Networking

Reliance Jio has picked up almost 490MHz worth of spectrum for ₹57,100 crore at India’s most recent spectrum auction, which closed on Tuesday.
Of that amount, the telco will pay almost ₹19,940 crore upfront to the Indian government, with the remainder to be paid over an 18-year period.  
Conducted over four rounds, the auction made a total 2,251MHz of spectrum available, with Reliance Jio buying up spectrum across the frequency bands of 800MHz, 1,800MHz, and 2,300MHz.
In total, Reliance Jio’s expenditure amounted to ₹60.8 crore per MHz, the telco said.
Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani said the additional spectrum would help the telco expand India’s digital footprint and prepare for its 5G rollout, which he previously declared would be ready later this year.
See also: Reliance doubles equity stake of magnetic levitation transportation startup skyTran
Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea also participated in the auction, each spending ₹18,700 crore and ₹1,990 crore, respectively. With those amounts, Bharti Airtel acquired 355.45MHz of spectrum across sub-GHz, 1,800MHz, and 2,300MHz bands while Vodafone added 11.8MHz across five different bands.

Vodafone Idea said it entered the auction holding the largest quantity of spectrum and only spent money on spectrum that was coming up for renewal.
By comparison, Bharti said the additional spectrum would help it serve millions of users and expand 4G coverage. It added that sub-GHz spectrum would improve its deep indoor coverage and its mid-band acquisitions would put it in a position to provide 5G.
Reliance Jio’s decision to be the biggest spenders at the auction comes shortly after its holding company, Jio Platforms, reported ₹22,858 crore in revenue during the quarter to December, which was a 30% improvement from the year prior.
Last year, Jio Platforms sold a third of itself to others for ₹152,056 crore. Buyers included Google, Facebook, Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners, General Atlantic, KKR, Mubadala, ADIA, TPG, L Catterton, PIF, Intel Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures.
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It’s a provable fact, backed by scientific research, that communication is more effective when you can see the person you’re talking to. Seeing the other person’s facial expressions, for example, makes it easy to tell a serious request from an offhand remark or a joke.
But as the business world has learned since the start of the pandemic, you don’t have to brave airports and public spaces for an effective face-to-face meeting. Instead, video conferencing software and collaboration services have become the tool of choice for meetings and classes, with everyone from schoolkids to mortgage brokers to grandparents to international award show hosts learning (sometimes awkwardly) how to unmute themselves.
Using the webcam on a Windows laptop, a Mac, or a mobile device, you can meet one-on-one or with a group, no matter how widely scattered the members of your class/team/family are. We’ve assembled the leading conferencing software platforms, all capable of providing high-quality video and full-featured collaboration tools. While many of these video conferencing platforms also offer live streaming and webinar capabilities, our focus here is primarily on virtual meetings. 
Note that several vendors responded to initial coronavirus concerns with free video conferencing offers. Many of those offers have since expired, but plenty of free and discounted options still exist.

The best-known video conferencing brand, by far
zoom.com
After a successful IPO in 2019, Zoom solidified its status as one of the leaders in the video conferencing industry, although recent security and privacy concerns have tarnished that reputation somewhat. Its conferencing software allows simple one-to-one chat sessions that can escalate into group calls, training sessions and webinars for internal and external audiences, and global video meetings with up to 1,000 participants and as many as 49 HD videos on-screen simultaneously.Zoom sessions can start from a web browser or in dedicated client apps for every desktop and mobile platform, with end-to-end encryption, role-based user security (including HIPAA compliance), and easy-to-use screen sharing and collaboration tools. Meeting invitations integrate smoothly with popular calendaring systems, and meetings can be recorded as local or cloud-based files, with searchable transcripts.
The free tier allows unlimited 1:1 meetings but limits group sessions to 40 minutes and 100 participants. Paid plans start at $15 per month per host and scale up to full-featured Business and Enterprise plans.
View Now at Zoom

New owner Verizon has cut prices and beefed up security

Billing itself as “the meetings platform for the modern workplace,” BlueJeans Meetings is a video conferencing solution that focuses on instant connections, using a mobile or desktop app or directly from a browser (with no download required). Verizon acquired the company in April 2020 and kept the quirky name, which comes from the founders’ desire to make video conferencing software  “as comfortable and casual as your pair of jeans. After the purchase closed, Verizon quickly lowered prices and added a slew of new features, including support for end-to-end AES-256 GCM encryption. The company plans to “deeply integrate” BlueJeans into its 5G product roadmap.
The meeting technology, powered by Dolby Voice, includes background noise cancellation and integrates with hardware-based conference room systems as well as enterprise applications like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Facebook Workplace. A full array of whiteboard and screen sharing tools add collaboration capabilities to any meeting. (For livestreams and large-scale web-based presentations, you’ll need a separate product called BlueJeans Events.)
After an initial free trial of the conferencing software, BlueJeans Meetings requires one of three plans, which can be billed monthly or annually, at a 20% discount. The Standard plan, designed for individuals and small businesses, costs $12.49 per meeting host per month; it supports up to 50 attendees and 5 hours of meeting recordings but doesn’t integrate with messaging apps like Slack. The Pro plan, at $17.49 per host per month or $167.88 per year, supports up to 75 attendees and includes 25 hours of cloud recordings per host. The Enterprise plan, with unlimited cloud recordings and an assortment of enterprise-focused tools, supports up to 200 attendees and requires a custom quote.
View Now at BlueJeans Meetings

Best for businesses and schools that already use Office apps

Microsoft Teams, a successor to Skype for Business, isn’t so much a product as it is a feature of Microsoft 365, which tells you a lot about its design and who its features are best suited for: businesses and educational organizations of all sizes. Anyone can sign up for the free version of Microsoft Teams using a personal email address; that tier supports up to 300 meeting participants, with guest access, one-on-one and group video and audio calls, shared files (2GB per user and 10GB per team), screen sharing, and document collaboration using online Office web apps.
Where Teams begins to deliver its full promise as a video conferencing solution is in an organization that runs on a Business or Enterprise version of Microsoft 365, where Teams is just another feature (and the successor to Lync and Skype for Business). In that environment, administrators have access to a full range of management, security, and compliance tools. Team members can share files (up to 1TB per user), schedule meetings directly from Outlook, record meetings, and collaborate on documents using the desktop Office programs and SharePoint Online. Those paid plans also support online training sessions and webinars.
Microsoft 365 plans start at $5 per user per month, and Redmond has been rolling out new features at a steady clip for the past year. For organizations that aren’t deeply embedded in the Microsoft way of working, the Teams feature set can be baffling. But for anyone who already lives in SharePoint and Outlook, Microsoft’s conferencing software should be a tight fit.
View Now at Microsoft Teams

