This year sees the launch of the 2011 Internet Service Provider Association Awards (or The ISPAs for short!), and Fluidata has been shortlisted for two categories: Best Business Fixed ISP Best Business Customer Service ISP The awards ceremony is being held on the 7 th July at the Lancaster London Hotel so fingers crossed for that evening. While there is a lot of strong competition we have...

A recent survey in ISP review showed that 35.3% of UK businesses feel discouraged from switching ISP’s because they fear of potential downtime. This is understandable when looking at August 2010’s survey in ‘Which’ magazine that showed nearly half of the 10,000 asked had issues or failed migrations. This kind of issue can cause loss of productivity and profit for any business and causes the IT...

Nearly exactly a year after we signed the lease for our new office, our new demo suite is now ready. I have spoken before about our old playroom in our previous office on Tooley Street and we wanted to replicate it when we moved office. We did nearly straight away but with the worst copper known to man coming into the building (the site flooded twice in two years…) speeds were not that...

In January 2011 Ofcom proposed charge controls for those rural areas in Britain which are not served by wholesale competition. This is to ensure better value connectivity for areas such as Northumberland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as the South West of England, Norfolk, Yorkshire, Cumbria and parts of Scotland. Ofcom proposed significant reductions in the prices that BT Wholesale can...

Last year the UK continued to lead online sales in Europe as the European online retail sales grew 18 per cent and are predicted to grow 13 per cent this year, reaching €92 billion, according to a five-year forecast from Forrester Research. This figure, coupled with the statistic that 57 per cent of adults now shop online, demonstrates that a shift has occurred from the high street to online. The...

It is a message that our Account Managers try to communicate every day! This week has seen a revival of the campaign against domestic broadband in the workplace. New figures suggest that SMEs using domestic broadband may appear to be making savings, but ends up costing British firms £357m in lost labour and 32.4 million hours per month of staff downtime. At Fluidata, we understand the need for...

Based on VDSL 2+ technology it is the big brother to BT’s Infinity product providing contention guarantees and a business grade delivery. As with all Fluidata’s services we do not enforce a fair usage policy and do not throttle our users. Our PULSE product physically locates the DSLAM within the street cabinet allowing for a significantly reduced copper line distance. This, coupled with the...

Recent client meetings have illustrated to me how far work practices and methods have progressed in a very short period time and how the ‘information age’ as the experts term it, continues to accelerate at frightening pace. Take the solicitor firm we met the other day. Until recently, it was still having to send their inter-office legal documents by courier at the end of each day. Now, not only...

With Ofcom keen to set restrictions on advertised internet speeds, it is important to remember the difficulties in assessing the potential speed a user can get until the service has been installed. Back in the old days with fixed rate products, such as BT ADSL IPStream and SDSL, it was much easier to downgrade a user’s service to the next available product if the bandwidth they desired was...

The telecoms market has witnessed a sizable proliferation in mergers and acquisitions over the last couple of years. The acquisition of BE by O2, and Cable and Wirelesses’ buy out of Bulldog remain the most prominent in my mind. But among others we’ve also seen big players like Tiscali and Easynet be bought out by Carphone Warehouse and Sky respectively, while Chess and Daisy have both embarked...