The Wooster Blog

Horses for Courses – picking the right tools for the fibre job!

Published on April 25, 2012 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: BD-UK, big society, business models, community, community strategy, digital britain, fibre, localism, network architecture, NGA, procurement exercise.

This blog started life on my Posterous page which I use for quick thoughts but the impacts have been troubling me so I decided to move it to my main page and add a little to it.

It started when I spotted this tweet from FiberNews, run by the excellent Marc Duchesne (If you don’t follow @mduchesn, then why not!):

“MikroTik RouterOS – Hardware suggestions for FTTH ISP bit.ly/IVK6v9“

Seeing it raised some big questions in my mind, and ones which I think are largely a UK specific issue and not one which may be of particular relevance to other countries beginning to fibre-up.

FttH is long-lasting national strategic infrastructure. At some point in the future there will be a copper switch-off and the fibre infrastructure left behind will become default telecommunications network in each country.

This isn’t a Mystic Meg prediction – I can’t say how long it will take but Regulators in some European countries are already starting to consider the conditions under which copper networks might be switched off.

When it does happen the fibre networks being built today become natural monopolies and will have the sole responsibility for delivering critical services and for supporting the market that relies on competition from wholesale operators through service providers to content organisations. All this will rest on the decisions being made today by the pioneering fibre operators.

Many countries around the world have active community-led broadband markets but there is a subtle difference in the UK. In my work with BDUK, I suggested three broad models for delivering community solutions:

Partnership – where there is co-investment in the assets but the network is designed, built and operated by specialists
Concession – where the community own all of the assets but a concession is offered to design, build and operate the network
DIY – where the community own all the assets but also design, build and operate the network themselves

The UK, like many markets can find good examples of the first two, and this is the core focus of many international fibre markets, but I suspect the UK is alone in seeing the emergence of the third group.

In the context that any resulting fibre network will become the national strategic infrastructure, any undertaking by a community carries with it not inconsiderable responsibility and for any community considering a DIY approach this responsibility rests entirely on the shoulders of the community.

I should be clear here: There is absolutely nothing wrong with a community adopting such an approach and for a few this is something their communities will be willing and able to take-on, and I for one wouldn’t want to stop them – so long as they fully understand the responsibility they are taking on.

However, it was the tweet at the top of this blog that brought into sharp focus for me this sense of a community having a full understanding of these issues and what practical steps they need to take to assure themselves and their communities.

MikroTik is excellent kit. I’ve used it myself to build devices with features from pretty much all the Cisco catalogue from simple routers to deep packet inspection, intelligent traffic shaping and distributed load balancing devices.

MikroTik and similar kit formed the basis of the wireless network I built some years ago to deliver first generation broadband to homes and businesses in rural Oxfordshire. It allowed me to build features into that network that simply couldn’t have been cost-effective any other way, and in the same circumstances I’d do it exactly the same way again.

But I wouldn’t build a network the same way that will at some point in the future will become the network ultimately responsible for guaranteeing blue-light telephone calls or providing critical health-care services, or for sustaining the local leg of what has been identified as the largest and most vibrant on-line economy in the world.

There is a fundamental difference between deep-fibre based NGA networks and the previous generation of overlay broadband networks:

Overlay networks largely have the luxury of choosing what traffic they carry and how;
Deep fibre networks will become the national infrastructure and with that comes the same responsibility that today pretty much only the incumbent operators have to shoulder.

When you build a FttH network you are saying that you are prepared to take-over that responsibility at some point.

For that reason I would want to make sure the equipment I used to build such a network was designed to carry the burden, and that would rule out consumer grade network equipment and equipment that works brilliantly in overlay networks but isn’t designed for such a critical role.

I could still find a 100 and one uses for MikroTik hardware in my network but I don’t think I would sleep well at night using it for mission-critical network elements. The reality is that being able to meet these requirements necessitates carrier grade equipment with carrier grade processes and support systems. Its all about horses for courses – picking the right tools for the job.

Lessons from the US and Europe show that doesn’t necessarily mean gold-plated pricing or vast scale but it does require a level of understanding that few communities will easily find locally.