A pioneer of remote software broadens its horizon

LogMeIn has been on an acquisition tear in recent years, with GoToMeeting and a collection of related collaboration tools acquired from Citrix back in 2016. A major update to the video conferencing software released in late 2019 includes a long list of new features and what LogMeIn calls “a completely reimagined product” that works in a web browser (no download required) or through desktop and mobile apps. After a 14-day free trial, you’ll need to choose a paid plan; options include Professional ($12 per organizer per month, up to 150 participants) and Business ($16 per organizer per month for up to 250 participants). An Enterprise plan supports up to 3,000 participants.
The reworked user experience in LogMeIn’s GoToMeeting conferencing solution is consistent across platforms and integrates with calendar solutions and platforms from Office 365, G Suite, Salesforce, Zoho, and Slack. For each call, you can take notes in real-time, which are then embedded and saved in the meeting transcript. Besides the normal option to save to video, you can also capture presentation slides from a meeting and share them in a PDF for later download.
View Now at GoToMeeting

Big-time services from a company that’s not too big

AnyMeeting has been around for nearly a decade, and the video conferencing software’s user base had grown to more than 1 million when the company was acquired in 2017 by Intermedia. Today, AnyMeeting is available as part of Intermedia Unite, a unified communication and collaboration platform that integrates its video conferencing, chat, and screen sharing functions into a cloud-based service that also includes VOIP capabilities and an enterprise-grade PBX system. If that’s overkill for your small business’ video conferencing needs, AnyMeeting is available separately in Lite and Pro plans that cost $10 and $13 per user per month, respectively.
Video conferencing software features are essentially the same between the two plans, with the ability to create custom meeting URLs, schedule recurring meetings, and integrate with productivity tools from Google, Microsoft, Slack, and others. HIPAA compliance and end-to-end encryption are standard features as well. Upgrading to a Pro plan increases the number of web-based participants from 10 to 30 (but a maximum of 12 in Full HD). The Pro plan also includes the ability to record and transcribe meetings and unlimited cloud storage of meetings.
We’ve been a big fan of Intermedia for years, precisely because it offers the option to use big-time software and services from a company that’s not too big to care.
View Now at Intermedia AnyMeeting

A completely browser-based alternative

Since its founding nearly a quarter-century ago, Zoho has grown to 50 million users worldwide. Its flagship product is Zoho One, a web-based suite of services and mobile apps designed to tie together sales, marketing, accounting, HR, and operations. Zoho Meetings offers tools for webinars, training, and online meetings, with plans starting at $10 per host per month (or $8 per month if you pay for a full year). The price tag of this video conferencing solution includes support for up to 100 participants and storage for 10 recorded meetings.
On PCs and Macs, Zoho Meetings is a completely browser-based conferencing solution, with no downloads required. For audio, participants can dial in over the phone (toll-free numbers are an extra-cost option), and in-session chat is available as well. Meetings can be recorded from any endpoint, including mobile devices. Zoho says the service is GDPR-compliant and is certified to the Privacy Shield Frameworks; more granular privacy tools include the ability for moderators to lock meetings and mute or eject participants. Although the video conferencing service integrates with Google Calendar, its primary strength is for organizations that are already invested in Zoho’s CRM and Projects tools.
View Now at Zoho Meeting

Nobody ever got fired for choosing Webex

Webex is truly one of the graybeards of the video conferencing software segment, founded in 1995 and acquired by Cisco in 2007. The free conferencing plan (up to three users) is surprisingly full-featured, with HD video, screen sharing on desktop and mobile devices, and limited recording options; it supports up to 50 participants per meeting, with meeting times capped at 40 minutes and online storage limited to 1GB.
If the limitations of the free tier get in your way, three paid plans are available: Starter ($13.50 per host per month, 50 attendees), Plus ($17.95 per month, 100 attendees), and Business ($26.95 per month, with a five-license minimum, supporting up to 200 attendees). Enterprise plans are also available. Each step up includes additional cloud storage and management features; single sign-on and support for Exchange and Active Directory requires the Business plan. An interesting add-on, Call Me, allows you to start a meeting by receiving a phone call; you’ll pay $4 per host per month for this feature for domestic calls, with the tariff for international calls going up to a pricey $35.75 per month. 
View Now at Cisco WebEx

Best for those on a tight budget

This member of the LogMeIn family should be on the video conferencing software shortlist for businesses on a tight budget. Audio meetings with screen sharing for up to three participants are free, with a unique interface that puts each participant’s face in a bubble that bounces around the screen. Paid conferencing plans start with Lite ($10 per host per month, five meeting participants, no time limits), with no webcam streams but support for screen and window sharing. Upgrading to Pro ($20 per month) increases the number of meeting participants to 250 and adds 50GB of cloud storage plus recording options. Go to the $30 -per-month Business plan for 1TB of storage, single sign-on support and Salesforce integration.
It’s unclear whether Join.me will thrive in the shadow of its bigger sibling, GoToMeeting, but for now, at least, it has an identity all its own.
View Now at Join.Me

Designed to work in Chrome browser

Google’s ever-evolving lineup of communications and collaboration apps split in two back in 2017, with the classic version of Google Hangouts video conferencing marked for retirement. Google Hangouts Meet is the business version, enabling video meetings for G Suite subscribers. External participants can also connect.
Naturally, the service is designed to work in the Google Chrome browser (although limited support for Internet Explorer 11 is also available), with mobile apps available on iOS and Android. The exact feature set depends on your G Suite version; the number of participants, for example, is limited to 100 for G Suite Basic, 150 for Business, and 250 for Enterprise. For live streaming (up to 100,000 audience members) and the ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive, you’ll need G Suite Enterprise.
If your business is standardized on Google’s productivity and email tools, this video conferencing option should be on your shortlist.
View Now at Google Hangouts Meet

Video calls only on desktop platforms

If your organization has a paid workspace that uses Slack’s collaboration tools, you already have access to a handful of limited video calling options that might be good enough for basic meetings and team collaboration needs. Just be aware that video calls are available only on desktop platforms (Mac, Windows, and Linux); the iOS and Android apps are limited to voice calls only. 
For the full range of screen-sharing features, including options to stream presentations and draw on a shared screen, you’ll need the Slack app. With Google Chrome (the only supported browser), you can view a teammate’s screen, but you can’t start a screen share. The company’s support site warns Mac users to download the Slack app from its website for full access to screen sharing features, which are not available in the App Store version.
View Now at Slack
What to look for when evaluating video conferencing solutions
What should you look for when putting video communication software to the test? After a full year of empty offices and no-travel orders, most companies have realized that remote work and online meetings can be extremely effective and are likely to demand much more from these tools than the basic feature set that might have been sufficient in pre-pandemic times.

We narrowed down the list of contenders in this guide using the same criteria we recommend you take into account when you’re in the market for one of these services. Think of our list as a starting point to help you organize your search: One or more of the products that didn’t make our cut might well deserve to be on the shortlist for your business needs.

