on the basis that it offered the Treasury more money over the life of the franchise, but that the First bid was also allegedly “lower quality”, while Virgin criticised the First bid as”unsustainable”, suggesting that First’s West Coast operations would go the way of East Coast out of Kings Cross – that First would surrender the the franchise, and the Government would be left to use public money to pick up the pieces.

There was also public outcry and grass-roots “underdog support” for Virgin’s operations, including a massive e-petition to Government to urge investigation and reconsideration of the decision.

Due to give evidence this to the judicial review Virgin had requested, the Government have slammed the brakes on hard, while reportedly some DfT staff members involved in the process have been suspended pending an investigation.

But, this all has a cost to the taxpayer.

Firstly, the Government have said they will need to reimburse costs to the franchise applicants – and this probably means the non-shortlisted companies (Abellio and Veolia) as well as First and Virgin. Branson’s blog said that the recent ICWC bid cost Virgin £14m, just to put the franchise bid together.

So, we’re looking at shelling out something in the region of £50m of public money to the companies who applied for the franchise, to defray their expenses in placing bids.

There’s also the question of who operates the West Coast from December. There’s two main options – 1) Allow Virgin to continue, or 2) Have the DfT directly operate the railway, as on the East Coast route from Kings Cross.

Branson had previously offered to continue running the trains while the decision was reviewed.

If this offer still stands, and is non-prejudicial, it would be foolish of the DfT to squander even more public money by not taking it up.

Update 20.00 3/10/12:

The CEO of Passenger Focus has made a very valid point on his blog: Passenger confidence must be maintained. People are creatures of habit and don’t like uncertainty.

Is the new mapping app the “killer app” for iPhone 5?

For those of you brave enough to upgrade your iGadgets to iOS6, you get a sneak preview of one of the “enhancements” Apple will be shipping with the iPhone 5 – their own mapping application.

Basically, it ain’t great. Mispelled placenames…

by Tom Wardill on Twitter
Duncaster?

Oh, and in case anyone at Apple is listening, Motorways are normally coloured BLUE on maps in the UK and Europe.

Significantly less detail…

Educational Wasteland?

But, I’ve seen people who like Apple’s 3D maps (using aerial imagery). A case of eye candy over substance?

Update: Seems the finger-pointing between Tom Tom (who provided backend data for Apple’s maps) and Apple has already begun.

Android is looking really attractive right now.

Chiltern’s offer to Richard Branson…

“…need a lift, Sir Richard?” Photo by @Gracey_Mills

Cheeky marketing by Birmingham to London competitor Chiltern Railways, encouraging passengers to try out their Mainline service.

Those who do try out Chiltern Mainline might be pleasantly surprised to find:

  • Cheaper fares.
  • Journey times that are only slightly longer than on Virgin, and maybe be end-to-end shorter if you’re closer to one of Chiltern’s stations.
  • Seats which line up with the windows.
  • Tables and power sockets.
  • Free wifi.

It’s one of the few places in the UK where you can find some genuine competition on a city centre to city centre rail service.

Chiltern have made massive improvements and real investments, i.e. spent their own cash, not claimed investment of public funds as their own, on the route and have worked hard to build a good relationship and understanding with their travelling public.

The CEO of Passenger Focus recently wrote this blog article on his positive Chiltern Mainline experience, and wondered how they can continue to grow the service. I suggested ia a comment that recommendation, word-of-mouth, is very strong in helping the Chiltern cause, but even tongue-in-cheek marketing like this has it’s place.

There’s one thing about the “wrapper ad” on the Metro which strikes me as bizarre. The words “Book now”.

Continue reading “Chiltern’s offer to Richard Branson…”

Customer Service is Crucial

When I need to get a memory upgrade for one of my own machines or for someone I know, I tend to go straight to Crucial. I usually don’t even bother looking anywhere else anymore. Thats where I went on Monday evening to order an upgrade for one of my machines.

Why? Well, partly because I’m lazy. Partly because I’m a man, and I mostly hate shopping. Even online.

But most of all, there’s a positive reason I’ll go back to Crucial. I’ve never been unhappy with their products or service, I’ve never had to return anything, they are competitively priced, and they always deliver things when they say they will, or do even better!