And it is this understanding that has typically led European and US communities to favour partnership and concession models – and deterred them from being more hands on.

I don’t want to send out the message that community-led broadband can’t work – it clearly can and I wholeheartedly support it. All I ask is that if your community is considering a DIY approach you weigh up the full implications alongside the benefits you have identified.

If you have any doubts, compare the outcomes and the risks with other models – with developing a partnership with a specialist or from offering a concession to run your network.

Reaching out for take-up

Published on April 8, 2012 in Adrian's tech blog. 5 Comments

At this year’s European FttH Summit in Munich Benoit Felton presented some research on the different market approaches adopted by a broad spectrum of established European NGA project. His work identified that successful projects make a conscious decision to either to aggressively develop market share or to adopt a premium position in the market.

As a rule of thumb, many incumbents tend to prefer a premium position for their NGA services as a means of managing their transition from their existing first generation services, while new entrant NGA providers were more varied in their approaches. But one thing was clear from Benoit’s findings – successful NGA schemes need to be very clear about which approach to adopt; sitting on the fence or having an ambiguous market strategy is a mistake.

I decided to write this up now for two linked reasons reasons. At the moment many Local Authorities across the UK are starting to contemplate the reality of delivering their Local Broadband Plans which will include demand stimulation and community engagement. Secondly, there are a growing number local schemes either starting out or in advanced stages of development at the moment.

For both groups understanding the importance of Benoit’s findings is a first important stage.

For local authorities contemplating demand stimulation and galvanising their communities to maximum effect, while understanding the market position of their likely delivery partners will provide a critical insight into what its reasonable for their chosen partner to do, and where their own demand programme will need to focus;
Community-based schemes generally would be suicidal to adopt an exclusive premium position within their towns and villages, so starting to consider how to optimise their market footprint will be critical to their success.

So what is it that defines a premium market position and separates it from an acquisitive one?

A common error that people in the technology sector make is to forget that there are other people than technophiles – that market’s contain more than just innovators. Every once in a while its worth pulling out a “Marketing 101″ crib sheet and reminding ourselves of Everett Rogers ”Diffusion of Innovations” model.

A premium market position is one that squarely attracts the “Innovators” and “Early Adopters” – here bandwidth sells. Simple messages that liberally mention fibre and big headline speeds are all that really matter:

“All you need to know is you get a Gig”

This is the message that reaches the people who happily queued all night for the iPad 3 when they already had iPad’s 1 & 2 – technology as a religion!

This approach is likely to reach the dizzy heights of perhaps 20% take-up – something an established company managing the migration from existing, lower-cost services would be happy with as a base-camp position but is likely to be unsustainable for anyone else.

Everyone else needs a reason to buy NGA. Most people aren’t moved by gigabits or have a view on the glass v copper debate. For these people its all about services – what you can do with it.

For Rogers’ “Early Majority”, that’s easy – these are typically adept users of technology and avid consumers of media. Content providers like Netflix and Love Films, and the greater responsiveness of the PlayStation Network are already making a good start with an embarrassment of riches coming down the line from the cloud. Reaching these customers is also not complex – many in the Early Majority will be on Facebook and Twitter so developing a dialogue is not difficult.

Persuading the Early Adopters and the Early Majority will help you reach break-even on a typical fibre project but it won’t get you into profit. For that you need to reach out to the “Late Majority”. This is a group of society that are less comfortable with technology and will often be quite utilitarian in their uses – on-line banking, booking a holiday, Tesco on-line orders, and so on. This group may already view today’s average broadband speeds as excessive – here not only doesn’t bandwidth sell, it may actually be a turn off.

However, a key constituents of the Late Majority will typically be older people and people on lower incomes; the kinds of groups that are more likely to be users of public services. The transformation of public services is the single most important way to attracting the Late Majority to technology in general and especially NGA networks.

Healthcare and independent living solutions that enable people to stay in their rural homes longer, and education programmes aiming to raise the ambitions of children and help adults back into work will be key to encouraging the Late Majority to go on-line. The flexibility and power of the experience that can be delivered by NGA networks makes this, to enlightened innovators, a far better starting point for developing novel services than first generation broadband – but get it wrong and the damage will be much longer lasting than if you get your media play slightly wrong for the Early Majority.

