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!

Topping out on Punta Fiames, nr Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.

I like cables of all kinds, especially cables that lead to the top of a mountain…

The internet is changing society in ways we barely imagined even 10 years ago, let alone 20. In the words of the Digital Britain report, “…We are at a tipping point in relation to the online world. It is moving from conferring advantage on those who are in it to conferring active disadvantage on those who are without.”

But while the internet gives, it also takes away. The online world has wrought big changes in advertising, the upshot of which is that many print publications are struggling. One of the recent casualties was FibreSystems Europe, a business magazine about the fibre-optics industry in Europe, where I worked in my first job as a trainee journalist, returning in January 2008 to be its editor.

So now it’s time to invent the next phase of my life. I’m writing this blog to a) keep my hand in while I build up my freelance work and b) provide comment on some of the issues around fibre-optics where I feel that I can make a contribution to the debate. I plan to write about optical components and systems as well as fibre-to-the-home. Older posts contain recent work published on other websites.

I hope my ramblings will be of interest to a few people out there. Let me know when you like something, we all need a little encouragement sometimes. Equally, please let me know if I get it wrong, I’m always willing to learn.