Monthly Archive for January, 2011

Why we should care about the US Internet “Kill switch” proposals

Published on January 31, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: digital britain, government, internet, politics.

There is a proposal running through the US Senate at the moment which would give the President powers to shut-down critical internet infrastructure, the so called “kill switch”. Apart from any concerns at a distance we might have about free speech and rights, there is an equally big issue which may be more critical to our own homeland security.

In the dawn of time, the internet was a peer network where each organisation with a network they wanted to open up linked, or inter-netted, with others on an equal basis. Since then major providers have moved into a position of some power and the equality of peering has pretty much gone. Small providers often have to club together or pass through multiple hands to get to a universal audience, so a small number of US-based infrastructure items have become critical to us as well as Americans.

Casting your mind back to the Autumn of 2008, you might remember a few days when odd things happened on the internet, where you could Skype some people and not others or reach some websites but not others, while your friends and colleagues experienced the same but it affected completely different sites and services. This was caused by a spat between Sprint and Cogent in the US, where Sprint decided to shut-down its peering relationship with Cogent (see here for a reminder).

Because peering is no longer egalitarian, a significant amount of the UK internet traffic needed to pass through this peering point in order for UK internet users to reach UK services; that’s why you could skype some people and not others, and why some websites disappeared but not others, and depending which way you passed through the peering point determined which services you could access.

I’m quite sure that proposals passing through the US legislature will have more safeguards than they do in Egypt and I’m sure the US President will act more calmly than Mubarak is but surely our national security should be in our hands?

While our diplomats should be ensuring we have assurances and safeguards as the law passes through Capitol Hill, we should also use this time as a moment of reflection, to make sure we have an internet that we can always use and can’t be impacted by the decisions of others far away and beyond our control.

Exiting JON

Published on January 29, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments

From messages in recent weeks its clear people want an update on the status and progress of the JON Exchange. So here is my update.

With immediate effect I am leaving the JON Exchange process owing to differences over the pace and urgency of the work.

I still strongly believe in the need for a broadband marketplace in a fragmenting access market, and that the Joint Open Network concept is the best approach. However it was my view that the JON Exchange companies pace of progress was too slow to meet the needs of the UK market and the Government’s broadband programme.

Believing this is the last subsidy for broadband will secure better value

Published on January 26, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 12 Comments Tags: BD-UK, central government, digital britain.

I’ve been getting a worrying number of messages from people close to their local authority who are concerned that they appear to preparing to give any broadband funds to BT for a quick FttC fix rather than seeks a more permanent, albeit more challenging, solution. Hopefully these messages come to no more than the nervousness of concerned citizens but, true or not, this raises two key issues in my mind.

The first is that the alternative network builders in the UK are increasingly wary of being used as tender fodder; at least one recent high-profile tender dented their confidence. If their settled view becomes that they are simply being invited to bid in order to make up the numbers, they won’t bother. Tendering for public contracts is an expensive process, and companies need to feel they stand a reasonable chance of success before they commit the significant resources and cash. If they choose not to don’t bid then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This wouldn’t be good for the economy, nor would it be a sensible way of ensuring the best value when public funds are at stake.

The second, wider point is that while developing a relationship with BT is certainly an easy solution, fibre to cabinet is a short term technology; few analysts internationally would see BT’s current strategy as anything other than buying them time while they work out how to persuade the money markets to lend them the kind of cash needed to solve the problem.

In five years, around the time of the next general election, FttC will have run out of steam while those areas which founds ways of delivering fibre will be merrily upgrading to gigabit services and Virgin Media cable areas are likely to be enjoying 200 Mbps services; the gap between the haves and have not’s will have never been wider.

In the build up to the next general election, after five years of tough economic decisions and shared pain, will there really be a political case for central government to support a further round of broadband funding, a third major public investment, simply because some areas failed to look hard enough now?

Would it really be credible for a local authority to go cap in hand when a neighbouring area was speeding ahead?

Of course BT should win contracts – they are the largest network operator with resources few others can match. But its better for everyone, BT included, if they have to work for their subsidies.

And wherever possible this should be the last significant subsidy given to the telecoms industry for at least a generation – this should be borne in mind as tenders are issued and forms are filled in.

Google, Apple and the mobile industry

Published on January 24, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: mobile industry.

It was reported in last week’s Financial Times (19th Jan, page 16) that some of the major European mobile operators including Vodafone are becoming sufficiently concerned about the influence Apple and Google are having on the mobile markets that they have joined forces to monitor them. Its interesting because the graph which accompanied the article didn’t quite tally with the text.

Certainly Google’s Android platform is seeing spectacular growth but today Apple’s and Google’s combined market share doesn’t exceed that of Symbian (when it does it will through Google’s growth alone) and I don’t remember similar complaints about Nokia’s intentions. So what’s really behind this?

I suspect it may have more to do with the approach Apple and Google are taking, that they have so far maintained more control over their platforms, and their application markets are completely independent of the mobile operators – in other words, the mobile companies have less control over how we use our phones and the revenues they generate.

