The Post Office Problem

Last week there were — allegedly — two days of strikes at the Royal Mail. I say 'allegedly' as I didn't notice any effect, but others report some, so let's presume there were. On Friday the Communications Workers Union announced there would be three more days of industrial action in the coming week.

All this, of course, has meant the media publicising the 'alternative mail services' that supposedly exist, from TNT to a bloke on a bicycle in Portsmouth. Thing is with very few exceptions none of these 'alternative' organisations actually deliver the mail they collect. They cream off the majority of the fee paid for each item, but leave the current Royal Mail postie to actually put it though a letterbox. None of them have a public service obligation to provide a delivery to every property in the country; only the Royal Mail has that requirement set upon it. And how do we expect them to cover the costs of that service if the government lets others take the majority of what is — still — a low per-item fee for that service.

In my view, what is needed is that the cost structure of the cost of a stamp needs to be strongly biased to covering the cost of delivery and not collection (and bulk moving of the mail around the country). There are, clearly, options for great savings on the collection and distribution side of things, yet delivering will always rely on individuals going out in all weathers on foot.

The only alternative would be the loss of the every-delivery-to-the-home service and every person having to visit a postal delivery office to collect their mail, in a similar way to the loss of the milkman delivering everywhere daily. And I'm sure that isn't what we want.

Are the EVE-Online servers moving to Iceland?

Yesterday I noted an interesting article on the BBC website about a firm setting up a 'green' server farm operation in Iceland to make use of the carbon-zero geothermal electricity alongside the lower ambient temperature to reduce the usually substantial overhead of cooling computer servers.

The article went on to note that Iceland is about to substantially increase its presence on the internet backbones with the Farice , Cantat-3, and new Danice high-capacity fibre links now on stream, and that the company concerned — Verne Global — hoped to gain a substantial number of customers by the cost reductions available to clients who move their servers there. They also made great play of how stable the underlying bedrock is in that area, close by Keflavik airport†. Indeed, their website has lots of interesting information on it.

Then I noticed a name I recognised; Vilhjálmur Thorsteinsson is Chairman of the Board of Verne Holdings. He is also Chairman of the Board of CCP Games, who created and operate EVE-Online. Given that the EVE universe is a "single shard" — every player world-wide uses the same physical group of servers and plays in the same 'space' — then, unlike other online games which have servers located in different continents, all of the EVE-Online servers are in one physical locations. Just outside London, UK, in Slough.

The Verne website makes great play of their centre being only 18ms from London (as the internet flies) and 36 milliseconds from New York. So, given the CCP Chairman is now creating this 'cooler' server centre one can't help but wonder whether the CCP servers will now be moving to Iceland to save money, as well as the planet.

† Keflavik — a former US Air Force base — also happens to be one of the rare airfields which is long enough and wide enough for the Space shuttle to land at in an emergency.