british on SWiK

British Airways App usage soaring on iPhone

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:04:49 -0700

How Realistic Is BT’s Fiber Broadband Plan?

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:54:12 -0700

Updated at the bottom: Unless you’re using Enron math, BT’s new plan to connect 10 million homes — roughly 40 percent of the United Kingdom — with fiber networks at a cost of £1.5 billion doesn’t quite add up. At today’s conversion rate, that’s about $3 billion — or $300 to wire up each of these proposed 10 million homes.

BT hopes this will help it stave off competition from rivals who have started to use their new backbones and the latest technology to eat into its broadband business. Cable operator Virgin, for example, plans to use DOCSIS 3.0 to compete with BT. The incumbent has been reticent about upscaling its infrastructure over concerns that it would spend billions and then be forced to share with upstarts, the way it does now. By comparison, the new plan is closely tied to regulatory concessions and includes some sort of investment protection from Ofcom, the British regulator.

The Guardian writes:

Under the current regulatory regime, BT must allow rival service providers to use its network on the same terms as its own retail arm. There would be a huge outcry if that “equivalence” was lost, following the battles between BT, its rivals and the regulators at the start of this decade when Broadband Britain was just an ambition.

Nevertheless, BT’s announcement is full of more holes than a wheel of Swiss cheese. Lets look at the deal from a distance: 10 million homes for $3 billion. In comparison, Verizon is spending about $22 billion to fiber up some 18 million homes. That’s a cost improvement of 9x, which means BT’s plan just doesn’t make sense, even if you take into account that somehow it will get massive sops from Chinese equipment maker Huawei.

BT plans to sell 100-meg connections to homes it will connect with fiber (FTTP) using mostly G-PON technologies. Other homes, which will be connected to special cabinets on the curb (which are, in turn, connected to the Internet using fiber), will get a top speed of 40 Mbps. So in a sense, the plan is a blend of broadband strategies being used by Verizon (all fiber) and AT&T (combination of fiber and copper.)

Having followed this business for some time, I know that neither of their strategies are cheap. Verizon spends close to $1,400 per connected home (assuming that everyone is going to sign up for the service). AT&T’s numbers are also higher than $300 per home.

According to my sources, it costs just north of $500 to get the network ready to offer households super broadband, or what is generically known in the industry as homes passed. This doesn’t include laying fiber to the home, its associated labor costs and the on-the-premise gear. All that costs between $750 and $1,000. The on-the-premise ONTs cost between $150 and $200 alone.

Given that the network is scheduled to be rolled out in 2012, let’s assume that by then, prices decline by half — but the numbers still don’t add up. It could be that this $300-per-home-for-fiber is on top of the previously announced spending on BT’s broadband buildout as part of the 21CN. But even taking that into account, I’m not ready to buy BT’s splashy announcement. I would like to know from BT the exact breakdown of the cost structure of their network.

BT’s new CEO, Ian Livingston, whom I had a chance to meet back in 2006, is a sales maven, given his background with a high-street retailer and an upstart ISP. Some say he’s so good he could sell ice to Eskimos. Of course.

Update: My good pal, Dave Burstein, who writes the influential newsletter DSL Prime, wrote in to point out why the news is spin. “There is nothing in the announcement that wasn’t discussed by Christopher Bland with Andrew Parker a year ago,” he wrote. Dave tracks the industry closely, so I’m not surprised he found the “spin” in the news. He also pointed out that by 2012, less than 1 million will be on fiber, and mostly new fiber.

And Andrew Odlyzko, the authority on broadband and networks, in an email to me noted that the incremental 100 million pounds in capital expenditure increase for this promised network upgrade is a mere 3 percent, and even that is contingent on regulatory relief from Ofcom.

Q: Is this investment dependent on Ofcom creating a new regulatory framework?

A: Yes. The right regulatory environment is vital for anyone seeking to invest. The funds required are extremely large and companies need confidence that risk-taking can be appropriately rewarded.

Image courtesy of BT plc.

Was Ribbit Sold? Maybe, Maybe Not

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:57:17 -0700

Ribbit, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that is pushing a VoIP platform that marries web with voice is subject of acquisition rumors this evening. VentureBeat reported that the company was close to being acquired by British Telecom (BT), but later changed their story. When contacted by me, Don Thorson, Ribbit’s Vice President of Marketing dismissed the rumors but declined to comment any further.

