After some
minor setbacks due to the election, the business channel has confirmed that
they are able to go ahead with broadcasting! We are very excited to see the
finished product on the business channel website Here, with plans for this to air
on Freesat television within the next couple of months, so watch this space!
1-7-10
Announcement: Winner of our Cricket Competition!
A big congratulations to Sue Neilson of Sovereign Business Integration,
who won our Prize draw for 4 tickets to see England Vs. Bangledesh on
Monday 12th July.
10-06-2010
Fibre To The Cabinet Release
Link-Connect forefronting rollout of FTTC
In June 2010, BT (BT Infinity) will start rolling out FTTC technologies across the country. But what is Fibre Technology, and how does it differ to the existing ADSL Broadband Solution?
Fibre Technology is the current high speed roll out that is replacing
Copper connections (Affectionately named BT Infinity). Currently, Broadband works by running high
frequency waves down existing Telephone lines. Telephone lines
consist of what is called a copper pair, or two copper wires that are
twisted together, that run from your local telephone exchange, to the
green cabinets that you see on the sides of roads, then onto your
house. The problem with copper wires is that there is a high ratio of
energy loss as the signal travels down it. This is why rural areas, and
homes that are far away from their exchange have slower broadband
speeds - the further the frequency has to travel, the more energy lost.
Fibre loses less energy over distances, so, more frequency can be
delivered over the same distance.
BT Infinity are currently roling out a service called FTTC, or Fibre to the
cabinet. So, instead of the signal travelling all the way from the
exchange to the green cabinet on the end of the road, and then on to
your house via copper pairs, The signal between the exchange and the
cabinet will run on fibre optic cables. You'll still have coper from
the cabinet to your home, but, the distance that the frequency is
travelling on copper is shortened, and therefore, higher bandwidth and
higher speeds can be achieved.
Link-Connect can provide FTTC either as a standalone, or as part of Smart Connect (Bonded ADSL) Technology. Call us on 0800 0354 777
April 24th 2010
Phone Line Tax Shelved
The Labour Governments proposal to put a 50p +vat per
month tax on all fixed phone lines to help
fund the rollout of next generation broadband services to 90% of the
country by 2017 has been shelved at the last minute. The tax itself was
widely disliked and had received stiff opposition from almost all
quarters, though without it the government has effectively erased its
crucial Next Generation Access (NGA) plans.
The tax was part of
the government's Finance Bill, which will now face a general delay until
18th May; crucially, after the general election. It's still possible
that a victorious Labour party might reintroduce it, though Conservative
opposition, even in a hung parliament situation, is likely to mean that
the 50p tax is now well and truly consigned to the dustbin.
In
the meantime there will be an inevitable climate of uncertainty, though
such weather is not to be unexpected around a general election year.
Meanwhile the Conservative party recently pledged to use 3.5% of the
BBC's existing TV Licence fee (Digital Switchover Budget, estimated to
be worth £130m per year) to deliver "100Mbps broadband across most of
the population" by 2017, instead of imposing the 50p tax.
March 19th 2010
Voters demand Digital Economy Bill debate as YouTube faces charges
The Open Rights Group (ORG) has released information citing 10,000 UK citizens have written to MPs to demand a debate on the Digital Economy Bill (DEB). The DEB seeks to combat internet copyright infringement (downloading of illegal music etc.) but its proposed solutions, such as website blocking and broadband disconnection for "suspected" abusers, have caused some serious concern.
The news comes on the same day that YouTube, which many fear could be under threat from the bill, revealed that Viacom had deliberately "roughed up" uploaded videos to make them look stolen or leaked; thus helping its copyright case against the free and popular video sharing website.
Those MPs who cast aside fears that websites like YouTube could be blocked should pay attention. Viacom has accused YouTube of "massive intentional copyright infringement" and is waiting for a court to rule on its £660m suit against the site.
March 4th 2010
The UK Government have announced plans to get 7.5 million new internet users online by March 2014
Some of the key targeted initiatives to progress this agenda include:
The Governments Home Access Programme, which will provide free computers and internet connections to 270,000 families with children of school age.
As part of the Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government
White Paper, the Government announced that an additional £30m would be
made available to UK online centres to support the development of the
National Plan for Digital Participation to get more than one million
people online in the next three years.