So Local Authorities looking to develop effective demand stimulation programmes could do much worse than look to the way they deliver their own services first – reach out to the Late Majority yourself and push your delivery partners to reach the Innovators and Early Majority, something they should naturally do well. Not only will you deliver much better take-up levels and secure economic outcomes, you may also save money!

And for community-led schemes. The term may have gone out of fashion already but this is Big Society territory.

Develop a fast broadband service, mould it into a triple-play bundle but then focus on local services - things that actually make a difference to people. Sell your triple play – market your local services.

Is the future of TV in doubt?

Published on January 31, 2012 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: broadcast industry, cloud, content providers, gigabit speeds, net neutrality, next generation networks, NGA.

Today Sky announced its to launch a standalone internet TV service. This seems perfectly timed given that NetFlix has recently entered the UK market, joining Amazon’s LoveFilms and a rash of other services and platforms like Google’s YouTube, Apple.TV, and the BBC’s iPlayer.

All this reminded me of something I heard a while back at last years Broadcast Evolution Summit in Cannes – a very good event but notable for the complete absence of any internet “broadcast” companies and a large number of traditional TV executive who were showing very real signs that they didn’t really get what was about to happen to them.

At the Summit, it was pointed out that it took something like half-a-century before a car had stopped looking like horse-drawn carriage. Similarly, early TV’s often looked like some odd amalgam of sitting room furniture and a radiogram; it then took another generation to pass before colour was added; and another until HD was added.

But now TV has joined the internet; a medium that evolves in months a years rather than years and decades, and its notable that its the Internet pioneers that are making the early ground, not TV stalwarts.

I’ll give you an example. At the Summit there was lots of talk about linear and non-linear TV:

Linear is the way we watch broadcast TV, where there is a constant stream flowing past us and we have a simple binary choice to watch it or not.
Non-linear is recorded TV where we dip into a pool of content and choose what to watch and the order in which we watch it; this is what happens when we record stuff on our PVR, visit YouTube, drop by Mubi, install Boxee, go to Witney.TV or use the iPlayer catch-up services.

This list is long and that’s because just about all of the innovation is being made by non-linear companies and the distinction they are making with linear models is rapidly eroding.

At the Summit I reminded the audience that at a gigabit it was possible to download an HD movie in a lot less than 30-seconds. Puzzlement! Why do I care?

That’s less time than it takes to broadcast an ad – while you are watching the ad, your next HD programme will be streamed to your box; the choice of programming could be pre-booked by you or it could be carefully selected by a cloud service that collects meta-data from your previous watching patterns, taking in Last.FM’s Love/Hate buttons, and your social media connections, linking you to your communities of interest.

Today the concept of “Spotify for HD TV” is well within grasp – Love Film has launched the first steps towards it, and with Amazon’s cloud infrastructure behind it it is only a matter of time (months rather than years).

Is this linear or non-linear? And who really cares? One thing is for certain, TV executives shouldn’t!

Traditional media companies have highly skilled staff and are able to create top draw content within islands of trust backed by the very best creative labs; even if their brands may have to do battle with major global players like Apple and Google for platform space, their content should remain king. But this, in the medium term, will only remain a valuable asset if the linear mindset is put to bed.

I understand Google has set YouTube a strategic goal to increase viewing time from minutes to hours per day. This is why net neutrality is so important to Google – unless the transmission medium is reliable they won’t be able to secure the rights to the very best content. If you were Disney would you sign away your content to a platform that regularly pixelates the most valuable asset attached to your brand?

I’ve written before about net neutrality and how ALA is about to deliver the tools that for innovative internet aware companies will remove the chance of pixelated content over pervasive and very fast networks so I won’t repeat myself here except to say that I’ve had far, far more interesting conversations about content delivery from internet companies who are beginning to get it, and far, far more puzzled or dismissive faces from traditional broadcast companies who don’t.

How long will it be before Google or Amazon try to secure premiership football rights? And who would bet against them?

For the time being at least it seems TV companies are playing catch-up. The speed of change is far, far quicker than anything they have experienced before, and they are being measured against companies who are comfortable working at that speed.