Our most important criteria was reputation. Every product on this list has a solid track record in terms of performance and reliability. We were pleasantly surprised, in fact, to find some firms in this business that have been going strong for more than two decades.
In business terms, we know that our readers represent a broad swath of sizes, shapes, and cultures. So we went out of our way to find a mix of products that work for cash-conscious small businesses (three of them are free, in fact, for organizations with three people or fewer). For slightly larger organizations, including schools, we’ve tried to highlight commercial plans that are reasonably priced if you can live with their limits, such as the number of meeting participants and the length of each meeting.
Others offer high-end options ideal for large companies that want control over livestreams and training sessions involving large audiences. The biggest differentiator here is the number of people you can have in the audience. That makes sense for organizations that do webcasts and presentations to large numbers of employees, customers, or members on a worldwide basis. Those plans are where you’re much more likely to find support for advanced features like full recording options and the ability to generate a PDF from the slide deck that powered your online session.
If all you want is the ability to talk face to face, with the occasional bit of screen sharing and whiteboarding, you have plenty of choices. If you want to make those sessions available for replay online, you’ll need to look carefully at the cloud file storage options associated with each plan.
As you’ll see from this list, you might already have access to effective tools because of subscriptions you’re already paying for. We included three popular names from that group: Microsoft 365, Google’s GSuite, and Intermedia’s Office in the Cloud. (A fourth option, Slack, is excellent for messaging and 1:1 calls but doesn’t have the feature set to compete with the other products on this list.) Shops that have standardized on one of those plans might find that the included conferencing and communication features are the ideal way to keep your company connected without extra deployment and training costs.
Finally, we considered the sorts of features that reduce friction in using this type of product. That list includes integration with other software you currently use, such as seamlessly connecting an online meeting to your calendar and your organization’s directory. And then there are ease-of-use features, including the ability to connect from a browser instead of being forced to download a client app or plug-in, and the ability to invite external participants to meetings.

ZDNet Recommends More

We’ve been running a series of articles here on ZDNet about setting up and running websites. With so much change going on in the world, it’s more important than ever to have a compelling web presence.

ZDNet Recommends

Also: How to build a website: What you need to get started
In this article, we’re going to look at all of the components that go into creating and maintaining an actively updated, mid-level website. What I mean by mid-level is that it’s not a one-page brochure site, but it’s also not a major site on the scale of ZDNet or CNET. We’re going to look at the content management system, the extensions and themes, the hosting provider, and the SaaS services that support the site.
By the time you finish reading, you’ll have a good  feel for what resources are used, so when it’s time to plan out your site, you’ll know what to look for.
Understanding the example site’s purpose
The site we’re going to discuss as an example is one of the WordPress-based sites I operate. Its purpose is to provide an online home for a few freemium software products I develop. The core products are open source, a donations add-on, and a privacy add-on for WordPress. Those core products are available for free on the WordPress.org plugin repository, which is essentially an app store for plugins.
My site provides more detailed product information than can be shown in the repository. It also provides an online store for users who want to buy add-ons for the free core products. Finally, it serves as a technical support hub for those who need help using both the free core products as well as the commercial add-ons.
One quick note: I’m not going to include the URL or name of my site here, because this isn’t about promoting my site. The actual site I run isn’t nearly as relevant from a site anatomy point of view as the resources and tools I use. So, I’ll just refer to it as “the site.”

I will, however, be mentioning and linking to the products and services I use. All of them are either free or I pay for them out of my own pocket. As with many products mentioned here, ZDNet may get a small commission, but none of that comes back to me.
If you’re curious about all the tools I use to develop WordPress plugins, here’s an article I posted last year:
Also: One developer’s favorite Mac coding tools for PHP and web development
How the site is structured
Logically, the site is structured into four major sections: products, support, lab notes, and about. There are also a few main pages like the home page and privacy policy.
Internally, WordPress has a few main data structures. The post type data structure handles long-form rich text. There’s a post metadata structure that handles data related to a post, like the date it was last edited and its publishing status. There’s also an options data type that handles key/value pairs on a site-wide basis, like the name of the site and email address for the site owner.
Post type is most interesting because it can be customized for a wide variety of purposes. The most basic is post, which is for blog posts that are posted sequentially over time. Another basic post type is page, which is for fixed specific-purpose pages, like the home page and the about page. Various plugins extend those post types for products, donations, affiliate programs, and more.
My site uses the following post types:
Pages: Pages include home, about, contact us, an affiliate registration page, the main support page, a user profile page (which also has purchase and help ticket history), a beta download page, and a few other supporting pages.
Posts: My site calls posts “Lab Notes,” because instead of blog entries about life, the universe, and everything, the blog posts on the site are really release notes and technical details about the products being supported.
Projects: The theme I’m using, Divi (more on that below) adds a custom post type called Projects. It’s meant to help users create items for portfolio websites, but I co-opted it to display each of my products as one project.
Downloads: Because the site sells digital downloads, the ecommerce plugin I use creates the post type Download for each sales entry. Each Download post includes pricing, licensing details, links to the digital file distributed on sale, and more.
Tables: I use a table-making plugin that stores its data in a Tables post type.
Affiliates: I use another plugin to manage affiliates, and that data is stored in the Affiliates post type.
So now that you know, roughly, how the site is organized, let’s get into the main components.
Primary site operations
We’ll kick off with the four main legs that support the entire site’s operations: WordPress, the ecommerce system, the hosting provider, and the theme. These are the elements that everything else has to integrate into or modify, so they need to be discussed first.

Digital goods ecommerce
Image: Sandhills Development
I’m mentioning the ecommerce plugin before a lot of other items because so much of this site is built around this plugin.
EDD not only accepts money and releases files for download, but it manages payment gateways and product licensing and license codes. I have blocks of code embedded in each of my add-ons that call back to the site to validate the license keys for users’ installation. EDD also manages updates of those add-ons, so when I issue a new release, users can download updates right alongside other WordPress plugins they’ve installed.
View Now at Easy Digital Downloads
I’m using quite a few add-ons to EDD as well. They include the following licensed add-on plugins:
Software Licensing: Adds the software licensing system to Easy Digital Downloads
Recurring Payments; Lets me sell subscriptions
Advanced Reports: Provides tools to build custom reports for earnings, sales, and other data
Invoices: Lets customers display HTML-based invoices
PDF Invoices: For those who need to download invoices, this plugin creates PDF Invoices for each purchase available to both admins and customers
Mailchimp: Subscribes customers to my Mailchimp mailing list when they purchase products 
Manual Purchases: Provides an admin interface for manually creating purchase orders
Stripe Payment Gateway: Adds a payment gateway for Stripe.com
Each of the above add-ons is available for purchase separately or as part of a bundle. I bought the bundle and renew it each year.
Before we move on, I should mention that I chose EDD because it was one of a very few WordPress plugins that had the full range of features I wanted. There are a ton of ecommerce plugins on WordPress, including WooCommerce, the one owned by Automattic (the company that operates WordPress.com). But EDD had the best selection of features that matched my business model, and so that’s why I picked it — and then built everything else around that decision.

