In my day job, Cisco kit is *very* popular, for values of “very” that compare with android vs blackberry market share.
This isn’t because cisco kit is good, it is now all made in china and very cheaply too.
It is all because of the two pronged thing that is Cisco IOS and Cisco certification.
Cisco IOS + certification means anyone anywhere with a TCP connection can log in to your switch or router and admin it*****, so cheap Chinese hardware and cheap outsourced to Mumbai tech support means major mark-up to the product hyped and sold here in the west.
***** Except when this isn’t true, and the only way in is in person with a console cable, or the cheap Chinese hardware is dead and the only way in is in person to swap it out.**********
********** And it is THIS that virtual machines are designed to eliminate, nothing else, that is the unique selling point that matters, not any of the other reasons given.
If you were to ask me what to buy, I’d tell you to buy Draytek, it’s less money and better kit.
As an aside, there are still niches, when it comes to bonded EFM / SHDSL it is still pretty much http://www.rad.com or nobody in real life on the ground, as in I can’t remember the last time I saw anything else, same as anything picking up a BT fibre connection is going to be an Adva box.
In all of these above if you follow the money you can see why the decisions were made that were made, even though technically the same or better results could have been achieved for less money, a bit like in the 80’s the Equipu copier guy who came around every two weeks to fix the copier, that is how the company that supplied the copier made money, not by supplying the copier or toner, but by the constant and ongoing support it needed, that you were not told about when signing up.
I know a very wealthy man, his business put out a tender for quotes, he wanted dual homed gigE to his new office building, and he wanted a flat fixed fee per annum, which he was happy to pay up to 5 years in advance, and, he wanted an SLA, 100% uptime of at least 100 mbit, don’t give a fuck how you do it, just do it, and don’t bill me for it.
He got ZERO tenders, because his SLA requirement explicitly forbade the business model that *everyone* out there was founded on, so in the end he started a new company that did nothing but provide connectivity to his new office, he has his dual homed gigE fibre laid by his new ISP company which has only one customer, himself, with dual homed redundant microwave links on the roof to other sites in town where he has taken offices that hold nothing but the switchgear for the dishes on the roof and connectivity, and a third dish providing a satellite link.
He has 5 guys working shifts to give 24/7 coverage working on-site to ensure all these connections stay up, and to monitor the internal network, and 2 guys working day shifts to monitor and maintain the racks of servers and NAS boxen.
Frighteningly, his numbers for all this aren’t more than 20% higher than the lowballed numbers the various mega providers quoted him for the standard service, excluding the constant ongoing support calls and outages or brownouts where he had connectivity but not full bandwidth.
His “business” is selling racks to certain other business customers, each customer has a multiple of 2 full custom built racks, which are mirrors, and backups of their business, live, 24/7 replicated, backups, the deal is he can *literally* power down and disconnect the rack in 5 minutes from that customer’s phone call, and literally 5 minutes after that the rack is sealed in a custom enclosure and in a van with 2 drivers up front and 3 “guards” in back to verify seals aren’t broken etc, and that van can be at any of the London airports within another hour, or anywhere else you like at an average road speed of 50 mph…. so one copy goes to the customer, one stays in situ, and another one is built pronto to replace the one that was just pulled.
This is a very specific business segment and all of his customers are known to each other and themselves, some of them actually own others as subsidiaries, in the same business sector… I can’t say much else about all this, but the data is basically customer records and billing databases.
The point of this is that for those who are wise to the iniquities of the “ongoing revenue from ongoing support” business model, which is essentially almost everything nowadays, there was a gap in the market, albeit a gap only someone with about 20 million of his own cash available to kick-start the project could exploit, but the gap was there, by design.
Market theory will tell you that such gaps are exploited naturally by market forces, not so, such gaps are CREATED naturally by big business, who seek to corral and control and manipulate customers, and while those who create these gaps do not exactly sow the ground with U238 and landmines, they do not do anything that might help anyone else exploit this territory.
I had the idea he is now doing, in 1998, at the dawn of the xDSL age and the end of the dial up 56k age, I didn’t have the wherewithal to exploit it, and back then I was thinking single hard disks, motorcycle couriers, small businesses with a single NT3.51 server, I wasn’t thinking big.
This man will himself tell you, part of the process before spending his own 20 big ones was to sit down with some heads and see if his project would in any way tread on the toes of those already in the marketplace, specifically, would starting his own ISP to get the product he wanted screw him with the major players, and the answer was no, on one condition, that the only customer his ISP ever served was himself.
This man told me, that it is in this business environment, that BT’s recent surprise and winning bid for nearly a billion quid for the football rights is being seen in the business world as the equivalent (and this is his words, not mine) of the USA launching Gulf War 1, which was of course all about freedom and democracy and mom’s apple pie for the kurds, fuck all to do with oil.
It is a gloves off, hat in the ring, launch *all* the thermonuclear missiles type of move, as far as all the other incumbents are concerned.
£897 million / 60 million (population) = £15 for every man woman and child in the UK, the vast majority of whom will neither be paying BT Sport customers, nor football fans.
It is, according to him, because Sky started selling broadband, hilariously effectively being a reseller of a reseller for a different BT group product, XDSL, but basically straying from the monthly subscription for a TV dish business model into the monthly subscription for a internet connection business model.
To be fair, it was a move Sky had to make, hello youtube, hello BBC iplayer, only a matter if time before the broadcast model fell to the on-demand model.
Nevertheless, it was an annexing the sudetenland moment, a kristallnacht moment, the gloves are off and now it is all down to burn rates and war chests.
The whole newspaper phone hacking thing, unrelated? Not at all, that was the archduke Ferdinand and some slimy Serbs, after all, the Murdoch empire has dirt to dish.
That is the trouble with following the money, if you aren’t aware enough you won’t see the drug dealer deliberately throwing away a million in product to burn a liability / competitor in a bust, or the biggest rivers on the planet being under the oceans.
You can’t even follow the billions, because that particular fiat currency might become worthless overnight, analogous to certain films where the protagonist must spend 100 million dollars in one year, and have *nothing* to show for it at the end…..
If you *know* you *have* to spend it now, while it is *still* worth *something*, or if you are involved in what is really a currency EXCHANGE, say 897 million Sterling at today’s “worth” for 10 million extra subscribers on monthly subscription….. the “sheeple eyeball month“, that might be a good exchange rate, I don’t know, depends if we are looking at the sheeple eyeball as a unit of currency that can be converted into sales of Brawndo, or votes, or apathy and the po-lice state…
Currently, in the UK, if you take “The Internet” to mean the backbone and all the switching gear, the local ISPs, the colo facilities and servers, home and business networking and computers, and increasingly the portable computers called mobile phones that shift *everything* as “data”, eg 0’s and 1’s, I have a truly frightening statistic for you.
The Internet = 17% of total UK electricity generating capacity.
and since all electricity consumed ultimately gets converted to heat, that means 17% of electrically sourced heat generation in the country is from “the internet”
That is bigger than *anything* since the days of steam dawned.
