Digital-Lifestyles

Networking

  • BT to Challenge BSkyB with Broadband TV Service; Partners with Microsoft on Web Conferencing

    BT has announced it has plans to introduce a broadband television service in the UK, aimed to compete directly with BskyB’s Sky+ service. With the cheeky codename “Sky Plus Plus”, a nod to object-based programers everywhere, the project is intended to increase broadband adoption. This will be BT’s first foray into broadcasting, after months and months of false starts and speculation.

    BT has already approached the BBC and ITV for content for the project, but will need much more than just those two if it really wants to compete with Sky+.

    The telco had originally intended to launch the service in October, but delayed because they thought the initial package was too complicated as it comprised a digital set-top box and PC modem, plus subscribers would have to pay an additional fee for broadband internet access. They have not yet specified if subscribers will have to use a PC to view content, or if it will be viewable on televisions. Also undecided is whether the company will be streaming live programmes or just presenting video on demand. If they are to compete effectively with BSkyB, the BT offering must provide a much wider range of features, as Sky+ offers live television, pausing, archiving and renowned ease of use.

    BT has also announced a new partnership with Microsoft – this time to deliver a next-generation collaboration service. Going far beyond video conferencing, the service basically glues together BT’s audio conference products and Microsoft’s Office Live Meeting.

    BT have piloted the service internally in the past year, and claim to have saved 6.2 million miles of business travel, which also means 112 million less litres of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere from vehicles.

    BT

    Microsoft’s Office Live Meeting

  • Senate Moves to Outlaw P2P Applications

    Orrin Hatch, Senate Judiciary Committee chair has moved his focus to P2P applications, claiming that they encourage children and teenagers to infringe copyright.

    In a recent statement, he said: “It is illegal and immoral to induce or encourage children to commit crimes. Tragically, some corporations now seem to think that they can legally profit by inducing children to steal. Some think they can legally lure children into breaking the law with false promises of ‘free music.’”

    Fairly emotive language. Given that FTP software and email are much more popular ways to distribute potentially infringing content, will legislation curbing those applications be next? Who makes the decision on what is an appropriate program? Clearly the legislation can be misused to stifle the development of legitimate applications and businesses.

    The bill is backed by the RIAA and co-sponsored by Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

    Hatch has argued that the new bill will not make devices such as iPods and CD recorders illegal – indeed the freedom to make non-infringing copies goes all the way 1984 Sony Betamax case where the US Supreme Court ruled that VCRs and similar copying devices were legal. Hatch asserts that the bill only targets companies that “intentionally induce” consumers to infringe copyrights – but the law is vague enough to allow it to be targeted at many common devices, say P2P groups such as P2P United.

    The RIAA regard the legislation as tightly focussed, and RIAA chair and CEO Mitch Bainwol praised it in a statement this week: “This bill places the spotlight squarely on the bad actors who have hijacked a promising technology for illicit means and ignoble profits. Legitimate uses of peer-to-peer are upheld, while those who intentionally lure consumers into breaking the law are held to account. Under this legislation, the path to legitimacy remains clear: Respect the law and block the exchange of works the copyright owner has not authorized.”

    The sponsors of this bill are being blinkered into a view that is entirely concerned with the profits of one group – the music industry. The backers of the Induce act are rallying towards just one group at the moment, because that’s where the money is.

    What about all of the legitimate applications for P2P software? P2P technology has a promising, legal, future ahead of it if it does not get hobbled by these misinformed people.

    Take, for example, the BBC’s Interactive Media Player project. The only way to distribute this content economically is to rely on a P2P network – yet all content will covered by a digital rights management system.

    Of course, the bill will only outlaw the production of P2P applications within the US – it has no teeth elsewhere, and will not apply to programs developed abroad. Using a P2P application is not illegal – he will have to outlaw the possession of such a program to have any real effect. And they wouldn’t do that, would they? Don’t bet on it – remember it was Hatch who suggested the development of software to destroy the computers of people who downloaded illegal music files.

    More details on BBC iMP

  • Bulldog’s 4Mps Broadband Service

    Good news if you live in central London and are after a fast, reasonably cheap internet service – Bulldog, who were acquired by Cable and Wireless in June, have launched a 4Mps product for UK£30 (€44.88) per month. Bulldog 4 is being offered through the company’s own exchange equipment in 39 London exchanges, made possible by BT’s local loop unbundling programme.

