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June 3, 2001 - June 8, 2001

News - June 8,2001

BT Ignite's 'Net Start' Service Slammed

By:mark.j @ 3:41:PM - Comments (4) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

There's a very strange and possibly incorrect news item up at VNUNet that we thought deserved a mention because of what it says. Apparently Rapid Prototyping Systems (RPS) purchased a 64Kbps 'Net Start' Leased Line connection (£3,600 PA) from BT Ignite and found it wasn't what they expected:

RPS found its connection speed very slow and asked Arvid Carlander, network consultant at Isogon Network Systems, to test its performance. The clocked test speed was 7Kbps, one tenth of the promised speed of 64Kbps.

"That makes the connection slower than an old analogue modem. The 'dedicated' 64Kbps is shared with up to nine other customers. If you're unlucky and one of them produces heavier traffic than you do, it will hog the line," Carlander said.

David Blakeman, managing director at RPS, said he had reverted to his Demon ISDN dial-up connection and was trying to get out of his contract with BT Ignite.

Now to any slightly trained eye the 64Kbps means 64KBits Per Second (always has) and not KBytes Per Second. 7K-ps is almost exactly right for a 64Kbps connection and so clearly this company have taken the line test and miss-read the results.

Even VNUNet wasn't able to spot the obvious, but most important of all is the fact that BT themselves couldn't see the hiccup in their response. It also highlights how a 64Kbps ISDN Leased Line still costs £3,600 Per Year (£300 Per Month), yet under a FRIACO/BTSurfport system with a 1:1 ratio it'd still be less than 1/3 of that.

Some businesses really do have to pay through the nose for ancient technology, in fact so do consumers where ISDN is concerned.

Iomart Strikes Trend Micro Alliance

By:mark.j @ 10:07:AM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

The popular UK and USA ISP/ASP provider, Iomart, has announced a new alliance with the Japanese anti-virus giant, Trend Micro. The new deal should help both sides boost their moves further into European businesses.

The Glasgow-based company is to use Trend's InterScan Virus Wall (Similar to a firewall) to provide secure messaging for its 200,000 European ThinkMail managed email service users as it moves away from its consumer ISP business.

Dharm Bain, Trend UK sales director, said: "This is a significant deal - for both of us. Email is the true backbone of ecommerce and we have seen enormous growth in the services provider market. We can both contribute and learn as this grows."

Trend Micro is a $208m-a-year, Tokyo-based company, which claims to have the major slice of the US corporate anti-virus market. With so much bad news today it's refreshing to see something a little more upbeat.

3Com Scraps DSL & C-Modem Production

By:mark.j @ 10:03:AM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Following on a similar line to Alcatel, 3Com have chosen to announce that they're scrapping production of DSL and Cable Modems for the consumer market:

3Com becomes the second networking company on Thursday to exit the high-speed modem business. French network equipment maker Alcatel sold its DSL business to Thomson Multimedia in a stock deal worth $389m. "It's a low-margin business," said Jeremy Duke, an analyst at Synergy Research Group. "The industry has a significant build-up of inventory. We saw a 20 percent dip in sales in the (2001) first quarter, and that will continue. The money is to be made in infrastructure equipment, not modems."

3Com executives said the company will honour all existing customer orders and warranties for its broadband modems. "It will be a soft landing for our customers," a 3Com representative said. 3Com has been reorganising to try to become profitable, but it has got a lot smaller in the past 15 months. The company last year spun off Palm, a maker of popular personal digital assistants, and US Robotics, its analogue modem business. As part of its goal to save $1bn, the company in March discontinued its consumer products, which included the Audrey Web-surfing appliance and the Kerbango Internet radio.

As the ZDNet item points out, the economic downturn, lack of enough demand (slow rollout) have forced prices and production needs to levels they're not willing to tolerate. Thankfully 3Com will continue to support and develop drivers for existing products, although how long that'll last remains to be seen.

ISPs Suffer ADSL Downtime

By:mark.j @ 9:55:AM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

As reported on by BTOpenwoe and confirmed by some of our own readers, several popular ADSL providing ISPs have been suffering some service outages:

The problem seems to be affecting all the ADSL ISPs. We've got confirmed reports of the problem hitting:

- BT Openworld
- IOMART/Madasafish
- Easynet
- Demon
- Freeserve Plus

This once again appears to be an issue with BTIgnite and so don't be surprised if you have any strange problems over the next day or so.

Alcatel To Stop ADSL Modem Production

By:mark.j @ 9:49:AM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

With 22% of all USB ADSL Modems coming from French Alcatel and almost 100% of USB ADSL Modems in the UK being made by the same group, it comes as a shock that Alcatel will no longer be making them.

Its ADSL modem business will now be sold on to another French company, Thomson Multimedia:

If the deal is given the go-ahead, both companies expect the transfer to be completed by the end of the year.

