Yesterday I had the pleasure to be at the Phone Co-ops annual meeting, as those of you who follow me on identi.ca or elsewhere will already know. The proceedings included a speech from Cooperatives-UK Chief Exec Ed Mayo that included the co-op pub in Salford, spurning David Beckham’s gift and this summer’s Co-operatives Fortnight.

As ever, the bits I liked best were the lively question-and-answer sessions, both on Ed’s speech and the annual report. I took notes and reproduce them below, but I didn’t capture every question, or every answer and none of this is verbatim. Questions to Ed about UK cooperation included:

• Can people in the co-op pub smoke? – No, there’s a bit of drinking in meetings, but not smoking. Some heated debates in meetings are defused by a break to go refill the glasses.
• Gordon Brown and Labour are starting to talk about cooperatives more. What should we do? – We need to stand on our own two feet, but expect to be treated equally. A “Mutuals Manifesto” will be out online next month. In regulation, having the telecoms networks opened up to co-ops and not be so limited would help. One interesting possibility is with football co-ops / supporters trusts: it’s been suggested that a fan co-op should have the right to buy a club if supported by 75% of season ticket holders.
• With all the business collapses and Cadburys being bought, what is the temperature of interest in mutuals outside the movement? – Good. The only AAA-rated bank in the world is the Rabobank co-op, but remember that co-ops are not immune to failure. Cadburys is not a co-op and was always vulnerable to the current investor-led rules changing its ownership. People are not necessarily thinking of co-ops, so we need to reach out. It’s a cynical, apocalyptic age, so we need to prove what we’re doing. coops14 is an opportunity. The co-op bank saw a surge in new accounts after it was highlighted in one newspaper as an alternative to excessive banker bonuses. We need to encourage people to act. Reminded of a quote that “the trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat”. Research shows that Britain today is a brutal and competitive place to grow up in, with only 45% of children trusting their friends. People have heard of cooperatives. We should try to build a more cooperative nation.
• Comment from the floor that the private sector won’t take substantial cooperative competition lightly. We must look behind us and never give them a chance.
• Could the BBC become a co-op? – Yes.

Questions about the annual report asked about:

• What is our target profit %? – No hard target. This year’s reduction was planned and it is still a profit.
• Why are we using UKMail instead of the Royal Mail? – £10k price difference. It was a hard choice, debated by the board, but there is no co-op option and no particular preference for state ownership.
• Why are we considering energy supply? – Telecoms is a deflationary market, so diversification is a wise move and energy supply is a top customer request.
• What is our churn rate? – 1.5%/year, which is unsatisfactory to us, but still low by industry standards.
• Was the Avoco acquisition price too high? – a good price by usual industry measurement (multiple of sales)
• Will we support coops14 Free and Open Source Software events, because there is an overlap? – (I didn’t catch the answer)
• Can we put leaflets in the shops? – Matt Lane is working on this and other opportunities
• Can we encrypt bills and emails if customers want it? – exec will take and deliberate on that
• Can we get some sales materials to Scotland? – details taken to send them out next week

Andrew Heaney of TalkTalk has submitted a petition “to abolish the proposed law that will see alleged illegal filesharers disconnected from their broadband connections, without a fair trial”. It’s not worded brilliantly, but it covers the vital point – without a fair trial – so I think it’s still worth signing here. Thanks to Glyn Wintle for the updates on fsfe-uk.

Meanwhile, unaccountable copyright collections agent PPL have picked the ideal moment to start harassing local community events. Please give generously: EMI only earned £298,000,000 last year.

If you’ve a bit more time, you could send a Message To Mandelson at ORG. I might not agree with ORG’s structure, but they do make some cool protest sites. (Javascript required to view, as far as I can tell.)

Even more flamboyantly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling on people to phone up and Stop the Pirate-Finder General!

This is an important step in the right direction. For too long, rights holders and their agents have been able to make allegations without fear of repurcussions, even though loss of internet access can be a terrible problem for customers, especially as more government services move online. In the US, we’ve even seen rights holder agents acting against legitimate publishing by TV production companies – these groups really are out of control!

There are still unanswered questions about who pays when an allegation is made, with the cost usually being left with the customer, either directly (through having to pay the ISP an admin fee for the allegation) or indirectly (through higher ISP fees). Hopefully the courts would rule fairly on who should pays the costs in each case.

The next step would be to prohibit things like Karoo’s Three Strikes as unfair terms in consumer contracts.