It wouldn’t surprise me if BT (or some European telecom) acquired Ribbit (or any other platform) to expand across the borders and find a way to stay relevant. We had pointed out that a consortium of incumbent carriers were developing their competitor to Skype. Ribbit-type platform could be used to develop apps for the incumbent supra-net.

Ribbit has so far raised $13 million from Allegis Capital, KPG Ventures and Alsop Louie Ventures. The company has attracted about 4000 developers to its platform, though it is hard to tell if it is making any revenues from its platform. Over past few weeks, I had heard about Ribbit being in “play” and talking to likely buyers, but there is nothing concrete to add.

BT to Cut Carbon Emissions by 80%

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:51:53 -0700

UK telco British Telecom has been working hard to reduce its carbon footprint: Last year the company said it would invest close to half a billion dollars in wind farms, and in February BT installed a solar system for its U.S. headquarters. This morning the company says it plans to reduce its carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020. Ah BT, you put our U.S. telcos to shame. Earth2Tech has the full story.

BBC - History - British History Timeline

Sun, 25 May 2008 09:19:57 -0700

Explore all of British history, from the Neolithic to the present day, with this easy-to-use interactive timeline.

HP-EDS: It’s About The Clouds, Baby!

Tue, 13 May 2008 01:19:04 -0700

Updated: With the Microsoft-Yahoo battle fading from the dynamic random memories of our over stimulated brains, it is time to turn our attention to Hewlett-Packard’s ~~$12 billion~~ $13.9 billion deal to acquire EDS, a services giant in its own right. The news was announced this morning. HP will purchase EDS at a price of $25 per share.

~~This indeed is the real thing: both companies have confirmed their talks and perhaps their seriousness.~~ HP-EDS pairing will go down as one of the more significant developments of 2008, and its impact will be felt for years to come.

“I see it as an attempt by HP to really go head-to-head with IBM in a much more meaningful way, especially in technology services and IT outsourcing,” Dana Stiffler, research director at AMR Research told Computerworld. I think there is more to this deal than just old-fashioned outsourcing, and competing with IBM.

Typically, such a major deal means two things: Either the buyer has some issues with his current business, or he wants to make a big bet on the future. In case of HP CEO Mark Hurd, it might be a bit of both. There is only so much market share HP can carve out when it comes to printers and computers. More importantly, HP seems to be realizing that the future is about on-demand infrastructure. EDS brings to the table about 100 data centers around the planet.

Not everyone agrees with HP’s decision to buy EDS and get big fast. Forrester analyst Paul Roehrig is in that camp. Vinnie “Deal Architect” Mirchandani is someone I immensely respect and he brings up a very valid point when he writes:

But EDS is not Accenture or PwC (which IBM acquired) or TCS or Infosys. Its major strength is still in infrastructure outsourcing (though it has been growing its application and BPO capabilities nicely). HP’s outsourcing is similarly more skewed towards infrastructure. So, it is a scale play. But the timing is risky because infrastructure outsourcing is being challenged by data center consolidations, a secular decline in processing, storage and network charges and emergence of utility and cloud computing models.

However, I am taking a slightly more optimistic view of this deal, pointing out that this is HP’s bet on those very same trends — utility and cloud computing. HP might have finally realized that the future is about offering hardware as a service. Lets look at some of the recent developments

HP bought EYP Mission Critical Facilities. John McCain, senior vice president and general manager, HP Services, at the time of the deal remarked: “Acquiring EYP Mission Critical Facilities boosts HP’s ability to help customers transform their data centers and build dynamic computing environments from the ground up.” (via Rich Miller.)
HP bought Opsware, a data center automation software company started by Marc Andreessen, for $1.6 billion in July 2007.
In March 2008, HP announced its data center-as-a-service initiative, targeting large companies.
Yesterday, The Times of London reported that HP is close to buying 24 data centers currently owned by British Telecom in Europe for about $3 billion. The Times report says BT will provide Internet bandwidth, networks and remote access to HP, an area where the Silicon Valley-based giant isn’t that strong.

If you plot the EDS bid against these four recent developments, it is not that difficult to postulate that HP is building its own cloud focused on large global companies. Going further, I would channel something Vinnie says in his post.

HP’s hardware business has seen significant success in a number of emerging economies — running that infrastructure as a service does offer some unique opportunities.