The plan is part of Alcatel's desire to focus on telco-oriented network infrastructure products, which was, incidentally, one of the drivers behind its failed scheme to merge with Lucent. Thomson, on the other hand, wants to break into the consumer Net broadband access market.

The progress of the deal will be watched by Linux users with ADSL connections. They have only recently won Alcatel's backing to get the driver technology behind its USB ADSL modems out into the open source community.

Quite how this item from The Register will actually affect the market is not yet known, although production levels aren't likely to change that much. What we're most worried about are the drivers for all platforms, it's not easy to pickup code from where one developer left off.

News - June 7,2001

BT Rated Least Flexible Technology Suppliers

By:mark.j @ 3:31:PM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Both Computer Associates (CA) and BT have today been rated as the least flexible technology suppliers by a The Infrastructure Forum (Tif) survey:

The Tif Challenge Index asked users how important they believed the 20 top vendors to be and how easy it was to do business with them. Rankings were based on issues such as customer support, maintenance, and contract terms and conditions.

Bottom of the heap was CA, but it was also ranked as the least important company.

More worryingly, BT was rated as the fourth most important supplier, but the second most difficult to work with.

Of course none of this is likely to help the struggling Telco, primarily because they've never really taken notice of such complaints before. More @ VNUNet.

AOL France Calls For FRIACO

By:mark.j @ 3:26:PM - Comments (3) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Today another reminder that while most of Europe may be leaps and bounds ahead of the UK on broadband, we still lead the way with dial-up unmetered access.

Having reached an impressive one million customers, AOL France is now calling upon France Telecom to offer wholesale flat rate charges for Net access:

Last year AOL France introduced a flat-rate service that it claims has increased its share of the French Internet market.

Over the last year, the average time spent online per member has increased to more than 60 minutes per day - a threefold increase since AOL France's launched its flat-rate promotional pricing plan.

AOL France also claims usage levels are on a par with activities in the US and the UK, where AOL services are available on flat rate plans.

The Register highlights an issue that also exists in many of the other European countries such as Germany etc. Perhaps the UK doesn't care about broadband because we've already started to get cheap dial-up and how many actually need 512Kbps?

C&W Cuts PSINets Cable - Ouch!

By:mark.j @ 9:16:AM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Internet traffic and thousands of E-Mails found their way into a state of limbo recently when a dispute between ISP wings of Cable & Wireless and PSINet ended up with C&W cutting the ISPs mutual connection:

Unlike the electrical outages plaguing California, which no one wants, this intentional blackout suited the purposes of one side in the collapse of talks between two major Internet service providers, Cable & Wireless and the financially strapped PSINet. A critical link between the two networks was cut, blocking some companies from seeing their own Web sites, and stalling e-mail between thousands of sources.

Although a connection between Cable & Wireless and PSINet was re-established Tuesday night, the squabble illustrates just how fragile the Internet's series of connected, largely unregulated private networks can be. The Net has built its strength in part on this decentralized, unregulated environment, but the ISPs' fight underscores that very little can prevent future blackouts like this from happening.

Some who closely watch the Net's daily health say such blackouts could even become more frequent, as cash-hungry telecommunications companies stop benefiting from deals with peers and rivals to swap expensive data traffic.

The ZDNet item highlights something we mentioned not long ago, that the largely unregulated and ever expanded Internet could become increasingly unstable with size. Much of this might also be drawn from the ever-increasing role of commercialisation, thus putting once friendly groups into competition.

Vote Broadband

By:mark.j @ 9:09:AM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

One of our readers, Tom, showed how a BWForum user decided to have a little fun on the Barrysworld forums and asked who'd vote for him and his Broadband Party. So if you're planning to get the technology then head on over and make a supporting post =):

If you already have broadband we promise:

1 - More bandwidth! Non of this piddly 512 kbit sub-broadband nonsense. Full, fat, juicy bandwidth by the megabit.

2 - Synchronous connectivity - Go Down As Fast As you Go Up! Oo er!

3 - Free-ness. Under the Broadband party inessential services such as the NHS will be sold off to bring bandwidth to all!

So ends the Broadband Manifesto

Praise already made for the Broadband Party includes:

"In a country where all the parties look and stand for the same thing its refreshing to see someone not afraid to limit their remit to a single issue designed to help a small percentage of the population. WE LUV YOU STEINY!!"

To be honest we're a little scared, could this be the one? The party to take us into the 21st Centaury (a little further)?

