There comes a time on a Friday afternoon where a man’s thoughts turn to the Bank Holiday ahead. This weekend I am off on stag weekend in London taking in the Premiership Rugby Final between Leicester & Northampton followed by the England v Barbarians match on Sunday. No doubt we will also take advantage of being in London to pursue some cultural activities the details of which have yet to be disseminated to the travelling party.

In the meantime I have been given permission to show you a video. It has nothing to do with the stag weekend although there is a fleeting bit of rugby action near the beginning.

The video has been produced by the heir to the Davies title (currently 2nd in line seeing as my dad is still going strong and I am still around obv) in between taking his final exams at Warwick University and is an advertisement for the end of term celebrations. It stars Aaron Bowater who was the joke candidate in the elections for the Warwick Students Union President. During the elections my son, Tom, produced a number of promotional videos that received over 40,000 views on YouTube. This one is well worth watching.

Just had a slightly disappointing junk email from Microsoft. I don’t normally bother opening this “legitimate spam” that pushes a company’s products but the subject line for this one was “Proud partners of the 2013 British & Irish Lions tour to Australia”.

You might guess where my thinking was here. Maybe it was a free draw for a trip to Australia for the Lions Tour. I’m in I thought, clicked and downloaded the pictures. The disappointment came when I read the following:

“Your First Windows 8 app in minutes

Joshfire is an online tool that Microsoft have partnered with to enable you to create a free and simpler than ever Windows 8 app for your business. Simply select a template, then add your existing sources of online content – Flickr for photos, YouTube for videos, blogs, social feeds and so on.

Even better, for the next 6 weeks Joshfire is free. And what’s more, if you’re one of the first 250 to create an app with Joshfire, we will give you a lovely Microsoft British & Irish Lions commemorative toy. ”

Am I alone in thinking that the Microsoft marketing is somewhat off the mark here? A there can’t be that many people developing apps for Windows 8 and B is a lovely commemorative toy the right incentive?

Well as I write this I’m changing my tune from contemptuous disappointment to idle nay vague curiosity so that I can see what it’s all about. After all I do have a Windows 8 PC and a Nokia Lumia 920 Windows 8 phone. I just clicked on the “Create your first Windows 8 app” link. Oops. Got the following screen:

My vague curiosity changed back to a disinterested disappointment. No lovely commemorative toy for me eh? Also ah well! I will make it on another Lions tour some day. I went to South Africa on the last one with the Commons and Lords Rugby Club. Had a great time.

Ciao baby.

It’s the middle of May. The 4G auctions were in February. We are all waiting with bated breath for announcements of service rollouts. Last time I looked was when I was preparing for my 4G talks at Convergence Summit North. The word on the web was “summer”. No specifics. In fact the O2 website said summer but I’m not sure that Vodafone even said that.

Now I’m writing a 4G update for Comms Business and thought I’d take another look. O2 has removed the reference to a summer availability but has not offered an alternative. I suspect that this means Christmas which is the big payout time for mobile networks. The Vodafone website just says “later this year”.

I guess this isn’t likely to come as a surprise. A 4G network rollout will be a lot of work and cost a lot of money so I guess there is a scenario that O2 and Voda will be pacing their investment.

There is a race on here though. I hear EE already have around 330,000 subscribers and say they are targeting 1 million by the end of the year. If O2 and Voda don’t get their act together that will mean EE will be ahead of them to the tune of 1 million customers, higher spending customers, by the year end.

Personally I don’t think 330,000 is a particularly good result for EE considering they have had the market to themselves for over six months even though their ARPUs might be good. Also the EE marketing appears to me to be less than optimal.  I recently spoke to an EE reseller who said that the product strategy wasn’t particularly joined up. The company apparently sells to consumers through EE, small businesses through Orange and larger businesses through TMobile¹ with three different hardware portfolios and different sets of pricing.  If I were EE that is one thing I’d be looking to sort out.

In fairness EE will have the same coverage rollout issues as being faced by the other mobile operators so there will only have been a limited segment of the market available to them in that first six months. Word is that EE will have reached 80 towns by the end of June. By the end of April that number was 62 covering 50% of the population.

According to the Ofcom Communications Market Report 2012 in 2011 there were 82 million mobile connections. Assuming the number is still the same today that would suggest that around 0.8% of the available market (330k/41m) is on EE 4G after 6 months. I guess the next six months are going to be crucial in the race. EE will have had a year’s head start on the others, assuming my Christmas guess is right. If they can sort out the marketing then if I were EE I’d be disappointed with only a million subs by the end of the year.

If I were O2 and Vodafone I’d be stepping up the pace of their own 4G rollout. The two operators are jointly building out the network, ultimately to 18,500 cell sites and according to the Vodafone blog splitting the work 50/50. It would be interesting to see how their respective rollouts are doing. Who is going to get there first in the partnership? If they are doing half the work each presumably they will be announcing the service at the same time. The timing of these announcements is therefore likely to be quite critical. Get there first and presumably get the marketing advantage. Get there second and you can tailor your own pricing and packaging competitively knowing what the other guy is offering. Get there at the same time and risk accusations of a cartel.

