Binfield Engineering Centre

At last the man-cave, or as we like to call it now: "Binfield Engineering Centre", is finally going to happen. I have quotes, at last, from a local builder, and the electrician and plumbing & heating engineer. There is a good chance we can actually get started in a couple of weeks.

I have been waiting nearly a year for this... And, of course, it comes at just the right time to clash with our tax bill, but it is going to happen!

The builder said a "change of use" needs approval from the council. They had a pre-planning application thing on their web site, which seemed quite efficient allowing uploads of drawings and pictures and so on. We'll see what happens with that.

I'll take pictures once the work actually gets started. I am actually looking forward to it.

P.S. Why "Binfield Engineering Centre"? It is apparently a thing to give your garage some grandiose title: http://www.revk.uk/2015/06/peter-mcghie-phase-dscs-phase-broadcast.html

Do they not teach decimal numbers in school any more?

The ARIN IPv4 depletion web site shows how much IPv4 space is left for allocation in the American region.

It is a number of "/8s" left. For those that do not know, a /8 is 16,777,216 IPv4 addresses, and is the size of block allocated to each region at a time. The top level /8s ran out ages ago, and 4 of the 5 registries are no longer allocating IPv4 normally (most have policies on final allocations from remaining space). ARIN is down to the wire and shit will finally hit the fan any day now.

What I find most amusing is the explanation on that page, to explain a simple number, like 5.22 as apparently the meaning of "5.22" is not clear, well, not to Americans?

Of course, this explanation is fine, to explain a number like "5.22", and you can probably guess what the counter was when someone wrote that explanation. But reading it now, does that mean we have 0 /8s and 978% of another /8 left?

It is reminiscent of the 0.002 cent argument someone had with Verizon...

A NOTE ABOUT OUR /8 INVENTORY COUNTER

The counter shows the number of /8s remaining. The numbers after the decimal point are equivalent to a percentage (so 5.22 /8s is 5 /8s + 22% of a 6th /8).

Back-haul

We have had many years now with very much the same prices for back-haul.

It is worth trying to explain to my less technical readers... One of the key things with the services we sell is connecting things. This means that you get data from one place to another. This is the crux of the whole telecommunications industry. Ultimately the costs of connecting stuff is the cost of digging up the ground and putting things in ducts. This is what allows the monopolies and major carries in countries to sell their communications services.

There are many ways the make this work, and there are some shortcuts by way of radio microwave links, and even people considering balloons and satellites. But for a long time the underlying issue is stuff in the ground.

Now, the copper in the ground is one of the key issues with broadband. There is copper from exchange to home and office and that is used for broadband (ADSL). Getting closer to the home or office by running fibre to a cabinet and then using the copper from there with VDSL (FTTC) is faster. Ultimately there are moves to get new connectivity to people's homes and offices using fibre.

But whatever the "last mile" is, whether coax, copper pairs, fibre, hybrid, radio, or what, there is also the issue of "back-haul". This is where the data goes from exchanges and similar concentration points locally to ISPs connection points and on to the Internet.

As an ISP we are in the middle - on one side we connect to peering points and transit providers that connect to "the rest of the world", and on the other we use carriers like BT and Talk Talk to connect via "back-haul" to the various local exchanges and "last mile" connections such as broadband. We join the two together.

There are costs on both sides.

When connecting to the "world", there are transit providers that buy capacity on (or run their own) transatlantic fibre links, and national fibre links in many countries. For as little as £1/Mb/s/month (that is £1 per month for a megabit per second) I can buy transit that connects to thousands of connection points around the world using national and international fibre links.

When connecting to the "UK", I am using back-haul carriers. Now, these have a simpler job in many ways, they are all on land and connecting to several hundred telephone exchanges. The "last mile" from the exchange to homes and offices I pay for separately. So this back-haul is simpler and smaller than the challenges of "transit" to the world, but the cost is anything up to 50 times that of transit! And for no good reason than "It has always been so".

The good news is that there is competition. The good thing about fibre back-haul is that you can simply change the transceivers on the end of the fibre and go from a gigabit to 10 gigabit to a terabit. It is a cost for the technology on the fibres, but the real cost is digging up the road, and that is not needed to make more and more use of the fibre links.

The good news is OFCOM are trying to get BT to open up "dark fibre" links to other operators. This is a big step as the existing way to buy from BT is by link speed. If you buy dark fibre you can choose to invest in later transceivers and get more out of it. If you buy by the gigabit than you are stuck with that.

Third parties can do this themselves if they have the fibre and can upgrade, so we really hope back-haul will finally start to come down in price.