BigBlueSky On Price Rises

By:mark.j @ 9:03:AM - Comments (4) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

BigBlueSky made two updates yesterday regarding their services and the new prices they're investigating:

Some people may be having difficulty connecting to the Internet. This is due to two specific reasons. Firstly, our authentication server has been overloaded, and we are in the process of upgrading it. Secondly, we are quadrupling our capacity, and plan to achieve first or second time connections when customers dial-up. This will be in place in approximately 10 days. In the interim, for those people with connection problems, we recommend Net Pal to ease the temporary connection blues. But rest assured, your one-year period only starts when you get connected the first time. We have also discovered that there are some users having intermittent connection problems. We took many of the user details and found that in some areas in the UK, this problem seemed to be more common than in others. We await feedback from BT as to the nature of this problem... and it will be relayed to the website as soon as we get hold of it.

Our Automatic registration system and StickyJAM webmail have proved to be a success. Thanks to those who have used it, we have received valuable feedback on bugs, and improvements, and these have been implemented.

The main topic of discussion on the feedback has been about the price increase! The spread of suggested prices has been between £50 and £150 for new registrants, with first or second time connection when dialing-up. This is currently being discussed, and will be announced on the website tomorrow.

Nothing official has been announced, although they soon made a second update to extend the £25 offer:

News Update - 19:30 06/06/01
Only in the last 3-4 hours we have received many, many emails regarding the registration and the price... and to "... please... please hold it for one more day!" For a period of about 3 hours today, many customers had problems registering. This was due to a glitch in our upgrade process. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

As a consequence we are extending the offer until the 8th June to allow many of these people to register.

Friday should bring the final wording on price and it'll be interesting to see whether they go very high, just a bit higher or find a steady medium.

News - June 6,2001

BTOpenworld Trials ADSL Teleworking

By:mark.j @ 3:47:PM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

If you know what Teleworking is then BTOpenworlds latest trial offering could well be of interest to you:

BTopenworld Broadband trials ADSL Teleworker package

BTopenworld, BT's mass market Internet business, today announced details of its teleworker/remote worker Broadband package, which will provide a cost effective and very secure means of connecting up to 100 remote workers to a company Local Area Network via ADSL simultaneously.

The package, provisionally called BTopenworld Teleworker SME, is currently in trial with around 100 users. A full release is expected at the end of June 2001. The price of the package is expected to be around £75 per user per month for 24-hour access, based on 15 - 20 users. Included in the price is all the necessary hardware, as well as business class maintenance and technical support.

BTopenworld Teleworker SME consists of a number of remote clients connected to BTopenworld through a fast, always-on ADSL connection and a head office hardware gateway connected to the corporate LAN. Remote workers access the corporate LAN over the Internet by using Virtual Private Network technology (VPN) that provides a secure tunnel from remote site to corporate LAN.

BT has conducted a significant amount of research into flexible working practices. This is reflected in the development of BTopenworld Teleworker SME, which builds on this experience to provide a fast, always on high-speed home to office link. During non-working times the service provides a high speed Internet connection.

ADSL offers significant benefits to the teleworker and to SMEs and large businesses. As well as speed, the big advantage of ADSL is that it is an always on technology with no call charges. This means that businesses can control costs and provide workers with access to the company LAN 24 hours per day if required. Email and day to day work files flow through the Teleworker connection as if the employee is connected directly to the company LAN.

BTopenworld Teleworker SME offers employees a significant advantage by providing a high speed Internet connection and web access in the home. This Internet connection can be used during leisure times when access to the company network is not required. Employees can either go directly to the BTopenworld portal on their work PC or connect a home PC to the ADSL modem. The Teleworker product can be individually configured for both simultaneous Internet and VPN access or mutually exclusive access.

Ben Andradi, chief operating officer, BTopenworld, said: "Btopenworld Broadband's Teleworker package will bring high speed, secure remote access for the smaller company at a price and performance previously only available to FT100 corporations. It demonstrates BTopenworld's innovation and ongoing commitment to providing Broadband Internet connections for as many SMEs in the UK as possible."

Full details of the Teleworker product, its technical specifications and requirements will be issued when the launch date is finalised. Details of other BTopenworld Broadband products, pricing and online ordering for all BTopenworld products are available at http://www.btopenworld.com. All BTopenworld Broadband products are subject to line test and the customer being connected to an ADSL-enabled exchange. Where these circumstances apply, installation of the Teleworker package is typically within 28 working days of order.

BTOpenworld To Introduce RADSL

By:mark.j @ 3:42:PM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

BTOpenworld have today sent us two press releases, the first (this one) regards their introduction of RADSL (Rate Adaptive) broadband:

BTopenworld Broadband to trial Extended Reach ADSL

BTopenworld, BT's mass market Internet business, today announced that it trialling, from the 25th June 2001, an enhanced version of ADSL that will allow more people in the UK to connect to high-speed broadband Internet via BTopenworld Broadband.

