UK

NTL To Give 10Mb Broadband, Eventually
After a period of speculation, a press release on UK cable company NTL’s Web site makes it official that they intend to move their customers to broadband connection “up to 10Mb as standard.”
Don’t get too excited yet. Clearly that could mean anything, even 2,400 baud fits into that category.
NTL tell us that they will be first upgrading their current 3Mb customers to the 10Mb service, while expanding these customer download restirctions form 30Gb/month to 75Gb.
We at Digital-Lifestyles hate a limit on traffic – we see it as another way to extract cash from punters when they start to have their TV/video content delivered via their broadband – an extra reason for a cable TV company to restrict you.
Well, when this all going to happen? It’s pretty unclear, but according to NTL, ‘by the end of 2006, the roll out of this new product portfolio will be complete,’ which gives them a lot of leeway doesn’t it?
We think it may be some time before this actually gets to the customers, as NTL are also talking of introducing an interim service, ‘The Turbo Button,’ which will burst a connection to higher speeds, when customers are downloading bandwidth heavy content like video.
NTL and their broadband service have for a very long time been damned by many of their subscribers, past and present. They were recently voted the very worst broadband provider in the UK in a poll of member by the consumers organisation, Which?
Such dreadful service lead one particular subscriber, Bryan Stevens, to take action online four years ago, forming ntl:hell, a news and discussion board that was solely focused on how bad NTL’s service was. Its membership expanded at a frightening rate … up to the point were NTL offered Mr Stevens a job running the board for ‘the good of NTL subscribers’. A look at the discussion board today give a clear indication of how effective embarassing your harshest critics works.
Many of you will already know that the person who was managing director and chief operation officer at NTL during the time ntl:hell was born – Stephen Carter. He now runs the UK super regulator OfCom.
NTL’s PR
ntl:hell
9 August, 2005
BBC’s Live 8 and Glastonbury Websites Attract Record Traffic
The BBC’s online coverage of Live 8 in July notched up a record volume of Web traffic on their radio and music Websites.
Their online coverage of the global Live 8 event generated a massive 14.6m page impressions during its three-day run, with the Live 8 Wap site for mobile phones also proving a big hit, generating 112,000 page impressions over the same three days.
Music fans unable to join the glorious mud-fest at Glastonbury Festival headed to the BBC’s interactive Website for coverage of the famous festival, with 13.4m page impressions being generated during the fortnight surrounding the festival.
The latest figures for the BBC’s online traffic also show a healthy boost in figures for their sports coverage on the Radio Five Live Website, with 910,841 unique users being recorded during June, compared with 840,019 the same period in 2004.
Curiously, although Five Live Sports Extra managed to increase its page impressions from 1,442,915 in June last year to 1,794,421 for the same period this year, unique users fell from 203,953 to 161,036.
It was mainly good news elsewhere, with Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 1Xtra, Asian Network and BBC 7 all increasing their unique users compared to the same period last year, with only 6 Music – one of our favourites – letting the side down with a disappointing slump from 418,729 to 356,564.
Revolution Magazine
2 August, 2005
Hello! WAP Service Launches
Hellomagazine.com, the online version of the ghastly celebrity magazine Hello!, is expanding its existing SMS and JAVA mobile offer with a new WAP portal.
The HELLO! WAP celebrity news service will allow ~~deeply unfulfilled souls~~ fans of the fascinating world of celebrity to trawl through eight of the very latest celebrity tittle-tattle and photos – updated daily – on their mobile phone, Monday to Friday.
Fans of this depressing vacuous nonsense are invited to check out the HELLO! WAP celebrity news site by texting GO HELLOMAG to 85080.
A bookmark directly linking to the portal will be sent by return, with users able to browse the latest headlines for free.
Punters desperate to discover more about the colour of Jennifer Aniston’s new handbag and the name of Brad Pitt’s pet gerbil will then have to subscribe to read the full fascinating story, for £3 (~US$5.31 ~€4.35) per month.
Tree Elven (what the…?!), hellomagazine.com’s Website editor, squeaked: “We’re pumping out great pix and authoritative news every day on hellomagazine.com – people don’t want to miss the latest titbits just because they’re on the go, so a WAP site is the perfect solution.
Celeb-thirsty fans can check the headlines then go in deeper if they want the full story with photos. We’re really happy to be adding HELLO! WAP to our mobile offer and we’ll soon be beefing it up even more with wallpapers, ringtones and other entertaining stuff.”
