A brilliant solution to Britain’s 3G woes

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

When Ofcom (or Oftel as it was known back in 2000) auctioned off the 3G spectrum for a sum that could probably buy you Belgium – Norway, at a stretch – those expensively acquired licences came with strings attached.

One of those strings was that each of the winning bidders had to cover 80% of the country – by population, not land mass – by the end of 2007. Four out of the five networks met that target, with O2 earning itself a fine for finishing the job late.

So, given that each of the five networks has at least 80% of the country covered by themselves, the figures released by Ofcom yesterday showing that only 73.1% of premises in the UK has 3G coverage from all five networks seems, at first, to be contradictory. Until you realise, of course, that those five lots of 80% coverage don’t overlap precisely, creating many “3G areas” where only one or two networks provide a signal.

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Why you won’t get the mobile broadband speeds Ofcom claims

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

On first inspection, Ofcom paints a rosy picture of the state of mobile broadband in Britain. O2 (somewhat surprisingly, given our past real-world tests) tops the charts with average speeds close to 3Mbits/sec, with only Orange customers looking like they should find a new network.

However, examine Ofcom’s testing methodology more closely, and it becomes clear that those chart-topping 3Mbits/sec speeds are likely to be far higher than the average customer will receive.

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Named and shamed: the “unlimited” liars

Friday, March 25th, 2011

For years, fixed and mobile broadband providers have used the term “unlimited” to advertise services that are anything but.

We’ve moaned about it for years, and last month even our normally docile telecoms regulator said the term “unlimited” was being abused.  “There are people offering unlimited packages that contain a fair-use policy that means what you are getting is not unlimited,” said Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards. “If you are claiming unlimited then it needs to be unlimited.”

It seems the industry wasn’t listening. New data tariffs are still being advertised as “unlimited” even when they have specific download caps.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has been conducting a review of broadband advertising, but frankly, we’re tired of waiting for this weak-kneed, self-regulating body to get its act together.

So, from now on, whenever we see a new tariff being advertised as “unlimited” when it patently isn’t, we’re going to add it to our blog of shame.

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Britain’s sleepwalking into a net neutrality nightmare

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

Imagine that you get home tonight, flick on the TV and BBC1 isn’t there. Not absent because of a strike or a temporary technical fault, but because ITV had paid Sky not to carry BBC1 on its satellite network so that it could gobble up a greater share of the viewing figures.

I suspect it would cause a bit of a stir. The Daily Mail would be apoplectic.  #burnrupertmurdoch would be a trending topic on Twitter in less time than it takes to strike a match.

Yet, Britain’s biggest ISPs and Ofcom are driving us towards exactly this kind of scenario on the internet. At a Westminster eForum last week, TalkTalk’s director of strategy unashamedly admitted that he could foresee a situation where Google paid his company to give YouTube priority bandwidth over the BBC iPlayer. His counterpart from BT said likewise. Both described it as a “legitimate business practice”.

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The word Ofcom won’t use about ISPs: liars

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

The first rule of every media legal training session I’ve ever attended is: never call companies liars. Yet what other word could you use to describe an entire industry that has systematically misled the public for years?

Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards would certainly never use the L word when referring to ISPs. He’s far too cautious for that. Yet, even he admitted for the first time yesterday that ISPs have been selling consumers broadband speeds that they couldn’t possibly achieve.

“Speeds should only be advertised if they’re achievable by some customers,” Richards proclaimed, referring to the invidious practice of selling broadband based on theoretical maximums rather than actual throughput. “Clearly ‘up to’ claims are not as clear as they should be.”

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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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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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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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Britain’s broadband leaders: arrogant and ambitionless

Friday, November 27th, 2009

How is Britain going to get the next-generation broadband network it desperately needs to compete in the modern world? That was the question posed to a panel of more than a dozen industry leaders and experts at the latest Westminster eForum, but convincing answers were desperately thin on the ground.

Instead of courage, creativity and innovation, the mood coming from Britain’s broadband leaders was complacency, resignation and a weary confession that we’re “still going round the same issues time and time again”.

The half of the country that’s connected to fibre provided by Virgin Media, BT or any number of local projects can almost certainly look forward to download speeds of 40Mbits/sec plus in the next few years. But what about the other half – the half living outside of the big cities that are already struggling on sub-standard connections?

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Why Britain’s watchdogs have fewer teeth than goldfish

Friday, November 20th, 2009

If there’s one thing that makes me angry, it’s other people not getting angry enough. Britain has swathes of so-called regulators and “watchdogs” monitoring everything from advertising, to telecoms, to the protection of our private data, and they’re all about as much use as a toaster in a bath.

Take the Information Commissioner, for example. Christopher Graham may have started talking tough about cracking down on data leaks when he waltzed into his six-figure salary job this summer, but his feeble actions speak far louder than his fighting talk.

It was the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who revealed that staff at a UK mobile network had illegally sold thousands of customer account details to brokers. That data was used to cold-call customers nearing the end of their contracts, in a bid to convince them to move to a rival network.

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