Tag Archive for 'idle thought'

Blackberry, Apple, outages, control and collaboration

Published on October 14, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Its been interesting to watch from afar the and 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. 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 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 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, 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 “” 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.

An observation on British broadband #2

Published on May 22, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

One of my long-term predictions has been that Service Providers will ultimately disappear as we know them today.

They were a necessary middle-man when we were trying coax our voice-grade network into the internet-era; dial-up internet evolved from banks of modems providing access to bulletin boards and mail hosts to an interconnected inter-net.

Now we are moving towards a network purpose designed for data that treats voice as just another service, there is something of an assumption that ISPs as we have come to know them will remain an important part of the supply chain – the necessary link between retail customers and the telecommunications core.

We can see that evidenced in the EU’s assumption that open access networks will provide multiple layers of competition, and the initial focus of Ofcom’s work began with a replacement for level 2 services which form the basis of today’s ISP services (in fact it doesn’t feel like they’ve moved much beyond level 2 access).

But its worth remembering what happened in the UK when the regulator mandated access to the first-mile copper network, the so called local loop; ISPs rushed to compete at an infrastructure level, not on a virtualised network but using  real networks. It suggests the industries preferred competitive battle-ground and the regulators may not be exactly the same.

In the days of dial-up modems, your ISP provided transit from their network to the internet, your email address and web-space. Today, most people prefer Gmail and consider Facebook their web hosts, leaving ISP’s as little more than resellers of internet transit. No wonder they seeks areas to differentiate!

Returning to today’s next generation transition, there has been a clear reluctance among ISPs to engage and commit to next generation developments. While much of the debate has been on the cost and complexity of creating new software interfaces to manage layer 2 Active Line Access (ALA – what BT calls GEA) services, lying behind this , I suspect, is a deeper preference to find a realistic substitute for local loop unbundling, where ISPs can retain their ability to compete using physical and not virtual networks.

If this is true, then perhaps it should not have been a surprise that the first formal, unequivocal request from a service provider to next generation network builders was for physical network access – Virgin’s offer to use a wavelength to extend their coverage to new areas where a full -to-the-premises network exists.

Physical network control provides greater scope to form the service layer in your own image – to differentiate the customer experience, matching it your brand and aims.

While the arguments from the rest of the service provider community for not joining the next generation party have focussed on the complexity of software system interconnection, this is really a facet of the cost and complexity of administering virtual networks – physical network interconnection is typically a much simpler process with fewer variables.

So was the work on ALA a waste?

Absolutely and unequivocally no!

A smart and flexible layer 2 framework is what will release the – the operators. While service providers appear to want to move down the network stack, their place will be filled by application and content providers. The capabilities of a smart will unleash the creativity of social media companies, cloud application developers and the content delivery companies.

ALA should be promoted to Sony and Google as much, if more than, to TalkTalk and Plusnet.

Am I bothered that some next generation networks appear vertically integrated? If their intentions are monopolistic, then very much so. If however, they are creating a platform for services and using ALA to actively encourage new service delivery models, then I’m less concerned – in many ways I suspect they will become the pioneers of a new internet era.

So what is the impact of all this?

If internet service provision does move further towards physical network provisioning, then we need to understand one key message: Who ever lights the service owns the customers and controls their access to the digital world. This is the true root of the debate.

While it is true that whoever builds the passive cabling has a natural geographical monopoly, whoever lights the service has a natural monopoly over people and businesses. That is one of the key strengths of ALA – it breaks the chains, putting control over the digital experience in the hands of customers and the services they value.

In this regard, it perhaps matters less about having a choice over who lights the service but much more important about how they light it. Getting this right will move the internet message away from bits and bytes and towards stuff that matters to us – the services we value.

So for Ofcom, two messages should be very clear:

  1. More progress needs to be made on passive infrastructure access. Its not just about ducts and polls but a passive version of ALA – a consistent framework that allows today’s ISPs to unbundle cables and reinforce their apparent desire to deliver real networks, not virtual.
  2. ALA is a brilliant mechanism but only if its purpose and opportunities are made clear. Whoever lights the cables, should be using ALA, and a new level of service competition should be created where multiple content providers are able to take advantage of the intelligence built into ALA. Ofcom needs to put its long arms around the totality of its remit, and not treat and different in some way to TV or content.

