CCS Leeds Ltd provides leased lines, ethernet first mile (EFM),hosting services, VoIP telephone lines, technical support and a wide range of other services. We are also human beings and this blog is a regular account of who we are and the kind of thing we deal with on a daily basis.......
About 18 months ago we were contacted by a TV production company called Left Bank Pictures. They were moving into a temporary location in Leeds and setting up a production office for series 2 of DCI Banks. As such they required some internet and telephones, but only on a temporary basis as the shoot was to last for only 3 months. Most other suppliers they had spoken to were only offering a solution on a minimum 12 months contract term.
However, we were able to provide them with what they wanted, which was an ideal solution and saved them a lot of money.
Just recently they started work on series 3 of DCI Banks and as such, contacted us to request that we reactivate their services. We were more than happy to do this and in less than an hour they were all up and running again with 10 telephones and everyone connected to the internet.
Because everything went so well and without fuss, Left Bank have been kind enough to recommend us to two other production companies who have a similar (if not the same) requirements as Left Bank, and we are now supplying them too.
So we're now supplying internet connections and VoIP telephony to the production teams of 3 new television series, all of which will air in 2014. You might even spot a certain employee from CCS Leeds on the shows if you look closely enough, as he's appearing as an extra.....
As time moves on, technology improves and we all embrace new developments in the world of IT.
The way we communicate changes too, with the increase of social networking being used for not only personal relationships, but as a way of promoting your business. These are very powerful marketing tools which everyone should embrace if they want to success and stay ahead of the competition.
It is also becoming clear that the Internet is vital to the way we do business, with many software applications and storage solutions being migrated to the 'Cloud'.
People now need the ability to access their information and documents wherever they happen to be as modern day living has created a demand for this kind of flexibility.
To this end, many businesses have invested heavily in their internet connectivity, often installing super fast and reliable leased lines, and quite rightly too. But over time their speed requirements grow and many have been fearful that the cost of doing so would be prohibitive. However, having looked at a few examples it might not cost as much as you think.
Take one of our customers as an guide. They're currently paying £300 per month for a 10Mbp/s an internet leased line. This guarantees them a synchronous and uncontended service , along with an excellent service level agreement. However, due to their business growth they now require much more bandwidth so as to cope with their additional staff and new cloud based software application.
So to cut a medium story shot, we upgraded them to a full 100Mbp/s, which is 10 times faster that what they previously had, and what was the new price I hear you ask.........?
Only £500 per month.
Yes, you read that correctly - 10 TIMES FASTER for only only £200 more per month.
So maybe now is the time to be re-evaluating your requirements and asking your ISP (or preffereably us), to quote you for upgrading the speed of your internet connections so that it can give you what you need.
“The internet connection is down again and the company is losing money as we can’t process orders and get the goods / services out, plus without email, we have ground to a halt.”
How often has this happened? It’s more common that you may think as standard ADSL Broadband connections (which includes BT Infinity / FTTC) do not have any service level agreement to speak of – what this means is that your ISP does not have any guarantees in place, or obligations to get your internet working again within a given time frame.
How much money would your company lose if the internet stopped working for a day? In one example, a firm which employs 40 staff and sells most of its products online, the answer was a staggering £32,000 per day. Don’t forget, the loss is not just lost sales, it is made up of the following;
Loss of sales
Paying staff wages for not being able to perform their roles
Electricity
Time spent reporting the problem and subsequently chasing for updates
When the internet is so important, surely it is worth considering having the most robust connection that is available? The rental for a much faster, uncontended and synchronous leased line would cost far less per annum than £32,000 per day in loss of service, plus it would come with a service level agreement (SLA) which would also guarantee that it would be fixed within a given time frame, should there ever be an outage.
The way we all work is changing, and a lot of applications are migrating to the cloud, which means that it is now more important than ever that we ensure that our connection to the Internet remains as constant as possible. We also need the flexibility to be able to increase the speed of our connections, in-line with our business growth. In this day and age, many feel that standard ADSL and FTTC products do not give us the reliability or guaranteed stability which we require, and given that the cost of renting fibre is coming down, these options are becoming far more affordable.
You can find out more about leased lines by following this link to our main website.
If this is of any interest and you would like to know more, please contact us and speak to one of our technical sales team. Please note that our sales people are highly technical and not commission based, are only interested in giving you the right advice and providing you with the right solution based on your requirements.