I think this is a good point: Even though it’s growing fast, BRIC Bloc remains reticent to spend big dollars on infrastructure. Offering infrastructure-as-a-service to Indian telecoms or Chinese automakers of Brazilian biofuel companies is a much easier proposition then making them spend millions of dollars on blade servers, storage systems and networking devices.

Update#2: My favorite writer/thinker/troublemaker Nick Carr disagrees with me thesis about HP & the Cloud. He believes that this is a backward looking move:

an acquisition aimed at boosting profitability through consolidation and cost reduction in a mature business. The transition to the cloud will, for big companies, be a slow one, and there will continue to be much money made in running client-server infrastructures for many years.

Nick might be right, but in reality as he argues in his book, Big Switch (have you read it yet?), the world is going the way of the cloud, and even a company as stodgy as HP realizes that it has to transition to the future.

Update #3 Our colleagues over at OStatic, all of whom are open-source experts, have taken a deeper look at the deal as well. Go here for the full analysis.

What do you guys think?

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

Global Telcos Plotting a Skype Rival?

Tue, 06 May 2008 10:18:46 -0700

AT&T, in conjunction with some 10-15 incumbent telecom carriers — British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom and NTT among them — is plotting to launch a Skype competitor, according to a research report issued this morning by ThinkEquity analyst Anton Wahlman.

This is Wahlman’s theory for now, but his track record is full of theories that have eventually been proven right. For instance, he once issued a report that outlined 16 reasons why Cisco should buy Scientific Atlanta — which the networking giant went on to do, for $6.9 billion. For that reason alone, I put in a call to AT&T to get the lowdown, but all they would offer was the boilerplate phrase, “We can’t comment on this type of speculation.”

Anyway, back to the Skype competitor! Essentially what Wahlman is saying is that incumbents are going to offer a VoIP client that will work on the incumbent broadband/3G wireless pipe, and will use a backend platform that will allow folks to make free voice calls to anyone who’s logged into it.

Much the same way as Skype-to-Skype calls are free, incumbents could use their platform to keep calls from each other’s network free. The plan could help them avoid the termination charges and still make money when the calls go off the network to, say, a rival’s phone service or wireless network. “We believe that they will have to use a common client and common software platform in order to make this work,” Wahlman said.

Isn’t it too little, too late? Realistically speaking, there’s a slim chance of anyone catching up with Skype, which keeps adding subscribers and which, despite being mismanaged by its acquirer, has a momentum all its own. “Better late than never,” was Wahlman’s take.

Here are some key points about this yet-unnamed proposed Skype killer:

* To be launched in 2009.
* The concept will be extended to mobile phones eventually.
* The service would run on the carrier broadband connection, and also on top of the 3G/4G wireless broadband pipe.
* The service will be used as a lure for selling other services such as video.
* The incumbent consortium partners can brand this service any way they want.

Big shifts in the telecom landscape are forcing the carriers to think along these lines, Wahlman said in a chat earlier this morning. First, carriers are reluctantly facing up to the fact that voice has become a losing proposition. Thanks to competition from folks like Skype, voice is becoming essentially free. Second, they are losing fixed-line customers with an alarming rapidity.

As I have noted previously on several occasions, the carriers are in a race against time — these line losses basically make their plans to sell other services such as broadband and video impossible, thereby risking their future plans all together. The cost of winning back the customer who switches to, say, cable, VoIP, or a rival’s wireless service is just too high.

In the past, carriers have merely taken half-measures to address the voice-for-free problem. So this is radical new thinking: If voice is a losing business, why shouldn’t the carriers cannibalize it themselves, then sell other services, including video? As Wahlman noted, “Robust data connection is the most valuable service the carriers sell.”

Amen to that. I just find it hard to believe that the dinosaurs are finally getting jiggy with this new way of thinking.

Broken Promises Behind BT CEO Exit

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:47:28 -0700

In 2006 I had traveled to London to meet British Telecom (BT) CEO Ben Verwaayen and his team, hoping to get a first hand look at how Verwaayen and his team were trying to overhaul the company well known for its iconic phone booths.

They had put in place a strategy to diversify into IP services, build a brand-new 21st CN (UK broadband network) and, to cap it all, plans to become the carrier of choice for large multinationals. It ended up as a long feature in the August 2006 issue of Business 2.0.

The 56-year-old former Lucent executive Verwaayen resigned earlier this week after six years at the head of BT. He is being replaced by 43-year-old Ian Livingston, who until recently ran BT Retail and was seen as the maverick to make BT Retail a force to reckon with.