We’d rather have our privates gnawed by a gang of rampaging ferrets than have this inane drivel downloading on our phone, but no doubt there’ll be a huge market for it….
Hello! WAP
2 August, 2005
Music File Sharers Spend The Most
Illegal music downloaders shell out more for legitimate music downloads than goody two-shoes music fans.
The results of the ‘2005 Speakerbox’ study by market researchers The Leading Question revealed that music fans who download music illegally via file-sharing networks also fork out four-and-a-half times more on legitimate music downloads than average fans.
The survey asked 600 British PC and mobile-owning British music fans about their downloading activities and discovered that music pirates spend substantially more on legally downloadable music through sites like Apple’s iTunes Music Store or Napster
According to the report, pirates who regularly download or share unlicensed music spend an average of £5.52 (~US$9.63, ~€7.99) per month on legal digital music, while average music fans only spend £1.27 (~US$2.21, ~€1.84) on digital tracks.
How much both groups spend on CDs wasn’t specified.
“Music fans who break piracy laws are highly valuable customers,” said Paul Brindley, director of The Leading Question.
“Legal actions are making something of an impact but unlicensed file sharing will never be eradicated. The smart response is to capitalise on the power of the p2p networks themselves to entice consumers into more attractive legal alternatives,” he added.
The research also revealed that illegal downloaders were mustard keen to try emerging music services, with 60% wanting to get their hands on a MP3-enabled phone, compared to just 29% of other music fans.
“There’s a myth that all illegal downloaders are mercenaries hell-bent on breaking the law in pursuit of free music,” Brindley continued. “In reality, they are often hardcore fans who are extremely enthusiastic about adopting paid-for services as long as they are suitably compelling.”
The survey highlighted that phones still have some way to go before they can compete with dedicated MP3 players as de-facto music playing devices.
Only 8% of punters surveyed were planning to buy a music playing mobile phone in the next 12 months, compared to 33% ready to rip out the readies for an iPod or dedicated MP3 player during the same period.
Respondents cited built-in cameras, organiser functions and video cameras above music players in their preferences for mobile phone features.
Punters expressed concern about the low battery life of music playing phones, with some fearful of losing their music collection if they lost their phone.
With many consumers getting their phones for nowt through contract deals – and often replacing them regularly – the survey concluded that most punters have a low “emotional attachment” to their phones.
Despite this, 38% of those surveyed liked the idea of downloading full-length tracks direct to their mobiles, with the figure rising to over 50% for punters already downloading tracks to their computers.
Mobile phone manufacturers trying to tempt new users with bigger onboard memory will note that only 4% of the survey respondents wanted more than 1,000 songs worth of music to take with them on holiday.
Online file sharers ‘buy more music’ [Guardian]
The Leading Edge
27 July, 2005
Ravensbourne College Publish Course Under Creative Commons
London’s Ravensbourne College is launching a new program called the School of Computing for the Creative Industries.
It’s quite hard to work out what it actually involves as their overview reads like a missive from a Hoxton style bar, babbling on about the “learner-practitioner” using the Internet “as an inspirational resource, drawing on that vast, interconnected meme-pool, but returning far more to it than s/he ever withdraws.”
We had to reach for the dictionary to make sense of this part:
“As the creative industries bifurcate into the twin realities of intellectual property businesses, and crafts-for-hire, the new creative has the skill, and panache, to exploit the opportunities of the new creative landscape.”
Apparently these new creatives are connected citizens, “whose passions and campaigns, ideas and innovations appear first on their blog.”
We would have thought that most of the passion manifests itself in the student bar, but the School insists that the new creative “understands that s/he is defined by the impact and credibility of their online presence.”
Now, some of you may be rightly thinking that this sounds more like The School of Buzzword Bullsh*t, but there is some interesting stuff lurking within the industry-speak.
It seems that School will release its learning materials under a Creative Commons license in an attempt to maximise usage and dissemination.
All the technical facilities in the School will be built on open source platforms, with support offered to students wishing to release projects under free and open source licenses.
Although it’s easy to scoff at their daft Nathan Barley airs, this looks to be a brave and innovative move by Ravensbourne College, which may prove a portent for colleges coming to terms with the impact of new technology on teaching.
Overview of the School of Computing for the Creative Industries
Creative Commons
25 July, 2005
BBC TV Listings Opened Up By Backstage Project
Punters are being invited to get all interactive with the BBC’s TV and radio schedules as part of their Backstage experiment. The call to action was trumpted at the London hosted Open Tech grass roots conference that ran at the weekend.
