Hokum watch: Safer Internet Day

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

It’s Safer Internet Day! The day on which we’re meant “to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology”, according to the official website. Instead, it seems many companies are using it to peddle irresponsible nonsense. Here’s just a few of those we’ve found – let us know if you find any more on comments below, and we’ll update the blog.

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Set-top censorship Virgin on the offensive

Monday, December 19th, 2011

When you have channels such as Television X and Playboy TV loitering in the nether regions of your electronic programme guide (EPG), it’s perfectly admirable to asterisk out some of the more risqué titles on offer, lest innocent teenagers accidentally wander into the listings.

But using a crude find-and-replace across your entire EPG can have unintended consequences. As Virgin Media has discovered, much to the amusement of the Twitterati…

God alone knows what Virgin’s EPG will make of Willy Thorne’s Guide to Scunthorpe’s Snooker Balls, which is coming to Eurosport in the spring.

Grabs from @MarcSettle and @TheMediaTweets

How bad is superfast broadband uptake?

Friday, November 11th, 2011

We’ve been waiting for years for true “superfast” fibre-optic broadband, but now it’s here it seems few people actually want it. At least, that’s the impression given by Ofcom chief Ed Richards’ comments earlier this week, when he said superfast (24Mbits/sec+) broadband uptake was “still low” and largely confined to families with teenage children.

How low is “low”? We asked BT for its latest fibre figures. More than six million premises now have access to BT’s fibre lines, but only 300,000 customers have actually signed up for the service. That’s a less than impressive sounding conversion rate of 5%.

It’s even less impressive when you consider that BT Infinity fibre costs no more than the company’s most expensive ADSL package, and that the company admits to “really going for it” in terms of marketing fibre to customers. People are being offered an effectively free speed upgrade and many seemingly don’t want it.

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Who are the real broadband conmen: the ISPs or the ASA?

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

When you’ve dug yourself a hole, stop digging. Or if you’re the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), keep going until you hit the molten core of the Earth itself.

Regular PC Pro readers will know how the ASA has allowed ISPs to over-egg the speed of their broadband connections by permitting them to advertise fantasy “up to” speeds, which Ofcom’s research has proven time and again are pure fiction. Even Ofcom itself called for this insidious practice to stop over a year ago, since when the ASA has dithered with a year-long consultation on the use of “up to” speeds, but still hasn’t arrived at a conclusion.

Consequently, one ISP took matters into its own hands. Last year, Virgin Media launched its Stop The Broadband Con website, calling on ISPs to advertise typical rather than maximum speeds – very similar recommendations to those made by Ofcom itself.

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How to switch off Virgin Media’s mobile broadband image compression

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Recently, I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time in the company of 3G dongles for our “Mobile Broadband Con” feature, which will be hitting the shelves on 11 February.

One of the aforementioned cons of mobile broadband is image compression – a process where the networks water down the images on websites to conserve bandwidth. The end result is that sites such as the BBC homepage look as if they’ve been dipped in the bath, and in my experience, the compression barely saves any time at all on page downloads.

Many networks allow you to switch the compression off if you wish. Virgin Media doesn’t, on the rather dubious premise that it’s helping customers stay within their data download limits.

However, there is a sneaky way to beat the Virgin image washout, which I accidentally stumbled across during my tests. Virgin piggybacks on the T-Mobile network, and if you download T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk Accelerator software, you’ll find that it can be used to adjust the compression on Virgin, too.

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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First look: the Virgin Media Freedom netbook

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

While mobile broadband dongles are undoubtedly well-matched with netbooks, most mobile broadband firms offer third-party netbooks with their respective dongle deals: T-Mobile bundles its dongle with an Eee PC 904HD, Vodafone entices customers with a Samsung NC10 and Orange lets prospective buyers choose between HP, Asus, Samsung and Toshiba models.

Virgin Media, meanwhile, is the first mobile broadband company to release its own netbook and, while it’s undoubtedly very similar to Zoostorm’s offering – even sharing the same name, the ambitious “Freedom”, – it’s an interesting move and a good-looking product.

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Britain’s scandalous upload speeds

Friday, July 31st, 2009

A letter to The Times this morning makes a spectacularly good point about British broadband. While the mainstream media has (rightly) been roasting the broadband providers for delivering only half the download speed advertised on the tin, “the real scandal is… that the upload speed may be only a thirtieth of this [headline download speed] figure”.

The Times’ correspondent is bang on the money. Ofcom’s broadband speed report claims that: “overall the average upload speed received by UK consumers is 0.43Mbits/sec, less than 10% of the average download speed”.

While that sounds a little sunnier than The Times man suggests, the report goes on to state that “even consumers on higher speed packages (20Mbits/sec cable and 16-24Mbits/sec DSL packages) receive an average of less than 0.7Mbit/s.”

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Why BT might have finished off Phorm

Monday, July 6th, 2009

For months we’ve been wondering who would be the first ISP to take the plunge with Phorm’s technology: now BT’s decision has helped push Phorm off the edge of the cliff.

Make no mistake: BT’s decision to drop Phorm is a cataclysmic blow for the advertising firm (as reflected by the sharp drop in its share price this morning). In one stroke, it’s lost the UK’s single biggest ISP and its closest ally.

Phorm’s three UK ISP partners – BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk – have been playing a cowardly game of chicken over the past 18 months. The service has attracted so much negative publicity that all three have sat on the fence, hoping that one of the others would be brave enough to roll out the service, so they could judge just how much of a PR disaster it would be.

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No “up to” speeds with cable

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Recently I admitted defeat in a battle with unhelpful telecoms companies and jumped ship to cable, and I’m absolutely delighted with the results. The Virgin Media kit was couriered to me within days, easy to set up myself and required a simple two minute phone call to activate. But the best thing by far is the speed.

Used to the fluctuating performance of ADSL, my new service runs like a dream. It doesn’t drop out, it doesn’t slow down when someone next door phones a call centre in India, and – best of all – it runs as fast as it should.

I ordered the “Up to 4Mb” service and last night ran a speed checker: my download rate is a little over 3.8Mb/s. Considering that’s faster than I ever got at my last address from my “Up to 16Mb” Sky service, I’m absolutely ecstatic with the results.

Others out there may have had wonderful experiences with ADSL, others may achieve speeds close to those they were promised when they signed up. I personally haven’t ever got what I paid for from broadband, until now. In this house at least, ADSL is history.