National legislation with global impacts

Published on January 19, 2012 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: central government, content providers, global challenges, internet, internet governance, manifesto, net neutrality, News, politics, sopa.

The Internet blackout by many of the big names in response to proposed US legislation isn’t the first time law makers and internet pioneers have faced up to each other, and its also not the first time that national legislation, attempting to target a national issue, has had potentially significant impacts on the running of the international internet.

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about the global challenges being posed by the US proposal for a domestic “Internet kill switch“; if the US Government were to switch off the US portions of the Internet it would not just deny UK citizens access to common services but may also kill entire portions of the UK’s internet access because of the global nature of internet peering.

There is no simple answer to this. Of course national Governments must act in their own self-interests but when it comes to the Internet the impact is seldom felt by local citizens alone. Internet Governance, thus far, has been largely successful in developing a fairly egalitarian, global phenomenon outside of national governance but we are entering a new world where national security, health and prosperity depend on the future running of the Internet – this makes it politically very important, not least to key knowledge economies like the UK.

US citizens have typically been more aware of this than many other nations – the importance of net-neutrality is a deeply emotional, heart-felt thing in the US but has so far been largely missed by UK citizens and is totally ignored in Ireland where the lack of transparency is actively marketed by the largest operator.

The reaction to the Internet blackout in response to the US SOPA proposals was interesting. It seemed to mark the awakening of debate beyond the US. I didn’t hear much from politicians outside of the US but the interest from commentators went beyond simply bemoaning that they couldn’t look things up on Wikipedia. When Jonathan Agnew from BBC’s Test Match Special comments about the importance of the internet and the problems that SOPA may introduce on Twitter, then it must have become mainstream.

My own position is that while copyright of course needs to be protected, the ramifications of any loosely drafted legislation can have far wider impacts, and the implementation of internet legislation specifically will always have implications far beyond national boundaries. Any Government considering a move like this today has a responsibility to world citizens and not just the self-interests of one sector of their local economy.

Today requires a generation of Internet-savvy politicians who can find new world solutions to old world problems like copyright.

Open is the best (only) policy – Ghost of Christmas Future

Published on December 17, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: broadcast industry, business models, cloud, content providers, customer loyalty, digital britain, eric schmidt, history, imagination, intelligent supply, internet, net neutrality, network architecture, next generation networks, NGA, open networks, public service networks.

In my last post (Open is the best (only) policy) I gave a high-level view on why I think open access networks are important today but I didn’t really explore why I think that offers just a narrow glimpse of why open access will become the single most important thing network operators can do for their customers, and why the UK is unknowingly paving the way.

So a bold statement:

I think that Active Line Access (ALA) will become one of the most important features of public networks in the years to come – but it will take a little time for that to become apparent. I also know that so far very few people have understood this.

When I talk to people who build public networks they typically see ALA as the necessary replacement to PPP/L2TP; that its the technical remedy that allows them to hand-off connections to ISPs in an NGA world. They are of course right in a very practical, narrow sense but what the NICC did in codifying a long list of technical standards was much, much more than that.

When I talk to people who build campus networks their immediate response is what’s all the fuss about; ALA is a codified collection of standards that large corporates have been using for many years. Again broadly true but they have forgotten what their lives were like before they had these tools.

A Ghost of Christmas Past

Travelling back 15 years to the world of large corporates, a network managers lot was very difficult. They typically had the biggest budget in the IT department with the biggest sign-off but they also found it the hardest to provide direct empirical evidence that any incremental increase in their budget would deliver a greater incremental impact on the business; granular return on investment calculations were impossible.

