Piers Daniell

As 2010 rolls in, I am reminded that a decade is a significant period of time and a good one to reflect on, especially in the world of IT and Telecoms. What have we achieved in the past ten years, and what, if any, predictions can be made about the next ten years? Well, for one, Fluidata couldn’t exist until 2004 on the back of ADSL technology, to launch as its own business until early 2006. Which means that the last decade has seen great advances in internet connectivity speeds and brought the word ‘broadband’ into common parlance.

We might be far behind many other countries in this race, but don’t forget in 2000 dialup was the norm and businesses like Freeserve dominated internet access with products offering up to 56 Kb/s. Now people have the choice of ADSL2+ offering up to 24 Mb/s (24,000 Kb/s in old money) or even 50 Mb/s with certain cable broadband offerings. Fluidata, for one, became a leader in bonding technology providing services over multiple carrier networks at speeds up to 60 Mb/s down and 8 Mb/s up with PureFluid. Even gigabit (1,000,000 Kb/s) speed is achievable with the use of fibre, as well as more affordable especially in urban areas.

Networks not only got faster, but also more intelligent, with quality of service, large wide area private networks and MPLS protocols. Businesses put voice over the internet and now video is seeing a resurgence with advances in HD video conferencing. Which begs the question - what will happen in the next ten years?

With the industry talking about FTTH (Fibre to the Home) and FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) more people will be able to experience the high speeds that fibre can deliver. But remember this isn’t like the previous decade when the main infrastructure (the cables) remained the same. This technology requires something new which not only will absorb huge amounts of money, but also time and resource. The cynic in me would say BT’s 21CN (to provide ADSL2+ and more IP services) offering is aimed purely at the LLU carriers such as Tiscali, Carphone Warehouse, Cable & Wireless and O2. I am sure its reach won’t extend over 2,000 exchanges by the end of the next decade. So FTTH or FTTC products are purely to take the fight to the cable operators such as Virgin. And what will quench our thirst for data? I believe there will still be some advances in DSL with products such as VDSL, but also other completely different technologies which will see in excess of 100 Mb/s over copper. Bonding will become more prevalent and give rise to a larger number of niche ISPs able to aggregate multiple networks together, not only to improve performance, but also reliability. Fibre will of course continue to grow in popularity and while still not being within easy reach of home users, will hit more of the SME market as costs reduce.

Other technologies such as WiMAX will become more widespread as companies such as Intel start to bundle the protocols into their mobile chipsets. I know of one company soon to come to market with a 3 GHz service which, if widely adopted, could bridge the gap between broadband and 3G mobile networks. Another product I am looking forward to seeing more of is BPL (Broadband Power Line), which has the potential to deliver many hundreds of Mb/s anywhere in the country over a normal power line. It has been a long time in the making, but I believe this decade will see its widespread adoption.

Mobile broadband still has a long way to go so that future services, such as cloud computing, can be widely used. And what else is in store? Well to be honest, it can be anybody’s guess. The great thing about this industry is the fact it continues to innovate and change - I’m, for one, looking forward to the next decade.

The playroom in the office is finally up and running. Bit difficult to make it out from the photo but sits alongside the video presence suite and gives visitors a chance to view all of Fluidata’s connectivity products in action. I think it must be a first for an ISP to showcase all their products but I think it is important in helping customers decide which service is best for them.

It is all well and good saying to a potential customer on the phone that the solution being proposed will do what they require but it is a different matter all together to demonstrate it. Too many in the telecoms industry hide behind contracts and long lead times, so to cut all the red tape and just show the product will give us a distinct advantage. Visitors can either see the products being demonstrated or can bring in their own equipment to test with. The room has a couple of screens and a generous number of power and connectivity ports alongside the mandatory Wii and kick back area.

One of the biggest aims of the playroom is to effectively demonstrate the range of failover and aggregation products which customers are skeptical about prior to purchasing. With Fluidata being the only carrier in the UK to successfully bond multiple technologies and carriers it is important for prospective clients to see it cope with VoIP, Video and Data. Also with the range of different ADSL2+ technologies available across the country it is useful to test the Telefonica O2 product next to the Cable & Wireless and BT 21CN products. Next to all the copper there is even a fibre line so pretty much any topology can be copied and tested.

If you are interested in seeing this room in action, then give the sales team a call and arrange an appointment. In the meantime I’ll keep you up to speed on any further developments.

