Broadband Market Consolidation

A change of subject for this post, as recent news articles may directly affect our customers, as many of them are using broadband providers we originally recommended.

Firstly, Brightview PLC have announced that, subject to shareholder approval, they have been purchased by British Telecom for just short of £16m. This affects the three current and many legacy brands run by Brightview, including Waitrose.com, freenetname, Global Internet, madasafish, care4free, ic24 and dialstart. The full story is available on:

• The Telegraph
• The Register

Next, PIPEX Broadband Ltd, part of PIPEX Communications PLC, have been sold to Tiscali UK Ltd for £210m. This affects the recent acquisitions of PIPEX as well, which includes (but is not necessarily limited to) Freedom2Surf, Homecall, Bulldog, Nildram & Toucan. The full story is available on:

• The Telegraph
• The Register

Unfortunately, this accounts for every broadband provider that we have ever recommended in recent years and we find ourselves in the same boat, potentially looking for a new provider.

Why? Well, BT's infrastructure is solid enough, almost every broadband product being sold be a wholesale purchase from BT or using their backbone network somewhere. However, their support is off-shored, if not out-sourced, and it is the experience of some of our customers that use BT already, that the support is less than comprehensively trained.

As an example, a DreamGenius customer, paying 090 premium-rate call charges to trouble-shoot the failure of her BT Yahoo! software, installed from their CD-ROM, was instructed to "uninstall Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, because there is a known conflict". Well, we'd defy the majority of Windows users to effectively uninstall either application and still have a working computer! Sure, you can disable them, even make them disappear, but not uninstall.

Similarly, Tiscali has always been viewed as a provider on the fringes of the mainstream internet service provision market but never really figured in the minds of the average broadband buyer. As such, they are somewhat of an unknown quantity but, being a major European company, and having shelled out a lot of money for PIPEX, are now perhaps looking to be taken seriously.

Sadly, we have no experience and therefore have no substantiated opinion to offer. The market is consolidating and there isn't much more of it to do. Now, when you pays your money and you takes your choice, it's from a much slimmer menu.

The Open Source Alternative

It's been a while since we last posted and, to continue but develop the current theme, we thought we'd move away from Linux a little and address the fundamental ethos behind this alternative operating system.

Open source software is exactly what it implies; the source code that makes it work is freely available to download, review, tweak or adapt, and pass on, subject to the terms of the licence agreement. Most such software is written and distributed under the GNU Public Licence (GPL) which is a universally accepted licence agreement for the development, amendment and distribution of open source software.

Linux is open source but not all open source is Linux, or even even Linux-compatible. It need not even be an operating system. The chances are that you're already aware of, and perhaps even using, open source software already - there are open source equivalents of Microsoft's favourites which are designed to run on Windows and address some of the perceived failings of Redmond's software development.

Arguably the most widely known suite of open source software, although many people don't perhaps actually know that it is open source, is the Mozilla internet suite; commonly referred to as Firefox (web browser) and Thunderbird (email client). Following wide-spread condemnation of the inherent security flaws in Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, or more importantly, the lack of speed exercised by Redmond in addressing substantiated vulnerabilities, Firefox and it's sister product Thunderbird quickly seized a sizeable chunk of the market share, outstripping longer established alternatives.

Firefox and Thunderbird are no less prone to bugs and/or vulnerabilities but, and herein lies perhaps the most convincing argument for using open source software, they are fixed rapidly by the developers, often before the bug/vulnerability is even widely publicised - they don't wait until the monthly patch download. It's that, and the dynamic development of extensions, themes and plug-ins by third party developers that appears to have made Mozilla so popular.

Another very convincing argument for open source software is its very nature; the code is freely available and therefore it's very difficult to hide malicious code snippets in it. Something that appears to be far more prevalent in the open source than in the proprietary world is the validation of downloads using an MD5Sum. This is a simple validity check, but not infallible. If a download fails the MD5Sum check, it's usually either corrupt or tampered with and shouldn't be loaded either way.

A lesser known but equally useful open source software suite is Open Office, the free version of Sun's Star Office, cited as the main rival to Microsoft Office. Being perfectly honest, and a Power User of Microsoft's offering, it has to be said that Open Office is not ready to take on it's rival in a toe-to-toe battle royal; it lacks quite a lot of the more advanced functionality and polish.

That said, Open Office wins over its Microsoft rival on three fronts, at least for the average user:

1. It's free; free to download, free to install on as many machines as you want, free to use
2. It will open the files of it's rival. even though they are proprietary and closed source. It will even produce files of the same format, readable by it's rival
3. It will also produce web pages and PDF (Portable Document Format) files natively, that is without having to buy additional software to do so or clear out pages of redundant code

So, you may not be ready for a whole new operating system but you like the ideas, morals and ethos behind the open source movement. You can download, install and use two suites of programs which cover off the bulk of the average users' needs, without spending an additional penny.

This post has been sparked by a couple of interesting articles posted on the BBC Technology News site, so it would be churlish not to link back to them in order that you can read an alternate viewpoint.

• BBC News Programs Click Getting the most from open source
• BBC News Technology Questions for Microsoft on open formats

More on other open source alternatives next time.