Around this time I started to talk about the proximity to business, and it went like this:

The applications people had a direct relationship to the business so anything they did had a direct and immediate bearing on the business; incremental change could be measured and valued.
The core software people, like database administrators, were closely coupled to the applications people so although they were one step removed from the business and their systems may be shared, they were were close enough to the business they could measure their impact.
The server teams were further removed and incremental investment is beginning to become more challenging because their world is now two layers removed and increasingly shared but by working closely with the applications and core software people they could typically prove enough incremental value to justify additional investment.
The network teams were by definition universally shared and with no direct connection to parts of the business, only to the business as a whole; at this time, budget meetings in times of major shifts in the business were a pretty unpleasant affair and something most network managers dreaded (or at least the ones focussed on the business did)

With Y2K looming, I started to focus on how I could bridge the void and improve my proximity to the business. It was also at this time that what I then called 3D networks were beginning to be possible. Traditional 2D networks were a trade-off between distance and speed but 3D networks had a policy axis using a combination of VLANs and qualities of service; combining these meant I now had a granular control over the network and could therefore finely adapt the network in response to changing business needs – it was now possible to improve the network’s proximity to the business and therefore provide a direct and measurable impact. Budget meetings could now be constructive and less confrontational.

It took time for the ideas of 3D networking to take hold, and my name for it never stuck, but today any private network manager of any merit should be able to have a direct dialogue with the business.

When the NICC created ALA, they codified the tools that private network managers use; they put in place the mechanisms to improve the proximity of public networks to people and businesses – and the impact of that will, in time, be far more profound.

A Ghost of Christmas Future

It often takes a single event to focus minds and create the conditions for a shift of this kind:

For private network managers it was Y2K, when vast sums were spent renovating application platforms and they needed to justify their budgets.
For public networks it will be the shift to NGA network we’re just beginning.

So when I talk about Service Providers I’m not being lazy and omitting “Internet” because I assume they’ re synonymous; its because I think ISPs are in reality a general-purpose subset of Service Providers – that once “providers of service” become aware of what the NICC has done the service provider market will become a whole lot richer and more exciting.

I had hoped the NHS might have been the pioneer in this space – the confluence of PSNs and the emergence of NGA is an opportunity that should be grabbed with both hands – but I suspect it will take a major commercial company to make the first move.

Who might the early movers be? The major cloud companies and content delivery networks (CDNs) are the obvious choices, and who better than Google (with YouTube) and Amazon Web Services (with Love Films).

Imagine this:

Today Google offer a best endeavours YouTube service, over the top of other people’s transit networks; it works okay if your goal is to support three minutes of viewing per day but isn’t good enough for three hours per day. This is at the root of Google’s concerns over Net-Neutrality.

In response, Google launch a Premium YouTube service for a few pounds month but instead of routing the service via an IP-based BGP interface onto your ISP’s network, its routed via an ALA VLAN hand-over point to your network operator. Quality is assured so now you can watch three-hours a day of broadcast quality media, and Google can secure the rights to premium content as the risk of pixelation has been removed and the rights holders can feel confident their brand wont be damaged.

Love Films backed by an ALA-based “Networks as a Service” offering from Amazon Web Services is at least as well placed to be the pioneer, completely demolishing the current rigid assumption that viewing is either linear (broadcast) or non-linear (on-demand); their new streaming package that learns your viewing habits is the first baby step.

Today, this minute, this is a dream – a perfectly feasible dream – but as companies like Love Films evolve their services and they explore, prod and push the capabilities and limitations of the underlying networks then I’m as confident as I can be that it will become a reality. When (not if) an organisation like Amazon Web Services gets their heads around the capabilities of ALA the world will change and imaginations will be unleashed.

Today we have a world of Over the Top (OTT) services – prepare for a world that combines OTT with RTS (round the side) services – and prepare for a future that blows your mind.

If you build your networks without ALA in mind then you are about to condemn your platform to obsolescence and your customers to boredom!

Start developing your networks with a proximity to your customers in mind and you will never look back!

Open is the best (only) policy

Published on December 12, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: business models, community strategy, content providers, fibre, network architecture, NGA, open networks.

If I’m honest I’m a little tired of the whole open network debate – largely because I don’t think there is very much to debate.

It seems very odd to me that people who are happy to argue that their own networks should be closed and vertically integrated are often well informed about the European open access models and the US net neutrality debates – that these great debates are basic human right but that they somehow don’t apply to their networks but should to everyone else’s.

Until recently it was certainly true that all but the very largest networks had little choice but to deliver their own internet services – but that was a market imperfection rather than a point of principle or commercial choice. That market flaw is easing – far from fixed but progress is being made – and it is no longer a necessity to restrict service choice.

