Within the telecommunication industry we are aware of some of the external problems that can affect our last mile access networks. During my 16 years working in these circles, I’ve witnessed everything from DSL slowing down due to frost, to a wireless networks poor performance being blamed on the heat. Interestingly, it looks like researchers in the Netherlands have figured out a way to use...

At the end of a complex bidding process, the 4G auction has its victors and has raised £2.34bn for the public purse. About 90% less than the price paid at the 3G sale 13 years ago - at the height of the dot-com bubble. It's also more than £1bn short of what the chancellor estimated in his autumn statement. The relatively modest amounts raised by the auction may well be attributable to the...

A recent BBC report has unveiled car manufactures plans to have all new vehicles connected to the web within the next few years. In fact Intel, which will invest £64million over the next five years in the 'connected cars' claims that is already the third fastest growing technological device after phones and tablets. The introduction of smart technologies into vehicles could herald a new era of...

If, like the vast majority of the population, you’ve never set foot inside a datacentre, then they may well be a bit of a mystery to you – large, nondescript buildings hosting the mystical cloud. Of course you may have seen some photos of the interior of a facility, but if you have, in magazines like Wired or the Economist, then it’s probable you’ve glimpsed at the facilities of Google or...

This week it was revealed that a US software developer has been caught outsourcing his job, which has been earning him a six-figure salary. Working from home, he had spent his days browsing Reddit and YouTube, whilst a Chinese software company had been working under a contract with him to carry out his work. He was paying them only a fraction of his annual wage. While this is completely...

Last year we got involved in a project to bring high-speed broadband to a rural community in Hampshire as part of a number of trials to evaluate what technology could be used to serve a number of residents in a remote pocket of the country. Interestingly the villages of Little London and Smannell were a stone’s throw from a new housing development which was being served with a fibre to the...

As the previous article on the anniversary of TCP/IP alludes to, the dramatic development of information technology in the past half-century has left more than one person’s achievements forgotten. Until 1997 that was the case for Clifford Cocks, who (along with James Ellis and Malcolm Williamson) first developed the widely-used encryption protocol, now known as RSA. In order to enable machines...

The gravity of January 1 st 1983 continues to slip under the radar for most. Much like Danny Boyle’s nod to Tim Berners-Lee in the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics, or the work done by Bob Metcalfe in the development of Ethernet technology, the significance of “Flag Day” will be lost on those not familiar with the great breakthroughs made in the development of the Internet over the past...

In many ways the late naughties and the early part of this decade (what are we calling this one by the way?) have been characterised by what’s wrong with this country: the recession, the riots, union strikes, press misdemeanours and expenses scandals. And while 2012 has not been bereft of such of problems, it has been punctuated by events – The Jubilee, The Olympics and the Paralympics - that to...

Fluidata are delighted to announce that we have completed a £2.5 million upgrade on our network on time and on budget. After months of work and planning, it’s fantastic to have concluded this project and we can now start to deliver the benefits of the new network to our clients. What’s new? Well the network now operates a hybrid core of Juniper MX and Cisco ASR hardware; providing a switching...