The question Ofcom won’t answer: is it safe to run an open Wi-Fi hotspot?

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

You may remember a few weeks ago, we reported on how Ofcom’s proposed code of conduct for dealing with illegal file-sharing contained a veiled warning to the providers of free or open Wi-Fi connections.

In a nutshell, anyone who provides an open Wi-Fi connection – be that a company with a free hotspot in their reception or a home user who decides to leave their router unprotected – will be held responsible if someone downloads copyrighted material on their connection. (Unless, bizarrely, they are a coffee shop or other business that offers Wi-Fi access in conjunction with other goods or services, in which cased they’re treated as an ISP).

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Is fibre broadband as expensive as BT makes out?

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

For many years now, BT has been claiming it simply cannot afford to deliver fibre broadband to large parts of the country. In 2008, the Broadband Stakeholder Group claimed it would cost £5.1 billion to deliver nationwide Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) – a figure that BT itself has repeated in public.

However, a press release issued by none other than BT today provides a fascinating insight into the economics of fibre broadband – and casts some doubt over the accuracy of those lofty figures.

In what BT describes as a “fibre triumph”, a local council in Kent has contributed to the cost of deploying fibre in the village of Iwade. According to BT, the council stumped up £13,000, which “unlocked” £62,000 of investment from the telco, meaning it cost a total of £75,000 to bring fibre to each of the village’s 1,350 premises.

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Brighton’s broadband battle: nimbyism or just common sense?

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

The people of Brighton and Hove are lucky enough to get a little love from BT, with new infrastructure being rolled out for superfast broadband, but a few residents aren’t happy with the plans.

They’re not arguing against broadband, of course. They’re asking BT to reconsider the placement of a few of its super-cabinets, saying the 1.8m “monsters” will make the local streets ugly and disrupt residents.

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An end to “unlimited” broadband ads, at last?

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Breaking news: there’s been a freak breakout of common sense at the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). After years of letting broadband providers – both fixed and mobile – get away with using the term “unlimited” on ads for services that have data caps as ludicrously tight as 250MB, the ASA seems to have finally realised something’s not quite right.

“We’ve looked at a number of complaints about individual ads in the telecoms sector regarding access speeds and usage limits and found that applying a single policy to how telecoms providers advertise can pose significant challenges,” the ASA’s communications and policy manager, Lynsay Taffe, told New Media Age.

“It’s important that we look at this on a broader policy level with service providers, other regulators and consumer groups, rather than relying on individual ASA rulings that focus on a particular service on one platform. Therefore, the ASA has invited CAP [the Committee of Advertising Practice] and BCAP [the British Code of Advertising Practice] to review broadband speed and ‘unlimited’ use claims.”

Terrific. But instead of consulting the world and his wife and taking another six months to come up with a policy, why doesn’t the ASA just consult a dictionary and find out what the world “unlimited” means? And then make the advertisers stick to it.

iPlate/Broadband Accelerator now free for BT customers

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

I first wrote about the BT iPlate (now renamed Broadband Accelerator) back in September 2008, and the blog post still gets thousands of hits per month from people desperately trying to eke more Mbits/sec out of their ADSL connections.

In case you’ve never heard of it, the Broadband Accelerator effectively cancels out potential interference from the now redundant bell wire, and can improve the speed of your connection by as much as 60% in our limited tests. It’ll only work on connections where the router is running off extension wiring, and even then it won’t work for everyone (indeed, some people have reported a drop in speed). And, yes, if you’re handy with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, you can achieve much the same effect by removing the BT socket faceplate and snipping the bell wire yourself.

However, as PC Pro blog reader ‘weeds season 4′ (don’t ask, just nod politely) pointed out this week, it’s probably not even worth the hassle if you’re a BT Total Broadband customer, as the company’s now giving away the easy-to-fit devices for free, bar £1.20 postage and packing. You can order one from the BT Broadband Accelerator website.

Let’s hope other ISPs follow suit.

Time for Ofcom boss to go

Monday, March 29th, 2010

What would it take to make Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards angry? It seems you could set a bomb off in his back pocket, and it would barely muster a disgruntled tut.

Today, Ofcom’s own research has conclusively proved that ISPs are simply ignoring the regulations laid out in Ofcom’s Voluntary Code of Practice on Broadband Speeds. Fewer than half of the ISPs called in a mystery shopping exercise volunteered information about the actual speed a customer could expect on their broadband line – a key requirement of the code.

Has Richards reacted with unbridled fury to the revelation that ISPs are plainly flouting the rules? Is he going to make good on his 2008 promise of mandatory regulation if the ISPs failed to abide by the voluntary code? Is he even willing to name and shame the ISPs that aren’t playing by the rulebook? No, no and no.

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Lords’ last chance to protect broadband customers

Friday, March 12th, 2010

On Monday, the House of Lords will have one final opportunity to rescue something from the rubble of the Digital Economy Bill.

Lord Erroll’s amendment 9A demands that Ofcom establishes a scheme to oversee the timely and effective repairs of people’s broadband connections, so that consumers are no longer left hanging  for two months – the time it currently takes the Ofcom-approved “dispute resolution schemes” to even consider a complaint when BT and a broadband provider blame one another for a fault.

“Ofcom has a duty to look after the consumer,” Lord Erroll told me last night. “There’s a feeling that Ofcom is not paying proper regard to it.”

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Fibre broadband: why you might have to move your router

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Those salivating over the prospect of 40 or even 100Mbits/sec broadband arriving down a BT fibre connection sometime soon, be warned: installation might not be quite as straightforward as you’d hoped.

BT’s fibre lines use VDSL, rather than the ADSL used to power today’s broadband.  That means BT can’t just flick a switch in the exchange like it normally does with ADSL upgrades: it needs to come into your home and fit a new faceplate on your master telephone socket.

The bad news is that with this set-up you can’t run your router off extension wiring any more – it must be plugged into the master socket. That’s a bit of an issue if, as in many homes, your master socket is inconveniently located in the hallway or kitchen. Not many people want their router sat next to the coat stand, and it’s a pain in the buttocks if you prefer a wired connection from your router to devices such as your PC or games console.

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Dreading the move to ADSL

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

In a few months I’m buying a flat. It’s not quite finished yet, but I’ve been inside it and I’ve seen the specs, all of which look impressive, except for one tiny problem. The block will have a communal Sky dish and connection points in every property, but I was told this week that cable won’t be an option.

This is bad. Very bad.

I’ve been with Virgin broadband in various properties for nearly four years now, and I’m genuinely despondent at the thought of switching to ADSL. Some of you will probably bring up traffic shaping, customer service and other less appealing aspects of Virgin’s offering, but I’m not listening. The blinkers have gone up and my opinion is set in stone: cable broadband just works, and I can’t live with anything less.

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It’s time to redefine “broadband”

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

If I had a pound for every time BT and Ofcom had proudly boasted that 99% of the country has access to broadband, I’d be paying for a nationwide fibre network out of my pocket change.

The problem is it’s not true. At least not true in the sense of what you and I would call “broadband” in 2010 – a connection fast and reliable enough to play even standard definition shows from the BBC iPlayer, for instance, or swiftly download a self-assessment tax form.

BT and Ofcom use the same definition for “broadband” today as they did a decade ago, when we were gawping in awe at 512Kbits/sec lines – “always-on services, offering data rates of 128Kbits/sec and above”.

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