Developed by academics at the University of Portsmouth, a new mobile phone game aims to help international students deal with the ‘culture shock’ of arriving in bonkers Blighty and cope with the rigours of university life in Britain.
Dubbed ‘C-Shock,’ the game was developed by the University of Portsmouth’s academic and games technology expert Nipan Maniar, an ex-overseas student who arrived in the UK from India five years ago.
The BBC Trust has given the go ahead for the BBC’s iPlayer service (iMP).
Expected to launch later this year, the iPlayer service lets punters watch TV shows online seven days after the initial broadcast, with viewers also able to download and store programmes on their PCs for up to 30 days.
Continue reading BBC iPlayer On-Demand Service Gets Green Light
Bebo have signed the team behind YouTube LonelyGirl.
YouTube watchers will be well aware of LonelyGirl 15 and her eventual unveiling as the product a small drama-writing team, rather than a troubled fifteen year old.
When that all came out (as it was eventually bound to), many thought LonleyGirl15, or Bree as she’s named would fade away, but the pretense of the story was kept up and ‘her’ video pieces have continued, in fact her channel remains the most subscribed channel of all time on YouTube.
Well, the 31 million member strong social networking site Bebo, have got the LonelyGirl team onboard now to create Kate Modern for them – an English LonelyGirl.
This time they’re being upfront from the start that Kate Modern isn’t real. There will be video pieces and posts made to her Bebo profile.
Mashable reported that it will all be going live in July with the episodes will be aired multiple times per week on Bebo.
The Times spoke to Miles Beckett, a San Diego medical studies drop-out who co-created Bree, to get the background, “Kate Modern is a 19-year-old university student in London. She wants to fit in with her friends and has problems with her parents — but yes, Kate is fictional and will be played by an actress.”
As The Times points out in their coverage
the innocence of LonelyGirl has been replaced by hard-nosed commerce. Joanna Shields, Bebo’s international president, said: “Kate Modern is a great proposition for advertisers and brands. Bebo users average 41 minutes per session and that can’t be ignored.”
The world’s top handset maker Nokia has announced that it expects to start shifting mobile devices using the WiMAX Internet technology by early 2008.
WiMAX (or Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access if you’re a spoddy type) lets laptops, phones and other suitably equipped mobile devices access the Internet at Billy Whizz speeds.
The technology uses a licensed spectrum to offer long-range (we’re talking kms), point-to-point connections to the web from the service provider to the end user, with Nokia saying that they plan to bring their first WiMAX enabled mobile device to market in early 2008.
Nokia’s numero uno handset rival, Motorola, has announced that it fancies a piece of the WiMAX action too, saying that they’ll also be bringing a WiMAX enabled mobile phone to market in 2008.
Intel, Nokia, Samsung and Motorola are all feeling the love for the open-standard WiMAX. The technology can be used as an alternative wireless broadband Internet connection for 3G users, which is handy because net access on 3G mobile networks can slow right down if networks fill up with yakking voice callers.
WiMAX should considerably reduce the cost of wireless broadband – up to 10 times cheaper than current third-generation cellular telephony networks – but the technology isn’t apparently too hot for handling wireless voice calls.
WiMAX looks good when it comes to pricing: the radio spectrum for WiMAX networks is rented out at cheaper rates by regulators than the 3G mobile phone spectrum, and WiMAX equipment vendors reckon that infrastructure and handheld devices work out cheaper than 3G systems too.
The City of London is due to become the biggest Wi-Fi hotspot in Europe next week, as we trailed last year.
A planned rollout will veritably bathe the City in luverly Wi-Fi rays, letting around 350,000 workers wander all over the Square Mile with uninterrupted wireless access.
The system comes courtesy of wireless network big boys, The Cloud, and dishes up continuous wireless access thanks to ‘mesh technology’ and a series of base stations strategically located throughout the area.
