Moreband

These guys have put together a great you tube video that spells out clearly the differences in bonding broadband and why Moreband (based on Sharedband technology) is the only real solution for bandwidth limitation in the access network.

What’s happening to broadband bandwidth

People can't seem to understand there is a difference beteeen the access network that is the copper loop from the exchange to the customer and the backhaul from the exchange to the ISP network.

I will try and clarify what this means in terms of capability and cost.

The Access Network:-

With the exception of cable network (owned by Virgin Media) almost all the copper connections from an exchange to the customer premises are owned by Open Reach (apart from an area around Hull).

These are leased to BT Wholesale or Local Loop Unbundlers (LLUs) on an equal basis. There is little chance of seeing fibre deployed in the access network for many years to come - as this means £ billions of capital expenditure and lots of road digging. Therefore most customers will have to use the copper already in the ground.

There are physical limitations mainly due to cross talk that mean many people may not get more than 4Mbps bandwidth from one copper connection – at 4kms from an exchange even ADSL2 degrades to that level. Also note that the more people that take up broadband then that increases the level of cross talk – reducing performance.

There are some new software technologies available that enable lines to bond together – (disclosure: like my own company Sharedband ). This will help people scale services to meet their need for more bandwidth in the access network.

The performance is a physical limitation of the copper loop and the equipment deployed at the exchanges not financial engineering by ISPs or even BT. There is no congestion in the copper from the exchange to each customer.

One ISP with 200k customers (Plusnet) in a recent article explained their cost structure in detail and revealed that the cost of the access network was on average £8.50 per customer per month – regardless of how much each copper line is used.

The backhaul:-
From the exchange back through the central pipes to the ISP when provided by BTW or in cases when using an LLU service the ISP has to organize their own backhaul infrastructure. Note: LLU availability tends to be limited to more popular exchanges.

The backhaul pipes are always shared (unless you pay a lot of money for an uncontended service) always fibre and the more data that flows down these pipes the more congested they become unless their capacity is increased – which costs more – either to BTW or in building your own infrastructure.

The PlusNet figures show that on average the cost they are paying for this backhaul today is around £3.50 per customer per month, however that only allows for an average usage of 5Gb per customer per month. It also shows that the maximum bandwidth of their central pipes for their 200k customers is about 3500Mbps.

Therefore if the adoption of new bandwidth hungry applications like iPlayer grow in popularity then they will need to add more capacity to avoid excessive congestion – and therefore they will need to increase prices or more likely charge customers on a usage basis.

There are other costs for peering and transit etc but these are small in relation to these other costs.

Remember:
1) There is no such thing as a free lunch!
2) You only get what you pay for…

Sharedband Press Stories

Last week Sharedband released three great press stories:

1) We signed a reseller contract with BT Wholesale, who will market and sell our products and services to ISPs in the UK
2) A great customer case study, based on a reprint of a story by Talk Internet about the use of Sharedband at the British SuperBike Grand Prix to help journalists upload their stories and photos.
3) Our new alliance status with Netgear as a global solutions partner.

All together they make a great story – not only did BT give our technology fantastic credibility but also a straight forward route to market. The customer angle clearly demonstrated we have a solution for a real problem and the alliance with Netgear was a truly global partnership.

After ringing a couple of dozen editors I was in no doubt we’d get some coverage – but I really hadn’t bargained for such a super uptake. Here are some links to articles and posts published by last Friday:

Techworld.com Peter Judge
Lightreading.com Ray Le Maistre
Telephony Ed Gubbins - also on Communications direct
PC Pro Barry Collins
IT Week & Computing & WiMax news David Bailey
Tech.co.uk Anne Lagerkvist
ZDNet David Meyer
Digital Trends – Christopher Nickson
Comms Dealer
ThinkBroadband
Telecom Paper – can’t read without subscription
Newswireless.net: Guy Kewney
ISPreview
One Stop Click
Broadband - Finder
Satnews.com
Blogs
Broadband Genie
The Hermes project
Tech Taxi

The last post - for Amstrad

The old Amstrad company may have been sold to Sky (R.I.P.) - but the memories of some great times with Sir Alan will live on as long as we all stay friends. 14 ex Apprentices from the 80's gather for some great fun, beer and pies at the Newman Arms last Tuesday evening. See the photos on Facebook.

This maybe the last post for Amstrad - but its my first blog post for months - I have been storing it all up - so there is lots to follow as I have been reflecting on 6 months of new social media i.e. Facebook, Plaxo Pulse, Twitter, Google Reader, Gmail, 400 Linkedin contacts - the progress Sharedband has made and where we are going next, extended stay in Seattle and visiting Portland, LA and San Francisco - meeting up with Robert Scoble, Om Malik and many other intersting people.

