New figures from research firm Epitiro puts BT as the leading consumer broadband provider for the 4th quarter of 2006 (October-January).
Their research found BT to be providing the best overall service, closely followed by Pipex, Orange and Demon, with Virgin in 5th place. Despite their low placing, Virgin recorded the lowest number of connection failures, suggesting that their customers achieved the highest degree of uptime.
BT notched up the fastest HTTP download speed and fastest FTP downloads from users’ personal webspace, with Pipex recording the fastest FTP upload speed.
Epitiro’s testing procedure monitors “customer experience” for internet access services, analysing over 622,000 real-time data samples from eleven locations around the UK – meaning that each broadband service was tested around 60,000 times.
Like ferrets in a drainpipe factory, Epitiro’s boffins keenly rummaged through these figures to get a breakdown of the speed and reliability of Internet connections, connection times, download and upload speeds, and the performance of both ping and DNS lookups.
The report also shows browsing speeds increasing steadily throughout last year, with the fourth quarter recording an average consumer ADSL connection speed at 5728.3 kilobytes per second.
“ISPs are increasing their speeds, which is good news for bandwidth-hungry users,” commented Epitiro’s Gavin Johns.
“Speeds have increased from 3817.82 kilobytes per second in the third quarter due to new ADSL Max entrants into the ten largest broadband providers. However it’s unlikely that many ADSL Max services will perform at their full capacity of 8Mbps. The speed of broadband service reduces the further the customer’s connection is from their local telephone exchange,” he added.
Overall rankings Q4 2006 (Q3 2006 in brackets)
1 BT (BT)
2 Pipex (Pipex)
3 Demon (Orange)
4 PlusNet (Demon)
5 Virgin (Virgin)
Filmmakers who upload their own movies on to the video-sharing website YouTube will soon be able to enjoy some financial rewards for their efforts.
Still in beta but already a big hit in the Digital Lifestyles office is the Walkit.com website, a mapping site designed for perambulating pedestrians keen to do their bit to fight global warming.
Folks still battling a post-Christmas beast of a belly might find the column displaying how many calories you might expect to burn depending on fast you’re shuffling along useful.
Another thing missing is the ability to plot routes involving multiple points: it would be great to plan an afternoon’s walking and have an instant readout of the miles walked and calories burned – and if there was a version that could be carried around on our Palm Treo, all the better!
Notebooks outsold desktop PCs in Western Europe for the first time, as Acer leapt ahead of Dell to grab second place in PC sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (an area known in da biz as ‘EMEA’).
Laptop sales totalled 8.4 million during the quarter, against 8 million desktops, but corporate refresh cycles are expected to elbow desktop sales skyward in the second half of 2007 with Windows Vista expected to drive consumer – but not business – sales, as IDC’s Andy Brown explains:
Pentax have announced two new slim-line cameras, the T30 and M30, both sporting 7 megapixel sensors and face detection.
With Digital SR you may manage to grab a low light photo without blur, but odds on it’ll look like it’s been taken in a noise snowstorm (which rather sounds like a death metal concert).
Optio M30
Exposure compensation +/- 2EV in 1/3EV steps
Slimmer than a hungry supermodel deprived of her daily slice of crispbread, Samsung’s new Ultra Edition 10.9 slider has proudly grabbed the honours to claim the accolade as the “world’s slimmest” slider phone.
Despite its wisp-like dimensions, Samsung have still managed to squeeze in a fair amount of functionality, with a 3.2-megapixel camera on the back of the phone for grabbing stills.
After all, judging by the way our Treo 650 has been battered about during visits to football games and ale-slopping nights at the pub, we reckon the Ultra Edition 10.9 would soon become the Broken Edition 10.9 within hours.
Back in our day we lived in an old water tank on a rubbish tip and considered ourselves lucky if we ate two bits of cold gravel for lunch and had a broken pen for our school work.
The Scottish initiative – costing £25 million – will see all pupils over the age of 10 in selected schools being handed shiny new PDAs, with 6,000 teachers also enjoying the freebie onslaught.
The scheme will also provide free wireless Internet in a move to keep children interested in schoolwork by giving them online access to course material and homework.
The Jack & Jill Children’s Foundation is a charity caring for families with terminally ill babies suffering irreparable brain damage (SDD), and they’ve announced a three week long fundraising campaign in Ireland.
“For the past seven years we’ve collected empty toner and inkjet cartridges. We saw groups in Britain doing something similar with mobile phones. Last year we did a sort of dry run collecting mobiles and managed to raise around €100,000,” said campaign organiser Stephen Bebbington.
With Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Slip Sliding Away’ surely on perpetual loop in the factory, LG have released yet another natty phone that’s big on that super-slidey thang, the 3G LG-SH110.
Rustling though the minimal specs offered thus far, we can tell you that Messrs LG have wedged in a 2.0-megapixel camera coupled with a secondary VGA camera for video calling, with the screen able to show your own face and the caller recoiling in horror at your gurning mug.
HSDPA connectivity offers super nippy 1.8Mbps connectivity with visio-conference functionality hoping to tempt business bods.
Although the home entertainment industry is more loved up than the Happy Mondays on a bagful of E about Video-on-Demand, a new report suggests there might be a bumpy ride ahead.
The company estimates that the UK market is set to be worth £2.6 million in 2007 (£400,000 up from last year), soaring up to £8.4 million in 2008, and hitting a badger’s nadger under £30 million by 2009.