I am happy to announce that Broadband Prime has moved to a dotcom domain. After being hosted for more than a year on blogspot.com and wordpress.com I finally settled to http://www.broadbandprime.com/

I planned to move the blog since the beginning of the year. Until recently this plan was simply my pet project; when I had time I was looking into it to ensure the transition could be made effectively. I would probably be going on for a couple more years, most likely, if I didn’t place it on “blog” priority 1 for the last 10 days.

So, Broadband Prime has finally moved. It wasn’t that easy and I had to do a lot of tweaking to bring the blog to its current format. The blog is running on wordpress 2.8. There are simply no words to describe precisely the functionality of the platform, the wide user community and the variety of plugins and addons available out there. All permalinks of broadbandprime.blogspot.com are preserved, so all your existing links to the blog’s content will keep working as they are (that was probably the most difficult part of the transition). The feed is also operational with no need for additional action from your side (if you are subscribed to the feedburner feed: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/BroadbandPrime or http://feeds.feedburner.com/BroadbandPrime).  However, if you run into troubles please let me know and I will fix it ASAP.

A few things about the new UI of the blog. I have redefined the categorization of the content to make it easier for you to follow-up, and I have also changed the landing page. Instead of throwing a list of the most recent posts you now have all the content categorized at your disposal. I do hope you will find this more useful, at least I do.

The categories of the blog are the following:

1. Access: Addresses issues relating to access networks, technologies, architectures, business models etc.
2. Muni/Broadband: Covers municipal initiatives and issues relating to local authorities involvement in broadband infrastructures.
3. Reviews: This includes weekly reviews, roundups, conference’s reviews, studies and analysis reports.
4. Greece: This is a special horizontal category to incorporate all posts covering developments related to Greece.
5. Green: Points to content relating to sustainability and environmental impact of broadband (nothing much there yet but is is a topic of great interest for this blog).
6. Government: This category involves coverage on national broadband strategies, national broadband plans and most of the content dealing with regulation and policy if it does not fall to another category.
7. Services: Services deal with any type of services and content that run on NGN (everything above layer 3 of the broadband market as described here )
8. Expert Insight: This category will include primarily interviews conducted by me with experts and field specialists. It will also include pointers to other bloggers and/or experts opinions that I comment or refer to.
9. AOB (Any Other Business): Finally, this category will incorporate topics that do not fall to any of the previous categories. I have already created a subcategory which I named Site Anouncements.

Whatsoever, if you still prefer the old format you can always go to the site’s footer and click on “The Blog”.

Of course there are a bunch of things left to do:

• Finishe off the content’s categorization
• Solve a couple of bugs in UI (not that important to stall the launch)
• Several minor improvements

Many thanks to zuka, pupa and blade for their help during the implementation of the site and special thanks to techies.gr for their support and inspiration throughout the whole gig. If you ever need to hire someone for your web project give them a call. They own the business!

As always, I look forward to your impressions, suggestions and comments on how to make this blog better, more effective and useful to you. See you on the boards!

Yesterday, Broadband Prime statistics showed 105 subsribers. After almost 13 months Broadband Prime hits 3-digits subs. The feelings are strong, rewarding and encouraging. I think it is probably a good time to draw some conclusions from the blog’s traffic. Right below there is a graph that I created from feedburner stats. It depicts subscribers and the one-week moving average of web hits.

A couple of things stand out. I want to mention them because they helped me so far and because I believe that pinpointing on past practices can indeed help others taking their blogging chances:

1. The red circle marks the period that I started using the social media. It may not seem much, but at that time it nearly doubled both subscribers and hits.

2. The blue lines on the top of the graph show the scale before and after my engagement in social media. It is certainly not negligible. Raising awareness is important for a blog’s readership. Refering to other blogger’s content, commenting, participating in relevant discussions can do your blog good, unless you exagerate a little too much!

3. Finally the horizontal red line on the right side marks the recent period of relative inactivity. Some good posts attracted interest but low posting frequency did not help sustain the subscriber’s increasing trend.

Most of the visits come, evidently from Greece. Looking at the all-time stats, Greece contributes with 32% of total visits and is followed by US (13%) and UK (10%). It’s interesting though that for the past few months, I get the same number of visitors from US and Greece, with UK slightly lagging. Finally, the second (after US) non-European country in this informal top ten is India. Now, that was a big surprise! Here’s the full list:

1. Greece
2. USA
3. UK
4. France
5. Spain
6. India
7. Netherlands
8. Italy
9. Germany
10. Sweden

In conclusion:

• A good frequency of posts does help
• Reporting news will bring in new visits but analysis, opinion and good argumentation is what will keep those viewers close.
• Engagement in social media helps too, but it probably requires a lot of your time to make a difference in the short term.