Although there’s something like 2,000 conventional Internet hotspots scattered around London, virtually all of these require users to keep on logging every time they walk into a new zone. The new City system means that users will only have to log in once and then be able to retain access at locations throughout the city.
“This is the biggest hotspot of its kind in Europe as far as we know and is unique as users keep the signal wherever they are,” enthused Niall Murphy, chief strategy officer at The Cloud.
“We have been meeting a lot of the big financial institutions in the area and have even found that the network is available in a lot of their boardrooms, so we think there will be a corporate use for it as well,” he added.
Perambulating freeloaders hoping to nab some free City-based Wi-Fi access action will be disappointed though. Unlike the mile long wireless freebie served in uptown Islington, users will have to shell out around £12 per month for unlimited access – quite a drop from the £5/hour they spoke about in February last year.
With its infrastructure able to support secure public and private applications concurrently, The Cloud are targeting consumers and municipal workers, although there’s also support for telemetry, traffic surveillance and security systems.
The Cloud say that they plan to extend coverage into Soho and eventually extend the infrastructure across all of London.
With all of these moves towards digital delivery in entertainment, we thought it would be worthwhile understanding one of the key items in this process – how to get the digital content to UK households.
Steve Kennedy is an acknowledged expert in the telecoms and data networks field, so it was an obvious choice for us to ask him to write an overview of how other IP operators can compete with BT – by creating their own data network. To do this, they need to put their own equipment into the telephone exchanges that connect to peoples houses. That process is Local Loop Unbundling (LLU).
Over three parts, we’ll give you a full background in LLU in the UK.
The two previous pieces gave an overview of LLU and which companies are players in the UK; and LLU Penetration in the UK and the (un)Economics of it.
OpenLLU
The operators should have joined forces and built a single LLU infrastructure between them and then competed on service. This would have meant a second national network to compete with BT’s 21CN allowing operators to compete with BT on their own terms.
Also a single network would have meant it could go to many more of the 5,600 DLEs than the 1,200 everyone’s competing for at the moment.
Unfortunately competition is so fierce between the telecoms operators it will never happen – much to their joint detriment.
Broadband Competition
BT is still the biggest player by far and they’ll try and increase market share when they launch their 21CN. Many operators are underestimating the effect of BT’s 21CN and how quickly BT can launch it.
When they do launch, they are trying to get back to a situation whereby everyone else once again becomes a BT reseller.
Virgin Media have around 4m customers, but they have little money for expansion and are likely to use LLU in future to provide broadband services. They’re stance is even worse now Sky have pulled their basic channels, which is likely to cause customers to migrate to Sky and if enough go, then Virgin Media may be in a sticky situation (the city won’t look kindly on a reduced customer base).
Wireless is the next big hope
Unfortunately there’s very little spectrum available for wireless broadband in the UK, though 2.5GHz is going to be made available for auction later this year, but it wont be cheap. It was reserved for 3G use, so there may be bids from 3G operators but it’s also bang in the middle of the frequencies WiMAX can use (BT have already said they’re interested in bidding for it).
Other companies who do have spectrum are: –
* PCCW (UK Broadband) who have a national 3.4GHz license.
* Pipex Wireless who have a national 3.6/4.2 GHz license.
It’s not clear whether the recent Pipex sale announcement covers the wireless side or not.
Future
Content will be key, access will just be a delivery channel for content and broadband will just be a commodity item (making it even more uneconomic to roll-out).
There’s going to be even more consolidation in the industry and BT will win either way (more LLU customers mean BT get more customers, if it fails, BT Wholesale get more customers).
BT will also dominate when they roll-out their 21CN, they want to be the Sky of fixed networks i.e. use them to deliver the content and they take a big chunk for the customer charge for doing so).
The future’s bright – but only for BT.
With all of these moves towards digital delivery in entertainment, we thought it would be worthwhile understanding one of the key items in this process – how to get the digital content to UK households.