As we reported in May, BBC’s Backstage project gives coders, computer program writers and graphics types the opportunity to bend and twist BBC digital content into new applications or Web-based prototypes that can be shared with others.
Developers and designers are now being asked to dream up innovative ways of using TV and radio schedules via a BBC competition.
“We want people to innovate and come up with prototypes to demonstrate new ways of exploring the BBC’s TV schedule,” said backstage.bbc.co.uk project leader Ben Metcalfe.
Metcalfe suggested that those taking part might be interested in combining schedules with Web search services, using online social bookmarking managers which let people collect, organise, and share their favourite Web links easily.
He also proposed that developers might like to fiddle about with the TV schedule data mixing it with other social elements, such as recommendation systems for friends and alert systems, or combining schedules with other Web data to serve up genre-based programme searches or listings.
The BBC has already received more than 50 prototype ideas for using BBC feeds and content for non-commercial purposes since the project’s launch in May.
Backstage aims to tap into the resources of the distribution channels and knowledge networks already used by big companies such as Google and Yahoo, who were quick to realise the value of releasing content tool kits for developers to create applications with.
“Companies are waking up and realising that they need to have a conversation with their audience,” explained Mr Metcalf.
“The BBC has a good opportunity to take the lead in that, and others are realising it has its benefits too.”
The competition runs until 5 September, with the winner being invited to take the proposal forward with the BBC.
As we’d reported before, we think that Backstage is a great idea … we just wish they hadn’t used the word Remix – it’s really just a big too much, jumping on the blogging bandwagon. The idea is strong enough with having to resort do that.
BBC Backstage
25 July, 2005
UK Wi-Fi Freeloader Fined £500
A British court has fined a man £500 ($870, €720) for using a residential wireless broadband connection without permission.
In what is believed to be the first conviction of its kind in the UK, a jury at Isleworth, Middlesex court found Gregory Straszkiewicz, 24, guilty of dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service and possessing equipment for fraudulent use of a communications service.
The case was brought under the Communications Act 2003 with the Crown Prosecution Service saying he was guilty of ‘piggybacking’ a household wireless network.
Police officers nabbed Straszkiewicz after he was spotted by locals wandering around a residential area looking for “free” net connections.
He was reported to have attempted this several times before the Old Bill invited him for a date in the cells.
In addition to the fine, Straszkiewicz was also sentenced to a 12 months conditional discharge and had his laptop confiscated.
We have to say this seems a little harsh as there appears to be no evidence that there was any hostile motive behind his actions.
Earlier this month, we reported on a Florida man being arrested for a similar offence.
It remains unclear whether mobile Wi-Fi users accidentally connecting to another party’s unsecured, unencrypted connection would risk prosecution.
The fact that many cafes and bars now offer free Wi-Fi Web access surely make it difficult to enforce this law, although there’s clearly a different case to answer when individuals are persistently wandering around residential streets with their laptops flipped open.
As ever, the solution is simple, and that’s for people running Wi-Fi connections to use the encryption tools provided.
And if you don’t know how to do that, here’s a tutorial: Wireless Home Networking, Part III – Wi-Fi Security
25 July, 2005
UK Digital TV Trial Results In – It Went Well
The long-awaited results from the Welsh Digital TV trial were published today.
The trial ran in the carefully chosen sites of Ferryside and Llansteffan, two Welsh villages either side of the River Towy (Google map, Geograph photo). The main reasons, it’s cut off as it’s surrounded by mountains and the sea.
The project started back in May 2004 with a roadshow that alerted the local residents to the intentions of the trial and to show them the range of equipment that they could choose.
Following the positive acceptance of the trial, the equipment was selected and installed and setup by residents. They were offered one of five Set Top Boxes and 2 PVR’s as replacements for their video recorders. The big difference between this trial and the full UK rollout, was that the equipment was supplied to them free of charge – something the UK government has refused to consider for the country at large.
The TV transmitter sat on the Ferryside of the River Towy serving the 475 homes and 1,200 residents that lived in both locations. The population was more elderly, retired and ill that the average UK population. Nearly 30% of the population of Ferryside were over 60.
The digital signal was switched on in November 2004, running simultaneously with current analogue for three month.
The big day of tension was on 30 March 2005 when the analogue signal was switched off. Digital-Lifestyles spoke to key members of the team during this time and learnt that it had gone remarkably smoothly, much to everyone’s delight.
The summary of the results from the 64 page document are as follows.
Transmission and Coverage – No one lost their TV service during the trial. Only three homes, which were previously in poor reception areas, could not receive the digital service and these were given a digital satellite service. Broadband was introduced during the trial and is seen as an alternative form of delivery to satellite.
