Networking

TalkTalk Admits To Free Broadband Cock Up
With its bottom spanked raw by a damning expose on the BBC’s Watchdog programme, beleaguered TalkTalk boss Charles Dunstone has admitted that they screwed up the launch of their free broadband service.
As we reported in June this year, the company – owned by the Carphone Warehouse – was experiencing problems keeping up with demand for their ‘free’ broadband offer which gave punters unlimited landline telephone calls and broadband access for £20 per month (plus a one-off £29.99 connection fee.)
After the launch of the service in April, more than half a million people signed up, but thousands failed to get connected and were forced to endure interminably lengthy waits on pay-per-minute helplines.
Speaking to the BBC’s Watchdog programme, Dunstone admitted the company bungled the launch, saying that the company had been overwhelmed by the number of people signing up, with their call centre staff unable to deal with customer demand.
“I got it wrong. I didn’t realise that free broadband was going to have the effect on people it has,” he whimpered.
Charles feels your pain
Clearly displaying a penchant for understatement, Dunstone commented in his blog: “We have had our fair share of negative publicity of late, and I more than anyone know how frustrating it has been trying to get through to us if you had a problem.”
We somehow doubt that he knows how frustrated Vie Marshall, from London was with his company.
The Watchdog site reports that after signing up in May 2006, Talk Talk completely failed to connect her to the Internet, even managing to lose her details three times.
She soon learnt all about how useless their call centre was too, on one occasion spending 56 minutes 40 seconds waiting on the line.
Donald Beal, was so fed up with TalkTalk’s crap customer service that he cancelled his contract after seven weeks, only to find that the company continued to bill him for a further two months – even though they’d already acknowledged his cancellation request.
They then went on to ignore his letters, emails and phone calls before referring his account to debt collectors.
TalkTalk broadband is, err, a “beautiful child”
After admitting that it had been a “bruising experience for everyone at Carphone Warehouse”, the relentlessly upbeat Dunstone chirped on, “as things start to improve, I hope people will appreciate that what we did was for the best for all consumers, and whilst giving birth to free broadband was painful, it is now turning out to be a beautiful child.”
He added that the company has now hired more staff and that by Christmas, anyone calling a TalkTalk call centre will get to speak to a living, breathing human, not a robotic automaton. Too kind, Charles!
Even with the extra call staff, TalkTalk has said that it can still take anything up to a month for the broadband connection to be turned on after the telephone ‘go-live’ date.
TalkTalk (don’t all rush now!) Dunstone’s blog
4 October, 2006
NTL 4 for £40 quad-play announced
NTL, UK Cable provider, has announced a quad-play offering for £40.
The ‘4 for £40’ service (with the inevitable Virgin-inspired foreplay joke to come) is the first product of the tie-up between Virgin Mobile and NTL.
As we’ve reported extensively, all of the communication world is bringing out packages that bring together various elements of communication as mobile phone companies get together with fixed-line broadband providers. The additional part with the NTL deal is the Digital TV.
The ‘4 for £40’ package includes:
Broadband
- Up to 2Mb with no limits on downloads
- Firewall and anti-virus software included
- Installed by an expert and modem included
Digital TV
- Over 30 channels, including Sky One, UKTV Gold, E4, Film4, ITV2 and LIVINGtv
- On demand access to a huge library of programmes and films – watch what you want, when you want
- Set-top box included and no need for a dish
Home phone
- Unlimited weekend calls to any UK landline
- Highly competitive mobile rates and simple tariffs at other times
- Standard features including 1471 and 1571 voicemail
Mobile
A Virgin Mobile SIM
300 texts and 300 minutes a month, plus free voicemail
Access to Virgin Mobile Bites entertainment service

One interesting feature is that the broadband offered is unlimited, which is bound to appeal to the tech savvy.

NTL 4 for £40 quad-play announced Bigging the service up and attempting to create extra excitement for the future, Neil Berkett, chief operating officer of ntl Telewest, enthused: “Quadplay demonstrates the unique power of the cable-Virgin Mobile union and this is just the beginning. Our new package represents unbeatable value while meeting a wide range of consumers’ entertainment and communication needs.

Current subscribers to NTL won’t be left out in the cold, they’ll be able to take advantage of the new service for an additional £10/month on top of their current packages.