    Richard Greco, CEO of Bulldog said in a statement, “Having our own infrastructure enables us to do this, unlike other Internet Service Providers who are restricted by BT’s wholesale offerings.”

    The connection is 4Mbps down and 400kbps up — still faster than most ADSL packages, but a deterrent to peer to peer uploaders.

    This is sure to set a fire under BT whose 512kpbs product is only UK£5 (€7.47) cheaper than Bulldog 4.

    Bulldog 4

  • Ofcom’s Broadband Ambitions, Appoints Telecoms Adjudicator

    The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, has outlined its next steps and long term aspirations for the development of broadband.

    Ofcom believes that their initial focus on rollout and coverage has paid off, with 512kbps services now common place and around 15% of the population taking advantage of broadband.

    The regulator now wants to define and focus on a phase two: “the new generation of broadband services likely to emerge as competition increases between providers.”Ofcom are still as keen as ever to promote local loop unbundling, and have been successful at goading BT into faster action to improve third-party access to exchanges – they they note that the pace in the UK does not match those in other countries: “If there is sufficient progress in reducing costs and improving operational processes, local loop unbundling in the UK has the potential to deliver the same kind of growth and innovation emerging in, for example, France and Japan, where tens of thousands of local loops are unbundled each month.” Although Ofcom’s first attempts at promoting LLU failed, they are pleased that BT is finally getting the message, and is reducing costs.

    By promoting greater competition in access networks, Ofcom believes that they can increase adoption of VoIP services in the next 3 to 5 years, with the majority of households benefiting from video-quality broadband by the end of the decade.

    To assist in the further progress of LLU and broadband rollout, Ofcom are keen to promote the establishment of a Telecommunications Adjudicator, an independent post designed to resolve working-level implementation disputes. Indeed, they have today named Peter Black as the man for the job – a former senior executive at BT, Thus and NTL, Black is an experienced telecommunications exec.

    The post is supported by BT, AOL, C&W, Video Networks, Wanadoo and others. Ofcom chief executive Stephen Carter said in a Statement: “We welcome the fact that 12 of the most significant companies have signed up to the independent Adjudicator scheme; and we hope this drives growth in the future.”

    Ofcom’s aspirations

  • UPDATED: BT Cuts Broadband Prices By Up to 25%, but caps downloads.

    With many companies getting in on the cheap broadband bandwagon, BT has been losing customers to upstarts like Wanadoo and Tiscali. In a effort to attract more customers, and keep the ones that it has, the British telco has announced cuts across their range of consumer broadband packages. And about time too, as they were the most expensive provider out there.

    The standard BT Broadband package is down from UK£27 to UK£25 (€40 down to €37.30) for a 512k connection, whilst the BT Yahoo! Broadband 1mb product gets cut down to £30 from £41 (€44.75 down to €61.16) – more than a 25% reduction.

    No doubt BT’s broadband competitors will react almost immediately with price cuts of their own, in order to keep winning business, but the question is: how low can it go?

    UPDATE: The bad news is, that bandwidth is now capped.

    BT have written to their customers to explain:

    “So that we can continue to offer our best possible price to customers, we’ll be introducing a usage allowance of 15GB of data a month. This is more than enough for the vast majority of our customers – for example, you can still download up to 3,000 music tracks every month. ”

    “You’ve absolutely no need to worry: the usage allowance will only be applied from early 2005 and, based on your current usage levels, you won’t be affected by this change to your Terms & Conditions.”

    The danger here is – what happens when you want to view video on demand on your PC? At 2 megabits per second, a 2hr film will use up 1.9 gigbytes of storage, so you’d get just under nine films a month and no browsing or music. We’ll be coming back to this and exploring it in greater depth in the next few days.

    BT’s broadband pricing

  • Qwest to Launch VoIP Service to Boost Internet Telephony

    Qwest Communications are to launch OneFlex, a new voice over IP (VoIP) service, in July. The product is aimed at both business and home consumers, and will require VoIP phones to use. OneFlex has conference calling, voice mail and other added features, all controlled from a web interface.