BTopenworld anticipates that the Extended Reach technology will increase the ADSL 'footprint' around each enabled exchange from its current limit of 3.5km to around 5.5km (for the technically minded, it increases the acceptable dB loss on PSTN lines from 41dB to 55dB). The ISP predicts that this will enable around over 90 per cent of people, including those who have previously not been able to have BTopenworld Broadband due to being too far from their local exchange, in an ADSL-enabled exchange area to access its portfolio of broadband products. Subject to successful trial, full launch is anticipated later this summer.

Download speeds, from the Internet to the user, remain the same as for standard ADSL at up to 500kbps, although the upload speeds will be variable in the range 64 - 250 kbps. The slower upload speeds will, however, be largely unnoticeable to most users since the vast majority of Internet access is in the download direction, e.g. surfing, email, file downloading.

Initially, Extended Reach ADSL will be available on BTopenworld's home500 and business500 products. Plans are also in hand to trial and launch later in the year an Extended Reach version of the business500plus product which can support up to four users, and more using a Local Area Network via an Ethernet connection.

Ben Andradi, president and chief operating officer, BTopenworld, commented: "Extended Reach ADSL represents great news for people who want a high speed Internet connection but who currently live or work just beyond the present range of BTopenworld's Broadband services. This trial also demonstrates our ongoing commitment to seeking ways of providing a Broadband Internet connection for as many people as possible."

Full product specifications, prices and online ordering for all Btopenworld products are available at www.btopenworld.com/broadband. All Btopenworld Broadband products are subject to line test and the customer being connected to an ADSL-enabled exchange. Where these criteria are met, installation is typically within 15 working days of order.

None of this should be a surprise given our recent news items on both Iomart and Zen Internets early trial and adoption of the newer RADSL standard. We plan on being involved in one of these and will inform readers of how things progress.

Atlantic Telecom Sale Looms

By:mark.j @ 3:36:PM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Atlantic Telecom has today announced that a possible buyer for their residential services may soon be finalised:

The telco, which announced on 24 January that it was putting its residential business up for sale as part of a restructure intended to create savings of about £35m over the next 12 months, said it is now in exclusive negotiations with only one company, which should result in a sale of the residential portion of the firm “during the summer”.

Atlantic inherited most of its indirect residential base from its acquisition of First Telecom in April last year, which created an enlarged user base of about 17m households and 1m businesses in the UK, and allowed Atlantic to apply First Telecom’s SDSL’s broadband technology to its own mainly fixed wireless and fibre optic cable services.

The netimperative.com article reminds us that Atlantic has already laid off 350 staff and plans a further loss of 300 in the coming months.

Businesses Shun Broadband Britain

By:mark.j @ 3:32:PM - Comments (1) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

The latest survey from the Mistral Internet ISP claims that up to 80% of SME Businesses consider broadband to be peripheral to their main activity:

According to the MORI poll of 200 managing directors, financial directors and senior managers, commissioned by business ISP Mistral Internet, 70% of SMEs (businesses with annual turnover of between £1m and £100m) disagreed that instant access to the internet was critical to their business, 88% said the Web is unimportant for purchasing, and 47% do not expect broadband connectivity to become crucial to their long-term business strategy within the next 2 years.

Indicating that the Government’s vision for having the most extensive and competitive broadband market by 2005 has not enthused the vast majority of the UK’s businesses, only 34% agreed that always-on connectivity was important while 77% believe their current dial-up internet access speeds are sufficient.

Indeed, Britain would appear to be lagging in all things broadband. A recent OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) report placed the UK 21st in the world for the number of broadband users, trailing countries such as Korea, the Czech Republic and New Zealand.

The netimperative.com article doesn't come as any great surprise considering the ever-wavering enthusiasm for broadband technologies. As before the slow rollout, high costs and lack of technology awareness seem to be the primary reasons most have slated such technologies.

C.U.T Talks Irish Unmetered ISPs

By:mark.j @ 3:20:PM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

The C.U.T (Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications) have finally updated their site today. There's an interesting item about the problem of unmetered access in Ireland, very similar to that of the UK two years ago:

BT’s Eire ISP subsidiary Esat Fusion sparked off protests after it imposed a monthly usage limit of 75 hours on its IOL NoLimit service which originally provided unmetered access between 6pm and 8am seven days a week. (Irish Times article). Esat Fusion sent letters to two thousand of its customers in late April advising them that, as they were using the service too much, they would be cut off as of today. No other unmetered alternatives were given, only a metered option.

All this has led to at least two campaign groups being created in Eire. First to get off the ground is Ireland Offline. It campaigns for unmetered, affordable access to the Internet in Eire for home users and small businesses, and grew out of discussions on the ie.comp newsgroup. A second campaign group is being formed by Urban Weigl to involve those cut off by Esat Fusion, but it has neither name nor Web site at the moment.

There's also another item regarding unmetered in different countries, both are interesting for anybody outside UK.