I wrote to representatives including Neil Parish MEP (who sent one incomprehensible answer) and didn’t seem to have much effect personally, but collectively, the campaign saw an Improved Telecom Package Passed by EuroParl.

Now it seems that one English service provider, Hull’s monopoly ISP Karoo, has decided to adopt the “three strikes” process by choice. Amazingly, “three strikes” is actually an improvement on the “one strike” policy previously used by Karoo and exposed by the BBC.

When will someone take these Kang-Karoo courts to a real court for breach of contract, or for abuse of their Hull monopoly?

I’m outside Hull and against three-strikes, so I joined the Phone Co-op, so I can vote against three-strikes when we’re offered it.

In the village where I live, our “up to 8Mbps” service is stable at about 4. As I mentioned previously, it will go faster, but it will break. Our end of the village is the “good” end. I’ve had reports that the other end of the village struggles to 384kbps. A point-to-point wifi link from the good end would be faster than the copper cables! This situation is incredible.

In general, things are slightly better for cable users – if you buy a 10Mbps service, you may well get 8. The result that really surprised me is “ISPs using ADSL1 who invest in network capacity are able to deliver speeds as good as ADSL2+ operators”. What does that means for where the bottleneck actually is and for all the expense of ADSL2+ equipment for both operators and consumers?

Disclosure: software.coop is an agent for ThePhoneCoop, including ADSL services.

The infernal Belkin was replaced by a modem that The Phone Co-op supplied and they’ve been gradually stepping down the DSL line speed to see if stability improves. According to the router, nothing has been changing though. It’s still been connecting at nearly 7Mbps on a line that used to do only 4.5Mbps on the bundled service, even when it was told to run at a fixed 2Mbps.

The infernal Belkin was still being used as a router and it finally gave up the ghost last week, so I replaced it with a shiny new Netgear DG834GUKv4. As well as being mostly GPL software (notably except the damned Broadcom DSL driver), it gives far more diagnostics. The telling one is that the Signal-to-Noise Ratio was hovering around 6dB. I looked it up on the Kitz information site and my fairly long line (3km-ish) probably isn’t suited to such a low target SNR. I also found a few twitter comments about SNR which reinforced my view. The standard Netgear software doesn’t offer any way to change the target myself: I asked their support service to check and they said it wasn’t offered on “Home” products.

Looking for other solutions to similar problems, I found ADSL: Significance of SNR and attenuation which pointed at The Jesus-firmware for your ADSL modem. One notable benefit of the DGTeam software is that it allows some tweaking of the SNR, as well as having later DSL drivers. I’d like to use OpenWRT, but I’ve not found time to understand the installation and configuration yet, not whether it can work the DSL. I should probably try it on one of the non-DSL wifi routers here first.

After loading the new software and changing the settings, the modem connects at 4.7Mbps with a SNR of around 11 dB. So far, I’ve had one disconnection. I’ll keep the settings under review and see if I can improve things further, then let The Phone Coop’s engineers know what I’ve done.

According to the BBC, a mobile phone directory enquiry service launches today. If you’ve ever had a marketing call to your mobile, your number is probably on this database. It’s very difficult to remember to ask every company that you give your mobile number not to sell it to other people.

The company that’s thought up this cunning plan to make money is Connectivity. The report says that you can remove yourself from Connectivity’s service by visiting the website, but as I write this, the site says:

“The 118 800 service for mobile phone connections is currently unavailable – from this website and by phone – whilst we undertake major developments to our ‘Beta Service’ to improve the experience for our customers”

So what now? Email contact@118800.co.uk or can someone go doorstep them at Merlin House, Brunel Road, Theale, Berks?

At first glance, it misses the mark. It doesn’t do anything to unlock Digital Britain and make us a more sharing and social place. From failing to open the 3G mobile networks to the Phone Co-op and other operators completely (they describe it as already being “highly competitive” – haven’t they visited a South West “notspot”?), through the unnecessary increase in protection for Star Wars’s foreign owners, right down to the continued support for Adobe on the report download site instead of third-sector-produced pdfreaders.org, it looks like the report won’t stop us being “Digital Divide Britain”.

I also have my suspicions about the effect of the “DAB-only from the end of 2015″ decision on our community radio companies, but I’ve not been active in that sector for years and there’s a further consultation about that.

Ultimately, “the Government believes piracy of intellectual propert for profit is theft and will be pursued as such through the criminal law” is the killer phrase in this report. The concept of being allowed to file-share without payment doesn’t even appear in the same section. I’ve been warning about these “New Enclosure” attempts for years: I didn’t expect the Digital Britain report to be such a leap towards them.