I’ll accept that the very largest service providers are still unlikely to bite your arm off for anything less than a few tens of thousands of customers but there is a very large world of choice between no service providers and offering each and every service provider. Many of the smaller ISPs are happy to engage in local broadband projects, especially if they themselves are local – and what’s more they may be better attuned to providing a bespoke service to your new customers than many of the very biggest providers.

So why should NGA networks be open?

People like choice – it may not be the number 1 factor for everyone but it is very important and will be in the top thee for most people. With take-up being the top success factor, its simply not worth putting an impediment in your way.
Encouraging service competition is likely to generate more exciting, innovative services. As the capabilities of NGA networks, and more especially ALA, become understood by the market service innovation will be more exciting than anything we’ve seen so far but it will miss any networks not geared to delivering variety.
If you need support from public funds then you have no choice; EU and UK law insists on open access wholesale networks. Shooting the messenger doesn’t change the law, so frankly if you have a hole in your investment case open up and you might find public funds are available to help.
Without wholesale services, you’re footprint is deemed “NGA White” and the State reserves the right to intervene with public funds. It may not be likely and you may have a case to challenge publicly subsidised competition but by the time the law rules you will probably be no more – its not a fight worth fighting.
And finally I fully expect Ofcom to rule within the life of your investment that fibre networks are a natural monopoly and may either force you to offer a wholesale service or impose challenging regulations on you.

Or to summarise – there are no good reasons to have a closed network and a good many to be open – its not a fight worth defending.

Radio silence

Published on December 6, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments

It’s been very quiet on the blog front lately but hopefully I’ll find time to rectify that soon – I’m planning articles on a pile of subjects from business models for rural broadband, cloud-network interactions, and emerging applications but finding the time has been the biggest challenge.

I’ve also started work on what I hope will become a book (“Cloud Consciousness” is the working title) looking at the shape of the cloud and how its future is closely entwined with the development of next generation networks – not exactly Christmas list stuff but I hope it will be more interesting than it sounds. About a third is written so far but it needs time to think – this is a massively disruptive area and the opportunities will be immense.

Radio silence will soon be broken – hopefully!

What’s actually going on?

Published on October 28, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 7 Comments Tags: BD-UK, business models, central government, community strategy, digital britain, fibre, gpon, network architecture, NGA, politics, satellite.

It still surprises me that after 18 months there seems to be confusion in the twittersphere about what is actually happening in terms of broadband deployment and the goal of the government’s policy.

There have been conversations which seem to jump from a position that fibre to every home is the only real NGA solution to suggesting they are being short-changed by some mythical NGA satellite with nothing in between.

This is far from a simple binary mechanism – anyone who suggests “Fibre good, everything else bad” is at best badly misinformed. The debate is far too important to be stifled by this kind of mantra – it has to move on.

One of the great shifts in thinking within the industry has been to consider multiple solutions – gone are the days when ADSL won simply because it was the best solution to reach the widest audience. Now the best technology from a basket of possible solutions is becoming the norm.

So this is my attempt to make it all a little clearer – hopefully.

There are essentially two different government broadband policies:

Basic broadband – To ensure everyone has access to at least 2 Mbps
NGA broadband - To make the UK the best superfast broadband market in Europe

Both policies are currently working towards 2015, and both are being delivered by BDUK. But, while the delivery of NGA broadband may have some impact on the basic broadband policy, they are essentially two different things – basic broadband is not NGA and vice versa! This is a simple undeniable fact.

The grid shows how these two different measures – NGA and basic broadband – are likely to play out in the UK. The purple area is where the commercial developments will focus, and the red is where the Government’s policy will have its key impact – the black boarder around the NGA White/Basic White is where the rural community broadband fund will focus.

NGA Broadband

The definitions of NGA and superfast broadband are many and varied but essentially the Government’s goal is to deliver fibre to the cabinet to 90% of the population as a base reference offer – that is not the same as actually delivering FttC to 90%, only that this is the base upon which other solutions will be measured.

It means that a company wanting to bid into the framework will need to offer at least FttC but will be able to deliver FttP or anything else they can successfully argue delivers at least as much as FttC.