Managed WordPress hosting
Image: Pagely.com
When I first set up my site, I used a relatively inexpensive hosting service. I ran into all sorts of performance and compatibility problems with Easy Digital Downloads. I moved the site around to a few other cheaper hosts and then decided to wise up.
I contacted the EDD folks and asked them which hosting provider they used. They sold EDD and its add-ons using EDD, and since my freemium model was similar to theirs, I decided that whatever host was good enough for them would be good enough for me.
They introduced me to their provider, Pagely, a premium managed hosting provider. The cost was more than I really wanted to spend, but I wanted the level of support and reliability Pagely promised. I haven’t regretted the decision in the five or so years I’ve used them.
View Now at Pagely

Page-builder theme
Image: Elegant Themes
The next big structural element in the site is the theme. For some sites, the theme itself provides the look of the site. If you want a site that sells software products, for example, you’d buy a software sales theme. If you wanted to post your art portfolio, you’d buy a portfolio theme.
Somewhere in the mid-2010s, the theme-as-page-builder approach became popular on WordPress. The idea is that the theme became an entire framework for look and feel, and you’d construct the entire site inside this framework. Some themes, like Divi, offer pre-designed styles and themes, so you don’t have to do all the look and feel yourself.
One additional benefit of this genre of themes is that some allow for front-end editing, so you can make changes in the site right where the change will be shown, rather than editing in the backend dashboard.
View Now at Elegant Themes
Divi provides the bulk of the look and feel of the site, but I use a wide range of little support plugins to tweak the look. But they’re not nearly as central to the site’s operations, so I’ll come back to them later. Next up is the support system that lets me provide tech support to all my users.
Tech support management
When I first adopted the plugins I support, I had no idea tech support would be such an ongoing challenge. I fully expected all site operators to be reasonably sophisticated IT folks, people who were fully familiar with setting up and managing things like a CMS. I was completely wrong.
Instead of experienced techies who were setting up their first nonprofit sites, I wound up encountering nonprofit operators with barely any experience in tech setting up their first WordPress sites. Tech support was a far bigger deal than I ever expected.
Unlike many WordPress plugin authors with free and freemium plugins, I support the free users just as much as I support those who pay for add-ons. I feel that the free users provide me just as much information about plugin performance and behavior, and they’re more a product and quality analysis asset to me than they are a drain on my time.
I had a very rough start but I eventually realized that getting to talk to these folks was a privilege, especially as a tech columnist who otherwise rarely spoke to the typical end-user. I developed a much better understanding of their needs.
The WordPress plugin repository provides a support forum for every plugin listed. I quickly discovered that the forums just didn’t work for me. The biggest issue was that I was working with nonprofits and folks interested in privacy and the forums were public. They couldn’t post screenshots and confidential information without all that being public.
I found a WordPress-based plugin that ran a support ticket system within my main WordPress site, and I used that for about four years. But I kept having problems with it, and ironically for a support ticket system, their support was abysmal. I later found out that the plugin had changed hands multiple times and it was pretty much languishing out there unloved.
So, I bit the bullet earlier this year and went with a well-respected, mainstream cloud-based SaaS support service…

Support conversations and tickets in the cloud
Image: Help Scout
Help Scout does most of its support via email. Users come to my site and open a ticket, and then the rest of the conversation occurs in their email inbox. I did a survey of other prominent WordPress commercial plugins and theme sellers and most of them recommended Help Scout, so that’s what I chose.
So far, it’s pretty good. My only complaint is that because it’s email-based, I can’t always attach zip files to tickets. Some email systems don’t accept incoming zip files. So now, I also have to use Dropbox to host zip files I want to share, and then I just include a Dropbox link into the support ticket.
Beyond that, though, Help Scout has been pretty much problem-free. It allows me to automatically set up workflows. One that I like a lot is an automatic script that runs thirty days after a ticket was last touched, which closes the ticket and then sends a note to the user letting them know the ticket has been closed, but they’re welcome to reopen it.
View Now at Help Scout

Integrates Help Scout into a WordPress site
Image: Sprout Apps
The only problem with Help Scout is that it has very limited integration with WordPress. I wanted users to be able to initiate tickets (and as part of that, answer questions about what product they were using, what version, who their hosting provider was, and more). I also wanted them to be able to come back to their profile page on my site and see all their open and historical tickets.
The Pro version of a relatively obscure WordPress plugin called Help Scout Desk does just this. Most of the folks who recommended Help Scout had no idea this resource was available. I had to write a few PHP scripts to customize the data gathering, but all that worked nicely in context with Help Scout Desk. By combining Help Scout with Help Scout Desk, I got the user experience I wanted for my support system. It was a nice little discovery that became a total win.
View Now at Sprout Apps
Mailing list management
Unlike most site operators, I don’t use my email mailing list primarily as a marketing tool. I use it to let users know about critical updates and changes to the plugins. Yes, I’ve done a few updates telling folks that there’s a new add-on available, but because so many nonprofits rely on my software, it’s much more important to be able to tell them when something (like how payment gateways process payments) is going to be changing.
Unfortunately, only about 10% of my users subscribe to the mailing list. As a result, after a big change, I still get a raft of tech support requests that cover the exact topic I’d previously explained in my update mailings. To be fair, 10% is actually higher than normal participation percentage, but I still wish it could be better. That said, I use a number of tools for managing emails and capturing subscribers.

Mailing list management
Image: Mailchimp
Mailchimp manages my email outreach. They maintain the list of email addresses and do the bulk mailing when I wish to reach users. For this, I pay them a monthly fee. Mailchimp does have a free tier, but I found I had too many email subscribers to remain eligible for the free tier (and, ironically, not enough email subscribers to reduce my tech support ticket load).
Mailchimp also provides a UI for composing mailings, and a wide variety of campaign tracking tools, most of which I haven’t needed to use. The service also had an opt-in confirmation feature I enabled. That way, if one of the plugins mentioned below adds a user to the mailing list, that user has to proactively grant permission before mail is sent to the user’s email address.
View Now at Mailchimp
As with Help Scout, the Mailchimp SaaS service doesn’t automatically integrate with WordPress. Instead, I use a number of different plugins to enable that integration. They include:
EDD Mailchimp: Mentioned above, part of the shopping cart software. Automatically (with confirmation, of course) subscribes customers to my Mailchimp list when they purchase products 
Bloom: This came with my Divi license and it presents a pop-up email subscribe box when users scroll 30% or more down a webpage, or when they linger on a webpage for a few minutes or more.
Divi block: DIvi has an email subscribe block that I’ve placed at the bottom and side of relevant pages to encourage users to subscribe.
MC4WP: Mailchimp User Sync: This synchronizes my user list with Mailchimp. That way, when someone creates a tech support ticket, they get added (subject to opt-in confirmation) to the mailing list. This plugin requires MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress, which, like Bloom, adds sign-up features. I’ve disabled all the sign-up features and use it simply to drive the user sync capability.
Marketing support
I don’t do a whole lot of marketing beyond the listings of plugins on the WordPress plugin repository and some occasional social media promotion, but I do use a few plugins on the site to encourage some marketing activities. Let’s take a look.