Livingston, before joining BT, was group finance director at electrical retailer Dixons and had helped set up Internet service provider Freeserve, now part of Orange. Livingston was part of Verwaayen’s attempt to hire folks from outside of telecom industry and bring some consumer-savvyness to a stodgy company struggling to stay competitive with pesky upstarts. He will have his work cut out for him — the company is still too big, too lumbering and too bureaucratic. The 21CN is still nowhere close to delivering its promise. At the same time, BT is facing increased competition from upstart broadband providers like Carphone Warehouse and Virgin. The company has no consumer mobile service, and it continues to lose consumer lines.

Those were the very same issues that put Verwaayen on the hot seat. On his watch, BT had a mixed record. A lot of promises were made, but never fully realized. The only stand out was the Global IT services business. It now accounts for about 40 percent of BT’s total revenue. But that’s about the end of it.

Fierce Telecom points out that “Verwaayen’s decision to leave comes not long after BT reported poor financial results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2007.” In recent months, several executives have left and there are questions about “execution and expense of its 21st Century Network project,” FT goes on to say.

So what’s next? Job cuts, according to some analysts who point to Livingston’s track record. I wonder if one of those will be company CTO Matt Bross, who came to BT at the urging of Verwaayen.

What are your thoughts on BT and its future?

Additional reporting by Irina Haltsonen, who is spending the summer with the GigaOM team.

[from martti] GP2X.co.uk official site - Buy the GP2X F200 Linux console

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 05:07:17 -0800

[from martti] YouTube - The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain ownage

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:43:18 -0800

[from martti] YouTube - Rowan Atkinson Live - A Final Bash

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 08:45:15 -0800

[from martti] YouTube - The Ukulele Orchestra of GB - You Dont bring me Flowers

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 08:44:59 -0800

The Open Rights Group

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 06:29:29 -0800

British digital open rights group, perhaps comparable to the EFF

Front Page | Sound Bites UK

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 05:55:18 -0800

MySpace’ Roommates, BT Wind: GigaNET Headlines

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 09:04:11 -0700

WebWorkerDaily: Turn on the TV and get to work
NewTeeVee: MySpace gets in bed with Roommates.
Earth2Tech: BT bets half-a-billion on wind power
FoundRead: What are a startup’s key assets?

Telecom Incest: The Fon-BT Deal Sounds Screwy

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 08:43:57 -0700

On closer inspection, today’s deal between Fon and British Telecom sounds like it could be a costly one for Fon and its investors. GigaOm is suggesting that Fon may have agreed to pay $8 to $10 to BT for every one of its broadband customers who agrees to sign up and activate the Fon service. If that’s true, with three million broadband subs at BT, that represents a potential liability of as much as $30 million. (Update: Just got off the phone with Fon USA CEO Joanna Rees, who says she has been closely involved with the BT deal. She categorically denies that Fon is paying BT for subscribers: “I have never heard that,” she says).

Buying customers is never a good thing if you can avoid it. Fon might need to do another round of fund-raising to pay for this deal. The $35 million it’s raised so far from Google, Skype, Index Ventures, and Sequoia, among others, might not be enough, especially if it cuts more sweetheart deals with other telcos around the world.

But here’s the really screwy part: BT is also now an investor in Fon, according to founder Martin Varsavky. So at the same time that it is presumably putting money into Fon with one hand, BT is about to potentially extract millions of dollars out of Fon with the other. I say presumably because it is possible that BT did not even put any cash into Fon for its stake in the first place (terms were not disclosed). Often in these deals, as the price of admission, the telco demands not only cash from the startup but an equity stake as well. In the telecom world, some things are never free. (Update: Rees says BT did invest cash. So maybe the deal isn’t so screwy, after all.)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Fon Inks Deal With British Telecom

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 05:44:15 -0700

Spanish WiFi startup Fon is invading England. In its quest to turn everyone’s home and business WiFi router into a worldwide network of shareable hotspots, Fon just inked a long-rumored deal with British Telecom. BT’s three million broadband customers in the UK can now opt to join the Fon network, which gives them access to 190,000 WiFi hotspots around the world. BT joins Time Warner Cable in the U.S., and French broadband provider Neuf in endorsing Fon’s WiFi-sharing across their customers.

