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.

FREE AV WILL RIDDLE YOUR PCs WITH VIRUSES!

“You may think you’re safe surfing the web but there are any number of internet nasties that can creep up and harm your computer,” warns the video on Virgin Media’s Parental Controls site. “If you have no internet security installed, or just other basic free solutions, viruses and malware can take over.”

Really? Running something such as Microsoft Security Essentials or AVG Free will leave you with a virus-riddled heap of silicon, will it? Even with detection rates that are not much worse than the Trend Micro-supplied software offered by Virgin? That’s scaremongering of the highest order. As our forthcoming Labs on internet security software will prove…

BRITAIN’S “SAFEST BROADBAND CONNECTION”

You may recall the ever-fearsome Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently took exception to TalkTalk describing its service as the “UK’s safest broadband”, just because it provides network-level content filtering.

Luckily, TalkTalk found a way around that ban – by adding the word “connection” to the end of that phrase – as we can see from the company’s Facebook page, which is of course promoting Safer Internet Day.

We’ll remind you what the ASA said about TalkTalk’s adverts last month. “Customers could interpret ‘safest’ as referring to a number of features, such as virus protection or protection from hacking, and that HomeSafe only offered a basic range of security features”.

A “basic range of security features” or “the UK’s safest broadband connection”? Which sounds more plausible to you?

POLICE VIDEO NASTY

As we pointed out yesterday, why bother spending taxpayers’ money educating the public about internet safety, when you can knock out a nauseating fifties-style public information video that is so bereft of information and entertainment value, even ITV4 wouldn’t touch it?

Step forward the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP) – funded by the taxpayer to the tune of £6.4m per year – with this enormous waste of time and money.

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

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.

Why can’t Britain’s two biggest broadband providers tempt more people to upgrade to the superfast speeds?

In BT’s defence, its conversion rate is much higher than this time last year, when the company had signed up only 38,000 out of three million fibre-enabled households, a success ratio of only 1.5%. And its chief rival is doing no better. Virgin Media’s Q3 financial report reveals that eight million homes now have access to its 100Mbits/sec service, but only 187,000 of its customers are on 50Mbits/sec or 100Mbits/sec lines – a conversion ratio of only 2.3%.

Reasons for refusing fibre

So what’s going wrong? Why can’t Britain’s two biggest broadband providers tempt more people to upgrade to the superfast speeds?

There could certainly be an element of once bitten twice shy. For years, broadband providers have over-egged their advertised broadband speeds with the largely fictional “up to” speeds. According to Ofcom’s latest fixed-line research, the UK’s actual average broadband speed is 6.8Mbits/sec, but the average advertised speed is 15Mbits/sec. The broadband providers have only themselves – and the ever-pliant Advertising Standards Authority – to blame if nobody now believes their speed claims.

Price is clearly a major factor, too. Virgin’s 100Mbits/sec service costs £35 a month (when taken with a Virgin phone line), but its cheapest 10Mbits/sec package costs only £13.50 – almost a third of the price. And while BT does indeed match the price of its top-end ADSL and fibre packages, you can get BT’s up to 20Mbits/sec ADSL for as little as £13 (plus line rental), compared to the minimum £28 per month outlay for fibre. When the whole country’s looking after the pennies, people need a pretty good reason to upgrade.

And what is that reason? Remember that, to date, fibre has largely been rolled out in inner-city areas, places that already had fairly decent ADSL speeds. For the average consumer (who is far less demanding of their broadband than the average PC Pro reader), there are few apps or services that would run a great deal more smoothly on a 40/50/100Mbits/sec line than they would on a 10 or 20Mbits/sec ADSL connection.  Unless you’re downloading multiple HD video streams – as you might in Ed Richards’ stereotypical teenage family – there is currently no compelling reason for the man in the street to upgrade.

The people who would surely jump at the chance of a fibre speeds are those in rural areas, smaller towns or on the edge of exchanges, for whom the jump from only 1 or 2Mbits/sec – or even slower – to 40Mbits/sec and beyond would be truly life changing. A point that was reportedly made by senior telco execs at a recent conference in Denmark. But, of course, they’re harder and more expensive to reach.

But with BT admitting its business case was based on 20% of broadband customers making the jump to fibre at this week’s Westminster eForum – four times its current conversion ratio – you can’t help but wonder whether it may regret taking the soft option first.

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.

Virgin, of course, has very good reason to make such calls. Ofcom’s research has repeatedly shown that Virgin’s actual connection speeds are much closer to the advertised headline speed than those offered by the ADSL providers.

Here, according to Ofcom, is the distribution of maximum and average download speeds for customers of “up to” 20Mbits/sec or 24Mbits/sec ADSL packages (click to enlarge graph):

And here is the distribution of maximum and average download speeds for customers on Virgin’s “up to” 20Mbits/sec cable lines:

As we can see, only 1% of ADSL customers get a maximum speed in excess of 18Mbits/sec. None get an average speed higher than 18Mbits/sec. Are those customers being conned when they’re sold “up to” 24Mbits/sec lines? In at least 99% of cases, yes.