Social media follow and sharing
Image: Elegant Themes
Monarch is another plugin from the Elegant Themes folks (who make Divi). This plugin creates a series of social sharing and social following buttons on the site. Social sharing buttons are like the buttons at the top of this page — they let users easily post the current page or post to their own social feeds. Social following are buttons that users can press that subscribe them to your social networks as a follower. 
Except for Facebook. Facebook doesn’t allow tools like this for personal Facebook pages, but if you do have a Facebook business page, you can use it.
View Now at Elegant Themes

Manage affiliate partners
Image: Sandhills Development
My latest addition to the site is AffiliateWP, a plugin that integrates with my ecommerce system and manages affiliate partners. Those who wish to promote the add-ons can sign up, and when they send a buyer to my site, they would get a commission.
AffiliateWP cost a little over $200 for this year, and so far it’s on track to pay for itself… never. I’ve had it installed for a few months, managed to sign up one partner, and haven’t had a single sale referred over. This isn’t the fault of AffiliateWP, because I don’t have the time to cold call possible partner sites and pitch the affiliate plan. If you do have a team that can do this sort of promotion, you’ll probably do better. In that case, AffiliateWP, in concert with Easy Digital Downloads, might be a viable solution.
View Now at AffiliateWP
Additional tools for managing look and feel
In addition to the Divi theme, I use quite a few plugins to tweak certain aspects of how the site looks to visitors. Here’s the list:
Crayon Syntax Highlighter: This plugin hasn’t been updated for a while, but still works for me. It creates a text field that highlights code syntax appropriately for the language presented. I have an API built into my donations plugin, and this allows me to postcode that presents syntax highlighting automatically.
Divi Bars: This allows me to create a highlight bar at the top of my site. I often do this to spotlight key version changes or updates people need to know about.
Hide Admin Bar from Non-Admins: Normally, in WordPress, when a user logs in, a black admin bar is presented on the top of the page. Since my users are only support users or buyers, there’s no reason for them to see that admin bar when they’re on the site. This little plugin makes the bar go away.
TablePress: This is one of my favorite plugins. Making HTML tables is always a pain, and even if your theme supports tables, they’re still a pain. TablePress is a complete system for editing, managing, and presenting tables. I use this for feature comparisons and lists of API calls. Can’t recommend it highly enough.
Theme My Login: TML is a plugin that allows you to change how the login page looks. I didn’t want users to have to go to a special page for logging in. I wanted to present it as part of the support pages. TML allows this to happen. Theme My Login also has a number of add-ons. I’ll show you the ones I use below, in the security section.
Additional tools for managing security
The single most important way you can protect a WordPress site is by updating the WordPress core, plugins, and themes when updates are made available. Almost all WordPress penetrations come due to an exploit in older code. So if you keep your site up-to-date, you’ll also help keep it secure. Here are some of the tools I use, beyond updates, to help me keep the site safe:
Backups: There are many backup plugins, but my hosting provider does daily backups for me.
ManageWP: This is a great tool, owned by GoDaddy. I use it primarily to update all my sites. Going through 12 sites and hand-updating them can be incredibly tedious. Instead, I just log into ManageWP and it does it all on one shot. It also has a variety of other tools that help manage sites and keep them safe. Worth a look.
BBQ Firewall: This plugin adds additional firewall protection to the site beyond the hardware firewall provided by the host. This tool protects against SQL injection attacks, executable file uploads, directory traversal attacks, unsafe character requests, excessively long requests, PHP remote/file execution, XSS, XXE, and related attacks, and bad bots, bad referrers, and a wide range of other bad requests.
Stop Spammers; My biggest problem with this site (and others I’ve operated over the years) are spammers who try to blast spam and other content through the site. This plugin helps reduce the level of spam. All-powerful, it’s not. But it’s part of my belt-and-suspenders approach to spam management.
Theme My Login 2FA: Allows me to require 2-factor authentication to admin users, but allows support users to login without 2FA (but they can enable it individually if they want to).
Theme My Login Moderation: Require users to confirm their email address or be manually approved. This is another part of my anti-spam system.
Theme My Login reCAPTCHA: Enables Google reCAPTCHA support on my registration and login forms. Yet another piece of my anti-spam puzzle.
User Role Editor: Many of the plugins I use to create specific user roles. This tool allows me to manage those roles and control the privileges each role is assigned.
Additional tools for site management
Finally, I use several plugins that tweak the site, help me manage it better, or add convenience in maintaining the site. Let’s look at those now:
Admin Menu Editor: This lets you tweak the main WordPress admin menu, so if you want to move items around or bring more commonly used sections closer to the top, you can. 
Better Search and Replace: This is by Delicious Brains, one of the smartest makers of plugins for the WordPress community. It allows you to search and replace the WordPress database and make changes. You shouldn’t use it often, but when you need it, you really need it.
Display PHP Version: This is such a simple little thing, but it’s nice to be able to quickly ascertain the version of PHP the site is running. This does that.
Easy WP SMTP: When WordPress wants to send an email, it has to deal with a wide range of hosting environments and variables. This plugin helps cut through that and makes sending emails (like for password resets) much easier and more reliable. I use it primarily for new user registrations, password resets, and to send purchasers their license code information. I use Mailchimp for mailings in volume.
Enable Media Replace: The default interface for images in WordPress requires you to delete an old image before uploading a replacement. This saves time by allowing you to simply replace one image with another. It’s another simple, but time-saving tweak.
Simple Page Ordering: This is another reordering tool, this time for pages in the Pages section of the admin menu. It allows you to move more commonly modified pages to the top. Yet another time-saver.
User Switching: This is an enormously helpful plugin for sites with different user roles. It allows you to switch to another user on the fly so you can see how the site is presented from that user level, make sure the right elements are hidden and other elements are showing. I used this a lot when setting up Help Scout to make sure users could get to their support tickets.
Widget Clone: Here’s another time-saver. This one allows you to duplicate a widget (a type of WordPress UI element used a lot on sites). Some widgets are pretty complex and this saves having to reproduce all the settings.
WPCrontrol: WordPress has its own cron (automatic code execution) system. Normally what runs is pretty opaque to site operators, but if you have this plugin you can not only see what’s scheduled to run but modify the cron as well.
Yoast Duplicate Post: Like Widget clone, but for posts and pages. It simply duplicates everything in a post or a page and lets you modify it later. It works well for pages and posts, but when I used it to duplicate a product listing, I kind of fell down a rabbit hole (which the EDD support folks thankfully dug me out of). Don’t use it to duplicate product post types.
In addition to these tools, I also wrote three custom plugins that run the site. One creates a bunch of useful custom shortcodes I use on the site, one gathers and manages telemetry data from my users, and the last one contains lots of little site tweaks, like the setup code for the help desk software.
Congratulations
Well, if you made it this far, congratulations! As you can see, an active website has a lot of components that all have to work together. Just keep in mind that I’ve been running this site for about seven years. It didn’t burst onto the web with all these capabilities and components. I work on the site a few times each year, improving it over time. If you set up a site and run it for a few years, your site will become more capable and reliable over time as well.
What about you? Are you running a WordPress site? What are some of your favorite plugins, themes, and features? What are some of the problems you’re trying to solve or some of the lessons you’ve learned? Share with us in the comments below.
You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.