NTL. (Strangely for such a big launch, the NTL site hasn’t been updated with details of the 4 for £40, at the time of publishing.)

27 September, 2006

Orange Unique/Unik Offers Converged VoIP/Mobile Telephony

Orange Unique Offers Converged VoIP/Mobile Telephony Orange has launched, nay unleashed, the Unique phone, its first converged service using a single handset that connects via WLAN in the home and then switches to the regular mobile network when the user goes walkabout.

Initially rolling out in the UK and selected European countries, the phone promises unlimited free VoIP calls from home to other Orange mobiles and landlines.

Calls can be seamlessly switched between the Orange mobile network and VoIP, with screen icons keeping customers constantly informed of the network connection.

Interestingly, calls started from home remain free, even when the user has wandered out of their front door and out of range of their Wi-Fi network, causing the phone to switch to the mobile network.

To use the service, customers must get an Orange Livebox which lets users connect to the Orange network via Wi-Fi.

Households can have up to six Unique phones, although there is a limitation on their use, with only three users allowed to use the Internet or make calls at any time.

Orange Unique Offers Converged VoIP/Mobile Telephony So far, only the Motorola A910, the Nokia 6136 and the Samsung P200 can be used with the service, but more phones will be launched in 2007.

Two price plans are currently on offer; the Canary 50 (offering 600 minutes per month) and the Panther 65 (1,200 mins), priced at £50 and £65 respectively.

A broadband connection is bundled in free with the convergence-tastic deal, with the setup offering clear benefits to users, who’ll now only need one phone, one number, one address book, and one bill from Orange.

The service will be available from November, although punters keen to be hip with the convergence crew can pre-register their interest here: www.orange.co.uk/uniquephone

THUS Preferred Supplier For HSBC

THUS preferred supplier for HSBC THUS, the communications provider that owns the Demon brand has announced it has become the preferred supplier for HSBC in the UK. The contract is expected to be around £50m plus over 5 years.

The contract covers connectivity for all their branches, ATMs etc (2,200 UK sites).

THUS recently sold off Demon Internet in the Netherlands to KPN, which means they have paid off most, if not all, of their debt and puts them in a very positive position compared to many UK telecoms providers.

THUS preferred supplier for HSBC THUS also recently acquired Your Comms (a business telco based in the North of England) and Legend, a smallish ISP with a portfolio of VoIP products. Other acquisitions must be on their mind.

Consumer Broadband is free, concentrate on business services
The consumer broadband market is rapidly becoming commoditised, which is good for the customer, though margins are extremely low, so providers need to find other revenue streams to make services pay for themselves.

Though Demon in the past have had lots of consumer customers, they have wisely concentrated on the business markets. Business broadband can still command premiums, as it allows customers to utilise services such as VoIP. Customers who want quality of service can even use broadband to connect to THUS’ backbone MPLS network so allowing teleworking and VPN’s to be securely provisioned.

THUS isn’t as big as several other telcos (in terms of customers or revenue), and in the recent past, they may have looked like a buy-out opportunity, however as they’ve concentrated on services that make them real revenue the tables may have turned with them becoming a threat to other bigger players who could be acquisition targets themselves.

Vodafone Casa Fastweb Comes To Life

Vodafone Casa Fastweb Comes To Life In the general rush of all mobile phone companies desperately try not to get sidelined, Vodafone Italy have just announced a tie-up with Italian broadband provider, FastWeb.

Customers will be be able to use their normal Vodafone services on their mobiles, make mobile voice calls to fixed line phones at fixed rates whilst at home and have access to Fastweb’s broadband network, which covers approximately half the population of Italy at speeds of up to 20Mbps.

Vodafone Casa Fastweb Comes To Life FastWeb bill themselves as “Italy’s leading alternative broadband provider,” and with under a million customers (874,300), they’ll benefit from having Vodafone selling their services from Vodafone shops around Italy as well as to their current 24m cellular customers.

If mobile companies don’t start offering fixed line services, they feel they’ll lose customers to people who do, with the single bill for all communications being the strongest pull.

We recently reported that O2 Germany has gone the same route offering DSL, Vodafone UK tied up with BT and Vodafone Germany launched similar services on 1 Sept.

Vodafone Italy
FastWeb

Sky Broadband DRM Woes Halt Films

Sky Broadband DRM Woes Halt Films Sky has hit the pause button on delivering films (known by some as movies) and sport via their Sky By Broadband service, due to cracks in Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM software.

