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.