UPC Fiber Power rips off Hong Kong FTTH Commercial (badly)

The orginal commercial is funny. It has farts in it.



Here the UPC-commercial, no farts, not funny



For those people who want to know which commercials UPC's creative team will rip off in the future?

http://www.youtube.com/user/HKBNatUTube

for all Hongkong city telecom commercials.

Fiber to my Home, the installation in home

Today fiber was installed in my home. You've seen the previous installments how fiber was just outside my front door. Today the last meter was bridged. This was done by a company called Schuuring. They apparantely are looking for more people to help out.  Two people came. One made sure that the fiber got from the front door to the utilities closet. The second guy did the final work, make the fiber ready for use.

The first guy
He started with opening the latch to the area between the floor and the ground, there is some space there to crouch. After this he opened up the stones in the street and dug a small hole to get the slack fiber from under the pavement. 

From Fibre to my Home

There is about 10m slack available

From Fibre to my Home

A hole is drilled in the outside wall to bring the fiber in. The fiber is run through and the hole is filled with some kind of elastic glue.

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

The slack is fed into the crouching space and left there. The last two meter is pushed upwards into the utilities closet.

From Fibre to my Home

The first guy is then almost finished. He cleans up after himself, hammers the stones back in. Tells the second guy that he has chipped a stone and promises that it will be replaced. His final task is to leave a plastic bag with a connection set for the second guy. Good thing to know. If the first guy doesn't hammer the stones back in properly and I would complain later on, than he has to come back on his own dime and fix the problem. So he was committed to hammering the stones back into the pavement the right way. (In 5 years time those stones will hover above the rest of the pavement I expect :-) )All in all this took about 15-20 minutes.

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

The second guy
The second guy came about half an hour later. He told me that they had been told not to allow pictures as some of the stuff was proprietary and "copyrighted". He was a young guy and I don't want to bring him into trouble. It seems Arcadis checks up on their work and well. Arcadis developed an online model for the Ministery of Economic Affairs which you can use to calculate the costs of installing a fiber network in The Netherlands. I used it for the calculations in my OECD paper.

I did get some pictures of his kit and the way the fiber was installed. The install itself takes less then 15 minutes and is mostly aimed at getting various layers of the fibers and then connecting the fiber to the connectors (which come with fiber attached). That then is put into the metering closet in the grey cabinet.

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

The splicer! Very cool with a small LCD screen.

From Fibre to my Home

The whole shebang installed in my utility closet. Next to it you can see my Alice DSL modem.

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

The Finished product.

The guy gave me some interesting information as well. An installer is required to do 11 installs per day. Homes like mine are easy. and they can do 20 of them on a good day. High Rise is difficult and takes more time. Older homes are also a pain. they sometimes need to drill straight from outside into the living room. A max of 6db signal loss is allowed. They try to do alot less, between 1 and 3. All in all the installation took only 15 minutes.

The line also needed to be tested. For this he used a unit by Kingfisher, pretty standard. What took the most time was getting someone on the phone at the central office. Those guys need to connect about 200 homes per day and they can be quite busy. There are 2 guys per central office. If someone finds a way in which the central office testing can be automated, that would be a great benefit. In my opinion. If you can get a testing unit to which you can hook up 500 to a thousand homes and have it communicate with the testing unit (or wirelessly to the guys mobile phone) that would be a major improvement to their workflow. Anything around 5 to 10 thousand euro would probably be worth the investment.

All in all this bit took another 15 minutes. 10 minutes for the waiting 5 for the testing.

Now I need to wait for KPN or Online to come up with a symmetrical offer for broadband to my home. Or shall I punish KPN and go for UPC for one year??

Bonus pictures
A picture of how Reggefiber promotes that people have signed up for fiber (glasvezel) in Zeewolde.

From Fibre to my Home

And some pictures of someone sitting in a tent in the street hooking up the fibers from individual homes to the main duct.

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

Dilemma: Do I choose Reggefiber/KPN or UPC

Maybe you readers can react and give me a clue of what I should do, because I am in a difficult spot here.
Tomorrow Reggefiber will install the FTTH in my home. Pictures will follow. So in a month or two, I will be able to get KPN over fiber here. Now you would imagine me to go for the fiber offer. I have promoted it everywhere. I still think that fiber is the coolest thing to happen in a long while... However this is the choice I am facing.