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Wi-Fi networks provider Boingo Wireless is going private in a deal valued at $854 million including debt.
Under the deal, a unit of Digital Colony Management will acquire Boingo Wireless for $14 a share in cash. Boingo closed Friday at $11.40. Digital Colony Management is paying a 23% premium for Boingo Wireless.
The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter. Digital Colony’s portfolio includes a bevy of global digital infrastructure firms.
Separately, Boingo Wireless reported its 2020 financial results, which have been hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Boingo Wireless took a hit from demand from retail and transportation hubs.
For 2020, Boingo Wireless reported revenue of $237.4 million, down 10% from a year ago. Net loss for the year was $17.1 million, or 38 cents a share. Boingo Wireless had cash and cash equivalents of $40.7 million as of Dec. 31, down from $54.6 million as of Sept. 30.
Boingo Wireless saw declines across its carrier services, multifamily and legacy businesses. Its military networks unit and private networks saw sales increases. Boingo Wireless gets the bulk of its revenue from partnerships with wireless carriers and military networks. More

The company responsible for rolling out the National Broadband Network will start taking new hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) connection orders again in either May or early June.
NBN on Monday said the May-June forecast was made after it came to an agreement with its chipset supplier to have the chipsets that are required for its HFC network termination devices delivered before then.
“We are targeting the recommencement period at the end of May or early June based on the provisional forecast we have developed in conjunction with our HFC modem supplier and Delivery Partners, underpinned by NBN Co and Retail Service Provider-supplied order volume forecasts,” NBN said.
NBN stopped offering new HFC connections last month as it had limited stock of the required chipsets as a result of the pandemic, with its remaining reserves set aside specifically for medically vulnerable customers and medical support and emergency services organisations where HFC is the only legacy service available to them.  
NBN was notified of the supply chain shortage in late January and was told it would “continue for several months”.
“We have been monitoring this issue for several months since we first became aware the global shortage of chipsets affecting various industries, including telecommunications. As a result, we have been working closely with our supplier to build up our HFC equipment inventories in our warehouses as much as possible,” NBN chief customer officer Brad Whitcomb said at the time.
NBN has not been the only company in the world to suffer such constraints, with AMD saying in January that the low end of the market would be squeezed with shortages in wafer supply.

During the first half of the financial year, NBN reported positive earnings at year-end. For the six months to the end of 2020, NBN reported a 25% increase in revenue to AU$2.26 billion, which it said was thanks to 660,000 premises joining the network and increased demand for higher speed plans.
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I’ve been building websites since 1995. Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, you can even see the slightly cringe-worthy first one I ever put up. You’ll need to make your browser much narrower because it was designed in the days when screens were only 800 pixels wide.
With 26 years of experience making sites, it’s fair to say I’ve been asked, “So Dave, what do I need to do to get my own website?” a few hundred times, minimum. In this article, we’re going to answer that question. To get started, let’s define our terms.

Website hosting and building

What is a website?
From a website visitor’s perspective, a website is someplace online you visit to get information or to do something. But from a site operator’s perspective, a website is, fundamentally, one or more directories of files, possibly accompanied by one or more databases of tables.
You may have heard terms like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, PHP, and more. These are all, more or less, computer languages in that they follow a specifically defined syntax and, when processed, produce a result of some kind.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language): This is a text file containing formatting commands for constructing a webpage. You can control the text style, add headings, lists, and place media content. Most HTML pages also embed or include content from other web languages as well, like CSS.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): These are files that help format the webpage. They contain positioning and styling information that gives a page its pleasant look.
JavaScript and Java: These are programming languages, initially developed to run in the browser to modify a page’s behavior on the fly. Now, there are server-side versions, like Node.js for JavaScript and Enterprise Java Beans for Java. Almost all web applications, like Gmail and Facebook, use Java and JavaScript (or a modified dialect) to make the pages more dynamic.