I think many of these problems could have been avoided if digital production cooperatives had been included in the preparation of this report in any significant way. I feel it has been captured by the private sector and a few trading funds, to the detriment of the nation. Shouldn’t we expect better from a Labour and Co-operative government?

What did you think of the report? What else am I missing? Seen any good reviews of it for free software fans or cooperators?

As usual, LUGgers were a source of help when it looked like going a bit wrong. Thanks to oddbloke for positive feedback about Buffalo routers (they work fine with OpenWRT, but not tried ADSL). Big thanks to Noodles for pointing out that the Buffalo router I linked wasn’t an ADSL router, despite being listed as such, that the only ADSL chipset to have full open source support is the AR7 (but the wifi is dodgy) and that the Broadcom chipsets have 2.6 support but maybe with a binary blob.

I’m still not sure if a new router is necessary. The infernal Belkin seems to be working, but it’s disconnecting and rebooting a lot more often. I seem to be on the TalkTalk/CPW network – anyone know of problems with Belkin routers? I’ve not seen anything yet.

Also, who else has unbundled and how was it for you?

What does ADSL mean?

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. Essentially, what we sell as broadband.

How many day-equivalents of training did part-time employees get on average? (I think this was the question, but I got a bit lost.)

Information not immediately available. ThePhoneCoop will research and reply later. The number of part-time employees is an asterisk footnote in the non-financial performance indicators.

Where are the Phone Co-op’s investments?

Most of the share capital is for investment in TPC, but surpluses arise for various reasons and are invested outside. Current locations include 40k in long-term investments, including 10k in the Co-operative Group, 20k in Westmill wind farm, 5k in a hydro power project; 60k is in the ICOF share account, 1.4m in the Co-operative Group, [...I missed some. I was struggling to keep up. Some of this may be wrong anyway...] 486k in Midcounties Cooperative share account, 20k in Chelmsford Star; total of about 2.9m.

Is ICOF deciding recipients of the sustainability fund or The Phone Co-op?

The arrangement with ICOF is now ending for various reasons and now TPC will partner with Black Country Reinvestment Society. Don’t want to manage the fund directly because it’s not a core task for a phone company.

The increase in turnover is described as mainly to existing customers. Has there been an increase in the number of customers?

The Phone Co-op is recruiting 150-200pcm residential and 30 business customers, but losing a similar number. Have recruited new staff to try to improve this.

Is share account interest being cut in line with banking interest?

Just cut to 3%, but there has been a net inflow of investment. Current interest receipts from TPC cover it due to long-term investments, but they will mature, so the interest rate will be cut gradually to keep it sustainable.

Purchase from other cooperatives is 11% and falling. What is being done to increase it?

[I missed the answer to this.]

What is happening about getting a new office?

The Phone Co-op still has an option on a site in Chipping Norton, but no planning permission. An alternative commercial building which was being discussed with its owner was lost to housing (planning permission granted there!). There is a general lack of suitable sites available and things are happening cautiously in the current climate.

If we’re trying to save paper, why did members receive two envelopes in the post for this AGM?

The report was sent from Calverts directly, to save time, postage, staff and “report miles”

Is the description of “non-white” in the performance indicators a problem for mixed white+non-white people?

Will look into this.

How many affinity schemes are there?

There are currently 300 and they are being reviewed for the best way to work better with them.

Are acquisitions likely?

Expect the credit crisis to being opportunities. There are benefits from more traffic and so on. TPC has been contacting potential suppliers and intermediaries asking after other providers in difficulties.

What is the deferred income shown in the financial statements?

Pre-billed broadband and similar products.

Is the investment in the Co-operative Group risky?

TCG holds around 4bn in assets under and is one of the longest continuously-traded companies in the UK.

Are ThePhoneCo-op’s 0845 numbers advantageous to TPC or the caller?

Still yes for TPC, paying 1p/min at peak; probably not advantageous to caller these days.

There are 15% sales to cooperatives shown. What’s the largest cooperative and what % of that is it?

Shown in the annual report. [The numbers in report work out to about 15% of all sales I think. So, nearly all sales to cooperatives are sales to Midcounties?]

All errors and omissions in the above are mine.

I heard the allocation approved, then I had to leave before the special meeting and the presentations. If anyone has links to them or coverage, please leave me a comment. Other comments welcome, too.