That’s not to say that home users aren’t using the internet for TV, on-demand streaming services such as iPlayer and SkyGo are testament to the fact they are. However, these services are what you might describe as hybrid IPTV, given they combine IP with traditional broadcast services. ‘True’ IPTV offers far greater benefits than what most of us experience currently; users have more choice of channels, significantly higher capacity for TV and video sources, as well as increased scope for customised features and levels of interaction (eg. Smart TV) . IPTV can also equate to a more efficient use of resources, through what we might term ‘network convergence’ i.e where business and consumers are able to use one unified connection for data, voice, tv etc.

One of the reasons why IPTV hasn’t fulfilled its potential is bandwidth, or rather – lack of it. However between Q3 in 2010 and Q3 2011 Europe witnessed a growth of approximately 68% in VDSL and FFTH services – opening doors for IPTV to make its way into our living rooms.

Another significant development has been IPV6 and its capacity to support multicasting more effectively. Multicast will allow network providers to disseminate information for IPTV more efficiently and at a cheaper cost – which should translate to a better customer experience and increased adoption.

What is important to consider from a technical and industry perspective, is the support and maintenance requirements, which will need to be of a high standard in order for the service to run smoothly. While TV might not be a business critical application, broadband bug bears like contention, outages could have grave dilemma’s, say if your service was to freeze during a dramatic scene in a East Enders Christmas special, or a tie breaker during a Wimbledon final.

So will the next few years see IPTV takeover traditional broadcast formats?  As long as service providers can offer more robust, consistent broadband connections I can’t see why not – multicast should help ISP’s minimise long term costs, and there is already strong consumer demand for unified services in the home. Personally a  ‘Smart’ IP controlled TV – with access to all channels from multiple devices, and the capacity to record and store as I like , anywhere , anytime – would be a welcome addition to my household.

Due to preparations for the Olympics this summer, Transport for London (TfL) are putting in place an embargo on all planned street work starting on 1st March 2012 that will prevent any road works on the key parts of the London Olympic Route Network (ORN).  Restrictions will continue to affect us until they are fully lifted on 30th September. However, it is worth noting that beyond this date a backlog of work may exist, delaying installations further.

It is therefore important to ensure early action is taken to complete Fibre Ethernet Access orders for Optical and Ethernet based services that will:

1.  Terminate on the core Olympic Route Network (core roads, sites, venues and the Main A501 Road)

2.  May require some form of construction work (digs, test roding etc) on the Core Olympic Route Network

Therefore, fibre orders must be placed by the end of February at the very latest if you wish for your service  to start before the Olympics.

A detailed map of the ORN route can be found on the following TFL map, where the London roads highlighted in Red and Blue are the ones affected:

http://www.london2012.com/olympic-route-network/maps/orn-overview.pdf

(N.B. this map can be zoomed to give a road by road level of detail)

A further embargo on the rest of the ORN (and most other central London streets) will come into operation on 1st July, so those orders would need to be with Openreach by May. This will impact most streets within the north and south circular and some areas of Greater London.

The SMART fridge has a large LCD touch-screen and camera, as well as an internet connection which allows it to download recipes and automatically add food to a user’s online shopping account when stocks are running low. Once a recipe is chosen, the fridge can switch on the oven to the correct temperature and set a timer via a wireless connection.  All that is left is for the cook to follow the recipe displayed on the LCD screen on the fridge door. The camera allows you to see what is in your fridge from a mobile phone, including sell-by dates of foods – handy if you have left your shopping list at home.

If all of that doesn’t strike you as compelling enough a reason to seriously consider buying into this ‘Next-Gen’ lifestyle, then consider this next feature; the fridge’s “blast-chiller” drawer, which swirls chilled air to prevent ice crystals from forming, can chill a bottle of wine in eight minutes and a beer can in five. SOLD.