Overall, the best thing is to be sincere with your content and respectful to your readers and visitors by always trying to post quality material. I don’t consider the route of the blog successful per se. I believe though that I haven’t lost track these months and I still align with the blog’s objectives. This, I owe to you all. Thank you for your participation, comments and suggestions made along the way that helped make Broadband Prime what it is today.

I have created a new group in Linked-In, the ” Public-Broadband Debating Group “, to let it serve as a debating medium about the role of Government in broadband development. The purpose of the group is to discuss the public role in broadband development worldwide and elaborate on the benefits, risks and reservations of the public endeavours. Topics of interest include municipal broadband initiatives, national broadband strategies, business models, regulatory measures, and more as things will develop. What I would like the group to become is an information resource on the changing role of the Government in broadband development and how this may impact the broadband economy (e.g. service providers, consumers, regional/national growth).

I plan to channel through the group’s news feed, readings from the Internet press and blogoshere to spur discussions and disseminate the information found abound in the Internet. You don’t necessarily have to be a municipal/public broadband enthusiast to join the group, on the contrary, opposing views on the subject will serve the “debating” angle of the group. However, what is desirable is that you’d be interested in following the international debates and sharing your ideas and opinions with the rest.

Simply click here to join the group .

For the past week, I’ve been receiving contradictive stats from the blog’s feed. By digging a bit deeper to it I found that there is indeed a problem with feedburner lately that was acknowledged by the company last week. However, it seems that it hasn’t resolved yet. It also seems that Google Feedfetcher is the one that suffers the most – funny as it is, Feedburner and Google Feedfetcher are the same company…

Apologies to those who are not getting the updates in a timely manner. Email distribution though is working fine.

Best, C.-

It has been one year already since I first posted on this blog. This is Broadband Prime’s 162nd post since the 1st of April 2008, when I attempted my first timid steps in blogosphere. And what a great time did I have all these months. I hope you did too. The international acceptance of Broadband Prime has been beyond any personal expectation, and that just empowered me (and still does) with will and strength to carry forward what I started, absolutely spontaneously, one year ago.

Thank you all.

Since about a month, time permitted, I have been experimenting in two premises:

1) How I could add extra functionality on Broadband Prime that would be meaningful and useful to you, and

2) What type of information aggregation & filtering, blog monitoring and other useful tools are available to make my pursuit more productive.

After some experimentation and proof testing I decided to switch my blog service to Google’s Blogger. The blog’s new place is http://broadbandprime.blogspot.com/.

Some of the reasons are explained in This is a First Test Post. I have changed the looks of the blog, and I hope you find it better.

I will be cross-posting for a little more until you get the time to update your RSS feeds. If you click on the banner just below you can directly add the new feed to your reader.

I have also added an email subscription form for those who might prefer it.

For some time, I have been thinking of switching blog service provider. WordPress is an excellent aesthetics blog service with quality tools for post formatting. However it lacks a set of serious functionality (at least in my views) such as 1. Incorporating video from third-party content sites, 2. Incorporating polls and other survey functionality 3. Third-party site monitoring etc.

Well, eventually it all comes down to allowing html/script code in the blog. WordPress doesn’t do it, blogger does. So I figured; I’ll be cross-posting for a while until I get the twists and turns of it and if I’m satisfied I’ll do the switch.

C.-

I’ve made some changes in the site:

I’ve added a blogroll named “The Fiber Ring“. It contains a list of blogs that put forward the Fiber/Broadband concept. You might want to stop by and visit as you will find some serious stuff in these pages.

I’ve also created a page I called “Links” (Yes I know, inspiration hit again!). There, I plan to keep adding sources of good information and references that I use for my academic and business research. I hope you like better.

Το ιστολόγιο αυτό ξεκινάει την Πρωταπριλιά. Σαν αστείο.

Θα αφορά στην παρουσίαση και στον σχολιασμό επιλεγμένων τηλεπικοινωνιακών εξελίξεων σχετικά με 1) πολιτικές προώθησης ευρυζωνικότητας, 2) ενσύρματες και ασύρματες ευρυζωνικές υποδομές, 3) ανάπτυξη και διάχυση ευρυζωνικών υπηρεσιών, 4) ανάλυση και ρύθμιση τηλεπικοινωνιακής αγοράς και ανταγωνισμού, 5) ευρυζωνικές προοπτικές της τοπικής αυτοδιοίκησης κ.τ.λ.

Θα προσπαθήσω να γράφω στα Ελληνικά.

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This blog starts on April’s fool day. Like a small joke.

I want to present and comment on selected developments in the telecommunications industry including 1) broadband diffusion policies, 2) fixed and wireless broadband infrastructures, 3) development and diffusion od broadband services 4) telecommunications market analysis, regulation and competition 5) broadband potentials of local governments etc.

I will try to write in Greek.