Great Animation

Thanks to my friends at Signals with some audio help from the podcaster at Focus Biz Sharedband has a really super flash animation that explains how it benefits customers and a simple overview of how it works.

If you find flash is choppy or poor quality then you could probably do with Sharedband service, so meanwhile best to download the exe file and view it at your leisure!

Escape from Corporate Colditz

A very good friend of mine said to me tonight that they had been missing my posts and I replied I had been lacking the inspiration needed to write them.

I continued – “you know it’s hard to keep writing about things, I don’t want to write a load of crap about nothing, so much of what I read is trivial and appears to be written because the author thinks they must write something to keep their audience satisfied or perhaps they just need to write about everything to satisfy themselves”

The problem is that I find writing a good post quite exhausting and certainly time consuming – unless I get a sudden flash of inspiration.

Last year when I started my blog I had a real drive – a desire to get noticed and an enthusiasm from discovering this new medium but most importantly I had time – plenty of time whilst trying to start up my own marketing consultancy business.

Today I am wrapped up launching Sharedband, discovering a new market place and learning so much about the difference between a start up environment and my prior corporate Colditz life – and loving every moment of my new found freedom – I haven’t had time to reflect on what’s happened in the last 6 months.

Maybe I need to pick out the best bits and post about the changes in my life and the differences which in hindsight are huge.

The news is getting out there

Sharedband was officially launched this week with first ISP partner KeConnect and it was well reported in Comms Business, see their news piece. They have decided their product using Sharedband will be called Flexiband - I wonder how many other interesting brands will emerge as others launch their products.

Also picked op on a new blog for small businesses - Alex Bellinger had written a post about the growth in VoIP adoption by SME's and made the point that ADSL bandwidth was going to be an issue for anyone with even a modest number of VoIP users - especially if their office was remote from an exchange - so I got into a brief explanation on how our new service could help solve this problem.

"Expletive" Cool Technology

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has got excited about Google alerts in his blog and I agree they are a really useful way of tracking your key interests. He points out how he tracks his own key words “Scott Adams Dilbert” so he can see who is talking about his work and that he’s reasonably likely to read (at least some of the content to get the context).

So I got to wondering if adding a batch of obvious key names, words and links at the end of this post I might grab the attention of a number of prolific bloggers and pundits and tell them about our great new technology.

Sharedband is this really cool patented software technology that aggregates the bandwidth of broadband lines. This is a totally new low cost line bonding solution for the mass market - it uses commodity routers pooled together distributing IP packets across multiple lines.

This gives you much faster internet connection speeds, upstream and downstream, as well as adding greater resilience to your service. Great news if you depend on the internet for your living as do the illustrious bunch below....and many many more besides.

Dennis Howlett AccMan B.L. Ochman Kathy Sierra Creating Passionate Users Hugh MacLeod Gapingvoid Om Malik GigaOm Jackie Danicki Brian Oberkirch Like It Matters Steve Rubel Micro Persuasion Shel Israel Global Neighbourhoods Naked Conversations Neville Hobson Shel Holtz Robert Scoble Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger Seth Godin Seth's Blog David Tebbut Teblog Sam Sethi Vecosys Techmeme Michael Arrington Techcrunch

Declaration: I am Sales & Marketing Director for Sharedband - and yes this an unashamed awareness promotion - unashamed because its great news for every broadband user who wants more than what their getting currently.

Sam Sethi Reports on Sharedband

Sam picked up on Sharedband and posted this article on his site www.vecosys.com. It started a few questions about how Sharedband can help the residential market get the bandwidth they need.

What have I been doing for 10 weeks!

If you've been wondering what's happened to my blog over the last few weeks I have been rather busy with a new job as sales and marketing director for a young exciting business.

This may sound like a lame excuse but I’ve held off telling everyone about it as we weren’t quite ready. Its been a challenge starting from basics on a shoestring whilst raising the necessary investment. Well that’s changing fast and tonight we published our new website www.sharedband.com

The elevator pitch is that we have a new patented software technology that allows you to combine ADSL broadband connections into one faster more reliable connection. This really helps with the upsteam bandwidth restrictions and distance from exchange limitations of existing ADSL services.

If you think it's all too good to be true then your thoughts are similar to my own initial reaction - then I had to take the job; how often as a sales and marketing guy do you find a business proposition as powerful with such obvious customer benefits.

The product goes live with a couple of service providers in the next few days and that’ll mean real customers, issues to fix and some very needy revenue. I hope you’ll take the time to look at the web site and let me know what you think – both in terms of the marketing and the business proposition.