Glenworld Ltd. Delay Unmetered Launch

By:mark.j @ 9:45:AM - Comments (1) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Thanks to Keith for pointing out that the 'similar to Connect25' unmetered ISP, Glenworld, may be delayed for another two weeks.

Originally due to go live on the 1st JUNE 2001, Glenworld now looks set to come online around mid-June instead. No details or reasons given for this, just blame it on the usual administration etc. style problems.

Tele2 Broadband Wireless Extend Coverage

By:mark.j @ 9:42:AM - Comments (5) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

It's been sometime since we last reported on the fixed broadband wireless alternative to Satellite, Cable Modems and xDSL. Thankfully Tele2's much anticipated coverage extension to their FB Wireless (FBW) services has finally arrived.

The Tele2 service is currently available in the UK's Thames Valley: Reading, Bracknell and Wokingham; Leicester; Leeds; Nottingham and Bradford.

Coverage Page For 2001

Over the next 3 months, consumers and businesses in Birmingham; Coventry; Bristol; Bath; Newbury; Guildford; Sheffield and Slough will finally see fixed broadband wireless in their areas:

Tele2 is one of the first broadband fixed wireless services in the UK and has a tiny subscriber base of just 2,000 consumers. While wireless is slower than ADSL and cable, it can also work out cheaper -- for £19.99 a month Tele2 customers get an upload and download speed of just 150kbps. The premium service -- £34.99 a month -- offers 512kbps.

But Ovum analyst Yum Petkovic believes the pricing is an issue. "For £20 a month you would expect a bit more speed than 150k," she said. She is not convinced that broadband fixed wireless is going to be anything other than a niche player in the broadband market. "There are terrains and topography that it isn't suitable for and it's really an urban solution as you need tall buildings and a clear line of sight."

The government is keen to push broadband fixed wireless solutions and following the disastrous spectrum auction last summer is preparing to re-auction licences this summer. However while Tele2 can offer service up to 20 kilometres from the base station, the spectrum on offer from the government will cover far smaller distances.

It looks as if fixed broadband wireless will eventually become more commonplace and could potentially go head to head with Cable Modems and ADSL further into the future. At present current networks are marred by bandwidth limits, fluctuating speeds, coverage and poor additional services. More @ ZDNet.

Iomart Cuts 50 Jobs / Softens Broadband

By:mark.j @ 9:30:AM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Iomart, the ISP provider we recently reported to have begun trials of Rate Adaptive DSL (RADSL), has cut 50 jobs and blamed it on the process of LLU (local loop unbundling) and broadband availability.

Along with the slow process of LLU that's been affecting their more business orientated services, residential ADSL broadband take-up has also floundered. The ISP along with many analysts believe that the two contributing reasons are lack of awareness and cost.

Unless prices come down, coverage increases and adverts are placed on the TV in order to sell and explain the technology, little is likely to change and things will continue to progress slowly. If anything the slow rollout is forcing prices up and making it pointless to advertise the technology because most can't get.

Iomart now intends to do what so many providers have started to and focus more on business services, although residential offerings will remain intact. Ultimately coverage must be increased for the service to be viably advertised and thus prices coming down, this just isn't happening.

Security Services Become The Hackers

By:mark.j @ 9:19:AM - Comments (1) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

In a strange twist it now looks as if modern law & security services/forces could take up where hackers leave off, by using Trojan horse programs to monitor suspect’s data activities:

Codex Data Systems this week released information on Dirt (Data Interception by Remote Transmission), a Trojan horse program that can be used to carry out all the typical functions of outlawed software, like Back Orifice, Netbus and SubSeven.

Along with its boasts that it can bypass firewalls, is completely transparent while on a system and can be implemented in something as simple as a Word file, Dirt also claims to act as a "no knock electronic search warrant".

A recent US ruling found that the FBI can legally access computer systems outside of US national borders as part of an investigation. The hacker community has voiced suspicions that it's not abuse by them we should be worried about, but abuse of the tool by these law enforcement agencies.

The software is of course only for the eyes of top-secret security services and your average Joe probably shouldn't worry. It may even be a little naive to think that something like this would never happen, it's probably old news to MI5/6 by now. More @ VNUNet.

Nortels Fast Light Network (80Gbps)

By:mark.j @ 9:09:AM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Nortel is to demonstrate its new OPTera Connect PX technology at the Supercomm 2001 trade show in Atlanta later this week. The Fibre Optic based technology is widely believed to be one of the fastest communication technologies to date:

The PX redirects light from one optical fibre to another, without electronic conversion, using a micro-electro mechanical switch system with tiny moveable mirrors.

According to Nortel it can support 1,008 duplex ports at any line rate - including 10, 40 or 80 Gbps - so we're talking switching fabrics which can theoretically scale to Terrabits (though since servers and routers aren't up to this kind of speed yet this is a moot point).