I currently spend 80 euro/month on Triple Play. Alice Internet 20/1 DSL+phone international 50 and UPC Royal TV.30
The TV is non-negotiable. BBC 1, 2, 3, 4 are watched alot here. KPN can't offer it yet.

KPN offers me 30/3 internet and free national calls at 55. So with UPC Royaal TV at 30 that makes 85.
UPC offers me 60/6 internet, free national and europe wide calls and UPC Royaal TV at 74 euro/month
UPC even offers me 90/6 internet, free national and europe wide calls and UPC Royaal TV at 84 euro/month

So what should I choose? Go for a year of Docsis 3.0 and hope KPN gets the point or go with fiber even though it misses the sparkles.

Please give a reaction in the comments

Price war in The Netherlands. UPC drops prices

Well, UPC has declared war on KPN. It has drastically dropped its's prices as of today. As you might remember I named UPC as the price quality winner recently. Now it's for a similar offer also the cheaper option. The worst comparison is the 60/6 offer. KPN asks 110 euro for a 60/6 triple play offer. UPC asks 74 euro for a similar offer.  KPN offers free viewing of the Dutch football league, but UPC throws in free calling in Europe (including Turkey)

Based on head-line speeds, KPN has a problem both in the fibre space as in the DSL-space. The public won't understand an argument based on the difference between Ethernet and Docsis 3.0 when it comes to fibre. The headline speeds of ADSL2+ are lower and the price difference is not substantial to UPC's 30mbit offer. For instance Telfort, KPN's cheap brand asks 34,95 for 20mbit and unlimited national calling. UPC asks 48, but throws in a free digital tv and a PVR for those customers that already have analogue Cable TV with UPC (almost 90% of the potential subs in UPC's region)

Grace Victoria Aimée van der Berg born May 14th 2009

 

This is Grace Victoria Aimée van der Berg. She was born this morning at 10:05 CET or 08:05 UTC for the timelords among you. She weighs 3515 grams. She and my wife Jamie are both doing extraordinarily fine.  

The value of Google for the world economy

I often remark that it's impossible to establish the value of Google Search for the world economy. Google Search acts as the glue of the internet. Domain names and IP-adresses may point to servers. Google points to content. Most non-digerati don't care for bookmarks, adresses, del.icio.us etc. All they care for is Google. As Google doesn't charge for it's services and it makes the world more efficient in ways that can't be calculated it's value to the world economy can never be fully appreciated.

A way of establishing the value of an industry is by looking at the percentage of GDP it represents. Google's annual revenues are $22 billion. That may sound like a lot of money, but its tiny. That's less than 0.03% of the world's GDP . It's only 1/45th of the 1 trillion revenues of the mobile telephony industry. Per global internet user it's slightly over $1 per month. But here comes the problem with this method of valuation. Google's revenue is just from advertising, it's not from search at all. The two may be linked, but Google doesn't get paid for everytime you search for something.

So here is the conundrum and I'm not pretending to understand it fully or even at all. Google is offering a service, search, that nobody pays for. None of the benefits that a searcher derives from a search flow back to Google. Even the site that was found doesn't pay Google for the privilege. Google's value measured in GDP therefore is zero, nothing. It doesn't show up in official government statistics. Yet we all know the profound effect that Google has had on our lives. "Just f-ing Google it", or "Google is your friend" are expressions that are part of our lives. Google has made our lives more efficient in a gazillion different ways.

I've looked into account for price and quality changes over time in the calculation of GDP and they sometimes use deflators to account for differences in quality, differences in prices etc. However this does assume that there is an economic value for the service offered. If I've understood it correctly services like Google Search don't show up in such statistics as there is no price paid for the service. It's even more difficult, because the value of the production of a knowledge worker is equal to the value of the salary of the knowledge worker. The output of a knowledge worker therefore increases with the increase in salary over time.

So here you are, you're reading this so you must be a knowledge worker. You get linked to the Wikipedia, OECD documents and all this stuff I found using Google. Everything new you do in your work starts with a Google Search. One way or another everything can be found quicker and better than it could before Google was there and way better than before 1994 when the internet arrived to the general public.

As a knowledge worker if you lived in 1994 and had to write a report on the defects of the energy market of an EU nation, like I did in recent months, you had to rely on what your librarian could get you. Lexis-Nexis, some books, some government papers and interviews that was it. Finding the documents was the biggest problem. It might take you weeks to just get the documentation and there was no guarantee on whether you had found it all. Comparisons with other countries were even harder. And now what did I do... I just googled it. I'm not saying I couldn't have written a good report then, but I do know that in the first week on that job Google brought me to alot more information than I could have gathered15 years ago over the entire course of the job.