The EU currently views NGA as a fibre-based fixed-line solution and specifically excludes satellite and wireless solutions; it is highly likely that some microwave technologies will be included in future definitions if they deliver specific characteristics but unlicensed and light licensed solutions like WiFi are unlikely to be ever considered as NGA even if they deliver high speeds.

Any suggestion that satellite or BT’s BET are NGA is simply wrong, and I’ve never heard anyone in either BT or the satellite industry claim otherwise! Just ignore anyone who suggests they are, they simply aren’t credible.

The main NGA contenders today are FttC/VDSL and FttP in both point-2-point/Ethernet or PON variants.

The two bar charts above attempt to show the impact of the Government’s policy on NGA broadband. Today there are commercial pledges to deliver a competitive physical infrastructure to at least 50% of the country, predominantly in the areas where Virgin Media are updating their cable network and BT is delivering their Infinity service.

In addition, BT has pledged to reach two-thirds of the country with an open-access wholesale service, making a further 17% Grey in the EU’s language. This leaves the “final third” where traditional commercial approaches begin to fail.

The Government’s aim is to extend the Grey area from 17% of the population to 40%, with only 10% of the population unlikely to see NGA services in the medium term.

Why only Grey? I find it difficult to see a case where the Government would invest in a competing NGA platform where one already exists but it is at least a theoretical possibility if the existing NGA service doesn’t deliver a whole service and is vertically integrated. As I’ve written before, if you run an NGA network and you don’t offer wholesale competition then you are carrying a risk that it is at least legal for the state to subsidise a competitor even if its poor value for public funds and probably unlikely to happen.

The focus of the £20m rural community broadband fund is on this final 10%, where communities are prepared to become more actively involved in a more ambitious plan.

Basic Broadband

Today its possible to argue that anything above 512 kbps might be classed as broadband; the Government is redefining that as 2 Mbps and that it should be as near universal as practicable.

The bar charts above show how today there are in fact two degrees of White basic broadband – there are those that currently receive a services above 2 Mbps but have no choice of provider, and those below 2 Mbps regardless of how much competition there may be at the telephone exchange. The Government’s policy is to remove the top White section, where services are less than 2 Mbps.

Some of this will be solved by the NGA plans – there are locations where the cabinet, as well as the premises, is a long way from the exchange. Evidence is already beginning to appear where BT is deploying Infinity in Hertfordshire with some homes now in an NGA Grey area when they were previously in a notspot – it is also the focus of organisations like Rutland Telecom.

Where the NGA policy won’t solve the notspot problem, the Government will intervene to ensure all premises are reasonably able to receive at least 2 Mbps.

In communities where the 2 Mbps offer doesn’t meet their ambition, the £20m rural community broadband fund may be able to help turn a basic broadband offer into a viable NGA plan where the community will exists.

Blackberry, Apple, outages, control and collaboration

Published on October 14, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: blackberry, customer loyalty, eric schmidt, idle thought, iphone, OpenOffice, steve jobs, ubuntu.

Its been interesting to watch from afar the iPhone and Blackberry stories this week.

When my last contract came up for renewal I looked around, asked the opinions of those around me and after long deliberation I still opted to renew with another Android phone.

Android isn’t as fast of slick as an iPhone but its nearly there; the battery life of most Android phones doesn’t match any Blackberry model; and the Market doesn’t offer as many apps as Apple (although its rare I can’t find what I need).

However, the consensus of opinion was clear – if I bought into the world view of RIM or Apple, that I liked their way of doing things, then Blackberry and iPhone handsets were great – in fact arguably better than anything else on the market. BUT if I didn’t, and I wanted to tailor the device to the way I work, choose what features I had and how they worked then neither was a good choice.

At the time, the Adobe Flash row seemed epitomise it all for me. Steve Jobs hated Flash. He’s perfectly entitled to that opinion but the balance of the world didn’t agree – and purely from a pragmatic perspective I didn’t agree but neither you nor I had any influence over Apple so Flash wasn’t available to iPhone customers.