Nortel's aims to leapfrogging Lucent's early lead by showing how non-optical devices can use the blistering fast speeds offered by an optical network, for applications such as optical virtual private networks (VPNs) and storage.

Good god, stick that in your ADSL pipe and smoke it, which is about our only comment on The Register's item. Not to worry, it's unlikely the residential market will see such things for another 100 years or so, by which time we'll be living on Mars and eating Alien animals - fun.

Virgin.NET For Sale - Again

By:mark.j @ 9:02:AM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Virgin.NET was to be Sir Richard Branson's first leap into the world of Internet access. Yet it never quite lifted off the ground and NTLs Takeover bid failed to finalise.

Today’s Financial Times Newspaper is now reporting that the Virgin.NET ISP is once again up for sale through the Lehman Brothers, it's last known value (NTL time) was £240Million.

The ISP isn't thought to be the most attractive prospect on the market and has somewhat failed to keep up with the times, this despite claims of being a Top 5 UK ISP. Analysts believe a sale could be difficult.

News - June 5,2001

Telewest To Increase Costs & Prices

By:mark.j @ 3:45:PM - Comments (4) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

With nearly 19,000 broadband Cable Modem customers under its belt and the weight of cable TV and phone users to follow that, Telewest may be small, but they're by no means tiny. Despite this the company has had some small problems and today predicted that consumers could be the ones to pay:

Telewest plans to increase revenue per customer to £60-70 in five years. It already earns the highest revenue per customer of any European cable company, partly through sales of premium subscription packages.

Finance director Charles Burdick said Ebitda should reach £80-90m in the fourth quarter following a £2 rise in the cost of most of its TV packages next month and lower broadband Internet prices, aimed at boosting customer numbers.

The company has leeway to raise prices on basic TV services. Telewest charged 8 percent to 25 percent less than satellite rival British Sky Broadcasting and ntl, the other cable operator, Burdick said.

The ZDNet item spells some relief for Cable Modem customers who had worried that Telewests long-term future could well include higher broadband charges; this doesn't appear to be the case. Although sadly users of their TV and or phone packages may find some increases in the coming years.

Tiscali Re-Introduces Itself

By:mark.j @ 3:37:PM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

The Italian Telco and ISP provider, Tiscali, have today re-introduced themselves at the World Internet Conference. After having shed 250-300 jobs from their subsidiaries in the UK, such as World Online and LibertySurf, the group are now ready to launch their centralised ISP operations.

Heralding themselves as, "the leading Internet communications company in Europe", Tiscali will now go on to introduce their new business ISP services (VISPs, Hosting, Streaming Media and Broadband etc.).

So far there's been no mention of how the residential products and offerings will merge and whether or not they'll adopt a centralised image. We'll just have to wait and see, more soon.

UUNet ISP Suffers Another Service Outage

By:mark.j @ 3:31:PM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Poor old UUNet, they've thus far suffered one of the UKs largest ever SPAM attacks and more recently lost 430 jobs due to the economic downturn. Today didn't bring any good news either when the service suffered a further outage, which UUNet blames on LINX (London Internet Exchange):

According to a connectivity report on ISP UUNet's Web site, some of its business customers had trouble getting online.

"It is currently believed that this was due to a problem within the London Internet Exchange, which caused bogus routes to be propagated onto the UUNet network," a statement reads. To resolve the problem, UUNet engineers had to perform emergency maintenance and normal service is now resumed. "UUNet regrets any inconvenience caused to its customers at this time," the statement ends.

The ZDNet item highlights the latest problem in UUNets somewhat troubled start to 2001, although LINX remain unsure exactly how their service could have caused the outage.

NTLs Guildford Network Restructuring

By:mark.j @ 9:58:AM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Thanks to all for pointing the following important NTL announcement out:

Planned Maintenance at Guildford will take place tonight, specifically 5th June at 1:00am, and will last approx 5 hours. This is due to network restructuring at Guildford, various Routers and Switches are being reconfigured/moved in Guildford to stabilise the network.

All services will be at risk for the duration of the outage. Customers may see intermittent connectivity problems with these services. The news service in particular will be at risk during this maintenance.

This update is important because Guildfords networking houses some crucial connections for NTLs global services. If all goes to plan then most people won't notice any problems due to the upgrades taking place so early.

It'd probably still be wise to disconnect your broadband or unmetered connections and avoid any large file transfers and thus possible corruption. Another point to note is that what NTL actually mean is June 6th @ 1am, since we'll be into the next day by then.

Vispa Announce FreeCall For NTL Users

By:mark.j @ 8:25:AM - Comments (3) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Vispa Internet (Connect) have today announced that they will also be supporting unmetered access for NTL (Cable) customers through an 0808 number. This shouldn't come as a surprise since Vispa and LogicSurf (yesterday) are closely linked:

PRESS RELEASE : NTL Customers can take advantage of Vispa Unmetered

Following recent information sent a couple of days ago regarding Vispa's Unmetered Access offering, we have since obtained quite a bit of feedback from customers and visitors.