The SMART fridge highlights the opportunities presented to us by internet connectivity and also the pressing need for IPv6 adoption. In recent times we have witnessed the explosion of handheld devices, such as smart phones and tablets, all needing their own IP address, now it would appear our household devices are set to become net-centric too. Such developments not only exacerbate the depletion of IPv4, they also illustrate the benefit of IPv6 – as the protocol allows for multiple devices to have individual IP public addresses behind one connection.

The report shows that the number of consumers who watch broadcast or cable television in a typical week plunged to 48% in 2011 from 71% in 2009. Accenture’s explanation for the trend is that the TV is losing ground to other devices – smart phones, laptops and tablets – in the battle for consumer eyeballs. The survey does not conclude that everyone has suddenly stopped watching video and starting reading books and listening to the radio; rather, consumers are simply doing their watching in different places, on different devices.

It is interesting to note that of the 1,000 people surveyed over a wide range of countries 53% own a Smartphone, (up from 28% in 2010) tablet ownership jumped to 12%, from 8% in 2010. The percentage of the survey group that intends to buy a Smartphone jumped to 27%, from 24%. For tablets, the number of consumers who plan to make a purchase jumped to 16%, from 8% a year ago.

I would be intrigued to see the affects the tablet and live online net streaming will have on broadcast figures for the 2012 games. Will viewing figures be ‘down’ based on trends as detailed above? If we are all watching online how will connectivity networks cope? We wouldn’t want to miss those Golden Olympic moments due to a spluttering contention effected streaming signal… if that is the case I will happily re-establish my relationship with TV, as I’m sure millions of others will too.

This means that ISPs can access Fluidata’s next generation network for a low one-off cost – mitigating the high costs associated with tunnelling into hard-to-reach areas. As a result, IFNL’s customers have a broad choice of ISPs, which helps keep costs down and encourage the development of new services. This offers businesses and residents in those areas the largest choice of ISPs on any FTTH deployment in the UK today and is the first time that up to 1Gb/s has been made available on such a large scale to residential homes.

We know that the UK is lagging in FTTH provision, from recent statistics published by the FTTH Council. According to Chair, Chris Holden, the UK had only 4,500 homes directly fibred in June 2011, but Ireland had 9,700 connected to fibre and Iceland 13,900. Lithuania had 343,400 and Italy 357,000, both exceeding Germany’s 123,300 and Spain’s 101,130.

So the Fluidata/IFNL project represents the first major tranche of FTTH connections andshould give the market some much needed confidence. It’s a big step forward and shows FTTH is a viable and sensible option for the long-term. It also shows that fibre can be commercially deployed on scale without government hand-outs, which compliments the work we are doing in rural communities.

IFNL provides, open access, high speed FTTH connectivity to property developers looking to install future-proof technology for homes and businesses. Among the benefits of fibre is the reduced carbon impact of telecommunications infrastructure for developers and greatly improved bandwidth, compared to copper infrastructures.  This is proving very attractive to developers as they look to meet the sustainable codes for new builds while also looking to improve the desirability of their developments for potential residents.

As each new development comes online it will be seamlessly integrated into Fluidata’s existing platform, enabling any ISPs connected to the platform to market and sell their services straight away.  Speeds start from 50 Mb/s going up to a current maximum of 1Gb/s per property. Without the need to dig fibre into the premises, installation can be dramatically reduced to a few days for customers luckily enough to find themselves in one of the new developments.

We spoke to Andrew Robinson from IFNL, who told us: “We have been deploying FTTH technology to new housing developments since 2008, we have 20 sites connected or in build and additional sites being won on a regular basis.  As part of the Inexus Group of companies, IFNL is focused on providing the very best services to our connected businesses and homes. We believe that our FTTH solution is ‘state-of-the-art’, the benefits of fibre stop where the fibre stops, which unlike most of our competition is in the home or business.  We’re excited to be working with Fluidata as this will help to increase retail competition on our network and ensure our customers have great choice and receive best value as well as superfast speeds.”