    Qwest are looking to roll the service out to 20 US metropolitan areas by the end of the year, but is launching in Boise, Denver and Phoenix. It uses the Qwest iQ Network and is intended to appeal to customers who want to get their broadband and telephone service from a single source, and is of course cheaper than standard long distance.

    VoIP is facing a slow start in the US – a recent survey from Ipsos-Insight revealed that 50% of public did not know what VoIP was, and some 60% of the people who did know were confused about how it actually worked.

    About Qwest

  • SCEA President: Cheaper Broadband is Critical for Future Consoles

    Sony Computer Entertainment America’s (SCEA) president, Kaz Hirai has said that broadband, and cheap broadband too, is going to be essential for future of games consoles – and you can bet he’s talking about the PS3.

    His presentation to the Congressional Internet Caucus focussed on Sony’s content strategy for their next iteration of the absurdly popular PlayStation console brand. Sony, and indeed most console and games manufacturers, are placing a lot of emphasis on online gaming as it carries a lot of potential for microtransactions – a constant stream of small charges for extra content, access to games and services. The notable exception here is Nintendo, who have done their best to hide the fact that there is a broadband adaptor for the GameCube and will even happily prosecute UK games stores if they dare try to sell one.

    To encourage the growth of online gaming, and therefore the microtransaction business model, Hirai argues that broadband subscription fees need to be cheaper.

    Hirai emphasised Sony’s commitment to online gaming by saying “For the next generation console, online is going to be like air conditioning in a car. You’re going to need it.”

    Kaz Hirai’s presentation

  • UK Broadband Take-up Almost Doubles in a Year

    New figures from the Office of National Statistics show that the UK broadband market has almost doubled in the past 12 months. In April, 27.2% of internet connections were now broadband, compared to just 14.5% a year earlier.

    Broadband connections continue to increase their market share rapidly, whilst dialup connections decline – there are now less dial up subscriptions than when the index started in January 2001.

    “The year-on-year decrease to April 2004 was 6.8 per cent for dial-up connections with a decrease of 1.9 per cent from March 2004 to April 2004,” the ONS said in a statement.

    The growth is being driven by new pricing plans, increased availability and more demanding applications such as music, video and online gaming.

    Dial-up internet access still accounts for 72.8% of internet connections, so there is still a lot of growth for broadband still to come.

    The Office for National Statistics

  • Happy Birthday, DNS

    The domain name service, DNS, is 21. If the service hadn’t been invented by Dr Paul Mockapetris, you’d be looking up internet protocol numbers manually, almost like using a phone directory.

    “The idea was to devise a way for Internet users to communicate freely with each other through an easy to operate system. Having to remember a long numerical code was not feasible as more users joined the Internet community,” said Dr Paul Mockapetris. “One of our goals was to develop a system that would allow global networking and information exchange. One of the ultimate successes of the domain name is that it is a universal every day language for Internet users across all continents.”

    Dr Mockapteris (now I’ve told you his name, you’re not going to forget it, are you?) worked on the system with the late Dr Postel as part of ARPANET, and is now chief scientist and chairman of Nominum, an internet address management provider.

    He predicts even greater things are yet to come for his offspring: “This year alone more than a billion users will interact with DNS to do everything from send emails, to browse web pages, or track inventory through RFID. In the next five years, I expect to see a dramatic increase in the number of ways in which the DNS is used, reaching far beyond what we have seen in the past twenty-one.”

    Nominum

  • WiFi in Court

    Bored when waiting to be called as a witness? Need to brush up a bit on public decency laws before you get called into the dock? Then if you’re at one of the seven UK courts that have just rolled out public WiFi access, then you’re in luck.

    As a pilot that might lead to a national deployment, seven courts have installed BT Openzone WiFi access. Ostensibly to assist court staff in research and communications, the access points are open to the public too, and standard OpenZone pricing will apply (about UK£6, €9 for an hour).

    “The hot spots should enable lawyers to access information held at their offices or receive emails and have information sent to them while they are attending court,” said Lord Justice Thomas, the senior presiding judge of England and Wales.

    “When new points of law arise during the course of the hearing, they should be able to carry out the necessary research without leaving the building.”

    Obviously the service will not be available in the courts themselves.

    The pilot runs until 2006, and echo a similar WiFi trial in UK public library also announced this week.

    The Court Service