I really hope that it will get cheaper. We are starting to see some clues to this with some carriers. We may even be able to offer new services soon. But what we really need is the major carriers like BT lowering the back-haul pricing to something a tad closer to transit. After all, transit providers link to the world, and BT link to the UK - surely BT should be cheaper!!!

NoT and 12 months term

I seriously think BT have got this wrong and it needs fixing.

BT plc t/a Openreach provide GEA links (basically what most ISPs use to provide FTTC) on a 12 month minimum term.

Firstly, this is a problem anyway - most other services whether broadband or phone line - do not have a minimum term. This may have made more sense in the start and when there was an engineer visit and modem supplier, but really starts to make no sense for wires only FTTC, and now that FTTC is the norm. So ideally BT need to drop the minimum term. However, for now we have it.

When migration of FTTC services came in there was a problem - BT would charge the old ISP for the end of the term whilst charging the new ISP for the same period of time and holding the new ISP to a new 12 month term. What was even worse is that this was done by BT plc t/a BT Wholesale. Their excuse was that BT plc t/a Openreach had this 12 month term. However a migrate from one BTW customer to another BTW customer did not involve BT plc t/a BT Wholesale restarting the term with BT plc t/a Openreach - they literally were charging two ISPs for the same service for the same time!

The eventual fix was to make a migrate not have a min term for the new ISP but the old ISP pays to end of term. It addresses one issue, but has some serious problems.

The issue here is that when two parties agree a contract and dictate something like a minimum term, it make sense for the party that breaks that term and ceases before the end of the minimum term to compensate the other party.

So, if an ISP buys a service with a 12 month term and ceases after 6 months, it makes sense to pay the supplier / carrier something, perhaps even the whole of the remaining 6 months of service.

But what if the supplier (carrier) breaks the term - and ceases the service within the 12 months. Then surely the supplier needs to compensate the ISP for that breach, at the very least not expecting the ISP to pay to term for a service that is not being provided.

Sadly BT plc t/a BT Wholesale do not agree - they think that even when they break the 12 month minimum term the ISP has to pay them for the remainder of the term!

Now, this only really happens if the service is transferred to a new ISP. But even so, it is the carrier breaking the term with the ISP and not the other way around.

Now, if BT plc t/a Openreach insist on a 12 month term, what would make sense in the case of a transfer is for the new customer to be starting a new 12 month term, and the old customer to be let off. That would mean that the carrier would not have to pay BT plc t/a Openreach when it is BT plc t/a Openreach that breaks the term, and similarly BT plc t/a BT Wholesale would not have to charge the ISP for the rest of the term when it is BT plc t/a BT Wholesale that broke the term, and ultimately the ISP would not need to charge their customer an early termination fee.

Even better would be for a migrate to carry over the remaining term and not restart the 12 months. This would ensure BT plc t/a Openreach always got 12 months rent for a VDSL port that they have installed, which is what they want.

But ultimately the best would be for BT plc t/a Openreach to just drop the minimum term on the wires only FTTC installs and then it would avoid a lot of unfair contract terms and arguments.

P.S. One carrier is being very very special, suggesting early termination means not only paying to term but also paying an extra early termination fee. That is crazy - why would you cease the service early rather than just leave it in place to end of term in that case.

Business Names Act

The Business Names Act 1985 was repealed and the various requirements included in to The Companies Act 2006. This is a tad confusing as it does not just apply to companies, but also individual sole traders and partnerships.

Basically the idea is that if someone is trading, acting as a business, then they have to actually identify themselves. It is why many shops will have a small plaque that states the company name and registered office, and why web sites and letterheads state company name and number and registered office. It applies to individuals and partners in that they have to state the name and address of the people involved on business letters and order forms and so on.

The principle is that you have to be able to identify the party with whom you are dealing relatively easily.

Unfortunately I am having trouble working out who enforces these rules!

Trading Standards said Companies House.

Companies House said yes, for rules relating to registered businesses (82-84), but not the section on individuals (1202), try the police.

Now I have had a nice chat with a Scottish policeman, who has paid a visit to Mr McGhie after I made a complaint, but who is unsure what to do. He says he has checked all the details he has, his manuals on such things, and cannot find anything that covers this. He thinks it is not a police matter, even though it is a clear criminal offence. He suggested Companies House!

In the end we have left it that he is going to ask Companies House for advice, but ultimately, surely, if there is a crime, then someone should be responsible for enforcement.

We'll see how it goes.

BT Account Managers

It must be a hard job in some ways - an account manager to A&A.

In principle, it should largely be about selling us stuff - that is what account managers do in a lot of companies - making sure that their client / customer is buying all the things that they could be.