You may argue that the internet made the publishing of information possible and so I should credit the internet. And on the one hand I do. However, I believe that even in 1994 all information was to be had somewhere. Finding the head or document it was contained in however was hard. Without search engines, like Alta Vista in the old days, however getting to the data on the net was still hard. Less hard than without the internet, but still hard.

The impact of this is profound in a myriad of ways. The incredible speed with which new developments get disseminated are to an enormous extent the effect of Google Search. Building a new product in Silicon Valey used to be limited to the component available at Fry's Electronics. Now it is limited to the components you can find with Google. The ways of implementing a component used to be limited to your knowledge and skills. Now it is limited to what you can find of how other people have implemented it and how they solved their problems. This allows you to find communities of like minded people, cooperate, develop solutions together and the speed of innovation is increased drastically. A simple example is that it someone once estimated that the use of open source decreased the price of DSL modems by 5-10 dollars per modem.

All in all... the quality of our life has dramatically increased through Google Search. We've become better informed, make better choices and spend less time and energy on gaining knowledge. Time and distance have shrunk. We can know what's going on in Kenya, what room to rent in Bali, the way the Indian telecoms regulator deals with termination costs and that Gravity is a cool Twitter gadget for the Nokia E51. How much that's worth is impossible to calculate. Google Search may not show up in GDP stats. Not having it or a functional equivalent around would set us back to 1997.

UPDATE May 26th. Completely forgot to mention this is a similar paradox to the productivity paradox.

(thanks to Herman Wagter for pushing me to write down my thoughts)

Spam so tasty, people want to eat it in crisis times

I received a spam message in my mail today, that was quite extraordinary. It looks well written.It doesn't over promiss. It doesn't contain weird URL's, hardly any typo's etc. If you fall for it, then it does make you a link in a global fraud and creditcard theft ring. The way it is written, it makes me feel many people who are in dire straits and not too bright, may fall for it and become a link in this international network. In the end they might end up doing time for something they don't really comprehend to be criminal. The website looks quite nice too (except for the "all rights reversed" at the bottom)

Dear Sir/Madam,


My name is Dolly Brunson, I am a Personnel Department manager in Global Shipping Agency Ltd and I would like to offer you a job of Customer Service Financial Assistant in our company.
First of all, I would like to make a brief review on our company. Global Shipping Agency Ltd.– is a world famous full service transportation company with the head office based in Hong-Kong. Our company is a leader and one of the most famous freight services providers. We work both with companies and private individuals. We specialize both in transportations by air, sea and road as well as in household removal services. GSA Ltd. has more than 10 affiliated branches around Europe and Asia and constantly develops. For more information, please visit our web-site http://adums.eu.

Today we would like to offer you a position of our Customer Service Financial Assistant with a prospect of a career growtsh.

In January, 2009 our Marketing Department started a research in the USA to determine the states with the highest customer activity. By the time research finishes, there will be 5 states chosen, with the highest level of clients’ activity. We will be happy to offer you a position of a full-time manager at one of our newly opened US offices, once you perform well at a part-time position.
As for now, let me tell more about a part-time position of a Customer Service Financial Assistant.
At this position, you would be responsible to deal with the payments form our American customers; these can be companies or private individuals. You will be a middleman between our customers based in the US and the regional branches of the company based in Europe and Asia. Your mission will be to fasten the process of payment delivery, so that to help us get the payments in regional branches efficiently, deal with each of the customer orders in shortest possible dates, attract extra customers and improve company’s total profit.
Moreover, it is important to notice, that we work on special program under patronage of U.S. Government for reducing cheap-contracts taxes. The reason we join that program is the European Union economic restrictions that affect us. If the payment is forwarded directly to one of our European accounts, our customers would have to pay another 25%-27% as a fee to the European government, which would make their expenses much higher. This 27%-Law was made by European Bank Association to protect the interests of European banks, but it affects us as well.

This is a step-by-step description of your responsibilities on a position during the approbation period:

You will have to deal with the customer payments, arranged by the Company Head Office for you. Our Head office will arrange every new coming payment with you in advance over the phone (so that to make sure you are available) and then send you an e-mail with all the details that you might need, a step-by-step instruction, exact amount transferred, the name of the customer who made the payment and the details of the regional branch the money is supposed to be sent to.
We try to arrange all the customer payments to be made like wire transfers – we consider this way of sending money to be the safest and the fastest one – transaction is checked by a Federal Wire System and is normally released for the beneficiary in 1 hour after the money has been sent.