Virgin made that very same point on its website. After complaints from rivals Sky and BT, the ASA decided that was beyond the pale, and ordered Virgin to shut down the site and not run its ads again.

“[We] considered the text “Not getting the broadband speed you’re paying for … Stop the broadband con” was also likely to be interpreted as suggesting other ISPs dealt with consumers dishonestly in relation to broadband speeds, rather than as highlighting Virgin’s concerns about the disparity they believed existed between broadband advertising and speeds delivered to consumers. We therefore concluded that the claims were denigratory.”

So outright exaggeration of ADSL speeds is fine; pointing this out isn’t.

Faster speeds “not better”

The ASA made another extraordinary statement regarding broadband speeds. Both Sky and BT had challenged Virgin’s assertion that “faster connection would always give a perceivable benefit for surfing the web and watching TV online”. Sky also moaned about Virgin’s assertion that an average ADSL speed of only 6.5Mbits/sec would lead to “buffering delays” compared to Virgin’s cable services.

The ASA, inexplicably, backed BT and Sky with one of the most technically inept judgements I’ve ever had the misfortune to read.

“We understood that, in order to surf the web or stream TV online without interruptions, consumers would need a certain amount of bandwidth and that some ADSL customers would have sufficient bandwidth to do so, even if their service was used concurrently. We noted that Virgin would therefore be unable to offer those ADSL customers who were not experiencing interruption problems an improved broadband experience.”

Here, the ASA appears to be claiming that a 20Mbits/sec Virgin cable line with an average speed in excess of 18Mbits/sec for the vast majority of customers, wouldn’t necessarily offer “an improved experience” over an ADSL line where only 1% of people get in excess of 18Mbits/sec. That is categorically wrong. If you’re waiting for a HD iPlayer video to buffer before playback, an 18Mbits/sec connection will start playing more quickly than a 6.5Mbit/sec connection every single time.

Not to mention the fact that you need a steady connection of at least 4Mbits/sec to even watch HD iPlayer streams –  something that 41% of customers on “up to 24Mbits/sec” ADSL lines simply can’t achieve, according to Ofcom’s empirical research.

Yet, because the ASA “had not seen evidence that a speed of 6.5 Mbits/sec would cause delays for internet users in all instances, we concluded that the claim was misleading”.

It’s one thing to allow ISPs to peddle lies about their broadband speeds; it’s quite another to censure another ISP when they point them out. The ASA is entirely responsible for the broadband con. It’s high time it stopped.

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.

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?

Perhaps impetus for a nationwide next-gen network would be greater if the industry was willing to admit that our current infrastructure just isn’t good enough. But the complacency of BT’s director of public affairs, Tim O’Sullivan, was staggering to behold. Confronted with statistics that show Britain’s current position in the international broadband league is “more Championship than Premiership”, and a second report from Cisco that claims Britain’s crumbling broadband network could threaten our future competitiveness, O’Sullivan responded with platitudes bordering on arrogance. More than 99% of the country already has access to broadband, he retorted, 40% of which have access to “up to” 20Mbits/sec connections on BT’s network. “People should take stock and have a dose of reality in these debates,” he snapped.

If he wants a dose of reality he should talk to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) and its tens of thousands of members who can’t get a broadband connection worthy of the name. He should talk to the small business owners who are forced to relocate because they can’t get a stable ADSL connection. He should talk to the people who are seriously considering moving to mobile broadband – and its average connection speed of 0.87Mbits/sec – because it’s still faster than their landline.

Ofcom’s lapdogs

Yet is it any surprise that BT rests on its laurels, when even our supposed consumer champions are so desperately meek? “2Mbits/sec is good enough for today, but it’s absolutely not enough for tomorrow,” Anna Bradley, chair of the Ofcom-sponsored Communications Consumer Panel told the audience. Sorry Anna, but 2Mbits/sec isn’t good enough. It isn’t good enough to watch the HD streams from BBC iPlayer – a service the vast majority are already paying for through the licence fee. It isn’t good enough for many people to work from home, because of the deplorable upload speeds. It isn’t good enough in modern multi-PC households, with two, three or more devices trying to connect to the internet simultaneously.  No wonder that a spokesman for Lord Corbett referred to the Communications Consumer Panel as the “Industry Backside Protection Unit”.

Hope for the future?

So what hope is there for nationwide superfast broadband? BT says there’s no business case to lay fibre in any more than 40% of the country; some others estimate that 60% may get fibre by market forces alone. But even the most optimistic predictions don’t go above that figure.

Mobile won’t step into the breach. “There isn’t spare capacity in mobile networks to augment fixed-line networks,” said Forrester analyst Ian Fogg. “Mobile next-generation access is about the twenty-four seven lifestyle – it won’t be an alternative to fibre or Virgin Media’s network.”

Which leaves half the country pinning its hopes on Government intervention – although few think Lord Carter’s broadband tax will raise anywhere near enough to fibre the nation, and the Tories have pledged to scrap it if they get into power next year anyway.