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc: These are server-side programming languages that run web applications on the server. For example, an online store will need to call out to a payment processor. Most of that payment processing is handled server-side in a web programming language.
Back in 1995, when I got my start on the Web, there were no web builders or content management systems. I had to hand-code all my HTML. Today, unless you’re writing custom functionality, you probably won’t have to know any of these languages in detail to create a successful site. But you might want to have a passing awareness of them and to understand basic HTML and CSS at the least, because little bits of customization in terms of how your site looks may require CSS or HTML tweaking.
A webpage is essentially a single document. A website is a collection of related webpages. Many websites, using web programming languages, also work with databases (which provide fast search and retrieval). These sites build the webpages dynamically, constructing all the elements as a user visits the page, and then transferring that cluster of elements as files to a user’s browser.
Although we hand-crafted our pages — HTML tag by HTML tag — back in the mid-1990s, that’s no longer a preferred practice. Today, you’re almost always going to use some sort of page builder or content management system (CMS), which will do most of the super-tedious page formatting and assembly work for you.
Content site vs. web application?
According to Internet Live Stats, there are 1.8 billion websites live right now. Each site is different (except, of course, for those sites cloned by scammers who hope to get web traffic from the stolen work of others). But even though there are millions of variations in what constitutes a website, right now we’re going to lump them all into two categories: Content site and web app.
Even here, there’s some wiggle room. Many apps have content as well. And many content sites have sections that are web apps. Any site that has a forum, for example, is hosting a web app.
From a “Dave, what do I need to do to get my own website?” point of view, if you’re reading this article or asking that question, let’s agree you’re looking to build a content site. You’re asking because you want to present information about the goods and services you offer, or about a topic of interest, or some other site that’s mostly information-based.
Web applications, although incredibly valuable (see all our writing about the cloud), usually require skilled programmers to create. If you’re looking to set up your first site, you’re not ready to worry about coding. For the rest of this article, we’ll assume your site is mostly content-based, although you may have some app features (like e-commerce or a forum).
Build it yourself or hire a consultant (or get your nephew to do it)
If you run a large corporation that can hire a web team, sure, go out and hire a consultant. And while there are many web developers out there (freelance and with agencies) that do a wonderful job, they can increase complexity considerably. For now, I’m going to tell you a few reasons why I don’t recommend you hire someone. After, I’ll show you some tips for succeeding if you do.
Let’s start with the reasons you might want to avoid hiring someone. At the top of the list is cost. Building a custom website is a lot of work. While it’s possible to crank out cookie-cutter sites where only the logo and colors change, anything built with more of a personal touch will take days to weeks to months.
I volunteer with a nonprofit. I agreed to build their site. It had just a few highly custom features (a tweaked membership list and member-only access). Even with just a few custom features, it took me a couple of weeks to put it together. Even the cost of hiring the least expensive developer, billing for 80 to 100 hours of time, is going to add up.
Beyond cost, however, is the loss of control. I also maintain a free donations app, again as part of my pro bono work. At least once a week, someone contacts me telling me that they lost their developer (or they have no idea who the original developer was) and they need to know how to modify their site.
You are unlikely to have access to the same developer for the entire life of your site. Consultants move on, get new jobs, move away, die, or get fired. If you are solely reliant on someone else to keep your site alive, you’re at serious risk. It’s incredibly valuable, especially for your first few sites, to build them yourself. Learn about hosting. Learn about your content management system. Learn about backups.
If you build up these basic skills, you’ll be able to jump in if your developer is unavailable. At the very least, you’ll have a better chance of understanding whether the consultant’s asking price is reasonable or over-inflated.
If you do want to hire a consultant, my biggest piece of advice is to keep each job simple, with clear objectives and a measurable set of guidelines. Rather than hiring someone to develop your entire site, you might hire someone to configure your e-commerce plugin — and teach you how to maintain it. Rather than having someone design the entire site, you might hire someone to help you choose your site’s colors and tweak your CSS to display them.
You get the idea. Keep the jobs simple, tangible, and objectively measurable. It’s much easier to convince a vendor to make a fix because payments aren’t processing than it is to try to convince a consultant to redesign because you didn’t get the light and airy feeling you were hoping for.
Getting ready to get ready
Up until this point, you’ve been getting ready to get ready. You’ve learned about the different kinds of files a website uses. You’ve learned to think about the difference between content sites and web apps. You’ve looked into hiring consultants and (at least if you follow my advice) you’re going to try to build your first site on your own.
You have a couple of more decisions to make about what web technology to use and what hosting provider. But before you jump into the logistics, you need to think through more about your site itself.
We know it’s going to be content rather than mostly code. But beyond that, what are you trying to accomplish? If you want to take orders, you’re going to need to look into payment gateways and payment processing. If you ship physical goods, you’re going to need your cart software to manage shipping and fulfillment tracking. If you ship digital goods, you’re going to need your cart to manage licensing, expiration, renewal, downloads, and registration.
If you plan on building a mailing list, you’re going to need a mailing services partner to manage your list and deliver your mail messages. And you’ll also want to decide how tightly you want to integrate your mailings with your web content. Do you want a mailing automatically triggered for each new blog post, or do you want to write your own mailer when you’re ready to do a promotion?
Also: Best email hosting in 2021
You’re also going to need a domain. Do not let any of the web hosting providers try to convince you to use something like yourname.theirname.com. It’s better to have yourbrand.com as your domain name. Domain names cost about $10 a year and you go to a domain registrar to buy one. The only challenge, like with vanity license plates, is finding one that hasn’t already been used.
Here’s a caution: Most registrars also offer some form of domain marketplace, where those who own domain names try to sell them to others who want them. Stay away. I have an acquaintance who decided he wanted a very specific name and spent thousands to buy it. Yes, the name of your company might have already been taken. Be creative. There are still many great combinations of letters out there. Don’t spend hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars on a domain name. Just be creative and choose one that’s available.
These decisions will help you look into the features that you’re going to choose when you look for a web builder or content management system. Let’s talk about that now.
Choosing a content management system
There is a wide spectrum between writing every bracket around every tag in every HTML file when coding a site completely on your own, and dumping text and photos into Facebook or Medium and being at the mercy of some walled-garden corporate algorithm.
We’re going to focus in the middle of that spectrum. There will be some configuration and setup decisions and a lot of design decisions, but it isn’t really a choice between writing all your own code or letting Facebook dictate who sees your message. You’ll be able to build a site that’s your property, with your look, feel, and identity.
Here, too, there are decisions. You can go the website builder route. You can sign up to Wix or Squarespace or an equivalent service, and they’ll take care of both hosting and constructing your webpages. All you’ll need to do is choose a theme, and then fill the site with your content.
Also: The best website builder for 2021: Your step by step guide
Depending on your budget, going with a website builder is a very simple and practical solution, especially if the themes provided are appropriate for the kind of work you’re doing. There is, however, a substantial downside: Lock-in. Most web builders are proprietary, so if you want to switch to another service, you’ll have to rebuild your site either mostly or entirely from scratch. At the very least, there will be a ton of cutting and pasting between services.
For smaller sites, that’s not much of an issue. Rebuilding five or 10 webpages is no big deal. But if your site is 50, 100, or even thousands of pages, that’s a lot of copying and pasting (or, if you’re very lucky, exporting and importing). Think about this: If you do one blog post every weekday, you’ll have at least 261 pages by the end of a year. Content expands very quickly.
The other approach is to run a non-proprietary content management system on a hosting provider. That way, you can switch hosting providers and your CMS can move with you. If you run an active website for any number of years, you WILL switch hosting providers. Whatever you start with will become unreliable, more costly, offer less quality support, or give you some other reason where you’ll want to leave. It’s rare to stick with one hosting provider unless you simply have no way out. So planning to be able to switch is useful.
The sweet spot: WordPress
I’m going to go out on a very safe limb and recommend you consider WordPress as the foundation of your website. According to tracking service W3Techs, WordPress now runs 40% of all websites and has a 64.3% market share of all sites based on a content management system.
WordPress is an open-source CMS you install on your hosting provider’s site. Usually, WordPress comes pre-installed, or you need to run a quick installer to create the site. The installation process involves answering a few basic questions. To just get WordPress up and running, it rarely takes more than about five minutes or so.
Also: Best WordPress hosting in 2021
It’s the customization of WordPress that can take a while. That non-profit I told you about earlier was a WordPress site that took weeks to build. Some of that time was spent on getting the non-profit to decide on a logo, gathering all the names of the members, and agreeing on wording and messaging. But the bulk of the time was spent choosing and configuring the plugins, themes, and layouts that best fit the group’s mission and provided the professional look and feel that was desired.
Speaking of plugins and themes, let’s talk about them. Plugins extend WordPress’s capabilities. There are thousands upon thousands of them. I consider plugins the great strength of WordPress because they allow you to customize WordPress to do almost anything. Many are free, many more are paid add-ons. Many offer a free core plugin but sell either a pro version or add-on capabilities.
The second great strength of WordPress is its enormous themes library. There are some very nice free and default themes, and a tremendous number of excellent commercial themes available. This, too, is one of the reasons I confidently recommend WordPress.
But… keep in mind that once you integrate a bunch of plugins and themes into WordPress, you’re going to have something of a lock-in situation as well. It’s not the same as being stuck on one hosting provider, but you may have data formatted just to work with your chosen plugins, or pages formatted to work with just the theme you’ve chosen.
The difference between module-level lock-in and hosting-level lock-in is that you can often find replacement themes and plugins, and you can almost always move your entire WordPress site (including all those plugins and themes) to another host without too much work.
Also, you may have heard about security problems with WordPress. Don’t let that scare you away. Keep in mind that 40% of the internet is running WordPress, so millions of websites run it. That makes a very large target of opportunity for bad guys and opens up a wide range of errors people can make in configuring their sites. But if you do the simple practices of backing up your sites and applying updates as they come out, you’ll almost always be in the clear.
One other benefit of WordPress: Because it’s so huge, there’s an enormous user community and almost unlimited amount of training, help, and support, and a virtual cornucopia of resources, sites, and helpful people out there who know WordPress.
Choose a hosting provider
If you go with one of the all-in-one web builders like Wix or Squarespace, you won’t have to choose a hosting provider. But if you go with some other CMS or WordPress, you’ll need to contract with a company to deliver your webpages to your visitors.
Also: The best cheap web hosting in 2021
I wrote about the hosting provider business model in Best free web hosting in 2021: Cheap gets expensive fast, so click over there and give it a read-through. You’ll learn a ton about how to think about hosting, what services hosting providers offer, and some of the pricing tricks hosting providers try to foist upon their customers.
Another article to check out, on our sister site CNET, is How to choose a web hosting provider. There, I wrote about the different types of hosting and servers to take into consideration.
Also: Best web hosting in 2021: Find the right service for your site
Here’s a quick tip: You can probably get by with shared hosting if you don’t have a ton of pages or a complex site. But stay away from the bottom-of-the-barrel pricing plans. You get what you pay for. Look for a plan that’s roughly about $10 per month if you’re running WordPress or anything with a basic CMS. If you’re running complex e-commerce, expect to spend more. 
The reason for this is that you’ll need a base level of performance to be able to feed pages with any responsiveness. The super-cheap sites will have terrible performance and often lax security. If you’re creating your first impression on the Internet, make it count. Spend a few bucks — way less than we used to spend mailing out brochures back in the pre-Internet dark ages — to get a decent quality but still affordable offering.
Final thought
There’s a lot to learn, but it’s not unreachable. More to the point, if you go through the learning curve, you’ll never be completely at the mercy of expensive consultants who may cost a lot and still leave you unsatisfied. I’m not saying consultants are bad, but taking control by learning how to set up your own site will help you become an informed site operator.
You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.

