We live in the digital age. IT, and the internet in particular, is now as important as steam to the industrial revolution, as the guillotine to the French revolution, as stone to the Stone Age, as ice to the... well you see where I’m going, and I could go on, but in short, it’s fundamental to the way we live. And to the way we work. Embracing new technology is smart. It makes sense to, say,...

When it comes to obtaining the right internet line for your needs, the speed of the connection is fundamental in the decision making process. Although any competent IT manager will not order a line offering 8 Mb/s download when in reality their company needs at least 12 Mb/s, many make misjudgements when faced with the cloudy issue of ‘up to’ speeds. Dissatisfaction felt by consumers and business...

Fluidata is proud to announce that we have made the short list of both the “Best Business Fixed Broadband” and “Best Dedicated Hosting” categories for the celebrated Annual ISPA Awards. The shortlisting process involved thorough technical testing and judging from an independent panel. We’d like to thank all Fluidata customers who collaborated with us during that testing process and help show...

Virtualisation is fast becoming the ‘got to have it’ technology across the globe. Seductive as a money saving initiative - through its capacity to reduce hardware, maintenance and administration costs (20% to 50% cost saving according to Gartner research) - it can also allow companies to take huge strides towards achieving another modern IT phenomenon: ‘Greener IT’. Its ‘Green credentials’ lie in...

Cloud computing is the current ‘buzzword’ in the industry, exciting in premise, but still in its infancy and awash with ambiguities. For some years we’ve been successfully delivering Layer-2 private wide area networks to our customers using our PWAN technology, and could see the progression from this to cloud-based environments. Our imminent office move has given us the opportunity to put these...

Recent research conducted by Point Tropic has revealed that global VoIP subscriptions shot up 15% during the last financial quarter. In the UK, VoIP subscription figures now stand just shy of the 3 million mark (statistics exclude Skype), placing us 10th on the list of highest subscribers. The US sit top of this list with 22 million VoIP subscriptions, but it’s actually the French who have...

This week has seen the launch of our new network operations centre (NOC) in Hemel Hempstead. Located in our Centro datacentre this new team will be taking over all 24/7 support duties, seeing Fluidata move away from the existing out of hours on-call setup to a permanently manned helpdesk. This change has been driven in part by the surge in collocation at the state of the art Centro facility. An...

As Network Manager at Fluidata, I’m often pulled into sales calls to provide technical consultation on the various products and services somebody may be considering purchasing from us. These calls can be quite eye opening, and in particular have given me an understanding of the reputation of certain services in the market place. One such thing I’ve learnt from this, is that that bonded services...

Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Linkedin; social network sites are the biggest cultural phenomenon of the last decade. They are emblematic of the 21st century; neatly encapsulating the accelerated, on demand and narcissistic post global, digital world we now inhabit. If the internet by definition is about interconnecting networks, then these sites are the purest manifestation of its raison...

There has been much discussion recently about the best way of ensuring that 100 Mb/s of broadband can be delivered to two thirds of UK homes by 2017. When BT announced that it was working with OFCOM to facilitate this, the Conservative party announced that it would make BT break up and divert BBC license revenue to make it happen. The blogs and discussion rooms went into overdrive, opining on the...