Web Development Live

According to Sun, the programme is designed to encourage the establishment and growth of small businesses by offering significant discounts on Sun hardware, web hosting from Sun’s partners, technical support, open-source software, and other Sun products and services. Discounts can be as high as 60 percent.

The scheme was launched in the US a year ago and, six months later, it was rolled out in India and China.

“Theprogrammehas been very successful,” said Juan Carlos Soto, vice president of market development at Sun. “So far, some 1,300 companies have joined it.”

That’s the warning from Ian Fogg, research director at JupiterResearch Europe, who was speaking during a Westminster eForum debate on the future of broadband in Britain.

Without investment to improve broadband infrastructure ?such as fibre to the home (FTTH) and fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) ?Fogg said the danger is “the next big thing on the internet may not work in the UK”.

But, even so, Fogg admitted that the business case for fibre is “incredibly hard” as the market has seen a slide in the average price for broadband over the last few years and consumers don’t see why they should pay more for fat-pipe access.

All-IP next-generation networks (NGNs) are being rolled out in the UK ?such as BT’s 21CN ?but NGNs do not solve the problem of legacy copper wiring at street level, from exchanges to cabinets and homes ?an issue known as “next-generation access” (NGA). NGA is the fly in the ointment of faster broadband in the UK.

Antony Walker, chief executive of the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG), told delegates the prospects for early investment in NGA are not good. But he said this is an issue that is likely to trouble small businesses before it annoys consumers, as SMEs might feel they are losing a competitive edge for accessing and competing in global markets where fibre deployments have ?or may ?outstrip the UK.

Consumer demand for upgrading the UK’s broadband infrastructure is less clear cut, Walker said. This point was echoed by Ofcom executive Peter Phillips, partner for strategy and markets development, who said there is still “a lot of uncertainty” about how long current broadband networks will deliver what consumers need.

The speakers at the eForum touched on various applications ?from videoconferencing to greater opportunities for home working to the rise of social networking and even the BBC’s iPlayer ?that might benefit from improved broadband infrastructure. But the general consensus was no “killer app” for NGNs has yet emerged.

JupiterResearch’s Fogg said: “No-one has yet identified that unique application that can only be delivered over next-generation broadband.”

Ofcom’s Phillips added that there may even be some advantage to the UK holding back on broadband development ?to see how things pan out in other countries and learn from their experience. The regulator is currently consulting on NGA.

The stance of the network operators was summed up by Andrew Lazarus, head of regulatory policy and strategy at BT, who said the company “does believe we can get a lot more out of copper”.

Lazarus cited ADSL+ ?coming next year, with top speeds of up to 24Mbps ?and said speeds would still “satisfy a lot of apps”. Issues such as broadband “not spots” ?areas not currently served by fat pipes ?and headline speeds are “not necessarily part of the fibre debate”, according to Lazarus.

Hampton, who runs what is essentially a one-woman web-development company, said she was glad she had her mobile phone handy when she was unable to make or receive calls from clients for 48 hours during last week’s Skype outage. She had decided to make Skype’s $40-a-year unlimited domestic calling her primary phone system to save money when she started her company.

“I always knew I needed a backup for Skype,” she said. “I was annoyed by the disruption, but since I was able to use my mobile phone, it wasn’t that big of a deal.”

Hampton’s point is well taken: while many large companies have already made the switch to IP telephones, small business may not want to cut off their traditional phone services just yet.

Indeed, many experts agree that it’s risky for small businesses to rely too heavily on services that use VoIP technology that leverages the public internet. The reason is simple. The public internet is still what is considered a “best-effort” network. Priority is not given to any type of traffic once it hits the public internet. And even though voice packets don’t take up much bandwidth, the technology is very sensitive to latency, which means that late-arriving packets could distort voice quality or cut off voice calls altogether.

While dropped calls or garbled connections may be tolerated by some consumers, business users generally have higher expectations for quality and reliability.

“The internet itself is not business class,” said Lisa Pierce, a vice president at Forrester Research. “Performance of the network is largely unpredictable. It’s like the freeway. Sometimes you can sail through with no traffic, and other times you can be stuck in a traffic jam for hours.”

Different for enterprise VoIPBy contrast, big companies deploying VoIP technology from suppliers, such as Cisco and Avaya, don’t use the public internet to transport their voice traffic. They use their own IP networks to transport calls within their campuses. And for calls travelling to other branch offices, they use leased data links rented from service providers such as Verizon or AT%26amp;T. As a result, large VoIP installations often require companies to invest millions of dollars to upgrade their local-area and wide-area network infrastructures.

There’s no question that these enterprise-class VoIP systems are too expensive for companies with fewer than 50 or 100 employees. But even the small-business offerings from Cisco and Avaya are often too pricey for many companies, especially those with fewer than 10 employees.

And yet the tiniest of companies want the features and flexibility that IP technology provides. Skype claims that nearly 30 percent of the 220 million people who have downloaded its peer-to-peer calling software client around the globe use the service for business purposes. In January, the company developed a special product called Skype for Business, which builds upon its existing calling features, such as Skype-to-Skype, Video Calling, SkypeOut, SkypeIn, conference calling, file transfer and chat.

But even though Skype is going after the “business” market, the company says it’s only addressing the very low end of the market.