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...

Communication has always been a key tool for businesses, so with the invention of the internet and email the way in which the business world worked changed dramatically. Suddenly anywhere on the globe both individuals and organisations could connect with others with speed and ease. Although this development brought everyone closer together this could never replace the true value gained in...

Office relocations tend to be demanding tasks and for most companies involve a high degree of thought and planning. IT and Telecommunications are increasingly integral to business operations and no doubt form a substantial part of a companies moving checklist. However, from my experience at Fluidata, it seems relatively few investigate the access to internet connectivity they will have at...

UK has dropped one place to 26th in global broadband race with an average download speed of 3.5Mbps according to the Akamai's ‘The State of the Internet (Q3-2009)’ report with Sweden in 5th place from European countries and South Korea sitting pretty as the fastest broadband in the world with an average speed of 14.8Mbps. Why such highly unflattering results then for a country with a reputation...

I recently handled an enquiry with a prospect whose VC system was being let down by its underlying internet connection. The connection in place was a cheap Annex-M (O2) solution, the problem an unsatisfactory upstream data transfer rate that was fluctuating between 0.8 Mb/s and 1.3 Mb/s and accompanied by high jitter. His incumbent provider had informed him that with his line length too long for...

During the last four weeks heavy snowfall across the UK has caused havoc to Britain’s brittle transport infrastructure and subsequently disrupted business activity to the tune of 230 million pounds per day. For any of you who follow Fluidata MD Piers Daniell’s weekly blog (I’m sure there are a couple of you somewhere) you may recall an entry in the wake of last year’s bout of extreme weather...