If we can get this right, the UK could become the first country to break the chains of the net neutrality debate and in the process create an exciting platform for the next wave of creative industries and social media. And we will have put to bed one of the key reasons the major ISPs aren’t fully engaging with this future.

What’s super about the injunction?

Published on May 22, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Fast becoming the national centre for new media, Manchester stands to gain the most from the move by companies like Twitter to the UK. Yet it is allegedly a Mancunian footballer that is doing his damnedest to make the UK the last place on earth you’d think of locating a social media company.

The sad irony of the super-injunction fiasco is that if Twitter decide not to move to the UK because of a Mancunian footballer’s alleged immaturity to face up to his own actions, it may be the Mancunian economy that pays the price in the longer term.

Enough said.

An observation on British broadband #1

Published on May 21, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Some key announcements have been made in the last couple of weeks or so and its worth considering what they may mean for in the UK – I don’t know why it took me so long but the conclusion is quite startling!

Firstly, we are seeing a host of new models and investment announcements which are making the final third – the most rural parts of the UK – a viable and exciting place to invest in -optic broadband – providing you have the logistics and business model sorted. Fujitsu, Rutland Telecom, NextGenUs and Jendens – jointly and severally – all making headway in their own distinctive way.

Secondly, BT has announced it expects to be lifting VDSL speeds using existing phone lines under its Infinity investment from “up to 40 Mbps” to northwards of “up to 80 Mbps” in the relatively short term. In their word – VDSL is a technology in its infancy and they expect to see considerable improvements as it matures. The combination of Fibre to the Cabinet (FttC) and VDSL is an architecture which really works best in more urban areas with diminishing returns as it tends towards more rural areas.

So the natural conclusion of these two shifts is that rural areas should become the place where fibre all the way to the doorstep dominates first – and urban areas will remain on copper for much longer but with services that keep in touch with their lucky bucolic friends.

Not something I expected to say out loud!

An observation on Ireland

Published on May 21, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

At a conference this week I saw a slide which provided a league table of countries according to some measure of , and it showed Ireland as being some places ahead of the UK – albeit with both languishing in the lower ranks. Mmmm I thought – doesn’t really tally with my by experiences. When over in Dublin recently I managed to upset over a comment I made on Twitter – thankfully no super injunction in place so it went no further!

Eircom’s current adverts promote “next generation broadband” but when you look at the detail its “up to 8 Mbps” – Ireland’s next generation broadband is the same speed as the UK has had for quite a few years on the surface of it (except its a lot more expensive!). So how do Eircom justify the monika “next generation”?

Eircom have invested in their core network and to overcome congestion they’ve added traffic shaping and quality of service techniques – this is their “next generation”.

This got me thinking about how different people in different places and cultures view things. In Ireland Eircom is presenting a heavily shaped network as a bonus – as next generation – yet the same action in America would have called people onto the streets waving placards decrying the end of and the imposition on their human rights.

I’ve not seen what regime they’ve employed to reduce congestion – given its a finite pipe, if something is protected, something else must be squeezed so somebodies traffic isn’t as good as it once was. Whether this matters, technically, is unclear – its perfectly possible to demote email and ftp traffic, where response times are measured in minutes, to provide a better browsing and real-time experience, where response times are measured in milliseconds. But if they’ve unilaterally demoted Skype and VoIP to protect voice revenues then its bad – very bad – or demoted P2P simply because they’ve made the sweeping assumption that all peer-to-peer traffic is illegal music downloading then its stupid and bad.

Whether this matters ethically is a different matter. That Americans come onto the streets and the British grumble into their cornflakes (in our own reserved way that’s quit a statement!) suggests that at a minimum its deeply questionable. Moves towards transparency in the UK would mean that Eircom would at least have to make it clear were they delivering services in Britain – a move in the right direction at least – and perhaps Eircom should consider putting a clear statement on their adverts and website about the precise nature of their shaping – what works well and what is being degraded.