When I recently upgraded my handset to a newer Android model it was clear that Vodafone had tinkered with the base system, adding demo applications they hoped I’d use and pay far outside of the Google market – and which you can’t un-install unless you reflash then entire Android firmware, a move which seems to have irritated customers more than pleased them if the forums are to believed.

With the increasing blending of traditional computing platforms, tablets and slates, and mobile smartphones, this tension is only going to increase. People have always shaped their computers and netbooks to their needs, adding and removing applications as needed; when the tablet or slate happens to run the same operating system as their phone then the same expectations are likely to exist.

Mobile operators’ desire to control the revenue streams may have to be re-thought over time as customers will resist controlled consumption, favouring the app store model.

On the right track with broadband – 2006-style

Published on January 24, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: BD-UK, big society, Bournemouth, central government, Fibrecity, next generation networks, tony blair.

To my wife’s frustration, I’ve tended towards the “empty desk, empty mind” end of the scale – in fact I’m a bit of a hoarder. So every once in a blue moon I decide to make amends and clear out the papers that clearly were never meant to be kept but might some day possibly, maybe, conceiveably be useful – the process itself often proves the point, offering a last chance reminder of events since the last re-stacking, and an opportunity to revisit old thoughts in a new light.

Every time there is something pertinent that surfaces, and this time it was a document I was given in 2006 when I attended a small workshop in The Netherlands held jointly by the OnsNet fibre project and the Dutch Government’s broadband team.

The document entitled “On the right track with broadband” (download an English version here) is a guide for councils and housing associations offering advice on tendering and state aid when looking to develop a local next generation broadband scheme.

Its worth remembering the timing of this – 5 years ago. This was a time just after Tony Blair had stood up at the Labour Party conference and announced that it was job done for broadband. At the same time the Dutch Government was actively encouraging and supporting councils, housing associations, and people to become directly involved in securing their long term digital future.

The document’s introduction ends with “The Netherlands can largely thank its present lead in the field of broadband connections to competition on and between networks.”

While the UK has long claimed the most competitive broadband market in Europe, the reality has always been competition on and not between networks – we would not have been able to make the same claim in 2006, and we couldn’t make it today.

In fact the small town of Nuenen, the home of OnsNet, had more fibre connections than the whole of the UK combined – even today, half a decade later, only the FibreCity network in Bournemouth can claim to have more homes passed than the small market town of Nuenen.

If we fast forward to today – five years later – the change of Government in Britain has meant Big Company has been replaced by Big Society; encouraging councils and people to stake a claim on their long term digital future rather than hope a massive subsidy for a behemoth will fix it for us.

Taking lessons from the Dutch experience can only help this process and a British version of “On the right track with broadband” would help put to bed one of the biggest hang-ups we still have – state aid. While other countries have found ways of working with European legislation, we have long used it as a reason to justify our inaction – we are now a long way behind our European neighbours, and the excuse can no longer be seen as reasonable.

And you know what’s mind numbing about this?

The Dutch advice points to more British state aid decisions as test cases than from any other country – Project Atlas, Cumbria’s intervention and Scotland’s business broadband decision. An updated document would no doubt also point to FibreSpeed in North Wales and South Yorkshire’s Digital Region. We pioneered the test cases but we are alone in not learning from them, and as a result we lag just about every European country who was smart enough to follow our pioneers.

The UK still has some of the best independent thinkers on broadband – in our councils, in Whitehall, in communities, and in the industry. For Big Society broadband to prosper as it has in the Netherlands and elsewhere, we need the confidence to support those pioneers and learn from them as others have done.

Broadcast Evolution

Published on January 21, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: broadcast industry, business models, content providers, internet, music industry.

I’ve just come back from the Broadcast Evolution Summit, a three-day conference exploring how the world of TV and broadcasting is changing, where I was given an opportunity to present some ideas on how the changes in next generation broadband infrastructures will create new opportunities and business models for content providers. Its impossible to turn down an opportunity to speak at a conference if its in Cannes and just as you’re getting over the winter blues, but this was a very good event.

One of the most striking things which really ought to have crossed my mind before was that the broadcast and internet industries are such different beasts, and at times it felt a little like we were looking at each other through some distorting lens, each with perfectly rational views of each other but very slightly wrong in important ways. So this conference was the first opportunity I’d had to meet, listen and chew over the challenges and changes the broadcast industry is facing, and fascinating it was. I plan to start a mini-series of blog entries about some of the speakers and impacts they’ve had on my thinking, and some of the ideas which came from listening to an industry undergoing change.

One thing was clear though, that this industry is facing many of the same pressures the music industry is facing – new technologies and ways of consuming media disrupting the ordered and well established way of doing things. However, there was much less of the Fergal Sharkey position, resisting change and arguing others should prop up their way of life, and much more of the Billy Bragg world view that people will still want to watch quality content, albeit in very different ways, and that although they haven’t got all the answers just yet there is a willingness to collaborate and learn so their industry has a long and successful future.