Sky has put an announcement on their site,

In order to make an essential update to the Sky by broadband security system, we are sorry that access to all movies and some sports content has been temporarily suspended. This does not affect your computer and content can still be bookmarked for future use. We will keep you posted on progress and apologise for any inconvenience.

Clearly being a big bash for the service, it must be of great embarrassment for all concerned. Content owners from around the world – especially those within the News International family, Fox, etc – will be throwing a dizzy fit, having bought the technologies companies long-lasting pitch that DRM is essential for the survival of the content biz. You see, most of them feel their clients are not to be trusted with the content,that they’re so used to having.

Sky Broadband DRM Woes Halt Films Background
A couple of weeks ago, a little software app called FreeUse4WM appeared, that stripped the Digital Rights Management (DRM) from any content, be that audio or video, held in the Windows Media format.

Following this, Microsoft threw people at fixing the problems – they had to, as it laid bare all of the content that it was supposed to protect. Sitting back with a smug look on their faces (we imagine), they must have choked on their latte’s when version 1.2 of FreeUse4WM came out, cracking the DRM and exposing the content again. It’s understood that Microsoft are working on the fix for v1.2.

Security of all sorts is just a game of cat and mouse, with no absolute guarantees – security company created protection

Huawei: “Who are We?” If You’re In Comms, You’ll Be Finding Out

Huawei: In 2004 the networking giant Cisco sued a little-known Chinese company called Huawei for IP (Intellectual Property) theft. Some two months later the case was dropped and settled out of court. Huawei promised to modify their designs, change their software and manuals. Rumours circulating at the time alleged that the Chinese government got involved and told Cisco that if they wanted to operate in China, they should leave Huawei alone.

Huawei was started by People’s Liberation Army officer Ren Zhengfei in 1988, specialising in the research and development of communications systems.

In the west the initial push has been towards core networking equipment for carriers and ISPs (markets which have historically been dominated by Cisco). In this market, Cisco’s normal approach was to offer a base product, then charge extra for additional software feature sets. Huawei’s approach is …. more generous, they include the all of the ‘extras’, while pricing the system around 60% of what Cisco charges for the base platform alone.

Support – throwing people at it
Low, all-inclusive pricing isn’t Huawei’s only winning approach.

If a large customer of Cisco reports a problem, it goes into their tracking system and the customer might be lucky if it’s looked at in a few days. If it’s identified as a bug, it might take a few weeks to isolate and fix.

Huawei: In China engineering talent is relatively cheap and their universities produce very high class students (and lots of them). This brings Huawei another advantage – huge manpower. When bugs are passed to Huawei, they go to their pool of, something like, 20,000 engineers, leading to the faults being tracked and fixed extremely quickly.

The Big Boys are buying Huawei too
Slowly Huawei started to make big inroads into the high-end markets. BT has even selected them as part of their 21st Century Network, (21CN). It’s rumoured in the market, that this will lead to the demise of Marconi (who failed to be selected, even though they’d been a partner of BT for decades).

Cisco – that’s just the start
If you’re in any form of communication business, don’t kick back and think, “Well Cisco needs a competitor. We should be OK.” Huawei’s plans extend far beyond merely eating Cisco’s lunch.

If you get a chance to wander into Huawei’s showroom in China, you may be lucky enough to get taken into a hangar the size of a football field. In one small area there’s the ISP/Telcocore kit, we’ve mentioneed. The rest of the space is filled with other technologies such as IN (Intelligent Network – the brains behind telco voice networks), GSM, GPRS, Edge, 3G, NGN (Next Generation Networks i.e. IP-based voice and data networks like BT’s 21CN), xDSL (both end-user and network), optical (driving fibres), routers and LAN switches and of course consumer devices for it all.

Huawei are currently supplying all sorts of companies. Ever wondered who makes the new USB 3G datacard for Vodafone (the USB one that works on Windows, Mac and Linux)? Huawei.

Initially Huawei picked a ‘small’ market to concentrate on, but now they’re ready to attack the bigger ones. They have the equipment, and the resources to make a huge dent into the existing players markets of all sorts. It won’t just be Cisco suffering.

Huawei

BT Vision Buys From BT/Entriq

Entriq Gets Into Bed With BT BT Media and Broadcast the business to business outfit within BT’s Global services division has announced an alliance with Entriq.