The motive behind Eircom’s move is the lack of investment they’ve been able to make in recent years – Eircom’s really is a sad case study in a privatisation process gone wrong. Hopefully things will begin to improve as they restructure under new ownership but there is a question about whether its too late – the effort they will need to put in to catch-up will be immense.

During my trip I also saw lots of white vans working behalf of UPC, the main operator in Ireland. They were everywhere, ripping out old, low-grade coax and installing what looked to me to be some of the highest gauge coax I’ve ever seen being installed for domestic TV. After many years of mediocre  services, Ireland is starting to see an investment which should put that behind them. Coax of that gauge means UPC appear to be taking few chances that any customer will experience anything other than the advertised broadband speed and over time I’d expect that to rise northwards of 100 Mbps – only a to the home (not cabinet or curb) infrastructure could compete (if Eircom were investing).

The implications of these two snapshots is intriguing. Could we soon see an incumbent telephone company relegated to the position of lowest-common denominator, catch-all service while the cable operator snaffles the premium top-spot? For UPC that can be nothing but good – lots of high-revenue, low cost customers in leafy Dublin 4 and beyond.

For Eircom that should be the warning they need – if the story is allowed to play out to its natural conclusion, they will be left with the high-cost, low revenue customers in the rural west of Ireland – the farms isolated at the far end of a grass-topped boreen. The loss of net neutrality isn’t a substitute for investment in the access network.

Why Sony needs the British

Published on May 10, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Sony’s well reported problems with the PlayStation Network are costing the company dear – but there is a solution to hand!

When the UK approached next generation it could never have been accused of rushing at it – we’ve taken our time, analysed every possibility and then thought about it a bit more. Something that has frustrated just about everyone but it sometimes feels like we’re just built that way.

The up-side of this is that we will be deploying one of the best thought out networks anywhere in the world, and one of the things that sets us aside is ALA – Active Line Access – the method of connecting service providers with customers.

How does this help Sony?

Today the Playstation Network is a network of people – at a technology layer its just a bunch of servers open to the public no different to any website. In an ALA world, the PSN could become a real network – a private tunnel between Sony’s servers in Sony’s data-centres and gamers across the UK.

  • It would no longer be open to the public internet so less hackable
  • It could be quality assured – latency and jitter controlled – making game play seamless and trouble-free while solving any worries
  • DRM type issues would be privately managed without getting in the way of customers enjoyment.

In an ALA world, Internet Service Providers are arguably the least interesting of a range of possible parallel service providers – providers of health, education, media and gaming – in fact, the only limit is our imagination.

So Sony could do a lot worse than talk to British network strategists – we may be little slower to act than some but we’re very good!

By the way – the same advice is offered to Google, Spotify, Last.fm, Skype, Amazon and its , Xbox Live, . . . . .

Broadband doesn’t need high population density or PCs?

Published on April 19, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I just re-watched the brilliant BBC programme “The Joy of Stats”, where the infectious Hans Rosling’s encourages you to explore the world of statistics. I’ve been hunting for a long time in search of a better way to present the mass of data on  and was left somewhat envious of the way Hans presents his world facts.

Good !! He has a website from which you can download the tool he uses with such zeal, and you can create your own animated graphs on a whole range of global datasets, from poverty and health to broadband and the – yep, he has included just what I’ve been looking for!

I’ve not really had time to fully understand the mass of correlations the software supports yet, but I thought I’d share with you a couple of very quick snapshots.

Chart from the Gapminder tool showing the level of urbanisation and broadband take-up. Chart from the Gapminder tool showing the level of pc onwership and broadband take-up.

The first  was a chart plots the degree of urbanisation against broadband levels. I expected to see a nice clean line – the more urban the country, the higher the level of broadband. But it wasn’t quite as clean cut as that. Many of the countries that rank better than us in terms of broadband take-up are also less urban – in some cases significantly more rural.

So perhaps this is a case of logic over engineering – more rural areas demand broadband because they need it for shopping, healthcare, education and so on simply because traditional face time services are a long way away.