As I collect my thoughts – and there were lots – the first is that this kind of event, where two industries get to explore their similarities and opportunities, is a welcome addition to the European conference circuit. If there were a music industry version of it I’d be there like a shot!

Where might a broadband market take us?

Published on January 21, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: aggregation, business models, JON, risk and reward.

There is a whole train of thought which gets set in motion as soon as you start to consider what happens if the broadband market becomes fragmented and more competitive at an infrastructure level.

Progress can be made quickly at first – fragmenting mass markets require a market; a market needs a marketplace; enter the JON Exchange; trading in broadband assets begins; the market learns to set it own price; and then comes some of the harder things to think about.

There is no such thing as a perfect market except as a thought experiment, and creative people begin to innovate when they encounter novel opportunities. Many of these innovations and turns add to the colour of the market and benefit the market participants but occasionally they can also have more challenging implications which may have a less beneficial impact. And that’s when market governance and regulation needs to step up.

Many sectors have evolved the checks and balances over a long time, and they never let up their guard or stop learning lessons – some of them very painful (think US mortgage derivatives if you want an extreme).

The broadband industry doesn’t have this long history to draw on – there is no two-sided broadband marketplace where assets are openly traded by a wide variety of market participants. But soon this will become a necessity!

The initial trading environment of the JON Exchange, for example, is currently the focus of work packages of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, the NICC, INCA, and a wide constituency of market members and pilot companies. At the moment much of this work naturally focuses on adapting the current interconnect regimes to the new broadband world. Falling from this are “use cases” used to check that the rules make sense and deliver something expected and of use.

Naturally the focus of this work is to create a solid trading environment which delivers the widest competitive broadband services, and its not a time for building in masses safeguards, wrapping the market up in knots, for what might or might not happen as confidence and experience grows. But it is worth starting the consider in the background some of the things which might come up, to help us adjust our mind-set to a more open and competitive environment – to take advantage of the positive opportunities and to prepare for the less positive ones.

Such a thought process came up recently – what are the implications of an organisation buying a VLAN on the market and sub-dividing it with further VLANs?

Continue reading “Where might a broadband market take us?” »

Visualising NGA broadband

Published on January 15, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: gis, idle thought, mapping, NGA, ordinance survey.

I was recently drawn to the Ordinance Survey’s blog where they had tweeted on image they had received which visualised the postcodes of Great Britain is a rather artistic way. Wondering if this approach was easy to replicate and if other data could be used I had a little play with the DCLG NGA broadband model I’ve used before to see if it was possible to create a short animated sequence which could show the spread of faster broadband.

Click on the image to see it run – it loops back at the end to highlight the gulf between where we’re starting from to where we need to get to.

Its not as polished as the OS image but I think it kind of works. The DCLG data is modelled on the ONS’s super output areas, so I resolved them to postcode level to give more points of light, and the colour simply matches the model’s traffic lights.

At the moment the image only covers England and Wales – Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own statistical output area systems which individually need resolving to postcode level. If I get a quite moment I’ll run additional areas to make the map complete.

BT showing signs it’s worried about infrastructure competition

Published on January 5, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: BD-UK, big society, ed vaizey, government, jeremy hunt, politics.

BT Wholesale’s Sally Davis was reported as warning the Government not to waste money on small rural broadband projects as a patchwork effect couldn’t possibly work (ISP Review article here). There is perhaps some irony in the example she gives – of the early railways not agreeing standards so they couldn’t work together, given that the railways did successfully put the canal’s out of business and a century later, with standards, multiple rail operators are still vyeing for customers everyday.

Perhaps its mischief more than irony – after all, BT is heavily engaged in the NICC’s ALA work and with the BSG’s passive infrastructure group, both seeking industry accepted standards for interoperability.

On a more general point, wouldn’t it be very odd if a whole nation went in search of a solution and without any dissent they all came up with the exactly same answer?

And what is it about the telecoms sector that is so unique that means it can only function with a monopoly at its heart?

Properly functioning markets develop choice and variety. Some of those choices may be small, others large; some risk averse, some daring; some targeting niches, some a wider constituency – that’s what markets do and are.

And that’s why JON Exchange is being created – to provide a marketplace for a competitive market.

What the shift towards next generation broadband represents is the single largest threat to BT’s monopoly in its history. If a region opts for an alternative infrastructure its likely that, without some serious soul-searching, BT’s Openreach will lose that area for at least a generation. This has never happened before, so Sally Davis’ salvo is assuredly the first of many to come.

The Government’s job isn’t to defend one company against threats from a wider and naturally emerging market – quite the reverse. If the Government doesn’t grasp this opportunity with both hands there is a very real risk that it will be held to ransom each and every time the incumbent should invest.

A functioning patchwork market is exactly what we as consumers and electors need; its what the market needs – it just happens not to suit the one with the most to lose.