It pays to be at the centre of attention

Jonathan Bowers, October 20th 2008, 5:13PM

Rural communities in the UK have come to the end of their tether with broadband providers and their deceptive claims, reports this week say. Broadband firms overstating the ‘speed’ of their packages is not new and the fact the rural communities always seem to feel the most disgruntled is also not new. However the critical mass of calls for the authorities to do something is novel.

Countryside dwellers, such as those in Huntingdon, Cambridge, are hitting back with concerted pressure on the Government and Ofcom to bring the misleading broadband providers to heel.

The classic problem is the ‘up to’ capacity advertised by broadband companies. Most, not surprisingly, state the maximum speed available on their network prominently. Meanwhile, talk of possible geographical limitations is relegated to the small print. The result is disappointed customers in areas that are a long way from the main local exchange, such as any rural community.

Residents in Huntingdonshire believe that instead of the 8MB broadband that is promoted, they are in reality only getting 512KB, one sixteenth of the headline speed.

All this grief and disappointing performance is because Huntington is not located on a broadband superhighway and that got me thinking about the parallels to the ecommerce industry. Quick and reliable service is essential for any Web business. Customers will not wait for slow loading sites.
Furthermore, Google rankings partly rely on speed ratings, so again slow websites will lose out due to poor Google listings.

So the lessons for ebusinesses are to ensure that their server power is up to the job and that their hosting company is located on a major hub of the broadband network. ISPs, such as UKFast, who occupy a position right on the broadband superhighway can offer more.

So to be in the ecommerce fast lane make sure your hosting provider is right in the middle of the action.

Tags: broadband, e-commerce, google, hosting, internet, websites
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Is video grinding the internet to a halt?

Jonathan Bowers, July 14th 2008, 2:04PM

It is a familiar scenario: we need more space, so we will add more space, then we expand our habits to fill it and once again we need more space. This is a problematic circle that can be attributed to a number of different areas of life, consider home buying or motorway construction, but for our purposes we are referring to the capacity of the internet super highway.

There was a time when telephone purpose cables and dial-up internet connections were all that were needed to get us speeding along the super highway. But then, when the internet’s popularity took off and its massive potential started to be fully realised, we needed more capacity.

Along came broadband (the cyberspace equivalent to expanding the M6 from 6 lanes to 66 lanes). We could once again speed along the highway but this time in huge trucks full of wonderful cargo such as music and film downloads, online games and other capacity greedy items. Now, however it seems as though our vast broadband super highways are once again clogging up, this time with juggernaut traffic jams.

The doomsday advocates say that our insatiable appetite for online video watching will break the internet by about 2010. However, don’t start panicking just yet. In reality the worst case scenario is that online video streaming use will just slow the internet down to snail speeds, so essentially taking us back to the dial-up era, the metaphorical stone-age of the internet epoch.

It seems that we cannot add capacity quickly enough to deal with increasing usage demand. According to Larry Irving, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance, (from The Observer April 6, 2008) “estimates show US internet traffic increasing at more than 50% a year, with capacity expanding at only about 40% a year.”

While online video surfing has been identified as the catalyst for increased internet capacity demand, experts seem to be divided into two groups with regard to the reason for the new capacity congestion problems.

Some feel that a lack of foresight is to blame. That is to say that the rapid increase in online video usage was not anticipated. The other camp blames market forces, arguing that infrastructure providers are not willing to make the necessary investments to keep up with demand.

If the first is true then the benefit of hindsight will ensure that capacity is geared up to cope with the internet video era soon. As for the second, well it seems to always take the industry time to realise the commercial potential of internet developments. But they will eventually and when they do, the necessary investment in infrastructure will follow.

So it might look as though video is grinding the internet to a halt, but in reality the internet will adapt as it has always done – until the next big thing that is!

Tags: accessibility, broadband, internet, video, websites
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Without a safety net

Chris Norton, June 9th 2006, 2:59PM

I recently moved home and found myself without a toaster, without an ironing board, without a bookcase and - most irritatingly of all - without a net connection. How on earth would I survive?

Reasonably easily, as it turned out. In fact for a while I got used to being netless, just like the protagonist of Sandi Thom's chart smash 'I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker', who wants to live in a time when 'the super info highway was still drifting out in space'. Admittedly I was still getting my fix of netiness at work, but this was tempered by the fact that I was, well, at work, and it seemed wise to get on with my job instead of spending all day emailing people - plus, holiday and financial planning went out of the window for a month. Having a good excuse to put these things off was quite relaxing.

But then friends started complaining that I wasn't around online anymore. My Flickr and 43things accounts were languishing. With my PC gathering dust, a backlog of songs I wanted to buy started amassing in my head. As frustration started to build, I finally got around to sorting out my connection. On the day it was switched back on, my router resolutely refused to work. By the time Daz managed to get me fully online-ified via some router-voodoo, I was starting to get desperate. Getting back into the web world felt like coming home.

Sandi Thom, don't get me wrong, I don't mind your song, (it's likeable and a little unusual, although hardly Imogen Heap) but you, and anyone else with this myopic, nostalgic view of 'simpler days', well you can all keep your rosy made-up version of the past. The net is amazing and the past is rubbish, we all know it - especially those of us who bring our songs about how great the 70s were to worldwide attention via the suspiciously modern medium of webcasts and huge PR budgets...

Tags: broadband, home, internet, music
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