I’d grown to love Swype – an alternative keyboard for both Android and iPhone users BUT I’d have to jailbreak my new iPhone to use it while I just install it on any Android phone. Why should I have to break my warranty and risk frying my new phone simply to use a keyboard I think makes the default choice of the developer looked dated, pedestrian and inefficient?

I have grown to hate iTunes for the same reasons and although we have a bunch of iPods about the place, we no longer buy anything from iTunes, keeping our music library separate and treating iTunes as the required tools for managing the device and not my world view of music.

Its very different on Android – I’ve no idea what Eric Schmidt thinks of Flash and, while I might be interested in his views as an industry leader, the fact that neither he or Google impose that view on me was enough. I could install Swype at the touch of a button without getting special permission, and Amazon is happy to integrate their MP3 market with my phone without taking control of everything or treating me as thief.

This week Blackberry customers had a massive outage – I know its not breaking news but it is worth spending five minutes thinking about why it happened.

Blackberry customers buy into the soup-to-nuts solution offered, owned, and controlled by RIM. The software, client and server, is developed, owned, hosted and controlled by RIM.

On the surface that’s appealing – a single point of contact delivering a complete solution that delivers my mobile world. But its also a reliance on a single corporate world view, and total reliance on their processes and controls. This week they failed, probably a very small process fault somewhere but it stopped all Blackberry customers dead in their tracks.

If the same had happened on Android, what would the impact have been?

Well I use Twitter and Facebook for instant messaging so no impact there; I use a mix of IMAP and gmail so there is a chance that I might not be able to get some of my mail but as the IMAP client isn’t owned, developed or controlled by Google it would have to be a catastrophic failure for all my mail to disappear. My contacts are naturally synced between Google, Plaxo and LinkedIn as well as Twitter, Flikr, Facebook and so on, so I could still contact people.

The chances of a significant service outage on all Android phones because a Google server died is almost inconceivable.

But, I hear you say, what if the bugs were introduced by an Android update?

Even here the Android approach has safeguards. Android development is a more collaborative approach – its not as open as say, Apache or LibreOffice, but it is somewhat open. As a result the raw development work can draw on many more eyes.

Then, because Google don’t control the Android handset market, any update to the core system will also need to be tested by a large market of device manufacturers, each with their own processes and controls, each with their own reputation on the line.

And finally, when the updates begin to roll, not all manufacturers will deploy at the same time and at the same rate so significant bugs will be discovered long before they become a problem and will have impacted a relatively small number of customers.

And then I have my own little safeguard. I’m an early adopter by nature but when it comes to single points of failure I try to resist installing anything on the day it was released – a hint to all those on Twitter bemoaning Apple this week.

Today, Ubuntu has released version 11.10, the Oneiric Ocelot – I got the pop-up asking me to upgrade – my fingers hovered over the mouse, itching to click “OK” – but I resisted, so far, and only just. I won’t be tweeting today using phrases that include “Ubuntu” and “#FFS”.

I’m sure its been widely and thoroughly tested, that’s its passed through a globally huge alpha and beta programme of diverse and demanding users, I’m confident its worth the upgrade but I still want to be second on this one.

Whether they buy into the whole Opensource movement or not (I do), I think the executives of both RIM and Apple could do well to read and understand two books:

Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral & the Bazaar” and
“Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution”

Buy into the political aspects of Opensource if you chose, release your code to your global customers if you like, but please don’t ignore the wider lessons of collaboration and sharing – it does far more than simply make your customers your collaborators, and therefore more loyal and supportive, it introduces safeguards and resilience.

I doubt friends of mine will be willing to dust off their old Nokia bricks a second time because you had another self-inflicted mishap.

Following Tweeters

Published on October 10, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: gis, mapping, opensource.

The opensource world never stops amazing me, and this time (again) its the QGis community with a new Timeline tool to map geo-coded information over time – very cool but what to do with it?

With a very basic understanding of the Titter API and scripts openly available (remember, I’m no programmer) I captured a morning’s worth of Twitter data and plotted the geo-coded tweets as a time-lapse sequence.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWMkT5y0uhw

I’ll admit its not the most interesting video ever but it does show the power of opensource mapping tools. Not a penny was spent on any of the tools and the base maps; all were Opensource or open-data.