Steve Kennedy is an acknowledged expert in the telecoms and data networks field, so it was an obvious choice for us to ask him to write an overview of how other IP operators can compete with BT – by creating their own data network. To do this, they need to put their own equipment into the telephone exchanges that connect to peoples houses. That process is Local Loop Unbundling (LLU).
Over three days we’ll give you a full background in LLU in the UK.
Yesterdays piece gave an overview of LLU and which companies are players in the UK.
LLU Penetration
All the large operators are going into around 1,000 DLEs (those being the most densely populated), since there are only around 1,200 of them, all the operators are targeting the same DLEs and there’s a lot of overlap.
Since the operators all want to get into the same exchanges, there’s overcrowding and BT have to install new hostel space (the space where operators can put their own equipment into) which causes delays. It can take more than 6 months from when an operator puts an order in to being granted access to an exchange.
LLU (un)Economics
When LLU was announced it was prohibitively expensive, mainly due to Ofcom (or Oftel as it was then) allowing BT to set the pricing models.
Over time the economics have become fairer to operators, with BT being forced to set-up BT Openreach which looks after the physical infrastructure. If they hadn’t formed Openreach, it’s likely Ofcom would have pushed for a split of BT.
Ofcom then made BT not reduce wholesale pricing for their broadband services to give LLU operators a chance to gain a foothold. BT would have to maintain their pricing until April 2007 or 1.5m unbundled lines, whichever came first.
In Dec 2006 there were 1,000,000 unbundled lines and last week Ofcom announced that 1,700,000 unbundled lines had been reached (there was no distinction between Option 2 and 4). BT Wholesale has over 9m broadband customers.
Also Carphone Warehouse (CPW) released their interim results showing they had 2.31m broadband customers, 700,000 utilising LLU.
So out of the 1.7m unbundled lines, CPW have .7m which means there’s 1m split between the rest (mainly the big players, Wanadoo, C&W, Easynet Pipex and Tiscali).
As a rough model that’s 1.7m lines, spread over 1,000 DLEs which makes 1,700 lines unbundled per DLE. There’s 6 big players which means around 280 customers per operator per exchange.
Unfortunately the economics of LLU only work if there’s a lot of customers per exchange i.e. massive scale.
Now that the milestone of 1.5m unbundled lines has been reached, BT Wholesale will be allowed to reduce their pricing (which they’ve said they want to do) which will make the economics even worse.
To get the scale, further consolidation will occur which means fewer LLU operators in the future (Pipex has already put itself up for sale with CPW rumoured to be the front-runner for buying them). They need to do this in order to get the customer penetration per exchange.
The next and final section will cover the possibility of competition to BT and what could happen in the future
Images are courtesy of wb-internet and the BBC, respectively.
With all of these moves towards digital delivery in entertainment, we thought it would be worthwhile understanding one of the key items in this process – how to get the digital content to UK households.
Steve Kennedy is an acknowledged expert in the telecoms and data networks field, so it was an obvious choice for us to ask him to write an overview of how other IP operators can compete with BT – by creating their own data network. To do this, they need to put their own equipment into the telephone exchanges that connect to peoples houses. That process is Local Loop Unbundling (LLU).
Over the next three days we’ll give you a full background in LLU in the UK.
What is Local Loop Unbundling (LLU)?
LLU is the ability to put equipment into BT exchanges (know as DLEs – Digital Local Exchange) and take over the copper line into the premises.
There are two forms known as Option 2 (metallic path facility as BT call it) and Option 4 (shared metallic path facility).
Option 4 characteristics: –
Option 2 characteristics: –
Once the operator has put the equipment into the DLE, then they have to connect it back to their own network. BT can provide this using BES (Backhaul Extension Services) or the operator can use their own connectivity solution. Most operators don’t have the coverage to provide their own connectivity solutions.
DLEs
BT have around 5,600 DLEs across the UK (i.e. telephone exchanges) and these have customers connected to them. Around 1,200 are in densely populated areas, another 800 or so with medium populations and the rest in rural areas.
