Today I started a new gig — writing news for the website www.samknows.com. My brief is to expand the coverage of the news section to include broadband issues in Europe and the US. The website already does a good job of covering broadband news from the UK.
For those of you who haven’t come across it yet, Samknows was set up in 2003 to provide campaigners in the UK with the information needed to bring broadband to their area. It was instrumental in aggregating demand for broadband services, which was important in the early days of first-generation broadband when BT set “trigger levels” for exchange activation.
Now that all of the telephone exchanges have been converted to ADSL, the focus of Samknows has necessarily changed to providing services, in particular a project with Ofcom to create a method of benchmarking ISPs. This work resulted in a well-publicised report earlier this year that provided hard evidence on a topic that consumers had been complaining about for some time — namely that broadband speeds aren’t exactly “as advertised”.
Samknows is now looking at other applications for its broadband monitoring platform, and has tweaked the technology to meet the needs of ISPs that wish to measure their own performance. UK cable operator Virgin Media has appointed Samknows to conduct an independent trial; Samknows’ plan is to expand its broadband monitoring business to other ISPs and beyond the UK.
The news at www.samknows.com is intended to add context to the solutions that the company provides. For the latest updates, you can follow Samknows on Twitter. And if you have some hot story leads, please get in touch!