So, after the customer makes a payment to your bank account, we will send you an e-mail with all the details of the payment. Once the payment is shown at your available balance, you are supposed to deduct your 10% commission first. Out of the 90% left you are supposed to deduct the related charges for the Western Union fee. The amount left after all the deductions are made is supposed to be transferred by Western Union to one of our regional branches (depending from and to what destination the transportation is required).

We use Western Union service to fasten the process of payment delivery – this I an instant money transfer service, and the money you sent is available for the receiver immediately.
As this is a part-time job position – you will get 2 payments a week to deal with during the approbation period and then up to 3-4 payments a week once we sign up a working agreement with you. Once you get some experience, you will probably need less than 1,5 hours to finish the whole task.

We offer that for the approbation period for the incoming customer payments you either use the existing bank account of yours or open a separate bank account for the company needs (the amount of each payment on the trial period will not exceed 10000 usd). Once we sign up a long-term working agreement with you, we will assist you in opening a business account for the company payments as we will expect more payments of larger amounts to be arranged for you to deal with. The business account takes some time and effort to be opened, and so that not to lose time (as we are just going to test each other) we advice to start with some private account first. 

The approbation period lasts for 2 weeks, which allows both of us make sure we are comfortable to deal with each other. We will sign up a pre-contract agreement with you, which will be valid through the approbation period only. Once the approbation period has gone through successfully, we will be happy to sign up a long-term working agreement for part-time employment on a regular basis with you. Some of our lawyers come to the US every 1-2 months, so once a lawyer comes to the USA, we will arrange a meeting for you, for all the papers to be signed up.


This position offers excellent benefits and basic salary of $2000 a month, along with long term career progression opportunity. Apart from a basic salary, we also offer you a 10% commission out of each project you are dealing with, so that to encourage you to deal with more payments and keep your interest in finishing any new coming task in shortest possible dates.
Once you get more experienced and are able to come with your duties easily, you will be offered to take more responsibility on a position. Experienced managers normally do all the arrangements regarding new coming customer orders themselves – communicating with the customers and regional branches, making lists of transportations, authorizing each new customer order with the company Head Office, dealing with the payments and sending them to the final destination. These responsibilities involve more time to be spent, but as well higher earnings. For all the business calls to go through successfully, you will be equipped with an iPhone. As well we will cover your international call expenses.


If you have any questions, please, do not hesitate to e-mail us.

We are looking forward to hearing from you ASAP.

FTTH: some more pictures of phase 1

Phase 1 is getting fiber to my home and that is now finished. Phase 2 will be hooking me and the rest of the street up to the active equipment. It took a bit longer for me to be hooked up to the network than I expected. I live almost precisely half way the street. The neighbours a couple of doors away to the right see their fibre go to the right. I see my fibre move to the left. The fibres meet up at the other end of the block.

At the end of the day a man from a construction company arrived to fix a damaged muff that encapsulated a traditional PSTN-cable. The man repairing it wasn't too kind about the competences of the fiber diggers. He said he had seen them too often and knew every dig site. At this moment only a small bit of fiber sticksout of the ground near my front door. It still needs to go to my meter closet, where the connections for the telephone, cable, electricty, cold water, warm water and central heating are too. (Almere has a city wide central heating and warm water system.)

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

Breaking the traditional world

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

Finishing the FTTH-build

From Fibre to my Home

nobody will ever read this... so it can be upside down

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

Reggefiber to my Home

Reggefiber has reached my home (almost) with their fiber. They are now two doors away from my home, so I expect not to be able to park my car on my own driveway this afternoon. This is part of what is locally known as Almeernet. KPN is currently offering services over it and Online (Deutsche Telekom) will soon too.

I made some pictures yesterday in my street and the neighbouring street. For those not familiar with Almere, The Netherlands. The town was build in what used to be a sea and later on a lake. Like most of The Netherlands the ground consists of clay and sand. Fiber is dug and installed with direct burial. The way Reggefiber goes about the installation is that first they dig the fiber in the street and run it through the front door. 3-4 weeks later someone comes to bring the fiber from the front door to the utilities closet, which most Dutch homes have.