Whatever happens it looks like I will have to wait until Christmas before I get a 4G connection – my phone is with O2 and my laptop with Vodafone. At least I’ll know what to put in my letter to Santa.

¹It may be the other way round re TMob & Orange marketing.

I quite like the title “A postcard from Timico”. It suggests destination, travel, communications even which is quite appropriate in our case. The reality is often different. It could be a reminder to book your dental appointment! Yuk.

On this occasion it is merely a  clever ruse to entice you to read this blog post which in actual fact is simply about the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the fact that it has a really cool feature that allows you to take photos using both cameras simultaneously (at the same time).

The simple things in life eh? Postcard below shows my face on a stamp – it’s the only way it’s going to happen:) The beautiful view is across the car park to the ball bearing factory (or some similar industrial manufacturing plant) and beyond to the rooftops of our fair town of Newark.

Just had an interesting talk from Matt Jansen of Vodafone GlobalNet. Matt was originally with AS1273, ie Cable and Wireless which has been acquired by Vodafone. The C&W brand has disappeared.

The interesting aspect of the talk was that Matt described the process of integrating the Vodafone and C&W networks. Voda and C&W have networks all over the world but the steps being taken are largely the same as those taken by Timico during the integration of our own acquisitions, albeit on a much smaller scale.

We are talking about rationalisation of existing pipes and suppliers, removal of duplicate services etc. Of course the savings that may be achieved by Vodafone are on a much bigger scale that Timico’s own efforts but the principle is the same.

Although the internet is driven by complex technology the high level principles are fairly simple and apply no matter the size of the network.

I’m at LINX81. I go to a couple of LINX meetings a year as it’s a great place to catch up with what’s going on in the world of internet plumbing. Laymen will probably not understand the allusion to plumbing. The internet is made up of lots of “pipes”. A pipe is usually measured as a multiple of Gigs (1x, 10x, 100x) is connected to a port, one at each end of the pipe (obv).

In the internet plumbing world the bigger your pipe the bigger your bragging rights. It’s all about shifting data. Timico I’m pleased to say uses 10Gig ports at its peering exchanges – LINX and LONAP. There is only one 100Gig port at LINX and that belongs to BT. I understand there are more in the pipeline.

The internet as you may know is made up of tens of thousands of autonomous networks. The chances are your favourite website is not hosted by the same network operator that provides you with your connectivity. What your ISP does is it connects its own network to every other network on the internet which it partly does via peering exchanges.

A peering exchange is a point at which networks connect to each other for the sharing of internet traffic. Being a member of LINX brings us lots of benefits. You can get an idea of this from the LINX stats:

468 members (39 new applications in 2013 so it’s growing)
1135 connected member ports
362 member-facing 1GigE ports
631 member-facing 10GigE ports
1 member-facing 100GigE port
over 1.618 Tb/sec of peak traffic (swoon)
6.792 Tb of connected capacity (so notionally plenty of headroom)
58 member countries

Peering at LINX connects us to a large chunk of the internet at relatively low cost. More from LINX81 as it happens.

Was chatting about broadband to a neighbour of my Mam and Dad in the pub near their house this weekend. He has to ration the use of the internet between his kids who all want it for different applications at the same time – Xbox Live, iPlayer etc. Unfortunately Manx Telecom still operates ADSL2+ and his connection isn’t fast enough to run the whole family’s internet needs simultaneously.

This unfortunately is what a monopoly does for you. We are lucky in the UK that we have Virgin. Virgin is what will have driven BT to invest in FTTX. Nothing else. What other motivator would it have had. In a monopolistic situation if I were the incumbent I’d be squeezing my assets for all their worth. Manx Telecom is a private company and I guess is doing just that.

Hard to believe but exactly five years ago today I posted my first blog piece on trefor.net. It coincides very closely with my fifth anniversary on Twitter. Since then I’ve written 1,616 posts – also hard to believe. 30,517 tweets in that time. I’m not going to dwell on the interim five years. The world has changed.

Even though it is the sabbath I’m going to celebrate with a nice Twitter story:

This weekend I’m staying with me dear old mam and dad in the Isle of Man. On Saturday morning I wandered down into a drizzling Peel and made for The Harbour Lights Café. It’s one of my faves. A classic seaside café with a quality product and a very relaxing atmosphere. It’s the sort of place to go when it’s raining out and there isn’t that much else to do. You can almost picture the scene: the occasional umbrella walks past the window, the raindrops saunter down the glass, every now and then a car whooshes by, a pot of tea and a plate of crumpets arrive at your table.

On this occasion the Harbour Lights was closed. You can’t imagine my disappointment. A real wave of emotion came over me. I looked in through the windows and walked around the outside of the building. It took me a while to realise that I was early. It opened at 10am. The time was exactly 10am and it being, as you know, one of my fave caffs I was quite prepared to give it some leeway, forgiveness. As I crossed the road to the promenade a car pulled up and a girl got out and proceeded to unlock the front door.