It’s a change for BT Media and Broadcast (BT M&B), who’ve in the past received coverage at Digital Lifestyles for their efforts to offload their satellite TV interests to have some positive news to announce.

The BT Media and Broadcast/Entriq combination has already landed an important customer in the shape of BT Vision, who as well as planning to roll out of a ipTV customer proposition to the home at the end of this year, have a live ‘download to own service’ at www.downloadstore.bt.com.

Barry Bonnett BT M&B’s CEO, aware that some cynics may think BT signing with BT rather convenient, noted that the tender was “highly competitive,” and that, “BT Vision recognised the quality of service and cost effectiveness of our overall network based capability.”

Entriq, who are in the business of developing and managing Pay Media infrastructure, is part of the South African publishing and media conglomerate Naspers. Naspers, as well as having the successful consumer TV platform Multichoice in South Africa, has technology interests that include the Conditional Access company Irdeto.

Entriq Gets Into Bed With BT Headquartered in San Diego, California, Entriq have offices dotted around the world and have a host of existing big name broadcast customers that includes MTV Networks, NBC Universal and the UK’s Channel 4 television.

More PE Takeover Talk At NTL

The much heralded NTL/Telewest merger, expected to be the saviour of the UK cable industry, has become the subject of another Private Equity takeover rumour and the likely winner, if it goes ahead, is Richard Branson.

A quick recap
Branson did a deal with NTL that saw Virgin mobile become part of a four-play (geddit?) proposition, allowing the operation to use the Virgin brand and in return received 10.6% of the company. The merger of the three companies has not yet bedded in, and customers across the country are still waiting for the promised improvements in the notoriously poor levels of customer support.

Flextech the programming arm of the company, which was up for sale at the time of the earlier merger (I hope you’re paying attention), is likely to again be offered up for acquisition to media companies. A great way for potential new investors to make a chuck of their cash back.

Market reaction
The market has viewed the possible takeover positively, as it considered the cable company is still under valued following its 20% share price drop in the last three months. More recently shares in the company, quoted in the US, gained around 8% last week, on the possible fresh takeover.

What would the impact be?
If a takeover goes ahead, then the focus will be on installing a strong management team to leverage the offering against well established competition from BT and the newer entrants to the market, like Tiscali whose purchase of Homechoice has put them in the triple-play space, and Sky who are rolling out a broadband proposition under their own well known brand.

Tiscali Take Over HomeChoice

Tiscali Take Over HomeChoice HomeChoice have agreed to be taken over ISP Tiscali in exchange for 11.5% of their new owner.

The tenacity of HomeChoice has always impressed us. They’ve been going for years and have just refused to give up. Getting started in the days when Video on Demand meant asking to rent a video from your local video rental shop, they’ve been through quite a number of investment rounds, some so severe that the investors ended up with nothing.

Never hitting big numbers, the writing has been on the wall for them, what with Sky getting into broadband, NTL re-enlivining themselves with Virgin mobile and BT Vision on the horizon.

Tiscali Take Over HomeChoice HomeChoice has been settled on around 45,000 subscribers for quite a while now as they’ve been restricted to operating within London and some areas to its north. They just haven’t had the investment available to unbundle anymore exchanges beyond the 145 they have to spread their service. Their original expansion was hampered by the huge cost BT used to charge them for the Visionstream service they needed to run the service.

The last murmur about HomeChoice was that Sky was casting their eye in their direction, but we suspect that this was floated by the company itself to try and flush potential suitors out of the wood work.

As to why Tiscali has bought them …
It’s likely that Tiscali feels they need to move fast to avoid becoming sidelined by the other companies putting themselves forward as the Big Boys in the ISP/IPTV/Phone market.

Tiscali Take Over HomeChoice By buying HomeChoice they’ll start with something they can build on, rather than having to start from scratch, giving them a time advantage. This is made very real by gaining 145 unbundled exchanges within London taking Tiscali to a total of 330 country-wide.

Homechoice has also spent quite a lot of effort in the last year building up their content relationships, creating niche programming.

As to the backend iron that HomeChoice is using to power the VOD – it may be that is getting a bit long in the tooth these days.

Don’t forget Tiscali don’t actually have to put their hands in their pockets either, just swap stock.

HomeChoice
Tiscali