Enfora 802.11 Wi-Fi Sled For Palm Treo 650s Review (75%)

Enfora 802.11 Wi-Fi Sled For Palm Treo 650s ReviewAlthough we’re not alone in thinking that the Palm Treo is the best smartphone around, the device suffers from one tragic omission; Wi-Fi.

For reasons best known to Palm, the promised drivers for their 802.11 Wi-Fi SD card never materialised, leaving Treo 650 users looking like chumps when the Wi-Fi gang were in town.

Enfora to the rescue
Seeing a sizeable hole in the market, Texas tech company Enfora released a WiFi Adapter for the Treo, unusually shaped in a ‘sled’ design, bolting on to the back of the Treo rather than using the SD card slot.

Enfora 802.11 Wi-Fi Sled For Palm Treo 650s ReviewThis design has obvious advantages and disadvantages; the advantage is that the sled offers its own power supply, giving users a considerably enhanced battery life compared to handheld-powered Wi-Fi cards; the disadvantage is that the thing adds bulk to the phone.

Getting started
Tearing open the box with gay abandon, we found the adapter (smaller than we imagined), an AC adapter that conveniently offers four different international plugs, an installation CD and the flimsiest instructions we’ve seen for some time – just a tiny scrap of paper.

There’s also a custom battery cover for the Treo which has two slotted holes for attaching the phone to the sled. Aesthetes may be offended to note that it’s a different shade of silver to the Treo.

Enfora 802.11 Wi-Fi Sled For Palm Treo 650s ReviewThe unit must be charged for two hours before use, with a small amber LED blinking while charging. This turns to solid green when the Treo is connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Installing the drivers
Installing the drivers via Windows XP was easy enough, with an automated setup program on the CD transferring the required WiFiMgr.prc driver file to the Palm.

Mac users will have to manually install the driver which is simple enough.

Getting connected
It has to be said that getting the WiFi Sled on to your Treo is a bit of a palaver, needing a dexterity akin to the Vulcan death grip.

Once you’ve changed the battery cover you have to pull the button on the sled, give the Treo an almighty shove downwards and then click the phone back into place.

Enfora 802.11 Wi-Fi Sled For Palm Treo 650s ReviewThe first few times we tried this, it took so much effort to pull the phone in and out of the sled we began to fear we’d end up breaking the thing.

In the end, we just took the cover off and fitted the Treo bareback, if you, err, get our drift.

Once wedged into the sled, we turned on the unit, clicked on the Wi-Fi icon on the Treo and ran the Enfora application to look for available wireless base stations (WBS).

As soon as you locate your network, you have to select ‘add’ to create a network profile and then input IP information and WEP passwords (if needed) and then hit ‘connect’ and you’re online.

Although this is fine if you know what network you’re looking for, the software for ‘sniffing’ connections is rather woefully Spartan, with no indications whether located networks are open or encrypted.

We did write to Enfora (who have excellent customer support by the way) and they said that they couldn’t justify writing a brand new Wi-Fi sniffer application for what is basically a niche product.

Using the Enfora Wi-Fi Sled
Although the Wi-Fi Sled is nowhere near as big as we thought, you’d still feel a right berk making calls with it attached, so a headset is a must (see our BoxWave Dual Handsfree Stereo Adapter review).

Happily, the Enfora has been designed so that you can still use the audio port on the Treo and there’s a microphone on the front of the unit so you can receive calls while surfing the web too.

Conveniently, the Wi-Fi Sled’s AC adapter will also charge the Treo when it’s in situ, so you won’t need to drag around two adapters on your travels.

Conclusion
It has to be said that although it feels a bit of a bodge, it actually works very well and for users who need to combine the slick functionality of a Treo 650 with the speed of a broadband Wi-Fi connection, the Enfora WiFi Sled is well worth the money (approx £106/$170).

Once connected, we had no problems hurtling through our email and whizzing around Websites and although the pocket-filling girth didn’t thrill, the additional battery life meant that it may prove far more practical for road warriors away from base for lengthy periods.

One thing: it looks like Enfora may be cancelling UK shipments in the near future, so get your order in quick!