But there is the customer care side - handling things that are not working right and trying to improve the partnership or business relationship. In the long run that can mean selling more stuff as well, obviously.

Sadly, one of the things we can be sure of with BT is a regular change of account manager, usually once a year but sometimes the break more often.

We have had some really good account managers in the past, Ian was especially proactive and really took on the challenge of trying to actually get A&A and BT working together. He also played WoW.

Sadly, there have been a few that are a bit more mediocre, and a couple really appalling account managers, sorry. Don't get me wrong, they are all nice enough. Usually we get to meet them - but that is part of the issue - the level of engagement various year to year. At some points in the past we have had a long period with no account manager. That was fun as the stock answer to anything complex is to "ask you account manager", and front line people and managers have no reply when we said "we don't have one".

In one case we have had a "desk based account manager" - who we never met and sometimes answered emails. More recently we had another good account manager, Martin, who spend months coming in every week to try and finally resolve ongoing billing issues (mostly SFI disputes) and managed to get a lot sorted.

Sadly, not all can be praised, and I won't point fingers. Sadly some are very poor at engaging with us, meeting us, or even answering emails.

But that time has come again - a new account manager. We don't know how it will go, but if the first emails we have had are any clue, the answer may be badly.

Why ask an ISP if they have an "IP network". I mean, really? Did something not go well in the handover from the last account manager, perhaps in the sense of not actually handing over any clue whatsoever about the client?

I suppose things can only get better. It is a shame BT cannot manage to have slightly longer term account management strategies. We really would like to work with BT on issues, and there are things we are actually trying quite hard to buy from BT and struggling to do so. We have issues that are not answered, let alone resolved, and go on for years and need handing over from one account manager to the next.

We'll just have to see how it goes. We'll do our bit and try and make this work well, honest. I assume other ISPs have much the same.

Do I give in to blackmail?

We have a customer with a dispute, and of course we want tor resolve it. I'm not going to give any personal details here, obviously...

The dispute is relatively simple, he asserts that we told him 100GB/mon for Home::1 would be fine for a house of 5 adults all separately watching netflix every night. Unsurprisingly he used 100GB in 10 days. Home::1 has a minimum term of 6 months and a very reasonable early termination charge.

Now, let me say right off, if we did say that to him, we will sort something out for him - more allowance for 6 months or leaving with no early termination fee, or whatever. If we screwed up and said something wrong, we will take responsibility for that. We have ticketing for emails and record all calls, so it should be simple to work that out. Sadly he is being a tad vague on times or numbers or names of people he spoke to. Hopefully we can confirm this.

He had a huge long debate with our accounts department over what is "average usage". We explained what we say on the web site and ordering pages and what OFCOM have reported about average usage for broadband. He seems to think he is "average", which is clearly not the case, but all irrelevant - we sold him 100GB.

The problem is that he is now talking of ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution).

Obviously we are going to try and resolve this, and ideally come to an agreement without involving ADR, but at the end of the day ADR is a huge problem with this and massively impacts negotiations.

The early termination charges are much lower than the cost of ADR even if we only look at the fee we have to pay (and ignore all the time and effort) and even if ADR finds we are completely correct and we are not ordered to pay anything or do anything. This means the threat of ADR is effectively blackmail. The customer can simple be as difficult as he likes; insist we said things with no evidence of that; and demand he can leave with no early termination charge "or else, ADR".

What concerns me is we may find the call recording and prove we did not say that, and so have done nothing wrong, but he can still demand ADR and still put us in this annoying position of choosing to cave in to blackmail or pointlessly go through ADR - a process which would not "resolve" the dispute.

If we cave in, we save money compared to ADR, but what is to stop everyone who changes their mind just invoking "ADR", making a total mockery of simple fair contract terms.

Very frustrating. We'll see what we can do to resolve it anyway, and what evidence we can find. In the long run we have have to think of other ways to package services as clearly "early termination charges" may effectively be un-enforceable on consumer products. I'll try not to get stressed this time.

P.S. One way this may be resolved in future is with routers getting cheaper, migrations getting cheaper, people already having FTTC, and, of course, cheaper back-haul bandwidth. Eventually there will be no need for any minimum term and no reason for someone that simply "misunderstands" not to simply move on to their next ISP as complete resolution of the issue. We can but hope.

P.P.S. In all the years I have been blogging, you can see disputes really are rare - I would not expect to blog every disagreement, but an actual unresolved dispute is incredibly rare and I think I probably have blogged every one so far - making me wonder even more why the hell ADR even exists.