Speaking to NTL staff and obtaining information from NTL's customers, we are now of the understanding that NTL lineline customers (not cable) can also benefit from the up and coming Unmetered Access from Vispa.

We also speaking to Kingston, Eurobell and Telewest regarding the situation to call 0808 numbers, however we have received little or no help from the above mentioned. Feedback from visitors to this site who use these Telco's would be most welcome, drop these messages to pressoffice@vispa.com

To also add, beta test places are still available, email sales@vispa.net for further details.

Vispa Internet Limited
http://www.vispa.net

Essentially this sounds like good news for all 0808 unmetered providing ISPs, although the following sentence doesn't exactly inspire us:

we are now of the understanding that NTL lineline customers (not cable) can also benefit from the up and coming Unmetered Access from Vispa.

By lineline they probably meant to say landline, or in other words, BT etc. copper wires converted directly to the Cable network, not Fibre Optic. If true then this is nothing new, we've known 0808 is freecall for such connections for sometime due to still going through BTs network.

Sadly this also means that the holy grail of unmetered choice for users of Telewest and NTLs primary fibre optic phone networks remains invisible. We hope to get some confirmation on this ASAP.

News - June 4,2001

DSLAM Upgrades For ADSL To RADSL

By:mark.j @ 3:26:PM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

ADSLGuide has posted a quick mention of how BTIgnite are planning to upgrade their DSLAMs, mostly to make them work properly with the forthcoming RADSL system (compatible with ADSL):

It involves a pilot upgrade of six Alcatel DSLAM's on 8th June. Which if successful will result in the rest of the Alcatel DSLAM's having their firmware upgraded between 16th and 19th June.

On 23rd June for Fujitsu DSLAM's and 24th June for Alcatel DSLAM's, BTignite will change the configuration for all USB service customers to switch over to RADSL configuration. This effectively means all USB ADSL users will become USB RADSL users.

For the record, RADSL = (Rate Adaptive), almost identical to ADSL except with a more fluctuating upstream transmission that ultimately allows for greater distance coverage.

Hotmail Users Beware

By:mark.j @ 3:22:PM - Comments (2) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

There's an uneasy lack of ISP news today, that said and Microsofts Hotmail system isn't doing so hot at present either. Apparently a new vulnerability has been discovered that's causing some users a lot of hassle:

The vulnerability allows an attacker to create an e-mail containing an HTML link that can act as a worm. If clicked by a user of one of the vulnerable Web-based e-mail services, the HTML code will execute, making it possible to manipulate the person's in-box and send e-mail, said Matt Parcens, the independent software specialist who discovered the flaw.

"The webworm has serious short-term danger, but less of a danger in the long term," he said in an e-mail. "For the webworm to be active, a hole must exist on the same server that serves the mail. This limits the number of possible holes dramatically."

If properly coded, the HTML link could forward itself to the sender of every e-mail stored in the victim's in-box, Parcens said. The result: a deluge of e-mail.

According to ZDNet the problem has now been fixed, so rest easy if you're a user of the service and we know many of you are. Always be cautious of E-Mails with strange links or attachments of any kind, especially VBS or EXE.

Fasthost Users Remain Disgruntled

By:mark.j @ 3:17:PM - Comments (4) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Some of you may remember that the Website Hosting / ISP Company, Fasthosts, last week suffered a collosal 36 hour outage. Apparently since then things haven't improved much and again last night some users were left without a service.

This has brought to light their 100% stability statement and redundancy backup through Telewest, which doesn't seem to have kicked in:

While the exact cause of that outage still remains unclear (Fasthosts said it might be due to failure of a router managed on its behalf by BT), Fasthosts' customers have questioned why the network redundancy the hosting firm states it uses, didn't help lift the blackout.

On its Web site, Fasthosts said its Telewest connection "is completely independent of BT's network". It also said UUNet's "excellent service level guarantees to Fasthosts enable us to ensure your Internet service is available 100 per cent of the time".

Andrew Michael, Fasthosts managing director, said that the data flood which caused Fasthosts outage last week was targeted at its IP address which "means that it doesn't matter how much redundancy you have in your routing - all lines will be flooded".

The Register's item shows how the large provider is still suffering problems and how BT blames Fasthosts and vica versa. We don't doubt most customers would just wish they'd shut up and get back to fixing things.

ADSL Availability Checker Working

By:mark.j @ 8:43:AM - Comments (8) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

We missed this one last week, but according to ADSLGuide BT have now fixed up their ADSL Availability Checker with updated information and a proper/working postcode checker. Might be worth checking availability if you failed before, still no sign of a similar system for RADSL, we'll probably have to wait until after the trials.