Any operator wanting to offer broadband (and possibly voice) has to put their equipment in these DLEs. However there is a cost to unbundling an exchange (around 100,000 including backhaul) which means operators are only targeting the most densely populated ones.
LLU Operators
Operators who have unbundled exchanges are: –
Any operator with a “-” after has been acquired by another player.
* AOL (UK) Ltd – CPW
* Be Unlimited – O2
* Bulldog Communications Ltd – Users to Pipex, LLU C&W
* Cable and Wireless Ltd
* Computacenter PLC
* Easynet – Sky
* Eaton Power Solutions
* eXstream Networks Ltd
* Groestar Ltd
* Kingston Communications (Hull) Plc
* Lancaster University
* Leanwood Communications Limited
* Lumison
* Nestor Electronics Ltd
* Opal Telecom (CPW)
* Pipemedia Ltd
* Pipex Internet Ltd – who knows, up for sale
* Tiscali
* T-Mobile
* UKBB
* Unisys Ltd
* Updata Infrastructure UK Ltd
* Videonetworks Ltd – Tiscali
* Wanadoo
* WB-Internet Ltd
* Zen Internet Limited
Some of the smaller players are conducting trials and some are just offering private services (like Updata who offer connectivity solutions to councils etc).
Tomorrow, the penetration of LLU in the UK and the economics of it.
The news for Sony and their PlayStation 3 just keeps getting worse.
Early pre-UK-release signs weren’t promising, nor were they looking any better when the UK PS3 was selling for £100 under their release price, a couple of days beforehand.
On the positive side, Sony did claim to sell 165,000 consoles in the UK in the first week – making it the UK’s fastest selling home console to date.
Now the official Chart Track figures, that follow sales in the UK are reporting to gamesindustry.biz that sales of the PS3 in the UK have dropped by 82% during its second week of release.
Software sales are also suffering with “sales of the top two PlayStation 3 titles, Resistance: Fall of Man and MotorStorm, had dropped by over 60 per cent.”
It’s not looking much better for the PS3 in Japan, where Bloomberg is claiming that Sony has sold 812,000 PS3s since November 11, against a mighty 1.95 million Wii consoles by Nintendo.
Our favourite UK Set Top Box manufacturer is celebrating their 25th birthday this year.
25 years! Staggering how old the industry is now isn’t it?
Waaaaaay back in 1982 they started off selling modems and software. Their first product was a PSTN modem called the Nightingale and we can even remember Pace modems from back when 1200/75 baud modems appeared as an exotic advance from the 300 baud ones that were the standard.
For all of you young ones who weren’t around in those days, that’s 1.2/0.075 Kbps vs 0.3 Kbps. Scarily slow.
Following their modem and software successes, Pace launched their first satellite set-top box (SR640) in 1987 and like all design, it was a product of its time, with a fab HiTech feel about it.
From there, Pace really haven’t looked back. They’ve consistently carried out pioneering development, building up a large selection of industry firsts, including the first digital satellite receiver in the UK, the first PVR (personal video recorder) in Europe, the first low-cost digital terrestrial adapter (thereby creating the freeview market in the UK) and, more recently, the very first H.264 DVB-S2 high definition set-top box in the world.
Their latest and greatest product is a HD DVR, the HR20, which records using MPEG-4.
If you, like us, dear tech trivia fan don’t know the history behind the name of Pace, you’ll be excited to hear that the name Pace came from an innovative shipping company in Australia called the Pacific Australia Container Express.
The Next 25 years
Looking forward to the next 25 years, Neil Gaydon, CEO, give his views of where Pace will be innovating, “Soon we will see multiroom and home networking solutions coming through, that will allow you to watch anything you want from any screen in the house, including mobile TV. When you add the fact you will import your photos and internet entertainment to any screen, your music to any room in the home along with wireless technologies emerging, so removing the need for wires, we are at the early stages of a new TV revolution.”
Best of luck to Pace in the coming years, may they continue their success.