According to a new survey, if you're after the best possible speed from your home broadband, then the best time to log on is 4am. Chances are, at this time you will actually achieve the speeds as advertised by your ISP.
According to the net comparison site USwitch, the average speed for home broadband is around 14.83Mbp/s download, but this drops by 28% to 10Mbp/s at 9pm, due to a higher demand for TV streaming services such as Netflix and the BBC iPlayer.
The fastest area's of the country at peak time are Middlesborough and Swansea, which average out at about 12.8Mbp/s, and the slowest area's are Swansea and Aberdeen at only 6.1Mbp/s.
However, built up area's such as city centers tend to suffer a higher percentage drop at peak times, due to there being a much higher demand for streaming services.
Of course these facts and figures only relate to 'contended' services such as ADSL products, whereas 'uncontended' services such as leased lines and EFM (Ethernet First Mile) are never affected and never would be.
Here at CCS (leeds), we can offer the best value options for any of these technologies, so if you're in the market for a high quality, uncontended and synchronous internet connection, then please do get in touch with us.
Along with Facebook's re-design and the introduction of the much-maligned timeline, comes new privacy settings (often overlooked by users) that can protect information you'd rather keep private, and prevent third parties from accessing your information.
Very few people actually explore this area and opt to just use Facebook’s default privacy setting. However, if you want to get into the tool box to ensure your information is safe and secure on Facebook here is CCS Leeds’ top ten tips on managing you Facebook profile.
1. Editing Your Privacy Settings
There are two ways to get to your privacy settings. In the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook page there’s the Settings drop-down menu that allows you to edit your Account Settings, Privacy Settings and Application Settings.
How you set your Privacy Settings depends largely on what information you want to display. For instance, if you’re using Facebook as a means of showing off to potential employers or clients you may not wish to show information that you would not like you family to see.
For most people though, Facebook is a means of either meeting people or getting your name out to as many people as possible. Decide which one you are.
2. What’s Not Private
It’s important to understand what information Facebook considers public. They say: "Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings."
3. Your Profile Information
To protect your Profile Information, select Privacy Settings from the Settings drop-down menu on your homepage and then click to the Profile Information section.
Your choices for privacy settings are: Everyone (literally everyone, including Google and other search engines), Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends, Only Friends and Customize. The Customize option allows you to include or exclude particular networks, or people - useful if you’re in a situation where you share Facebook with co-workers or family.
4. Your Contact Information
The Contact Information section gives you the option to limit who can contact you outside of Facebook, via email, phone or post. Depending on your needs, select whether you want to share with everyone or just friends.
5. Who Can See You?
The Settings tab includes all your basic information and you can control who sees your name on a Facebook search by clicking on Name, where you can decide to enter an alternate name, show only part of your name, or display your name in your profile and search results. If you don’t want your name shown, uncheck the box.
6. Your Email and Linked Accounts
Which email you use is another option on this page, depending on your privacy needs, it might be best to use an email you don’t mind sharing with the world to, or one that you want everyone to have. You may also sync your Facebook account with your other accounts in the Linked Accounts section here.
7. Your Wall
Allowing friends to post to your Wall is another personal choice, easily made by checking or unchecking the indicated box.
8. Hiding Your Friends
There’s an option to hide your friends so they won’t appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out.
To hide your friends, click on the pencil icon in the top right corner of the Friends box on your profile, uncheck the 'Show my friends on my profile' box to prevent your list from appearing on your profile.
9. Blocking People From Your Profile
From the Settings drop-down menu and click on Block List. Note, though, that while friendships/relationships on Facebook will be removed when you block someone, they may still use some apps that you do and so you may still have some communication with them that way.
10. Your Apps Privacy
Editing the privacy settings of the apps on your Facebook profile is another way to protect your privacy, given that most apps access the information on your profile as a condition of use. Select Application Settings from the Settings dropdown menu or go to the Applications and Websites section of Privacy Settings in the same dropdown menu to edit these settings. The page prompts you to edit your privacy settings after reading.
The main point is you have to dig deep into the Facebook website to access your privacy settings and edit them - but it’s well worth it.
If in doubt go to the Facebook/Privacy/Help page or check out this useful video.