The way they get fiber to the front door is the more interesting bit. It doesn't require digging. Because the soil is so loose, they can use a device (I call it a thumper), that drills itself under the driveway to the front door. This device is operated by compressed air. After this a duct is run from the street to the front door, through which fibre is run.

Enjoy the pictures. I hope I can make some of the installation in house too. In the Picasa webalbum there are some more that I took earlier.

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

From Fibre to my Home

UPC Fiber Power triumphant over KPN FTTH

I'm living in Almere. It's one of the first towns in the Netherlands that gets both FTTH from KPN/Reggefiber as well as UPC's Docsis 3.0 offer Fiber Power. I thought it would be good to compare the offers.

Conclusion
KPN's offer is disapointing. It doesn't give a revolutionary feel. This is not the thing you'll be bragging to the neighbours about.There is no compelling reason to upgrade fiber to from DSL and there is no compelling reason to switch away from UPC.

So KPN's got fiber. Internet isn't symmetrical, the TV offer doesn't have HDTV. KPN's TV offer offers too little channels, too little extra's. None of its offers have anything remotely innovative in them. It's clear KPN regards FTTH as nothing more than a more expensive upgrade from DSL. KPN can't even claim to offer the fastest internet in the country as UPC clearly gets that title. KPN strategy may have made a brilliant move with teaming up with Reggefiber, KPN Marketing sure knows how to mess it all up.

The price of the KPN's silver 50/5 offer at €80 is a bit more friendly than UPC's 60/6 offer at €92,60, but it doesn't offer the same quality TV. KPNs 60/6 offer at €110 is overpriced even if we allow for the Dutch Football League TV-channels.

Kudo's to UPC. It's technology is not up to the level of KPN's. It's expensive, it cheats on its website with only mentioning a €16 charge in the small print, but from personal experience I can say I like it's Royaal digital TV offer and according to the users on this forum its internet offer works as promised.

So what am I going to do? Well, I can't do without the BBC and KPN still can't offer it despite political pressure from the Netherlands on auntie Beeb and a lawsuit in the courts. (UPDATE 14-4-09: It's not KPN's fault that they can't offer BBC. The BBC is to blame here. I do fault KPN for not making the rest of the TV and internet offer better) I like the extra TV series that the Royaal offer has and I can't give my wife less than she currently has. So KPN is out for TV.

I would like to choose KPN's fibre offer. I'm currently on Alice DSL (20mbit/1mbit) and that delivers too little 6mbps with too much hassle (3 times major administrative problems). Moving to KPN for internet and telephony would give me the internet and telephony offer I had before. However at 55 euro and 30 euro for UPC royaal that would bring me to 85 euro a month. Almost as much as UPC fibre Power 60/6 at €92.

What needs to improve
Well call/mail me/twitter me, maybe we can do a strategy session. It is KPN however who is in the hot seat. It needs to create a wow factor for its offer. KPN can up the ante for free by making internet symmetrical. This might have some effects somewhere in its network, but it wouldn't change any of its wholesale transit agreements. KPN could also add a lot more television channels to its offer.It's the one who isn't constrained by technology, so add more analogue and more IP-TV channels. There should be a lot of more free to air channels available.

However if both KPN and UPC are continuing on this level, than price competition is their only option. What we need is innovation. New services on the network. Not that these are going to bring in massive amounts of money, but at this moment there is no compelling reason to switch between the two networks and worse for UPC customers there is no compelling reason to switch to KPN. Both networks could leverage their mobile offer and just add a lot more generic services to make their offer more sticky.

One final thought for KPN, in FTTH penetration is key to your businesscase, not ARPU. I can't fathom what the line of thinking was to market FTTH as DSL, but at 1000 euro per customer in investment, it can't be a good thing that Telfort or Planet DSL still looks like a compelling offer!

Methodology

All offers compared based on what I can find on the web.

Unfortunately KPN isn't too open about its offer. It requires one to find out where they offer their services, take a random postal code and see if your lucky. When you are lucky, this page contains a lot of information. For UPC I used the publicly available data.

