Posts by Terry Barnes 670 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2008
There aren't very many - lots of mergers, lots of companies who've gone to the wall. The only way those wafer thin margins can work for you is to have scale. Look at the telecoms companies around a decade ago, look at how many are still around. Sometimes the brand survives even if the company behind it has gone.
But the cost of your text is greater than just the unit cost of the message transfer. Among the more obvious ones are the handset subsidies.
£500M profit can't be judged as good or bad unless you understand the revenue it took to achieve it. If the profit margin is 50%, hurrah, if it's 2% boo. If the margin is tiny, it's really easy for the market to turn that into a loss when the next step in the race to the bottom gets enacted - and then your loan repayments get more expensive, your share price falls and the shareholders who actually own your business start demanding even more cost cuts.
"For most big publicly listed companies, the old style belt & braces & and a spare pair of trousers approach to vital big-tech doesn't happen anymore."
That's because people aren't prepared to pay the prices that such an approach would result in. Almost everyone buys on price - the cheaper the better. The choice providers face is to take out cost and remain competitive - but less resilient - or to stick with the belts and braces, lose customers and go bust.
Generally, providers are responding to market requirements, and what the market is saying is "cheap as chips". A provider who spends a lot on resilience has higher prices and finds that they don't then have any customers.
It's not really about providers absolving responsibility or outsourcing, it's about the decisions they have to make to hit a price point that customers will pay for.
Britain has amongst the cheapest telecoms in Europe - and those low prices are driven by the market. There is a flipside to those low prices however, and that's constrained investment and engineering to meet a cost.
I buy resilient services to meet the SLAs my customers need - but the cost of that can be eye-watering. Thousands of pounds a month for resilient 100M Ethernet between two fairly close sites, for example. If you're used to paying £15 a month for consumer broadband the prices you get for proper, carrier-grade resilience look like decimal point errors. Anyway - the point of my post is this - if you want it to always work without question, you need to pay a lot of money. If you want it to be cheap, you'll get something that works most of the time.
Fairly standard practice in telecoms to have emergency gear provided by someone else for just such a scenario. Mobile techs carry phones on other networks, telephone exchanges have lines provided that are long-lined back to a different exchange served from a different major node.
There's nothing worse than realising on a 3am callout that your first line tools and techniques aren't enough to resolve an issue and then not being able to call for help.
It is distasteful - but what's the alternative? One thing we've learnt from nearly 20 years of mass-market Internet is that people won't pay to use the services they want. Advertising can plug the gap between what a service provider spends and what they earn, but people don't much like it.
It's the Holy Grail of the web, but a new model that lets service providers make a return on what they provide consumers has to be found. Eventually VCs and investors will tire of pumping money into businesses whose only model for success is "get lots of users and hope the advertisers are interested". What comes after that? I don't know.
Erm, there's the directory underpinning it all and the application itself.
If you don't believe their service is acceptable, don't use it. I don't believe Skype is compulsory.
I don't use it everyday, but I do if I go abroad for work or pleasure. I'm happy to pay Skype an amount of money far smaller than my mobile phone provider would require for the ability to stay in touch and see my kids.
No, because data transmission has always been measured in bits per second. If you want to create a new marketing led unit of measure, I don't know - a netnit or something, fill your boots, but using bits per second will always be the standard.
(Try using bytes to measure terminal to terminal throughput if you're using a line protocol like 7N1 and then complain about having to do maths).
Many European manufacturers (French, Italian) pulled out of the US market in the early 80's after rules seemingly designed specifically to exclude them from the market were introduced. Essentially a law was passed saying that cars had to become significantly more efficient on fuel - somewhere around 25%.
This was easy for US manufacturers to achieve as they just had to tune their engines properly, maybe fit something smaller than 3 litres in even the tiniest car. European manufacturers who tended to sell small, already efficient, cars couldn't achieve the required savings whilst also complying with new safety rules that required them to fit huge, heavy bumpers that ruined aerodynamics and increased weight.
Your GPRS phone would work on a GPRS network when one was launched however. This Apple thing won't work on 4G in the UK even when 4G launches.
Do you think I should be allowed to import devices designed to run on 110V and describe them as 'mains powered' to UK customers?
The mess of 4G standards isn't of Apple's making, but it's their choice to include the claim in their marketing stuff.
...but could you type ZAP, PING, SHOOT or EXPLODE like you could on an Oric-1?
My dad bought me an Oric-1 from Laskys - the complete lack of software availability (without ordering games from France using bad schoolboy French) led me to learn how to program and ultimately to a career in IT. And an understanding of how technical superiority means nothing if the public don't buy your product.
Because it's a valid thing to do. Indian call centre rings UK customer of UK bank, it shows the 0800 number of the bank instead of an Indian number that can't receive incoming calls. The next call is to a US customer of the same bank and the presentation number shows the local 1-800 number for the US customer to call.
How could it be fraud? The number that gets presented is valid for the organisation making the call. One Indian call centre could be making outbound calls on behalf of the bank to customers in the UK, France, the US, Netherlands, Australia. There's no point in presenting a +91 number, no-one will ring it back and the individual making the call almost certainly can't receive incoming calls anyway. It's much better to present the 0800 or equivalent number to the person being called so that they can choose to return the call to the bank if need be.
