Network Noise

I had a press release through from BT yesterday full of yet more FUD. The small Welsh village of Erbistock, near Wrexham, is to receive its first ever broadband service.

After spending more than 12 months thinking about the problem, BT has decided it can deliver a 1Mb/s to 4Mb/s service over, um, copper lines.

This is nice, of course, although I don't really think trumpeting the advent of copper infrastructure based broadband is anything to write to the papers about.

BT said the nasty old media had been accusing it of quoting £500,000 to deliver broadband to the area when really it had "bent over backwards to find a solution" and had several other ideas. Some of them even better!

My Virgin Media installation came and went without a hitch last Friday - evidently somebody got into those blocked ducts with a leaf-blower or something - and since then we've been enjoying the perks of music videos on demand and BBC iPlayer through the TV.

I should add that the ability to pause and rewind live TV came in very handy on Saturday evening when two X Factor contestants started fighting on stage.

Obviously we also have broadband now, which is what the point of this whole exercise has been, and I'm happy to report that Virgin Media's claims on speed are by and large, and taking into account the fact that any network experiences a slow down at peak times, pretty damn accurate.

According to the various speed tests we've run, our 10Mbit/s service does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin.

This is all well and good, but not everything is quite right yet and I am by no means a happy camper. A speedy connection is all well and good, but if you can't connect to the speedy connection, it renders the whole exercise a bit pointless.

We're seeing a lot of research popping up at the minute into the problem of legacy networks and how failure to adapt to changing infrastructure needs is damaging innovation and investment in other parts of the IT sale.

Last week we wrote about research carried out by networking integrator Kcom, which highlighted concerns around ignorance of network management tools among CIOs.

But Brocade has put a more positive slant on this picture, suggesting that in fact, CIOs and IT buyers are ready and waiting to invest.

The network infrastructure and storage vendor released the results of a poll of 600 EMEA CIOs today.

According to Brocade well over three quarters of enterprises are looking to consolidate their existing IT infrastructure in the next 12 months.

As London Underground staff embark on a planned 24 hour walk out, the channel has been reminded of the cost to the economy of a stranded workforce, and urged to be more proactive in talking up installations of remote working and unified comms technology...

No. Wait. Just ... no .... 

I can't bear to transcribe any more of these press releases. We all know that remote working is a time-saver in a crisis, and I like to think that channel sales teams are intelligent enough to be able to identify a sales lead when it's dancing the macarena in front of them wearing a sandwich board with 'SALES LEAD' written on it.

Instead of boring you rigid, I decided to take a peek at the future of remote working, so I nicked a crystal ball off the newsdesk at Fortune Telling Week (one of RBI's lesser known titles) and looked up some future editions of MicroScope.

We turned to the Hovertube strike of 2025 and asked what technological innovation awaits us in the next 15 years?

"For one brought up in a pub in Suffolk, Mitel CEO Don Smith has come a long way. While he describes himself as a 'reformed engineer' he is also something of an industry veteran," wrote MicroScope in 2008.

Don Smith today announced his intention to step down from his position and retire, having overseen the firm's transition from a legacy digital PBX vendor to a bright prospect in the world of UC, mobility and networking software.

Don started his career with BT Labs back in the 1970s before moving to Canada towards the end of the decade.

There he joined Mitel for the first of two stints with the company, and ended up as executive veep of worldwide sales and marketing.

In 1986, he moved to AIT Corporation, where he steered the company to gain a 90% share of the worldwide automated border control market before taking the firm public in 1993.

Internet services outfit Griffin Internet is gearing up for its annual channel partner day and poker tournament, which this year will be held at Sandown Park in Surrey in early October.

Attending partners will get a sneak peek at the firm's product strategy and channel roadmap for 2011, and this year the agenda is firmly up in the clouds, with Griffin rolling out new virtualisation products and enhancing its MPLS networking line-up.

Griffin's top-performing partners will get a seat at at the poker table, where they will be playing for prizes donated by BT Wholesale, Ericsson, Softcat and Virgin Media.

