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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Why you could lose your broadband connection for doing absolutely nothing wrong

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

How nice to have friends in high places. Having failed to convince Digital Britain author Lord Carter to cut off the connections of alleged illegal file sharers, the creative industry has somehow managed to convince Lord Mandelson and the new Minister for Digital Britain, Stephen Timms, that it’s a good idea after all.

Hence today’s announcement that the Government will now urge Ofcom to suspend people’s broadband connections as a “last resort”. But on what evidence will ISPs be forced to clip your connection?

Rights holders will be required to identify the IP addresses of people they claim to have caught file sharing, and pass those details to the relevant ISP (as they do currently). But here comes the clincher. “The standard of evidence required from rights holders should, as a minimum, establish an infringement on the balance of probabilities,” the Government’s own consultation on legislation for illegal P2P file sharing states. So no innocent until proven guilty – a high likelihood that you’re in the wrong is all that the rights holders need to press the ISPs to cut off your broadband.

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Why you’re better off on LLU than BT broadband

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Ofcom’s latest research into broadband speeds might have been spectacularly indecisive on the surface, but when you start digging through the 113 pages of the full report, some interesting nuggets of information begin to emerge.

One of the most noteworthy of these is that broadband customers on local loop unbundled (LLU) lines – where the ISP has put its own equipment in the telephone exchange – are generally on much faster connections than those with connections delivered by BT Wholesale.

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iPhone and Palm Pre owners locked to Britain’s patchiest 3G network

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Ofcom has published detailed maps of Britain’s 3G mobile data coverage – and they make grim viewing for owners of the iPhone and the forthcoming Palm Pre.

Both Apple and Palm have decided to lock their devices exclusively to the O2 network. But as Ofcom’s network-by-network maps show, O2 has by far the patchiest 3G coverage of any of the UK’s five mobile networks.

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Yet another Ofcom own goal

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Ofcom is once again patting itself on the back for a job well done on its new broadband Code of Practice. “Which? magazine has hailed the code, which comes into force tomorrow, as a broadband speed victory,” the regulator’s homepage proudly proclaims. Utter cobblers.

Let’s look at the detail. The centrepiece of Ofcom’s Code is that broadband providers must “provide consumers at the point of sale with an accurate estimate of the maximum speed that their line can support.” Can you name me one major ISP that hasn’t already been doing this for months? BT has an online ADSL Line Checker that’s been spitting out this information for years.

Even then, knowing your “maximum line speed” is about as much use as knowing the top speed of your car: it’s utterly irrelevant. It’s the actual speed of the connection – what people will see in their day-to-day surfing – that really matters.

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Ofcom: the chocolate fireguard starts to crack

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

More than half of Britons haven’t got the first clue whether their broadband connection is dawdling along at dial-up pace or delivering data to their door at warp speed, according to Ofcom’s newly-published (and ironically titled) Consumer Satisfaction report. “The proportion of broadband customers unaware of their connection speeds has continued to grow – 55% were unaware of their connection speed (actual speed),” the report claimed.

Who’s to blame for this widespread ignorance? The ISPs, who continue to advertise “up to” speeds that are often so detached from reality they make the X-Files look like a documentary? Ofcom and its equally toothless cohorts at the Advertising Standards Authority who’ve allowed the ISPs to get away with marketing these fantasy speeds? No, apparently it’s us meddling journalists.

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Global warming, the Ofcom way

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

We’ve seen recently just how muddled a regulatory body Ofcom seems to be. There was the nonsensical claim that rural households in Britain are as well connected as their urban neighbours, swiftly refuted by a ThinkBroadband.com survey – and anyone who’s ever been outside a major city.

There was the bottling of speed sanctions on ISPs in favour of a laughable broadband code, essentially giving ISPs carte blanche to continue attracting punters’ cash with fantasy headline speeds.

Then there’s the eight weeks Ofcom still expects disputing customers to wait until their case will even be looked at. Not to mention the no-win situation Ofcom’s been manoeuvred into by BT.

But for final damning evidence of Ofcom’s ineffectiveness, I point you away from the world of IT and towards this excellent, and deeply unsettling, New Scientist article. It explains (far more eloquently than I could here) how Ofcom has essentially given permission for documentary makers to pretty much make things up, on the basis that it’s only news programmes which need be presented with “due accuracy”.

If they won’t crack down on something as huge as that, what hope for an end to “up to” speeds?

BT puts gun to Ofcom’s head

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

There have been plenty of times in the past where I’d have happily fired Ofcom. But it seems BT has cleverly put a gun to the regulator’s head with the announcement of its planned fibre network.

The company says it’s prepared to spend £1.5 billion to bring high-speed broadband to ten million homes by 2012, but that depends on “ “a supportive and enduring regulatory environment”. In other words, give us what we want or we’re taking our football home.

That puts Ofcom in a no-win situation: if the regulator puts it foot down, it will be accused of stalling Britain’s broadband network; if it gives BT carte blanche, the former monopoly’s rivals will be crying foul.

BT has already demanded access to Virgin’s cable network in an exclusive briefing with PC Pro. What else will it demand in its negotiations with Ofcom? Oh, to be a fly on the wall in those meetings…