Your suggestion wouldn't always work - as there are UK telcos that don't police presentation numbers actively. A call that originates in the UK can have a duff presentation number just as well as one that originates in India. It can on;y be policed by the telco or service provider who are first in the chain.
It's a little more complicated than that. People are allowed to buy presentation numbers - this is where the number that appears is the inbound number for the caller, rather than the number they're calling from. If a UK bank has a call centre in India, there's no point showing an Indian CLI, it's more useful to everyone to show the UK number that the person receiving the call can ring back if need be.
That's well policed by the larger telcos - normally it's all part of a package - voice VPN and call centre traffic management out to India, outbound calling plan, presentation DNs. The caller might be in India, the call might not enter the PSTN until it reaches the UK.
The issue comes when calls are passed between telcos, two or three or four times - how could you police that? How could you maintain a white or black list when there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of calls a day, and numbers change on a daily basis? Telcos have to trust each other or the whole system falls apart - and that's where careless or rogue behaviour can allow things like CLI spoofing to propagate.
It's not as easy as that alas. Thieves steal lengths of cable - where a two mile cable might be made up of four half mile lengths jointed together. Even the most skilled cable jointer finds it tricky to join a length of fibre into two lengths of copper. So, to replace with fibre you'd need to do the whole length, and then have somewhere to terminate it. It's the difference between being out of service for a day or two while a new length is run in and jointed, or several weeks while a new cabinet is installed to terminate fibre.
What? 120VAC might be enough to penetrate skin, but it being half the voltage of the UK's supply, the resultant current flow would be rather less. You'd be really unlucky to end up dead. Telephone engineers work live on phone lines in the UK that carry a ringing voltage of over 100VAC with no precautions. It stings, it's not dangerous. You've not explained how someone would actually be exposed to such a hypothetical risk anyway - I believe even US mains leads tend to come with their conductors insulated.
!2v adaptors damaging your car? How so? Your fag lighter socket is fused and it floats straight across the battery. If you think plugging in an adaptor lead can generate electrical nastiness, just think what horrors could result from something like a, ooh I don't know, solenoid and high powered starting motor could do.
Fluctuating output doesn't matter, because the voltage is floated across the laptop's battery. If it gets too high it'll blow the fuse in the laptop's charging circuit.
I've been using a £5 eBay lead to run my Acer Aspire One in the car for the last three years. It was made in China, it is fused, it's well built. I have an inverter too, but I've never used it to power my laptop - it's crazy inefficient to convert 12VDC to 240VAC just to go back to 18VDC.
It can't be a mobile - the whole point is immediately being able to identify the premises the call is coming from. Signal triangulation is of course possible but the advantage of using a fixed line is that the CLI lookup has taken place and the address presented to the emergency operator before they've even answered the call.
Working when there's no electricity? A fairly sensible requirement because a number of potential emergencies can render mains inoperative.
Crikey, that's a good 192K of RAM between those four Orics. I just hope they've used the 27 years since the first Atmos was launched to correct the dodgy tape-handling routines, or there'll be some upset customers out there. I always found turning the treble right up and using metal tapes helped.
Wasn't the Atmos V2.0 called the Stratos though? Demo-ed the day before Oric went bust, to be then bought by a French company called Eureka and launched some months later with a Minitel modem and renamed the Telestrat...
Content Delivery Network.
Overlay IP network, not part of the Internet - used to get data from a content provider to a point as close to the recipient as possible. Means that on demand services aren't screwed by 'best efforts' Internet routing or congestion. The most well known company doing this is Akamai, but BT do it for their Vision service.
Contentious because a CDN isn't compatible with the concept of net neutrality. Many people will argue about this for years, others will just enjoy the video on demand working properly.
The problem with that model is that it still costs the ISP the same regardless of the speed you get. If ISPs were forced to charge less if your sync speed was lower than expected the end result would be ISPs declining to offer you service. Why would they? At best they'd make a reduced profit from you, at worst a loss. Easier just to say "no thanks" to anyone who lives more than a mile from the exchange.
I don't think a BT Vision customer and someone downloading free films are likely to be the same person. The Register's readership isn't an accurate cross-section of society - I'd guess there are more downloaders here than in society at large.
Sample size of one - I've got BT Vision, but I've never free downloaded a film or CD. If I want something I pay for it, if I can't afford it I don't have it.
We need to be sure that whatever clean up operation takes places is viable for thousands of years - and we need to find a reliable way of telling our descendants that this would be a really bad spot in the future for a maternity hospital or swimming pool or spinach farm.
Remember that society sometimes regresses instead of evolving, knowledge and skill can be lost. People in 500 year's time may have no idea what a geiger counter is or know how to read documents we wrote warning them to stay well away. Hell, we're not even able to get at the operating manuals for computers stored on obsolete floppy disk systems from 30 years ago. How do you ensure knowledge transfer for 1,000 years or more?
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