"It's a good opportunity to give partners a preview of our plans for 2011 and to have a bit of fun," said Griffin MD Andrew Dickinson (not pictured above)... just so long as he's kept well away from the blackjack table, that is.

Internet provider Virgin Media has thrown its weight behind growing public demand for truthfulness in the claims ISPs are allowed to make.

Releasing ICM-conducted research that said 90% of people found broadband advertising misleading, Virgin has pledged to publish the typical speeds its customers receive each month across its 10Mb, 20Mb and 50Mb services.

The information will be made available at www.virginmedia.com/speedhonesty.

The research comes on the heels of July's Ofcom report that highlighted a growing gap between advertised broadband speeds and what was in fact attainable.

As our readers will remember, out of all the ISPs tested, only Virgin came close to delivering what it promised, and even it fell short.

But the funniest part of all this has been BT's reaction. According to this morning's Guardian, the telco has already complained that listing 'average' speeds is, and I quote "disadvantageous to larger networks operating in rural areas that require longer copper lines".

Maybe so. But the thing is listing average speeds is closer to the truth than any claims BT has made over broadband speeds.

BT has today reported that fifteen million homes and SMEs are accessing broadband over its network, saying that from a base of 200,000 connections in 2002, it has now added an impressive 14.8 million connections in eight years, or 5,000 new connections a day.

When figures from rival Virgin Media are taken into account, there are over 19 million premises using broadband in the UK. That's about 71% of UK households, up from 35% in 2005 and incredibly, higher than in France, Germany and the USA.

But the incumbent is actually being very cheeky here. While it says it has "more than five million" connections through BT Retail - the rest of the 15 million are "via other companies who benefit from equivalent access to the BT network", the telco said in its press statement today.

Now, excuse me one second, that means that BT is effectively claiming customers of ISPs using unbundled exchanges, such as TalkTalk and the like.

Those are customers of ISPs who I doubt consider themselves BT customers.

So while the essence of BT's claim that 15 million homes and SMEs are accessing broadband over its network is truthful, the facts are being fudged. Again.

It's great that broadband is seeing such widespread adoption and great that BT is investing so heavily in fibre to extend its reach even further, but come on, guys, if you can't tell us the truth about broadband speeds, why do you expect us to believe these statistics?

I want you to imagine, if you will, the technology news cycle as something a little bit like the Large Hadron Collider, with beams not of protons, but of rumours and hearsay being constantly fired around it.

The watching scientists, of course, are the bloggers and journalists of the world, ever alert for a genuine yet elusive story.

Just such a 'Higgs-Boson' story popped into existence for a brief moment this weekend, when for a brief fraction of a second the journalists thought they saw Cisco buying Skype.

The story, broken by TechCrunch and citing an unknown yet 'reliable' source, suggested that Cisco was prepared to put around $5bn on the table for the assets of the VoIP provider before it completes its IPO.

For a firm like Cisco I think this potential deal has a high probability of success, and let's face it; it certainly makes a hell of a lot more sense than Skype's frankly bizarre pairing with online auction powerhouse eBay. Let's consider why.

First we should look at Skype. It's a successful company with a business model based on low-cast calls and free video-conferencing services that bypass traditional telephone networks but has struggled to make money (although it is now profitable).

I felt a sense of smug satisfaction on hearing that a particularly irksome installment of BT's increasingly tedious 'Adam and Jane' broadband commercial series had been banned by the ASA.

The series of TV spots in question, cast by BT as some kind of nationally important saga, chronicles the lives of Jane, her kids, and her toyboy, played by the dopey one off My Family.

And as a side note, are there any other IT adverts that turn you off? I have to admit I mute the TV when those Dell guys in hard hats start singing about lollipops, and a particular Kinks song has forever been ruined for me by HP IPG.

