Peter Nixon’s News Niche

Last Sunday night I participated in the Nike Human Race 10K in Istanbul together with 1 million+ runners in 25+ locations around the world simultaneously.
The race started in Beylerbeyi on the Asian side of Istanbul and concluded on the European side in Kuruçeşme with a Serdar Ortaç concert at the Kuruçeşme Arena. This was an absolutely beautiful course which involved running across the Bosphorus Bridge joining the Asia to Europe. Looking down on the lights of Istanbul lining both sides of the Bosphorus was a truly beautiful sight.. I just wish I had had more time to enjoy it, instead of chasing the guy in front of me!!

This was the first time I have ever run 10km in an actual race, and in-fact I rarely run that far on the treadmill at the gym so I was quite happy with my time of 71 minutes giving me an average speed of almost 8.5km per hour. I have to admit I was quite sore for several days afterwards though… Next time I will train a bit harder before hand, as this time I only trained for a few weeks at the start of the month and then missed almost two weeks of training leading up to the race due to work commitments.

Well, as many of you know, things with my company Suntel have been a bit unclear since my business partner went to work for our largest partner company (Vodafone). After many discussions, much soul searching, and several months of uncertainty (Including considering a move back to Australia) I am happy to say that I have started working with a great team of people at AirTies Wireless Networks as the “R&D Manager, VoIP Systems”.

AirTies is very strong in the ADSL and Wireless market in Turkey with several million deployed devices, but is really just getting started in the voice market (To be fair the voice market is just getting started in Turkey also). We have some existing combo VoIP Gateway / Router products, but we have significant work ahead of us to become a serious player in the VoIP industry.

Turk Telekom is currently in the process of un-bundling the local loop, and alternate operators should be able to assign and route local Turkish telephone numbers over IP by the end of the year, so it should be an exciting ride!