Features: 70% Build: 70% Value For Money: 75% Overall: 75%

Enfora
Enfora Online ordering (UK)

Polycom Communicator Review: Handsfree Skype (83%)

Polycom Communicator Review: Handsfree Skype (83%)The Polycom Communicator (C100S) first caught our eye at the Skype-day in London. It’s a well-formed handsfree speaker/mic kit that connects to your PC via USB, letting you make trouble-free calls on Skype.

Polycom aren’t new to the field of handsfree. You may well have used their SoundStation in telephone conferences. They’ve leveraged this experience to tune the Communicator to minimise feedback.

Polycom Communicator Review: Handsfree Skype (83%)What’s it like to use
Getting it setup is breeze. When you’ve carried out the one-off process of installing the small piece of software on to the PC and authorised to allow it to work with Skype, you’re away.

We found it very easy to use, not only that, but were highly impressed with its performance.

Conversations flow more naturally, as if you were in the same room as the person, because you’re not holding a phone handset. The extra auto-echo-cancellation that has been built into it, also lets you use it without the other party realising.

For those who are keen on secrecy, there’s a standard 3.5cm headphone socket in the right by the mic.

When you’re travelling and need to make a series of calls from your hotel room, the Communicator will be a boon. Forget using the cellular with an ear piece, this lets you sit in your hotel room and make your calls while taking advantage of Skype’s low-cost calling too.

The Communicator also has a life beyond Skype calls. Due to its high quality speaker, it’s great to use to play your music through, or use during a presentation with audio in it. A great advantage.

Polycom Communicator Review: Handsfree Skype (83%)Design
It’s a well designed solid piece of kit that’s had a lot of thought put into it. This is amply demonstrated by its surface-finish (which comes in either blue or grey), which just through its touch gives you confidence in it.

With its size being similar to two packs of cards sitting next to each other (3.24″ x 5.25″ x 0.85″/ 85 cm x 135cm x 25 cm), you would have no hesitation in chucking it in to your bag when you’re on a business trip.

Polycom Communicator Review: Handsfree Skype (83%)The centre-top is dominated by a high quality (22 KHz) speaker, with twin microphones on either side of the bottom front corners. This not only gives excellent sound reproduction (actually beyond Skype 16KHz capabilities), but the dual mics make it easy for many people around a table to take part in the conversation. The microphones are independently balanced, so a person sitting a distance away from one would not be drowned out by another sitting close to the other.

The middle section of the unit has a collection of five buttons arranged within a circle. On the left is a blue Skype-logo’s button, that when pressed, makes the Skype software on your PC become active. The button on the opposite side of the circle connects and disconnects calls. Volume controls are at the top and the bottom, with a mute button in the centre.

Polycom Communicator Review: Handsfree Skype (83%)Around these buttons is a circular LED that gives progress on the call – it flashes green when connecting the call, glows green when on a call and red when the conversation is muted.

The back is hinged to provide two features – holding the 79 cm (33″) long USB lead that wraps around the back, and to act as a stand for the unit when it’s in use. Like the rest of the unit, it too, has a reassuringly-solid feel about it, with a hinge that feels like it will last.

The intelligent design touches continues on this flapped hinge with its rubber corners, minimising movement where it rests against the table.

Summary
A great, quality device that works easily and well, providing you with a better way of making Skype calls.

Score: 83%

Ups
Great quality calls on Skype Superb speaker for music-listening Well designed and compact

Downs
No Mac or Linux support yet

Cost
US RRP $149

Polycom Communicator

Buy it at Amazon UK (Blue)

Buy it at Amazon US (Grey)
Buy it at Amazon US (Blue)

BBC To Take Live Webcam Feeds To TV Shows

BBC To Take Live Webcam Feeds To ShowsA visual communications company, All New Video, have announced a deal with BBC to enable feedback and input into TV programmes from viewers, video calling from 3G phones, Web cams and ISDN. On the voice side, it will add VoIP to its inbound voice channels.

It will open up and encourage the input of BBC viewers into news television programmes, widening the chances for user-generated content. The first show will be ‘Have Your Say’ which is aired on BBC World and BBC News 24, which they hope will before the end of the month.

We think this is a really exciting idea, with the live element being the real revolution. We spoke to David Hogben, General Manager, to get the low down.

