MARKETWATCH
EXIT MATTERS...
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BROADBAND
update:
By Nigel Cook, CEO of Evolution Capital
Only a few months ago, respected
commentators were predicting that rising stock markets and bold investors hungry for risk would lead to a revival of initial public offerings. Sadly, the future isn’t what it used to be, as I discovered when I optimistically supported Go Native in the Champion Hurdle. The fact is that, as Sean Farrell has noted in The Times, just one issue – Kea Petroleum – has been concluded in the UK this year, raising £6.1 million. Withdrawn deals including Travelport, Merlin Entertainments, which owns the London Eye, and fashion chain New Look total about £1 billion. That’s the highest figure since the first two months of 2007.
Internationally, it’s a different picture. IPOs worth $19.7 billion have been issued this year, largely fuelled by emerging markets which accounted for 86 per cent of deal value. Farrell points out that investors are treading carefully because of fears about the wider European economy and concerns about sovereign debt. That said, some smaller listings are set to go ahead, among them SuperGroup, which makes the Superdry clothing brand favoured by David Beckham and which hopes to raise £125 million. It seems that investors are wary of helping private equity firms to pay off debt in return for a stake in a highly geared business.
Ernst & Young’s Michael Lynch-Bell says that investors are looking for realistic pricing, a conservative balance sheet and a clear growth story. Non-private equity companies going for traditional flotations are, he believes, better placed in the current climate and are often more willing to adjust the offer price for new shares. So it seems that investors are preferring to back companies looking for funds to stimulate growth rather than those aiming to reward owners.
My own view is that there will be a resurgence in merger and launch activity towards the end of the year. What could spoil it, despite the fact that many of its members deserve hanging, would be a hung parliament.
Many websites and video streaming applications are free, but the bandwidth required to get to them is not. Andrew Dickinson, Sales & Marketing Director at Griffin Internet, looks at how resellers can protect themselves from financial risk, while optimising their business customers’ broadband experience.
of Charterhouse who won the bottle of Single Malt. In that article I mentioned DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) and traffic shaping and I have had a number of requests since to elaborate on these technologies and their role in the world of IP.
F
In the last few years average bandwidth usage has more than trebled, even for a business-only ISP like Griffin. Despite the constant pressure on price at the retail level the price that ISPs pay for most of their wholesale bandwidth has reduced by less than 10 per cent. An 8Mbit/s ADSL line running at full capacity would cost an ISP over £1000 per month, and so without some form of network-based traffic management they are putting themselves and their Pay As You Go customers at great financial risk.
It used to be that different types of traffic used specific ports on the Internet, and simply by blocking these (eg, file sharing, peer-to-peer) an ISP could restrict bandwidth-hungry non- business applications. Those days are long gone and most peer-to-peer applications are now designed to disguise themselves as legitimate web browsing. ISPs that persist with basic port blocking technologies are kidding themselves and many of their resellers are paying much more than they need to be for their broadband.
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So how does DPI work? As the term suggests every packet entering the ISP’s network is
irstly, thank you for all your responses to January’s acronym competition and congratulations to James Banks
Andrew Dickinson
inspected and depending on the application and the traffic profile set up by the ISP or their reseller it is routed to different parts of the network and assigned a priority. This process of profiling and prioritising is known as traffic shaping. Of course the processing power required to inspect every packet without slowing them down is immense and very expensive. At Griffin we spent over £1 million in 2009 in upgrading and making fully resilient our DPI platform, but this investment has already paid back and enabled us to remain uncongested and competitive to our 400-plus channel partners.
A carrier-class DPI system will inspect a packet in under a millisecond, and DPI vendors will issue regular ‘signature’ updates as peer- to-peer software distributors find ever more ingenious ways of disguising their traffic. Of course, there are some legitimate business streaming and peer-to-peer applications and the DPI system must be able to identify them so that the ISP and the reseller can decide what priority and bandwidth to assign to them.
Across the Griffin network we identify and prioritise all legitimate VoIP packets and we peer directly with all of the main vendors so that when we pass voice packets to them they do not have to transit the public Internet. It might be worth asking your ISP how they manage traffic on their network – you might just be paying more than you need to.
n
46 COMMS DEALER APRIL 2010
www.comms-dealer.com
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