I walked off and crossed to Fenella Beach and the breakwater. Not many people around. It was classic Manx weather. The day before had been beautifully sunny. Today we were back to mists and white topped seas. I was comfortable with this. At the beach there were some kids kitted out in safety gear clambering over the rocks with an instructor type. I wandered on to the breakwater and climbed the steps to look out over the water.

On other occasions I’ve been able to spot a basking shark from that position. Not today. Even the basking sharks were staying away. A couple of bikers, helmets in hand, walked around the castle and a bloke in an old Rover sat there smoking with the engine on. Turn it off man!

A fisherman was lowering scallop dredging kit onto his boat. I stopped for a chat. There are only two weeks left of the season. It starts again on November 1^st. When you think about it the sea floor needs time to recover and for the creatures to bring on the next generation. A good haul is twenty bags on a trip but at this time of year you are lucky to come in with ten.

The rain spotted the lenses of my specs and I figured it was time to move on and back to the Harbour Lights. I got there at the same time as a young couple and sat at a table looking out onto the promenade. Tea and crumpets ordered I settled in to Twitter availing myself of the caff’s free WiFi.

At this point I’ll let my tweets tell the story:

@tref: Live tweeting from @harbour_lights cafe on the prom in Peel using their free wifi. Crumpets & tea for brunch

@tref: @harbour_lights is one of my fave caffs.nice sitting here in the window watching the rain run down the glass

@tref: Listening to beegees muzak @harbour_lights – almost nodding off

@tref: Just seen the size of @harbour_lights special breakfast-huge. (I should be on commission here)

That one was retweeted by @harbour_lights which was nice -  I felt that the café was reaching out and engaging with me its customer. The young couple who had arrived at the same time as me were tucking into huge plate of “full Manx” – the Harbour Lights special.

@tref: There is no rush

@tref: This reminds me of my student days – sitting around all day drinking tea

At this point the waitress came and asked me if everything was ok and did I want some more hot water in my tea pot. I declined and said she could bring the bill whenever she was ready. A short while later she came back and said that the bill had been taken care of. The boss had rung up and said it was all on the house having seen my tweets.

@tref: Thanks @harbour_lights for brightening up a dank day & thanks for the tea and crumpets  )

I left the café with a smile on may face. That was a great experience.  My suggestion of commission was a bit of fun – tongue in cheek. @harbour_lights is a good business. They understand how to build customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The smile stayed on my face all the way home through the rain.

It’s amazing the effect that a smile has you know. I passed one woman who smiled back at me. As I got towards the White House pub there was a bloke stood outside in his work gear having a cigarette. He smiled back at me. Not normally the sort of thing a grown bloke does to another bloke he doesn’t know.

In a nutshell that is how the world has changed since I started to write this blog.

Earlier this year I spent an appreciable chunk of my life filling out awards entries. Three of them were for the ISPAs. Google it. These awards entries have pretty strict entry criteria and very fixed number of words that you are allowed to use. Not nearly enough space to adequately cover how great you are at what you do.

However you have to put yourself in the position of the judges, whoever they are. They don’t want to have to plough through several editions of War and Peace (Tolstoy) when they are giving of their time free and gratis. So it takes ages to condense War and Peace into 500 words or whatever the number was (war was waged, someone won).

Anyway the upshot is that of the three categories entered by Timico we made it to the shortlist for all three: Managed Service Innovation, Customer Service and VoIP, as I recall. Yay.

This is great news because we are up against a lot of other great companies with great services (what a great novel War and Peace was). Great.

Companies enter these awards because if you win it means you have bragging rights and can show off to customers and prospects and hopefully turn the prospects into new customers. I think you know what I’m talking about. So I’m reasonably chuffed to make it to all three shortlists.

Details here. Wish us luck on the 11th July. If you’re going come and say hello.

Ciao.

Sat on the train and can’t get anything done. Some bloke behind me talking very loudly on his phone. Keeps ringing up to try to invite “CEO”s to a dinner in a month or so. He is a former CEO apparently. None of the people he is trying to reach are in and he only gets their PAs. Very distracting.  I could move seats I suppose but the train is fairly full and I can’t be bothered.

Also the internet connectivity on this train is totally rubbish. The WiFi is like sludge and the cellular connection no better.

Usually I like to use train time to get stuff done. Rant over.

On the plus side it is a beautiful spring day and Mervyn King has told us all not to worry and that everything is going to be ok with the economy. He has nothing to lose of course but I am inclined to believe him.

I spoke with a customer this morning who said that things had started to move forward at their end. I think he is right. Having been to ISPA and ITSPA council meetings recently I note that membership is on the up and businesses in the new industries are growing. You do wonder how much of the recent recession is down to the negative hype of the media.

Anyway I’m not going to solve it all. I’m just going to wait until I get a signal and upload this post.

Ciao…