Webcam to Live Broadcast
During live shows, the producer will be able to ask viewers to join in with the programme, by connecting with their 3G mobiles (unlikely and expensive for the caller), or far more interestingly, their Webcams.

To get to add their two penny worth, prospective video chatters will go to the BBC News Web site and download an ActiveX control (sorry Windows only currently), which will pick up their Webcam and/or microphone, letting them connect.

As the Application can be downloaded by anyone, input can come from anywhere worldwide.

BBC To Take Live Webcam Feeds To ShowsThe system give the assistant producer the ability to carry out a video chat with the viewer letting them ascertain their suitability of the show – frankly, filter out those not relevant. Each person can also be ranked and some notes made about them.

When the assistant producer thinks they’ve got the best of the bunch, they are passed in to a ‘waiting room’ where the producer can also chat with them, and then they decide if it’s time to put them live into the broadcast. As the 3G video is low res and the Webcam quality variable, it’s likely that video feeds will only be broadcast at quarter screen resolution for the time being.

The whole process runs through a Web-browser on All New Video’s servers, until the broadcast, when a server at the BBC is connected with, feeding the video and audio out through an SDI interface.

Video comments
Those old enough will remember UK broadcaster, Channel 4, used to have ‘feedback booths’ in a couple of UK cities where viewers were able to go into a darkened box and share their views with the UK audience.

BBC To Take Live Webcam Feeds To ShowsThe new BBC system will let people do the same from the safety of their own bedrooms, where they’ll be able to leave their five minutes of video wisdom in a video mail system.

Background on All New Video
All New Video started in 2002 with the advent of 3G as they thought it would address a lot of the problems the founder, David Atkins, had encountered in their previous video conferencing business.

Their first big business win was a contact with Orange to supply the technology for their video answering service. Any time you can’t get through to someone with a video call on a 3G or 2.5G phone, you’re connected to the All New Video kit, where you can leave up to a 30 second message which is then delivered via MMS.

As we’ve been hearing from Vodafone recently, video calling isn’t being embraced by the 3G owning public, neither, more widely, is 3G. This lead to a rethink for them and a switch to including Webcams and other Internet technologies such as VoIP to be included.

They’ve previously done deals with two UK TV companies ITN and ITV’s breakfast show, GMTV. Neither are advanced as the BBC system advised today, with the ITN handling video messaging and the GMTV allowing video calls going direct to air, both from 3G phones.

All New Video

Sony Mylo Wi-Fi Media Player Introduced

Sony Introduces Mylo Wi-Fi Media PlayerSony has released details of the Mylo, a groovy new Wi Fi-enabled personal communications device aimed at Instant Messaging nutters.

Available in black or white, the curvy handheld comes with 1GB of built-in flash memory and features a slide out QWERTY keypad, 802.11b Wi-Fi and three free instant messaging services pre-installed.

A cringe worthy video on the Sony site declaring the Mylo to be the “the easiest, raddest broadband device” makes it clear who this device is aimed at: dA K1dZ.

Instant Messaging
With Skype, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk onboard, Sony is hoping to attract Instant Messaging addicts, although with only Wi-Fi connectivity and no SIM cards onboard, users are going to need to find free wireless networks to enjoy the fun.

The device ships with JiWire’s hotspot directory, which lists more than 20,000 WiFi networks across the US (but nowt for UK users), and there’s an avatar-enabled “What’s Up” screen which lets users check the online status of up to 90 friends.

Sony Introduces Mylo Wi-Fi Media PlayerFor teens who, like, don’t find email too slow for their hyperactive needs, there’s also an e-mail client, compatible with services such as Yahoo! Mail and the Gmail web mail service.

So long as there’s a free Wi-Fi connection within range (not always an option here in Britland), the Mylo looks to be a capable wireless device, offering predictive typing, the excellent Opera Mini browser, and a fun option to share playlists and stream songs between other Mylo users.

Multimedia support
Sporting a 320 by 240 pixel 2.4-inch LCD screen, the handheld offers a full suite of multimedia support (music, videos and photos) with a Memory Stick Pro Duo slot allowing up to 4GB of extra storage (Sony is set to introduce a 4GB Memory Stick this month for $170).