Interesting developments going on at Tiscali. With shares suspended and talks at an end with Sky, the company is currently worth about €100m. With debts of over €500m they are having big problems keeping their head above water and some reckon there will now be a fire sale on a number of assets.

From my perspective this is no bad thing. For a number of years Tiscali has been bullish in the marketplace and always over promised and under delivered. With their purchase of Bulldog last year when they took on Pipex it was inevitable that they would hit the buffers as that client base does appear to be one very hot potato. It nearly brought Cable & Wireless to its knees (sold for £12m even though it cost C&W closer to £120m), ruined Pipex and now making it’s mark on Tiscali. It may be a coincidence but with Tiscali eager to just gain market share at any cost it was a telling sign that they were prepared to take on the Bulldog client base when buying Pipex.

What does it mean to us? Well it adds to the point I have made before that the consolidation in telecoms market has not been to the benefit of users and that dealing with a large multinational does not provide any level of guarantees or security. At least with a smaller company you have more visibility in how it is performing and in dealing with a business such as Fluidata risk is spread as multiple networks are used to deploy services.

Business already using Tiscali’s platform for DSL and MPLS are already starting to hit the phones to minimise risk and move off the network. If Tiscali don’t move quickly to stabilise their position they could find they don’t have a client base to sell.

One concern I have had with the telecoms industry while running Fluidata has been around Service Level Agreements (SLA). Business customers demand that services stay up and provide their business with connectivity so that they can get on with the job of growing their company. Internet or voice loss for an hour, let alone a day, can have a serious impact on their business as pretty much all communication or transactions now rely on IP transit.

What seems to happen in our industry is a slapdash approach to SLAs, where they are oversold and only when the worst happens does the client understand what they actually are and what protection it offers. Let’s be clear that an SLA is a statement of a promise and nothing more. Even if an SLA states it has a 21 hour (BT) fix on a fault there are still instances I am aware of that means this can significantly overrun. One fault I remember a few years ago revolved around a FTSE company loosing service because rats (BT’s explanation not mine!) had chewed through the cable. The only issue was that a major A-road had to be closed so that a 6 foot hole could be dug to reach the stricken cable. This took 3-days. So the client under the terms of the SLA could claim for downtime as it was longer than 21 hours but that inevitably is less than the actual cost to the business.

Therefore I can not stress enough the necessity for disaster planning and preparing for the worst. A good quote is that nobody cares as much about your business as you do. So while an SLA shows you the confidence the provider has in its service, you need to see how they arrive at that figure – because a blanket 100% uptime guarantee is obviously complete nonsense. It brings me neatly onto our range of PureFluid and Advance products which aggregate not only multiple lines together but different technologies and uniquely, multiple last mile carriers. This means that one line could be provided by BT and the others by Cable & Wireless or Telefonica. This dramatically decreases the chance of failure and helps towards increasing the uptime.

Prepare for the worst and if you are someone saying well mine hasn’t gone down in years then you are probably the sort of person who does without fire extinguishers, alarms and insurance. You are dicing not only with your job but the future of your company.

At a recent partner meeting with Cable & Wireless conversation turned to BT’s ongoing 21CN rollout. This multibillion pound investment by BT seems to be floundering especially when it comes to converting the legacy phone system onto it. Currently BT have unbundled some 3,000 lines so with a further 29 million to go we can be confident that the expected completion will be way into 2014, a few years behind schedule.

What was interesting was the near unanimous acceptance that BT 21CN will not reach all the exchanges and that realistically they will stop rollout at around 1,100 exchanges. This observation confirms other rumours I have heard within the industry and makes a lot of sense. When you are multinational business with a project requiring such massive investment why take it to areas that will not provide the necessary return. With BT suffering from a dramatic drop in share value, parts of the group loosing vast sums of money and a pension deficit I can not see there being the resources, let alone the desire, to roll out new services to exchanges that do not have the demand.

I suspect any announcement on such a plan will be a long time coming from BT as they will have to withstand pressure from Government on the ‘Digital Divide’ and the partners who have invested heavily in equipment to talk to BT’s new network. Currently only BT Retail and Enta have made the necessary investment into WBC and I am sure will be very upset if BT only provided the same footprint as to most LLU carriers.

Fluidata has always invested in LLU relationships just because the technology is years ahead of BT. We have been selling ADSL2+ with Annex M technology from Telefonica O2 at over 1,200 exchanges for over 18-months now and by the time BT gets to the party it will be time to go home. Maybe this is what BT are slowly waking up to.