Consumer Experience – Not everyone was able to install the equipment themselves but the majority of those who had trouble were able to fix problems with guidance over the phone.
Remote Control – The elderly hit problems handling additional remotes, especially those with many buttons – their preference being remotes with three functions – on/off, volume and channel change.
Aerials and Connectivity – This is where the majority of problems occurred. Digital TV needs a quality signal to work and nearly a quarter (22%) of the household had problems. Set-Top aerials (Do they still exist?) had problems, which wasn’t really a surprise.
Content – Having an EPG went down well with the residents, particular when they used it to record programs on their PVR. The trialists also enthused about the ability to receive extra TV channels – after all the major benefit to consumer if the expanded choice they will be given.
The total cost of the trial was a little short of 1 million pounds. The UK Government put up £565,000 and the broadcasters the rest, £300,000.
Many organisation worked hard to bring the trial to a successful outcome including Intellect, the trade association for the UK IT, Telecommunications and Electronics industries in the UK.
There’s going to be a lot of people letting out a sign of relief that this trial went well, and not just in the UK. Those involved feel there have been some real lessons learnt here. The harsh reality is that there a world of difference between a controlled trial in two villages in the Wales and a full scale rollout over the UK.
Digital Switchover Technical Trial at Ferryside and Llansteffan Report PDF (1.68mb)
Intellect
21 July, 2005
Champions League Broadcasters To Simulcast Matches On T’Web
Armchair football fans around Europe will soon be able to enjoy live Champion’s League matches over the Internet and mobile phones.
The European Commission has declared its intent to promote the beautiful game over a range of platforms in an attempt to mollify European commission competition authorities who want to see rights owners promoting mobile phone and Internet usage.
A spokesman at football bosses UEFA confirmed that all broadcasters showing games live would be “obliged” to screen them online simultaneously.
By linking live television rights to the Internet package, UEFA hopes to calms the fears of broadcasters who suspect that a separate online deal would cut deeply into their audience figures.
Champions League coverage in the UK is provided by BSkyB and ITV (both of whom look likely to retain their current rights), and the Internet simulcasts could provide a honey pot for new revenue streams with advertising and betting partners.
This may cause some friction with the big clubs like Man Utd and Arsenal who may be planning their own lucrative online propositions.
With media regulator Ofcom reporting that more than 8.1 million UK households now boast broadband connectivity, Internet television on demand is set to become, well, a household name.
BSkyB has already announced its commitment to IPTV – programming delivered over broadband PCs or TV sets – and from later this year, premium package subscribers will be able to access content via a Sky Sports and Sky Movies broadband service.
The service will offer 200 on-demand movies with sports junkies being able to access news, interviews and highlights (like wonderful Cardiff City goals) through the online sports channel
From 2006 the service could be offering Champions League games live, ensuring that only Sky Sports subscribers are able to log on, with non-subscribers having to fork out a pay-per-view premium.
Sky Sports
20 July, 2005
BT Doubles Broadband Entry Speeds
BT has announced that it will be doubling the speed of its entry-level broadband service.
The move was announced just hours after Wanadoo UK revealed its intention to tempt new punters with a two meg connection for just £17.99 (~€26 ~US$32) a month.
From tomorrow, all new and existing BT subscribers should be able to get 2 meg as standard, with no upgrade charges.
BT group managing director Gavin Patterson said: “Today’s announcement creates a standard of a minimum broadband speed of 2Mb for all our retail broadband services – these higher speeds open up a wealth of new possibilities for the use of broadband.”
BT’s generosity knows some bounds though, with its no frills package retaining its monthly usage limit at 1 gig.
As competition in the broadband sector heats up, customers should be able to take advantage of lower prices and faster connectivity.
This is the second free upgrade that BT has introduced, with the telecoms giant upping the speed for all of its retail broadband customers back in February.
Broadband users can calculate their current connection speeds with the handy app at ADSLguide.org.uk and check to see if their broadband speed matches their provider’s claims.
A recent informal survey on urban75.com asked over 60 subscribers to compare their broadband connection speeds using the ADSLguide Website.
I quickly learnt that not only was I paying more than most, but my BT connection was as swift as a sleepy sloth on a hot day compared to the rocket-like speeds quoted by others.
Seeing as BT has declared that the “battleground in broadband will be in differentiating services rather than price and speed as it is today”, I’ll be monitoring this upgrade very, very carefully indeed.
BT Broadband
20 July, 2005