But is speed the only problem that rural communities (and councils) face? I’m not convinced, yes it takes me an age (relatively) to download updates and programs but I can equally go for a walk (or the pub) whilst I wait for whatever Microsoft update I need.

But streaming, that’s where my problems lies, or should I say, any need for constant low latency connectivity to a server, now most people will think why is that important? Let me explain: The reason we all need more speed is for the user experience at home or in the office. Part of that user experience is how quickly can I get a piece of data from over there, to me at my computer. But if you are needing a constant stream of data say of video and sound, say around the 27^th of July this year, and you keep dropping packets you’re not going to be a happy user.

I’m pointing out the problem of a recreational user but what if the your talking about a home user or small office using Citrix or a thin client solution, this is where the problem often gets very worrying. For those of you who don’t know, as soon as a packet is dropped on a Citrix session, the client software has a bit of a moment and decides it needs to check the connection to the central server, meaning the user hopes that they saved the last piece of work they were doing and logs back on. This is often the problem of latency and packet loss, unfortunately for the end user and ISP there is a whole host of things that can cause this. From dodgy old routing equipment (on the ISP’s core network) to the end user not having a good enough CPE.

So are there solutions to this issue? Well the short answer is “yes” , however the issues are often specific to each end user due to the amount of things that can affect the latency. If you are having problems and you don’t use our connections, come have a chat with one of our consultants who should be able to help.

On a final point  (not an intentionally smug way, but…) I was lucky enough to upgrade my line at home to a BURST connection last year, so high latency and packet loss can’t be my excuse as to why I’m so rubbish at Battlefield 3!

Social networking continued to rise in popularity and significance. It’s power to help mobilise the revolutionary fervour during the ‘Arab Spring’, perhaps the most striking illustration of its social, and indeed political magnitude. It also played a role closer to home, in inflaming , reporting on, and helping to extinguish the London riots.

Wikileaks opened up fresh debates over the dichotomy between freedom of speech and national security, while twitter circumvented super injunctions that attempted to suffocate free press under the banner of right to privacy. The News of the Worlds demise and subsequent Leveson inquiry, where all such matters would come to a head, may be viewed, in part, as the print newspapers struggle to stay popular in the digital age.

You can’t speak of WikiLeaks without mentioning hacking and 2011 witnessed a worrying rise in the hacking of public, private and government networks, culminating with the theft of 24,000 sensitive defence files from the Pentagon. Another thing we saw rise in popularity was ‘cloud’ services. From Microsoft 360 to Amazon ebooks, the cloud is transforming the way we work, rest and play. Although it’s not immune from failure – as the Blackberry smartphone crash of October highlighted.

Apple suffered no such technological setbacks, with iPhones becoming ubiquitous, iPads the new ‘must have’ and iCloud launched. Sadly, November would see the passing of their charismatic CEO Steve Jobs (1955 -2011) who left a rich legacy which is yet to be fully realised.

Looking forward to what 2012 has in store.

From our previous analysis the internet looks to be the first port of call for most business workers during any major news event such as Wimbledon, Mr Murdoch and riots and looting across the UK. With anything between 50% to 60% increase in traffic and over 50% of that being identified as BBC’s iPlayer traffic. So if your employees are working during the games how will accommodate for this?

So it is not only worth considering bandwidth requirements now to enable staff to watch the games, but more importantly protect your business’s day to day activities online during the games. This can be solved in a number of ways by limiting access via the corporate firewalls, implementing QoS or even looking at dedicated links for different purposes. All we can be sure about is that bandwidth will be higher than any major event we have witnessed so far this year.

After being a Cisco partner for a number of years we felt the standard channel did not recognise the value add we brought to our customers either at their site or hosted within our network. The Managed Services program however recognises partners that add value by configuring and supporting their customer’s equipment. Also as many of our customers have moved into private wide area networks (PWAN), more and more Cisco hardware is now being located in our datacentres to support their private cloud infrastructures.

It just leaves us now to work towards the next level of qualification!