Month: August 2012

What’s the value of a testimonial?

/ Raj / Leave a comment

Originally published over at Melbourne.co.uk

We’re lucky that lots of our customers recommend us to other people. And some of them kindly offer or agree to give us a few words for our website to share with you.

You might’ve seen them, at the foot of various pages – links to stories about other companies that use our services and are happy to talk about them. Sometimes we link to them in tweets or share them with prospective customers, if they’d like to check out credentials. To be honest, we probably don’t make as much of them as we could do.

But what’s the real value in a testimonial?

Last Monday, I’d had a busy day back after a non-stop weekend. Loads of emails to respond to, content to create and a spot of troubleshooting to throw in as well. Add to that, a bike ride over glass-covered roads and, by the time I got home, I was ready to collapse with a drink.

As is my (bad) habit, I flopped onto my sofa and got out my iPhone. Amongst other things, I checked my work email and saw an unexpectedly swift reply from a customer.

There are times when you see something and you know it’s all worthwhile. One of the reasons I love working for Melbourne is the honest commitment to customer service from every single person. And it’s not easy to maintain that, when there’s a hell of a lot going on at once.

It was an email from Phil at Netweaver. Reading it put a grin on my face and I forwarded it to my colleagues straight away. It’d been a tough day (and it’s been a busy week since) but knowing we’re appreciated and that someone wants to share it with others is a great feeling. And that, for me, is the real value of a testimonial.

If you want to read Phil’s story in his own words, check out his testimonial here.

Ending over the air TV broadcasts will congest UK broadband even further

/ Raj / Leave a comment

Originally published over at Melbourne.co.uk…

The House of Lords has recommended ending the use of airwaves to broadcast TV and re-allocating this spectrum to mobile data usage.

TV “should be delivered exclusively over the Internet”, reports the Reg. The House of Lords report, titled Broadband for All – an Alternative Vision, presents a series of recommendations that are part of a wider set of suggestions to improving broadband quality in the UK.

The fact is, that if the recommendation contained within the report were to be adopted by the Government, it would put never before imagined pressure on the UK’s Internet infrastructure. This is why the committee’s consideration of a universal service obligation for minimum broadband quality is a good starting point.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the UK’s domestic and business broadband relies on adapting old copper-wire technology to handle it (i.e. DSL). This means it’s inherently going to be of a lower quality and speed than the fibre-optic broadband Internet access available in some of the biggest growing digital economies in the world, like South Korea and that’s being experimented with by Google in Kansas City, USA.

In Manchester – a major broadband not-spot – tenants of the Manchester Science Park are lucky to get 100 MBps Internet connections provided by our network. If we’re going to stop using the airwaves to receive broadcast content, then this type of connection will become the bare minimum businesses need and consumers will expect to consume content online.

In my opinion, the Government needs to step-in and realise that without significant fresh investment in the UK’s Internet infrastructure, we will continue to languish in the global broadband league tables.