Most ISP service agreements still ban customers from reselling or sharing their broadband connection. But Fon is convincing some ISPs that it might actually be a selling point to be able to tell customers that included in their home broadband bill is access to free WiFi when they travel across town or across the world. Fon claims its network of WiFi hotspots is already the largest in the world. Investors in Fon include Google, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures, and now BT as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

[from martti] YouTube - Graham Chapman's funeral

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:32:07 -0700

[from martti] YouTube - Shakespeare sketch

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:32:06 -0700

Gail C. Murphy's Home Page

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 06:45:16 -0700

This week's UK television & radio

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 04:41:29 -0700

Flickr: Tate: How We Are Now

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 23:48:40 -0700

Firefox 2 Spelling Dictionary Hacks; Make Firefox Inline Spell Checker More Useful at Digital Inspiration Technology Guide

Wed, 30 May 2007 01:29:33 -0700

National British Archives - Your Archives

Tue, 22 May 2007 03:12:47 -0700

Création des archives nationales en mode participatif

Competition, ain’t that a good thing

Mon, 21 May 2007 14:19:38 -0700

Competition in broadband - and I mean real competition not what passes for competition in the US - is such a beautiful thing. It works so well for the consumers. UK broadband is a perfect example.

A few months ago, NTL and Virgin merged to become Virgin Media, the largest broadband provider in the British Isles. They didn’t do such a good job of keeping their customers happy, and British Telecom surged ahead, leading to speculation that some private equity guys are going to buy out Virgin Media.

And while these two are jostling for the top spot, the little players are trying to do their best to lure customers, and offering all sorts of interesting combinations. Pipex, has started offering six months of 8 Mbps broadband (though with 2GB transfer cap) for free, as long as folks sign up for $25-a-month voice plan (unlimited local and national calls). Of course there is Carphone Warehouse with its Free Talk Talk offering. (I wonder if any of our readers are tracking the broadband prices in UK and if they are really heading south.)

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Telco dogs need to learn software tricks

Mon, 21 May 2007 04:13:54 -0700

Last year, after visiting British Telecom (BT) and meeting with their executives, I left London with one key take away: BT was one telco that completely understood that it was facing uncertain times, and had no choice but to reinvent itself to survive.

The senior BT management understood that while broadband was a start point for its reinvention, it had to boldly go where no telecom had gone before, if they wanted to survive. They had to behave and think like an Internet-based software company.

Ben Verwaayen, BT chief executive, when talking about BT’s transformation remarked :

“This is the second phase of BT’s transformation. The first phase saw BT shift its focus from narrowband to broadband. This next stage will see BT advance from a 20th century hardware-based company to a 21st century software-based services company.”

Though it may sound like a hookey statement by a telco chief, it is actually quite true. According to McKinsey nearly 60% of CIOs are currently considering software-as-a-service model. If you factor in the lag-factor typical of McKinsey reports (aka a year after the fact), the SAAS movement is well under way.

“There are more than 1,000 SaaS vendors in existence today, although 90% have less than $15 million in annual revenue, but are growing 4x faster than licensed software,” notes Colby Synesael, analyst with Merriman Curhan Ford.

The weak link, however, for SaaS, is the reliability of these services over an IP connection. Synesael, makes a good point when he argues that SaaS needs to overcome bandwidth constraints, packet loss, jitter and latency. These are issues that telcos can address with their network capabilities, and they can start to learn the ways of the software world, and work with SaaS vendors.

“In a software driven world, services will be available in real time and around the globe, harnessing the potential of BT’s 21st Century Network,” Verwaayen recently said.

That holds true for any telecom operator. The old AT&T CTO Hossein Eslambolchi used to talk about software-expertise-as-a-way out from telecom commoditization.

I wonder if this is a wiser, albeit less sexy way for telecoms to bolster their business. Instead of spending $6 billion on IPTV projects, AT&T could say buy a Salesforce.com (have some money left over for satellite-based triple play) and ensure a few hundred thousand folks paying $60-odd dollars a month for the CRM as a service. It be a nice way to fight off the cable companies who are now gearing up to go after the small and medium sized businesses.

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British English Dictionary | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 16:31:18 -0800

british english firefox extension

[from obrun] British food, tea, cheeses, frozen, gifts & tearoom

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:06:02 -0800

LISTEN TO THE CHRISTMAS BROADCAST VIA THE ROYAL PODCAST

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 15:48:45 -0800

British English Dictionary :: Mozilla Add-ons :: Add Features to Mozilla Software

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 23:55:42 -0800