Open Source SpeedTouch USB Drivers

By:mark.j @ 8:38:AM - Comments (1) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

According to BTOpenwoe, you can now get open source drivers for the Alcatel SpeedTouch USB adaptor. In other words intelligent Linux users and those with a BSD O/S should find this link interesting:

http://www.xsproject.org/speedtouch/

News - June 3,2001

LogicSurf Spells Good News For NTL Customers

By:mark.j @ 12:38:PM - Comments (5) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

According to the Managing Director of LogicSurf Internet, Steve Hubbard, customers of the NTL cable network will be pleased to hear that they'll soon have some more unmetered options:

Good news for logicsurf 0800 and NTL customers.
I have just had conformation from NTL rep saying that 0808 number will be free on NTL lines, which means logicsurf internet will be again offering to all NTL and BT customers.

Steve also let slip about some of the prices they intend to charge, which could be between £13 and £13.99 per month.

ISP Review Weekly Update

By:mark.j @ 10:18:AM - - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

I'm going to keep this week’s update to a much shorter length than usual; this is because my mother has become quite ill with an unknown virus. She now seems disabled to the point that her feet are so painful that she can no longer walk and is feeling extremely unwell.

Due to this unforeseen turn of events I'm putting almost all ISPr articles, reviews and code improvements off for a week or two as I go to help since nobody else is around to. I should still manage some news updates, although please take general questions and info. to the other staff.

Back to ISP Review and the last week has certainly been full of work, primarily on the forums. We've managed to update them to the latest code base and also introduced all the original features + a few extra ones. There's still a lot to do and requested features will steadily be implemented.

The new 'Readers Top 50' has also been officially commissioned and we're waiting to here what our coder says about it. We should know more next week, although whether there's a weekly update or not depends on my mothers health.

Finally we'd like to apologise to the ISPs whom we had stated would get their services reviewed this week, it's clearly going to be delayed. We'd understand if you choose to put a week’s hold on the review account, it's up to you. Expect an important update sometime during the week, but for now – enjoy the weekend.

LogicSurf Internet Update On Unmetered

By:mark.j @ 9:54:AM - Comments (0) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Today certainly seems to be full of interesting ISP news and updates. Next it's the turn of unmetered ISP newcomer, LogicSurf Internet, whom have now announced some kind of launch date in their update to pre-subscribers.

Just a quick note that 0800 service WILL be launched in July and at this rate maybe the first week. We can also Guarantee that WE WILL HAVE a lower price than most 0800 ISPs. Make sure anyone that wants 0800 get signed up to 0845 service to be part of this wonderful offer.

To get an idea we will be placing Pre-Signup page on the website which will be open to ANYONE wanting to be apart of 0800 24/7 access. Just so we can get an idea of who wants what. We can promise that we will be lower than most 0800 ISPs.

LogicSurf appear to be doing a good job with their 0845 system and hopefully this will smoothly pass over to the 0800. We're also intrigued by the 'low price promise', especially considering that most providers are now offering a variety of options.

Whether this means they'll go even lower than £12.99 per month we don't know, although good luck to them all the same. Thanks to Richard for the heads up on this one.

Iomart Introduce Trial RADSL Packages

By:mark.j @ 9:38:AM - Comments (2) - SendNews [HERE] / PrintNews [HERE]

Thanks to one of Iomart's ISPs, Madasafish, for informing us that they've become one of the first ADSL providers to announce their product list for RADSL (Rate Adaptive) services - HERE.

The new packages are currently under trial and for those that can't remember, RADSL allows ADSL style technology to be pushed further than 3.5KM from the exchange (Up to 6KM). Iomart's RADSL packages apparently include CopperSurf SOHO 500, 500, 1000 and 2000, all of which use ADSL style technology (The RA is in the network itself).

Despite this we could only find CopperSurf SOHO 500 as being a package that actually takes advantage of RADSL properly, with its 5.5KM range. The rest still retain their 3.5KM reach for unknown reasons. The details for this offer are as follows:

576Kbps Downstream
64 - 288Kbps Upstream
24:1 Contention
Static IP
Modem Included
5.5KM Reach From Exchange
AntiVirus & Firewall Software Included
-£95 Per Month
-£100 Connection

Further Information

Rate Adaptive ADSL providing home workers and single PC users with a real cost effective alternative to ISDN. Date Rates - Downstream 576Kbs max. - Rate Adaptive Upstream 64Kbs - 288Kbs max.

To browse through our ADSL equipment for this product please click here.

NOTE
An additional monthly charge for CopperSurf 500,1000 & 2000 packages can provide your business with a non-nat configuration with a choice of either 2 or 6 IP addresses.

We must confess to finding that while the connection charge may be much cheaper than most, the monthly cost of £95 for home usage seems excessive, although the options for this offer aren't so bad.