In fact, the best hope of widespread fibre might come from innovative start-up projects, such as Fibrecity’s cost-cutting solution of running fibre though the sewer network. The company’s Adrian Cook said Fibrecity would shortly announce another ten cities that would benefit from the technology, and laughed off suggestions that fibre deployment need cost anything close to the figures suggested by the likes of BT and the BSG. “[We can install fibre for] significantly less than £400 per home,” he said. “If I were anywhere near that, my chief financial officer would have something to say about it.”

Perhaps someone can put a word in, and get this man a job at BT.

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.

We eased back the lid, for instance, to find an edge-to-edge screen and glossy finish that instantly makes the Freedom look like a far classier affair than plenty of the slightly staid netbooks that we’re used to seeing, and the keyboard feels good, too, offering decent size and travel. We’re not sure if it can yet match up to the charms of the Labs-winning Samsung N110, but it certainly felt comfortable enough to use for extended typing sessions.

The trackpad also felt good, with the pad itself proving nippy and responsive and the pair of buttons – which we always like to see instead of a single rocker – felt light and supremely clicky. Build quality was also solid, with the screen exhibiting no more flex than is to be expected and both keyboard and wrist-rest feeling resilient.

Inside, it’s typical netbook fare, with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM promising to deliver entirely average benchmark results, and the 120GB hard disk providing plenty of storage. The included draft-n wireless is a nice touch but, in a slightly strange move from a mobile broadband company, there’s no in-built SIM slot, which is perhaps a fault in Zoostorm’s design rather than Virgin Media’s.

Instead, the Freedom is bundled with a Virgin Media mobile broadband dongle and, as is now the norm with mobile broadband deals, is offered for free when you sign up to a contract. In this case, deals start from £31 a month and include 10MB broadband and a landline phone, with the more expensive packages – costing £45 and £58 per month respectively – including faster broadband, more generous call packages and Virgin TV.

This raises the usual question, of course, of price: sign up for the cheapest 24-month tariff and you’ll be shelling out £744 over the course of the contract for this “free” netbook and, while this does include the price of the included TV, internet and phone packages, you’ll have to weigh up the pros and cons of the various deals offered by Virgin and its competitors: while T-Mobile doesn’t offer TV or phone access, for instance, its tariffs start at a mere £20 a month.

It’s also worth considering if it’ll be cheaper to just buy a USB dongle on its own and use that with your laptop instead, especially if you don’t necessarily need the extras that are included with Virgin’s various deals.

Our other major concern is battery life. The Freedom comes complete with a 3-cell battery that, it’s quoted, will last for two and a half hours – but, when the £304 Samsung N110 will last for more than eleven hours on a single charge, that’s not good enough. We’ll be sure to give the Freedom a thorough test in the PC Pro Labs but, suffice to say, we’re not expecting great longevity.

It seems to have the fundamentals nailed down pretty well, but there are still several question marks over the Freedom’s pricing structure and battery life. Suffice to say, the full picture will be revealed soon enough in the PC Pro review.

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.”

Ofcom even provides a graph (shown below, click to enlarge) that reveals how little upload speeds improve for people on those premium, high-speed connections:

Does this really matter? If you’ve ever tried using an online service to back-up your PC, you’ll know it’s probably quicker to copy the files to a hard disk and drive it to the company. In fact, Amazon’s online backup service suggests you do exactly that.

Thankfully, there are signs of improvement on the horizon. BT says the 40Mbits/sec fibre lines it’s rolling out at the moment will have two tiers of upload speed: 5 and 10Mbits/sec. The company claims it might even be able to squeeze 15Mbits/sec uploads out of the fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) technology. That’s potentially ten times as fast as Virgin Media’s 50Mbits/sec service, which only offers upload speeds of 1.5Mbtis/sec.

It’s been quite a while since BT could claim it was ten times as fast as Virgin…

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.

BT was the only one of the three to have completed a full public trial of Webwise and has long been the favourite to deploy first. Now, it’s decided it’s perfectly comfortable collecting splinters on the fence. “The interest-based advertising market is extremely dynamic and we intend to monitor Phorm’s progress with other ISPs and with Webwise Discover before finalising our plans,” the company claims.

The harsh truth is Phorm has made startlingly little progress with either of the other ISPs. Virgin has been repeatedly forced to deny stories that its interest in Phorm was waning over the past couple of months, while its customer service team has (unofficially, according to Virgin) been sending out letters reassuring worried customers that it has no plans to roll out Phorm.

TalkTalk, meanwhile, has just bought Tiscali and its associated ISPs, and faces months of complicated integration work ahead. A distraction like Phorm is the last thing it needs. Neither Virgin or TalkTalk have even tested Webwise with their customers, let alone committed to a rollout.

BT has also undermined Phorm’s chief selling point: that it’s a money-spinner for ISPs. “Given our public commitment to developing next-generation broadband and television services in the UK we have decided to weigh up the balance of resources devoted to other opportunities,” BT claims, suggesting that it views Phorm as a cost rather than a pot of gold. So much for the service that was going to help boost the finances of ISPs.

In short, despite a public relations onslaught and concerted attempts to convince everyone from ISPs, to politicians, to advertisers about the merits of its technology, Phorm seems no closer to rollout in the UK than it was 18 months ago, when it first arrived on these shores.  In fact, its chances of success have never looked weaker.

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.