The ASA specifically objected to one advert in which Dopey was being shown round a new house by an estate agent who couldn't get his boring old 8Mbit/s connection to work, while Jane, stuck in her improbably tidy kitchen, surfed the web with brazen impunity on a whizzy new 20Mbit/s line.

The watchdog received 17 total complaints over various misleading claims in the ad, including from broadband rivals BSkyB, TalkTalk and Virgin Media.

The full adjudication bears reading in-depth and can be found at the ASA's website, I won't go into the nitty gritty here.

If you've a business trip to Turkey or Russia on the cards, then you might want to think about leaving your laptop at home, say the antivirus bods at Internet security outfit AVG, who have just released a new report detailing some of the most dangerous, and safest places to surf the world wide web.

Based on a tally of Internet attacks for the final week of July, as well as the number of AVG installs per country, the experts found a disproportionate risk of falling victim to a hacker, malware or virus attack in Turkey, where its software stepped in to protect on average, one in 10 users.

This was followed by Russia, with one in 15, Armenia with one in 24 and Azerbaijan with one in 39.

Asian countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam were also seen as risky, while the US and Pakistan also made the top 10 most dangerous list, with a one in 48 risk.

The UK was, as usual, doomed to mid-table obscurity, ranked 31st with an average of one in 63 users attacked.

Brocade is cracking open the bubbly this week to celebrate the day, 15 years ago, when it first drew breath in a small storefront with a cardboard box serving as a conference table.

And we at MicroScope thought it was high time to embarrass the teenaged company in front of its friends with a baby photo!

On August 22nd 1995, foudners Seth Neiman, Paul Bonderson and Kumar Malavalli realised (apparently out of the blue) that storage connectivity and scale was going to be a choke point in IT performance and determined that Fibre Channel was likely to be the solution.

With such perception maybe they could help pick my Euromillions numbers this Friday.

Flash forward to the present day, and with nearly five billion devices plugged into the Internet, the network plumbing companies like Brocade and its competitors remain at the forefront of the evolution of the web.

Said EMEA veep Alberto Soto: "In thinking about how technology has evolved over the past 15 years, the most remarkeable transformation is how we have adapted to technology."

He continued: "If the past 15 years have been about adapting to technology, then my hope is that we can leverage technology to solve problems in education, healthcare, the environment and the economy. That is a legacy we would all be proud of."

Brocade, incidentally shares its special day with, among others, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, author Ray Bradbury, actress Honor Blackman and singer Tori Amos.

Hewlett-Packard PSG head Todd Bradley has bitten the bullet and announced that a Palm-based webOS HP tablet will be coming to the market in 2011, but added that it will not be canning its Windows 7 powered Slate, as many - including me - had suggested it would.

Speaking to investors as the vendor unveiled its quarterly results last night, Bradley said: "You'll see us with a Microsoft product out in the near future and a webOS-based product in early 2011."

So, HP is apparently entertaining the possibility of a three-in-a-bed romp with both Palm's and Microsoft's developers.

Well, it's been two days since my last post on the subject and I'm starting to think this dog food might be out of date.

Yesterday, 24 hours before Virgin Media was due to show up to install our Internet and TV service, my OH received a phone call from Virgin saying that their engineers had found a blockage in the duct, and they would be putting our installation date back to early September while they fix it.

Virgin says that they could install our service now, but they couldn't then guarantee our quality of service, which I suppose is fair enough.

But the most annoying thing about the whole situation is that we called them to set up our account a fortnight ago precisely so that we could avoid the tedious delays that BT Broadband customers always complain about.

Unified communications and collaboration vendors should be anxiously looking back over their shoulders, because Google is on the move, according to research released by analysts at Frost & Sullivan today.

"Although Google has not officially announced this strategy it is evident that by continually adding new UCC applications to its portfolio and focusing on integrating them, the company is effectively entering the UCC market," said Frost & Sullivan's Dorota Oviedo.

"In recent years Google's culture of innovation, numerous acquisitions and openness to third party developers have resulted in a number of product launches in the UCC space, which in addition to Google Apps included a VoIP service (Google Voice), social media tool (Google Buzz), mobile services (Android) and online collaboration plaftorm (Google Wave)," she added.