The second assumption was that you need a PC to drive up sufficient demand for broadband. Again, not quite true. A number of countries with lower PC ownership rates than the UK also have better broadband take-up. Is this a sign that other countries are finding more things to do with their broadband connection than just connect a PC, like tele-medicine? Or that perhaps we have been poor at marketing it? Do other countries offer a more compelling story, more than just ”here’s your bandwidth, now get on with it”.

I don’t have the answers to these, just a growing number of questions – and the more I play with the Gapminder tools, the more questions I’ll have.

Visualising NGA broadband

Published on January 15, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

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 model I’ve used before to see if it was possible to create a short animated sequence which could show the spread of faster .

NGA broadband growth

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.

Why aren’t mobile customer valued?

Published on October 18, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

My mobile contract with was up for renewal this week so I had a look at the deals I was being offered to retain my long-running contract – almost every offer was worse than if I’d walked in off the street.

At my request, the “Customer Retention” department rang me and encouraged me to become a new customer of theirs; they seemed a little taken aback when I said that if they don’t value seven years of then I wouldn’t either.

A quick Google to find out what the churn rate is in the found this article from three years ago – at that time churn rate was around 40% and rising rapidly. And the reasons why people move on:

  • Not being recognised as a valued customer (55%);
  • Unhelpful staff (47%);
  • Ineffective call centres (42%)

At some time over the last year I’ve counted myself in all three groups so it seems little has changed.

The annual quality survey just published by the Said Business School and Cisco ranks the UK’s mobile services as 24th in their table – a lower ranking than fixed-line which isn’t anything to boast about either.

So with a relatively low-quality technical offering and a culture of not valuing customers, why would anyone stay with their mobile operator?

Ubuntu or Windows?

Published on July 20, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

While clearing down my info emails this morning there was an entry on the daily slashdot digest about Dell’s new advice to people torn between using Windows or on their computers. Like everyone else I suspect, I was expecting a checklist which helped differentiate the two operating systems and guide their customers to the right choice for them. Instead, it came down to - if you program or don’t fancy Windows, use Ubuntu, otherwise use Windows.

My take? I did a trial with my family four or five years ago to see if they missed Windows. For about a year they had Fedora inflicted on them and to be honest I don’t think they really noticed. They used instead of MS Office, Evolution and Thunderbird instead of Outlook or, er, Thunderbird for email, and Firefox instead of, well, Firefox. For those irritatingly proprietary websites we even had Explorer running under Wine.

Today, my main business machine is now running Ubuntu and probably 75% of my work is still done under – its very fast, reliable and has a very slick user interface almost on a par with a Mac but not quite, and some distance ahead of Windows. For technical work, like the , its streets ahead, and even for a lot mundane stuff like editing pictures and playing music its at least as good. And its simple “app store” model for just about very application type you can think of makes it so easy to find, install, and update applications (for free of course!).

My son has a and he loves Ubuntu NBR – its quicker and easier to use than Windows on such small computers (screen and processor). And it seems he’s far from alone as Linux on netbooks has become mainstream.

So why do we still have a Windows computer as well? For two reasons:

  • Openoffice seems to have made no real progress in recent years while MS Office has been revolutionised since their 2007 version. The Oo interface is a ’90′s throwback – I’ll be the first to admit is probably got more features but you have to go searching for them and frankly I just want write reports not study word processing. Why is it taking so long? The OpenOffice Renaissance project seems to have been under-way for ages now; in the mean time Oo stands-out on my desktop like a sore thumb against all the other applications I use.
  • Secondly, schools seem obsessed by Microsoft. If we didn’t have a Windows computer its not clear my kids would be able to finish their homework.

So hats off to Microsoft - Windows 7 is a huge improvement and Office 2010 is great – for lots of people Windows is just right for them. If OpenOffice could get their collective heads around just how far their interface has fallen behind, then those same people could equally be using Linux, and schools might be able to save a pile of money. In the mean time Ubuntu will very comfortably dominate a growing number of niches, like netbooks and high-end workstations.

Still not sure? If you have some spare disk-space then try WUBI – “Windows Ubuntu Installer”. It installs Ubuntu under Windows and if you don’t like it, just remove it like any other application. But if you do, you have a dual-booting machine which is able to run both without formatting disks and all the messy stuff associated with installing a new operating system. Well worth a try.

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