That memory upgrade I ordered on Monday night? I decided I’d pay the extra couple of quid to get it sent more quickly than their 3-5 day free standard postal delivery. I got an email yesterday, early evening, confirming my memory had been dispatched, and with a tracking number.

It arrived at about 0830 this morning, by Royal Mail Special Delivery, which costs us mere mortals about £6 if we go and send anything SD ourselves from the post office. Fantastic.

I know, I’m waxing lyrical about a company just going about it’s business of delivering the service and product I’ve paid for. But when you hear so often about companies who can’t keep their promises, it’s great when you find one that consistently can.

This Mac is much happier now, and I’m seeing fewer spinny beachballs.

Superfast Broadband Roundup – 19th September

Surrey County Council have advised that they have awarded their “final third” superfast broadband deployment to BT. The contract is worth around £33m.

It’s worth noting that the SCC deployment is being done seperately from the BDUK umbrella, and it’s been revealed BT were bidding against two other independant contractors, as opposed to their usual BDUK bidding rivals Fujitsu.

If you fancy being the person who manages the BT deployment in Surrey, they are currently seeking a Programme Director to run the show. I’m not sure what happened to the last occupant of the role, if there was one?

Of course, one advantage of going with BT for this deployment is that assuming BT in the main use their existing FTTC/FTTP service models, it shouldn’t be a problem for any ISP to deliver “superfast” service to homes and businesses on the Surrey deployment. It will be done using the same interconnects and some provisioning.

Compare that to more “bespoke” superfast networks such as Digital Region, which had been viewed as unattractive to work with because of the additional overheads for a consumer ISP of dealing with their processess and provisioning systems, in addition to the “defacto” wholesale broadband providers such as Be/O2 and the ubiquitous BT.

So, while I was at the IX Leeds meeting last week, I was interested to hear of a new service from Fluidata, which aims to solve the problems commonly associated with delivering service over multiple local access wholesalers, which they are calling “Stop@Nothing”.

Their plan is to offer a wholesale “middleman” service, interconnecting to various local access networks, both national (such as BT and O2) and regional (such as Digital Region), among others, and being able to deliver these over an inter-regional backhaul network to the ISP on a common pipe (or pipes), and provide a common API to the ISP for provisioning, regardless of which last mile network is delivering service to the customer premises.

I can see this helping the ISPs in two ways – potentially doing away with the time and cost implications of integrating a new wholesale broadband provider platform into your own provisioning processes and systems, and in giving ISPs who don’t have any local presence cheaper access to regional projects (such as Digital Region), without the risk of building into the area – maybe this becomes something can be done later if volume warrants it. It potentally also gets around issues such as minimum order commitments from individual ISPs, as these are aggregated behind the Fluidata service.

I haven’t got a clue how cost effective Fluidata’s product will be, as I’ve not seen any pricing for it. I can only assume that it’s competitive or they wouldn’t be doing it.

Meanwhile, the group of determined farmers and country-dwelling folk behind B4RN in the North West continue doing their own thing, their own way, and have recently been digging into a local church hall in Abbeystead:

There’s a whole series of videos on their YouTube channel about how they are progressing and details on the physical elements of their infrastructure such as digs and fibre installs.

Recent IPv4 Depletion Events

Those of you who follow these things can’t have missed that the RIPE NCC had got down to it’s last /8 of unallocated IPv4 space last week.

They even made a cake to celebrate…

Photo (and cake?) by Rumy Spratley-Kanis

This means the RIPE NCC are down to their last 16 million IPv4 IP addresses, and they can’t get another big block allocated to them, because there aren’t any more to give out.

Continue reading “Recent IPv4 Depletion Events”

The best thing EE could introduce at LTE launch is…

…a LTE mobile access point, or “mi-fi”.

There’s been lots of excitement about the iPhone 5 supporting 1800Mhz LTE, perfect for EE’s deployment in the UK. But, forget about new handsets, tablets and USB dongles for a minute.

Almost every gadget you already own is wifi enabled. Why spend vast amounts of dosh on making this LTE friendly while the market isn’t fully developed?

Stick a LTE capable mi-fi in your bag and you’re ready to take advantage of the faster data service on your existing kit – your laptop, your phone, your tablet, your camera, etc.

Simples.