The Governments commitment in Building a Society for All Ages to support an extra 20,000 people in sheltered housing to go online by March 2011.
The appointment of the Champion for Digital Inclusion (Martha Lane Fox) and her Task Force, who are targeting the four million digitally and socially excluded people who have never been online through the Race Online 2012 strategy.
An extensive programme, through the Government’s skills and education programmes, to provide clear routes of progression for both child and adult learners who wish to become digitally included.
The establishment of the Consortium for the Promotion of Digital Participation, which brings together over 60 key industry and third sector stakeholders to both coordinate much of the above activity and support new Social Marketing and Targeted Outreach programmes to help change Digital Participation behaviour.
February 1st 2010
New Year - New Products
We think 2010 will see increased interest in network security and particularly on threat management at the point of network access. This is traditionally provided on a firewall at the site, but with the capital costs and the need to upgrade with changes to the business, plus the management overhead of having staff trained in all the firewall variants, clients are increasingly looking to have this provided as part of a managed service.
Smart-Secure is our new network-based security service where all the threat management is provided within the network. When delivered with say a leased line, Smart-Connect service or even a basic broadband connection the public IP is retained within our network and the service delivered to your siten is provided on your private LAN IP addresses. In essence the LAN port on your firewall is now the network service. Link Connect manage the firewall functionality for you, or you can have Administrator access and complete this yourself. All the usual functionality like VPN connections, anti-virus, content management and port forwarding can be configured as before but now much of the traffic managed by the firewall no longer runs on your access circuit, making it much more efficient.
There are options suitable for just a few users to thousands and all available now.
If you are considering upgrading your firewalls at any site call the Sales Team at Link Connect and see how a combined access circuit and Smart-Secure could save you time and money.
January 2010
2009 - Good or Bad?
Well it was hard work that is certain. There was no free lunch available and all our staff worked hard to achieve our sales growth and meet our high standards of customer service.
The growth in our Smart-Connect product has again shown how important it is to have reliable and scalable connectivity in today's business environment and how, for many customers there are few alternatives. We doubled installations of Smart-Connect in 2009 against the previous year. Quite an achievement in todays straightened times. However, maybe we should not be surprised as Smart-Connect represent’s very good value for money, and in many cases we have saved customers several thousand pounds against their original connectivity.
Basic failures during the bad weather of February 2009 and again in December and this January had little or no impact on our Smart-Connect customers, with only one experiencing any outage due to line problems. Our overall availability across our network service is very close to five 9s, representing an average unavailable time for all customers of less than five minutes in the year. This was achieved through careful deployment of our network, aggressive management of our partners and the use of continuous monitoring to predict likely points of failure correcting early. We were even able to diagnose a likely memory fault in an access device and have it exchanged before it failed.
With customers increasingly relying on access the need for high bandwidth, high availability and simple delivery has never been greater.
25th December 2009
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our customers from everyone at Link-Connect!
12th December 2009
Building a Digital Britain
Link-Connect were interviewed for the upcoming "Building a Digital Britain" film for The Business Channel, and due to be broadcast on Sky and Freesat early in 2010.
The film, also to be available on the Institute of Directors (IoD) and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) websites examines a number of key issues surrounding the deployment of next generation networks in the UK as part of the government’s "Building a Digital Britain" campaign. Martin Alexander (MD) and David Amos (Director, Sales & Marketing) made the case for Bonded ADSL and other services to supplement the infrastructure where the next generation technologies will not be available for several years. Video of the interviews will be available on the Link-Connect website and here on
3rd December 2009
Keep in touch!
A new study has revealed that the average UK adult spends 68 hours online and over 7 hours using their mobile phone every month. This equates to over a month (34 days) a year online and three and a half days per year on the phone.
The Moneysupermarket survey was conducted by Opinium Research with over 2000 British adults between Friday 21st and Tuesday 25th August 2009. It found that 59% feel they would be cut off from the world without a phone or Internet connection.
Technology is so important that people would find it hard to keep in touch with friends and family, with 30% of adults admitting they would contact people less without access to the Internet or a mobile phone. Some 14% wouldn’t know how to keep in touch if they did not have a mobile or Internet connection. With the internet rapidly becoming a preferred way of staying in contact with the world, Link-Connect are working harder than ever to continue to provide fast and reliable connections to all our customers.
