Overseas invasion targets UK consumers

Jonathan Bowers, September 5th 2007, 11:29AM

As a hosting provider UKFast gets a glimpse of the way the online industry is developing slightly ahead of other businesses. Quite often it's easy to spot which areas of the net will grow fastest or which are levelling off.

At the moment there's plenty of evidence to suggest that serious overseas companies are pushing to take a chunk of the UK market for themselves. And this isn't necessarily in one particular sector - although some are leading the field - it looks like this is happening across the board.

We now know that you rank more highly on search if you host in the country of the searcher, so if you are appealing to the markets in the UK and Germany, you should make sure you have a good host for some of your solution in Germany as well as here in the UK.

By the size of the solutions foreign companies are taking with UKFast, it's fair to say that they are very serious about our market. The largest UK online businesses in each sector will not be that worried by them but much of the SME market needs to make sure it is competitive enough with it's hosting to fend off this foreign invasion.

Tags: global_community, hosting, search
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Control lies where on the Internet?

Jonathan Bowers, June 12th 2006, 10:56AM

In a radio interview last week, Lawrence Jones was asked to explain what an Internet Service Provider does. Following Lawrence's answer, Phil Wood, the host said - "so you basically run the Internet" and Lawrence's response was "I guess so, personally we just have a small chunk of it."

And in one sense this is true - any ISP can pull out a few cables and disconnect people from the Internet, or do a few lines of code and block a network of people from seeing a range of websites.

Today questions abound about who controls the Internet. Google has only just been reinstated in China after a couple of weeks of conflict with the Government and the Net Neutrality bill has taken a step backwards in the U.S.

What will happen if companies are allowed to create tiers of performance on the Net? Why is the U.S. debating this issue without involving the whole Net community? Should Google and other Internet giants retreat from China or submit to sensorship issues?

I think the global industry is beginning to face its widest challenges to date. Where does the real power lie - is it with the Internet corporates, the ISP's, the governments or somewhere else entirely? And how do we bring all these sectors together to bring an outcome that is most beneficial to the user in front of their computer/mobile/blackberry/satelite TV?

Tags: control, global_community, net_neutrality
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