I once spoke to a particularly enthusiastic marketing guy at a wireless vendor who was very keen to stress that he was using his own technology in the office to demonstrate to resellers exactly why they should sell his product.

He used what I thought at the time was the wonderfully apt phrasing 'I'm eating my own dog food.'

Now, you might remember a few weeks ago when Ofcom revealed worrying discrepancies between the speeds advertised on TV by broadband providers, and what they were actually able to deliver.

By Ofcom's reckoning, it was Virgin Media who got closest to delivering the broadband speeds that they promised.

I believe it's a matter of national shame that the UK languishes behind our European neighbours in broadband speed, and a poor reflection on BT when rural areas are forced to take matters into their own hands.

It is high time for the providers to start taking responsibility for the situation, as our dependence on the Internet will only increase.

In my last blog on this subject I may have recommended that those thinking of switching broadband providers give Virgin Media some serious consideration. And having just moved house, that is exactly what I'm doing. In fact, the cable guy is coming on Thursday.

It's time for me to eat that dog food. I'll let you all know if it was tasty.

As the tough economic times continue it's no surprise to learn that Brits have turned their minds to more traditional holiday pursuits.

The dreary, media-generated concept of the staycation - I can't quite believe I just typed that word - is nothing new.

Indeed, the renaissance of the camping holiday is now well-established, with ONS figures suggesting 5.43 million camping trips were taken in the UK last year, up 29%.

MicroScope's editor has himself fallen victim to the trend, spending last week in a field in Dorset.

Bitter experience says camping is not for me, and if all these new campers are anything like myself or Simon, they're getting bloody bored and have been looking for new forms of entertainment (you're fired - Ed).

The news of Mark Hurd's resignation from the hotseat at Hewlett-Packard will continue to ripple through the industry this week, and is already causing concern among some network watchers.

Hurd threw in the towel on Friday after an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment found breaches of conduct relating to his expenses. A former actress and reality show contestant has since come forward in an attempt at damage limitation.

But already, HP's share price is suffering and the whiff of scandal that surrounds Hurd's departure is going to take a lot of people off message at a crucial time.

The world's largest IT vendor is currently basking in the praise for its recent acquisitions in the networking space, with the integration of Palm on track and last year's purchase of 3Com bedding in very nicely.

It's a sad yet inevitable fact of life in this sort of game that a lot of the same old stories come around again and again.

Take the good old technology partnership, a stalwart in these parts; two vendors, both alike in dignity, in fair Maidenhead where we lay our scene...

Yes, sometimes the plot is so in your face that we can all already tell it's a kangaroo bouncing across the Outback before Rolf has finished with the charcoal outline.

Although in our case it will be less to do with marsupials and more to do with a 'strategic enhancement to our portfolios that, going forward, will allow our end-users and partners to leverage our (almost certainly) cloud based expertise.'

And when the PR email says 'I can't give you more details at this stage' my brain is already filling in the blanks.

So I can confidently say that next Monday a unified communications vendor will announce a technology partnership with a PC vendor.

It will probably involve adding comms tools to desktop solutions and it will almost certainly  enhance enterprise mobility in some form.

I shall wish them pre-emptive good luck with it.

After a brief flurry of initial interest, Google has suspended development of its Wave networking service, which many will now argue was doomed from the start.

The applications of the service, which was designed to be nothing less than a revolution in workplace communication, meshing together email, chat, document sharing and social networking in one handy package, were far-sighted indeed.

In my opinion it's this far-sightedness that did for Google Wave. It stumbled because it tried to replace things that people perceived no need to replace.

And let's face it, in our corner of the industry, communications providers and networking firms were never going to warm to a service that could take revenues away from phones and video-conferencing.

I certainly don't know of a single person who made a habit of using it.

But with Google intent on preserving the code and technology for future applications, I have little doubt that we will see something similar again some day.