There’s also a built in speaker for annoying bystanders, with the Mylo supporting MP3, ATRAC, WMA (inc DRM stuff), MP4 (Advanced Simple Profile) and JPEGs formats.

Sony Introduces Mylo Wi-Fi Media PlayerBattery life looks pretty good too, with a claimed 45 hours of music playback and around seven hours of instant-message chatting/Web surfing.

This drops to just three hours when the Mylo is used for Skype telephone calls – mere moments for teenagers.

The device comes with a microphone, stereo headphones, a USB cable and a neoprene case and is expected to retail for around $350 (~£183, ~e272) in September.

Oh, and the name ‘Mylo’ supposedly stands for “my life online,” in case you were wondering.

Mylo

Boxon MP3 Player Bolts On VoIP

Boxon MP3 Player Bolts On VoIPWhen it comes to convergence, we’re always on the look out for shiny new smartypants devices, even if we’re not always totally convinced about their usefulness.

A good case in point is the new Boxon VoIP gadget from Korean electronics manufacturers Hyunwon (who are better known as Mobiblu).

As the name suggests, the Boxon is an MP3 player a VoIP telephony system built in, letting you plug it into any Internet-connected PC and start talking for free.

To get chatting, simply slam the player into any available USB port on a desktop or laptop PC, and then the (unspecified) VoIP software should automatically load up on the host computer.

Boxon MP3 Player Bolts On VoIPOf course, the idea of a converged MP3 player/VoIP device isn’t a new one – in fact, we wrote about a very similar device, the Ezmax EZMP4200P VoIP MP3 Player, way back in March 2005.

The wave of disinterest that followed that particular product announcement suggests that perhaps the public aren’t quite yet ready to shell out for VoIP MP3 players that need to be plugged into a computer before you can start chatting.

As a MP3 player, the Boxon looks to be a fairly middle of the road affair too, sporting a 1.71-inch full colour OLED display, with e-book reading, video playback, photo viewing, and an English-Korean dictionary.

We’ve no idea if (or when) this thing is going to be arriving in Europe, and we can’t say we’re particvularly bothered either because, well, it’s a rubbish idea, isn’t it?

Mobiblu

Four Skype WiFi Phones Announced

Four Skype WiFi Phones AnnouncedThe terrible day that the mobile phone companies had been hoping wasn’t going to arrive, is here. Skype have today announced four WiFi handsets that let you send and receive calls without switching your computer on while wanding around – err, like a mobile phone. They’ve been expected for a while, but are finally getting closer to the hands of the public, being as they’ll start selling in Q3 this year.

The big shift for these handsets are that Skype is embedded into the handsets, so the PC/Mac isn’t required to make calls, as has been the case with wireless Skype handsets to now, like the Siemens M34.

Speaking in an ideally sized, sound-bite sentence, Stefan Oberg, General Manager Hardware at Skype enthused, “We want to give people the freedom to move around while talking and have access to Skype wherever they are – whether in front of a computer or while moving around the home or office,”

The quad-bevy of handsets announced were

  • Belkin WiFi Phone for Skype (F1PP000GN-SK);
  • Edge-Core WiFi Phone for Skype (WM4201);
  • NETGEAR WiFi Phone for Skype (SPH101); and,
  • SMC Wi-Fi Phone for Skype (WSKP100).

NetGear SPH101
Four Skype WiFi Phones AnnouncedWe got our hand on the NetGear SPH101 recently and were really impressed with the solid build and how easy it was to use. The Skype interface was loyal to the computer-based editions, with the graphics being an exact replica.

The only issue we found was, as it doesn’t have a Web browser built into it, it doesn’t have the ability to connect to Public Wifi points such as BT OpenZone or The Cloud, as you can’t log into them. Open access don’t have this problem and the expected encryption protocols are supported including WEP, WPA, and WPA2 with PSK support. We’d imagine that the inability to login via a Browser would be the same with all of these handsets. It’s unclear how long the battery will last when released, by NetGear were quite bullish.

The SMC handset is being made by a company that we’ve been speaking to in Taiwan. The OEM manufacturing deal was signed within the last week, so it shows how fast this area of the market is moving, seeing the Skype announcements coming so close on its heals.