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TPG Telecom — the culmination of the TPG Corporation-Vodafone merger — revealed that the financial impact of COVID-19 during the fiscal year 2020 was approximately a AU$90 million hit to its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA), which ended up being AU$1.39 billion.
The results account for 12 months of the former Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) and six months of the now-defunct TPG Corporation (TPG Corp) as the merger was finalised midway through the fiscal year.
Read more: Vodafone Australia and TPG merger: Everything you need to know
Net profit after tax (NPAT) was AU$734 million after the company paid AU$820 million in taxes for the year. The AU$820 million tax bill was the byproduct of an accounting credit to income tax expense that was not previously recognised in the company’s accounts.
For the year to December 31, revenue amounted to AU$4.35 billion, up from AU$3.5 billion from the corresponding period last year, while EBITDA rose 18% to AU$1.39 billion. The revenue boost was due to service revenue growing by 44%.
Looking at TPG’s various customer bases, broadband saw a 6% year-on-year increase to 2.17 million, representing a growth of 117,000. The company’s NBN base also grew by 28% to 1.9 million, adding 415,000 new subscribers for the year.
The company’s mobile base, much like those of other telcos, was impacted by the absence of overseas visitors and migrants coming to Australia due to border closures. As a result, its postpaid mobile subscriber base dipped 5% to 3.26 million while postpaid average revenue per user dipped 5.1% to AU$40.90 from a strong decline in roaming revenue.

TPG’s prepaid subscriber base suffered a similar fate, dropping 22% to 1.97 million from 2.52 million. Unlike its postpaid subscriber base, however, the dip in prepaid numbers was due to the company’s “inability to compete aggressively” during the merger process.
On a pro forma basis, which calculates figures to simulate what TPG’s results would have been if the merger had been effective for the entire year, its numbers dropped across the board. Pro forma revenue decreased by 6% to AU$5.52 billion, while both EBITDA and NPAT dropped 10% to AU$1.79 billion and AU$282 million, respectively.
Categorising TPG Telecom’s pro forma revenue into its consumer and corporate segments, both declined by 7%, primarily due to COVID impacts, price erosion, and loss of low-margin NBN wholesale business, it said.
For 2021, TPG said COVID-19 would continue to impact the telco, with lower international roaming and international visitor revenue expected to continue into 2021. It also expects total NBN headwinds of around AU$60 million.
“While we are in a stronger position to respond to aggressive competition in the market and mitigate headwinds, we will continue to be impacted by global travel restrictions, NBN margin erosion, and the new RBS levy,” TPG CEO Inaki Berroeta said.
To counteract NBN headwinds, Berroeta said the telco would work towards shifting customers from NBN to its fixed-wireless services while continuing to progress merger integration activities.
Berroeta added that the telco is targeting AU$70 million in cost synergies as it continues merger integration, which excludes any savings contributions from the cross-selling of fixed-wireless services.
Providing an update on its 5G rollout, Berroeta said the telco expects to offer 5G fixed-wireless services during the first half of 2021 and is on track to provide 85% 5G population coverage by the end of the year.
“As we move into 2021, we are building on momentum gained in the final quarter of 2020, continuing our merger integration plans, our 5G mobile network is on track to reach scale in the top six cities by the end of the year, and we will begin offering 5G fixed wireless services in the first half,” he said.
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CEO also compares NBN capacity charge to completing laps of Mount Panorama stuck in second gear.
Company formerly known as Vodafone Australia ends first half once again in the red
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Telstra InfraCo’s dark fibre optic network is now available for use across six Australian state capitals.
“Spanning across our nation is 250,000km of untapped potential that we can now begin to offer our customers,” Telstra InfraCo fibre executive Kathryn Jones said. “With our massive fibre footprint underpinning our new offering, it opens up a wealth of capabilities and control.”
Jones said over 250 pre-defined paths across six state capitals that are connected to 68 metro data centres, 78 NBN points of interconnect, and two cable landing stations are now available.
She said opening up the telco’s fixed network to customers is a “profound step in unlocking untapped value” in Telstra’s network assets.
Dark fibre is the first product to be launched by the infrastructure arm of Telstra since its launch in 2018. Jones said it is the first of a series of offerings Telstra InfraCo is planning on bringing to the market.
Towards the end of last year, Telstra announced that by the end of 2021, it intends to split itself into an InfraCo Fixed business that would own and operate passive fixed infrastructure such as ducts, fibre, data centres, subsea cables, and exchanges; an InfraCo Tower business that would own and operate passive tower assets; and ServeCo that would remain as the bulk of Telstra, owning its retail business, active electronics and radio access network, spectrum, as well as offering services and products to customers.
“The proposed restructure is one of the most significant in Telstra’s history and the largest corporate change since privatisation. It will unlock value in the company, improve the returns from the company’s assets and create further optionality for the future,” CEO Andy Penn said at the time.  

Elsewhere, Optus on Wednesday announced the launch of Optus U, an employee upskilling program that will deliver accredited short courses to its employees.
Partnering with the La Trobe and Macquarie universities, TAFE, industry associations, and other partners, the “bespoke” curriculums and five micro-credential programs are aimed at bridging the skills gap for in-demand digital skills.
“At Optus, we predict the acceleration of technological change will continue unabated in 2021 and beyond, as the adoption of new technologies such as cloud and AI are brought forward by years,” VP of human resources Katie Aitkin said in a blog post.
“To meet the demands of new technologies, it’s critical that we ensure our people have the right skills and capabilities in place to drive Optus into the future and deliver for our customers across multiple digital domains.”
115 Optus employees have begun undertaking courses across customer experience, data and analytics, and artificial intelligence.
New programs covering 5G, cloud, Internet of Things, and cybersecurity are planned for 2021, with Optus expecting over 300 employees to take part.
In addition to micro-credentials, Aitkin said Optus U will also future proof employees through a lecture and guest speaker series called U Talks. She said Optus U will also feature practical workshops and innovative research projects for employees to collaborate and learn new skills from one another.
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