KPN Glasvezel

The offers

This seems to be the whole service offer. You can have:

• Telephony (unlimited national) and basic TV (40 channels) for €45
• Internet 3/30 and telephony (unlimited national) for €55
• Bronze package: Internet 3/30, basic TV (40 channels) and telephony (unlimited national) for €65
• Silver package: Internet 5/50, TV (70 channels) and telephony (unlimited national) for €80
  
• Gold package: Internet 5/50, TV (100 channels) and telephony (unlimited national) for €110

One thing strikes me straight away. The internet offer is styled like a DSL offer. It's asymmetric. KPN invested in P2P Ethernet 100mbit/s up and down, but it doesn't offer it here. Instead it offers fibre like it is some kind of DSL on steroids. There is no internet only package.

Technology

KPN's fibre terminates on a network termination box that converts the signal to ethernet (internet and interactive TV/IPTV) and to Coax (analogueTV). To the Ethernet box KPN connects its Experia box a home broadband router with 4 ports ethernet, wifi and connections for 2 telephones. The choice to deliver analogue tv is very interesting as this allows KPN to offer exactly the same usability/look and feel as the cable companies can. One of the major benefits in cable/analogue tv happy Netherlands is that all tv's in the house can receive the analogue signal without the need for extra IP-tv boxes. KPN offers the Motorola 1960 as its IP-TV convertor. It has a hard disk DVR, HDMI and can deliver HDTV.

The television offer
The basic offer is 40 channels analogue tv. This is available over coaxial cable to all tv's in the home and is included in all TV packages. All the channels Dutch people expect from analogue TV are included, like discovery, nat geo, cartoons, MTV, Belgian, German, French, Italian and Turkish channels, except BBC1 and 2.

The digital Bronze TV offer is similar, but with more regional channels and Playboy TV it can be expanded with the plus pack at €7,50. The Silver package adds the plus pack to the mix a lot more digital channels to the mix. The Gold package adds the Dutch football league to the package (normally 10 euro's). All digital TV offers come with "Programma Gemist", the Dutch version of iPlayer and a Video on Demand service that promisses 1000 movies.

I couldn't find any HD-TV channels on offer, which is weird. The Motorola box should be able to carry HD-TV channels.

Telephony
KPN employs a VoIP platform for its telephony over broadband and this is used here as well. Not very surprising and from personal experience I can say that it works quite well. Free national calling to fixed lines is included. Calling to mobile phones is 17 cents per minute with a 5 cent starting tariff. Calling to neighbouring countries, US, UK is 5 cents per minute. Rest of Europe and Australia and New Zealand is 10 cents. (Interesting, the bronze package of VDSL charges 3,5 cents per minute during the week and is free during the weekend.) A second line is €2,50 per month.



UPC Fibre power
The offers

Important! UPC charges an extra €16,70 as a standard fee for its basic TV-offer. There is no way to get around this charge. Add this to all prices!


UPC's fibre power offer is:

• 60mbit/s down and 6 mbit/s up for €60,50
  
• 120mbit/s down and 10mbit/s up for €80,50
• the 25mbit/s down and 2.5 mbit/s up offer for €50,50 is comparable to KPN's bronze offer in speed, except that it seems that this one will be replaced by the 60/6 offer. Existing customers get the possibility to switch at no cost.

UPC has a proposition where the cheapest element in a triple play package is free. In general this is the Royaal digital TV offer of €13,50 with DVR. It does seem that UPC delivers the promissed speeds.

Technology
The modem is the Cisco EPC 3000.It is a Docsis 3.0 modem and doesn't offer any other functionality, like VoIP or digital TV. In order for it to function correctly installation by a technician is required, as it is very sensitive to signal quality. For telephony a customer will receive a standard Docsis modem, because it seems there are no Docsis 3.0 modems available with integrated VoIP. An end user will therefore receive 2 modems.

Television
Analogue TV is the basis of UPC's offer, it has the 30+ standard channels, including BBC 1 and 2. The digital offer is divided into two options starter and "royaal". The starter pack adds mostly regional channels. The royaal offer adds 40-50 channels including BBC 3 and 4. Next to television channels, there is also a Video on Demand offer available. This includes Programma Gemist (the Dutch iPlayer) and in the royaal offer a lot of on-demand tv-series available for free. (Frasier, dr. Who and Bob the Builder are among them). A DVR can be ordered for an additional €4-5,50 per month. There are more packages to choose from, like specific packages for specific nationalities, or sports (Dutch Football league) and movie channels. HDTV is an extra 9 euros

We're currently using the Royaal with DVR at home and we like it a lot.

Telephony
UPC's telephony offer is similar to KPN's. They have unlimited calling for €15,50 to national numbers. Calling to mobile is 17 cents and 10 cents starting tariff. International calls start at 5 cents, but seem to be a bit more expensive than KPN's offer. (often 1 cent per minute) An extra line is €7,50 per month.