On Friday 27th April 2012, we held an event to
mark the official opening of our new Data Centre.
The event was well attended by over 30 guests who consisted
of clients, potential clients and local Member of Parliament Mr George Mudie.
Attendees were treated to a guided tour of the Centre’s
facilities and refreshments were on hand throughout.
Nick demonstrates a power cut.
Nick Ryder, Technical Manager at CCS (Leeds) Ltd gave a short
but entertaining speech, during which he demonstrated, with the help of
colleague and MD Peter Knapp, what would happen if the power supply to the Data
Centre was disconnected. There was a nervous hush as Peter turned off the main
power supply, and then relief as the graphs showed that the generator had
sprung into life, thus maintaining continuous power to the Data Centre.
What made this little demonstration more poignant was that
there were a number of CCS’s co-location clients at the actual event, and to
say that they appeared slightly apprehensive would be an understatement.
All in all it was a great afternoon and we would like to say
a big ‘Thank You’ to all of those who
attended.
At CCS Leeds we are always keen to support local good causes and as you might have seen from recent newspaper coverage we are now offering to host websites for ten West Yorkshire charities for free!
Nick Ryder, technical sales manager at CCS, says: "Like most charities the Leeds Teaching Hospitals Charitable Foundation relies on the generosity and support of the general public. We’ve been working with the Foundation for several months now and after finding out more about the amazing work they do, we decided that helping to cut their running costs was the least we could do.
"On the back of that, we have decided to offer the same service to other charities too. We would like to invite charities to apply for free web hosting and we will initially choose 10. The charities must be based in West Yorkshire and will have to meet certain criteria, but in the first instance we would like any charities who are interested to get in touch with us and we will take it from there."
Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust has created a new children’s hospital on the Leeds General Infirmary site which resolves the problem of seriously ill youngsters being transferred across the city for treatment.
The Foundation needs to raise money to make every child’s stay as wonderful as possible by providing toys, DVD players, art work for the walls and ‘put up’ beds to enable parents to sleep by the side of their child. This is in addition to the state-of-the-art medical equipment that all staff would like to work with.
Any charities who are interested in receiving free web hosting should email nick.ryder@ccsleeds.co.uk or ring 0113 2946699.
We came across a really interesting article here by Br0kenTeleph0n3 so thought we would repost it on our Blog so as to share it with our faithful readers. Here it is in full;
Market consultancy Analysys Masons (AM) has done some theoretical thumbsucking and concluded that by doubling the network frequency (planned for 2012) and applying novel VDSL acceleration technologies such as vectoring, bonding and phantom lines, BT will be able, theoretically mind, to provide a 30Mbps broadband service over existing copper lines to 99% of homes in the UK.
Bloody marvellous, what!
AM was at pains to say that these technologies are in use or planned in the United States (AT&T’s U-verse), in Netherlands (KPN) and even Pakistan (PTCL), because they allow incumbent telcos to compete on sheer speed using their existing copper access networks against fibre and cable companies, and in some cases beat them for coverage.
Of course, there are caveats (see here for attenuation issues). Fibre to the cabinet, the most expensive part, has to be pretty well ubiquitous. The line length from the cabinet to the premises must be under two kilometres. The copper in the lines should be good quality. The homes should have at least two pairs of wires that could be bonded. The telephone pole to the cluster of homes it serves should be not be multiplexing services ie 12 homes each with two pair cables should have a 48-wire cable on the pole.
AM says it’s a secret how many homes have just a single copper pair. Br0kenTeleph0n3 understands that many, if not most, premises actually have four pairs, something AM doesn’t dispute hotly. And 99% of homes are within two kilometres of a street cabinet, it says.
Slam dunk, game over, right?
Well, no. There’s a problem with quantifying demand, which goes to the commercial or business case.
OK, so what’s the cost of just building it and hoping they will come? Remember this is only for the one-third of the country that BT says it requires taxpayers’ money to make it worthwhile. AM reckons the extra costs represents about 15% of monthly revenues from those subscribers.
So would BDUK’s £830m cover it?
AM’s answer to that is not clear and explicit. That’s because I asked if that money was applied mostly to put in fibre to the cabinets rather than upgrade the “last mile”, might it not contravene European Union rules on state aid?
Apparently this was getting into an area where conflicts of interest might apply, and the interview ended. Abrup…