Two afterthoughts

1. I'm never going to write a review like this anymore... too exhausting to correctly describe everything in a triple play offer.
2. I had a look at KPN's VDSL offer. It's even more disapointing.
   

Fiber coming to my Home in Almere (pictures)

In the coming months Fibre will be rolled out in my neighbourhood in Almere, The Netherlands. Yesterday I saw the first dig a few streets from my house. I took some pictures

Thou shalt not promote wireless broadband for (Dutch) homes

Warning, for those pushing wireless broadband. 

I just spend the last 5 days without DSL. The only connectivity I had HSDPA through my Nokia E51 and it was ghastly. I should have perfect connectivity, according to my phone I have full bars 3G reception. The problem is 3G. It doesn't work where I live. Or better said, what I live in.

(on wireless your happy with getting a drop)

 I (we) have a Dutch house build in 1999/2000. Great, house, really proud of it. 160m^2, garden in front, garden in the back, 4 bedrooms, big bathroom, attic, garage, well insulated, garden on the south side, semi-semi-detached, Fibre to MY home planned for november this year. BUT 3G signal indoors is just horrible. The reinforced concrete and brick walls, the double glazing, the wooden floors insulated with tin foil it just kills any and all wireless signals in the higher frequency ranges. Indoors I even have trouble getting wifi to work in all rooms. And this is the case in most houses build after 1990 in The Netherlands.

The best throughput I got from using GPRS. Trust me, life isn't fun in the GPRS world. I never want to go back there again. Even Google Search is dreadful on GPRS.

(wired you get water continously)

So please if ever someone promotes wireless as a last mile technology, point them to my blog and show them these two brilliant pictures made by  Robin Eckermann

5 and 10 euro with Google Earth image of Manhattan

 

This is certainly one of the nicest designs for money ever. On the one side Manhattan as it was 400 years ago and on the other side Manhattan as it is now as seen by Google Earth. You can literally feel Ground Zero. You can buy it online The design is by Ronald van Tienhoven

Also see this design from a  while back

Credit crisis hits KPN and Reggefiber's FTTH plans

The Dutch "Financieel Dagblad" reports that Reggefiber is finding it hard to find banks, both Dutch and foreign,  willing to loan it money for its ambitious €4 billion Fiber to the Home project. Reggefiber is operating in a joint venture with KPN.  KPN and Reggefiber are both paying 25% of the costs of the network. The other half needs to come from banks and they aren't willing. If they do loan money its in small tranches.

Reggefiber is now looking for pension funds and local governments to invest in its plans. The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs is looking into rules for local governments under what conditions they can invest in these plans.

The project has attracted alot of attention recently with its plans and the regulatory approval that the Dutch regulators OPTA and NMA gave to the joint venture. The whole Dutch telecommunications sector seems to be against the plan as most cable companies and alternative operators have filed objections to the regulatory approval.

How I calculated that the iPhone uses 640MB of mobile data/month

I got a question on how I reached the conclusion, that the iPhone uses on average  640MB of mobile data per month on T-mobile NL.

The T-mobile data I calculated from the combination of two news reports. They seem to have been mentioned by T-mobile in a press release that isn't publicly available. A press release in december does say that mobile data usage has grown 7-times since last year and is now at 2 terabytes per day. 

My calculation was based on data cited on Tweakers.net and Emerce.nl  and goes as follows:

Tweakers says that in December 2008 20,5TB per week was used by mobile users, in June this was 3.1TB. In Januari 2008 this was only 2.5TB per week. If we would have seen a "normal" growth rate, then T-mobile's weekly data usage should have been at 4.5TB maximum. The rest can be attributed to a phenomenon... being the iPhone 3G. 

Emerce.nl reports that there were 100.000 iphone users and also reports they use between 30 to 40 times more data  than normal mobile users. They also report that mobile data users Iphone and other use 67TB of data or 3TB per day. (It looks like they mixed up two numbers here, 67TB/30days is 2TB. So it looks like Tweakers is more accurate. 

So roughly mobile data usage is at 82TB/month, 18 is used by non-iphone users -->64TB is for 100,000 iPhone 3G users= 640MB (and 640 is a magical IT number, so I went with that one)

It's not perfect, but even if we allow for a 20% margin, it's still above half a gigabyte.