Mobile phone companies are now having to live with the fact that, with sufficient WiFi coverage, people may not need to pay for their mobile phone calls in the future. Yikes!

US Democratic Party Adopt Net Neutrality

The US Democratic party has adopted net-neutrality as a party-political issue following the rejection of a second pro-neutrality amendment in a vote late last week.

Previously we reported on the demise of the first pro-neutrality amendment as part of the ongoing review of US telecommunications law.

The Senate Commerce Committee were tied at 11 for and 11 against, with Republican members voting against the amendment and Democrats for it. A majority vote is necessary for a bill to pass. Afterwards, Republican Senator for Alaska, Ted Stevens, gave his reasons for voting against the bill as well as displaying his obviously comprehensive grasp of the technicalities of the Web, “It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”

The Democratic party subsequently took up the issue with the slogan “Republicans: They sold the environment to Exxon, and sold the war to Halliburton. Now they want to sell the Internet to at&t.”

Former presidential candidate Senator John Kerry commented, “This vote was a gift to cable and telephone companies, and a slap in the face of every Internet user and consumer.” Another Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden, placed a ‘hold’ on the bill which temporarily stops further progress but a decision is inevitable and both sides are marshaling forces behind their cause.

Lawrence Lessig greeted news of Democratic support with caution, “Good for the Dems that they got it. Bad that the issue is now within the grips of party politics.” He acknowledged that, give the amount of money involved, political involvement was inevitable.

Many fear that the loss of net-neutrality will signal virtual civil war on the Internet and that commercial interests are having too much effect on the US Legislature. Jeannine Kenney, Senior Policy Analyst, Consumers Union offered a concise summary, “The network neutrality nondiscrimination principle, which protects competition, maximizes consumer choice, and guarantees fair market practices, is one step closer to being abandoned with the Senate Commerce Committee’s vote. This endangers the most important engine for economic growth and democratic communication in modern society. Nondiscrimination made possible the grand successes of the Internet. Its removal can take them away.”

Packard Bell EasyNote ‘Skype Edition’ Laptop: Mini Review: Exclusive

Packard Bell EasyNote 'Skype Edition' Laptop: Mini Review: ExclusiveWe played with the Packard Bell EasyNote ‘Skype Edition’ Laptop, at its first European showing yesterday. The machine we used was the only one in Europe and had been jetted in from development labs in Estonia.

They claim it to be the worlds first ‘Skype Edition’ laptop, and we’ve no reason to doubt them. While many machines have been selling with Skype pre-loaded on it, this is the first to have a dedicated button built-in to the machine.

If your reaction is, ‘so what? It’s a laptop with a soft-button on it,’ that wouldn’t have been too dissimilar to our initial reaction – before we used it. After having seen it action, our view is more favorable.

Where’s the button?
Our first surprise was to find the Skype button at the top of the screen, where you normally find the catch. We’d expected it to be on or around the keyboard.

Packard Bell EasyNote 'Skype Edition' Laptop: Mini Review: ExclusiveAs you can see from the close-up photo, the Skype button sits on the right, the microphone on the left and in the centre is a video camera, a la new Mac laptops. There’s an LED between the mic and video camera and another surrounding the Skype button.

How does it work?
The button performs various functions depending on what you’re doing with Skype at the time.

If you’re working on another app and feel the urge to Skype someone, pressing the Skype button, brings the software to the foreground. No big shock there.

When a Skype call comes in to you, pressing the button answers the call, bringing you live.

There’s a LED surrounding the button that shows various states of call as follows

  • Orange colored when Skype application is connected to Internet and in idle mode
  • Orange/Green alternate blinking when there is an incoming Skype call
  • Green when there is an active Skype call in progress
  • OFF when Skype application is not connected to Internet or not launched

The green LED between the mic and camera shows solid green to indicated you have a call in progress, perhaps to save you from the embarrassment of slagging off the person you’ve just completed a call with, while thinking the call had finished.

Packard Bell EasyNote 'Skype Edition' Laptop: Mini Review: ExclusiveCalling quality
One of the concerns we’d had was the placement of the mic and the call quality that might bring.

We know that the mic on the Apple iBook lid is less than great to be using with Skype. We often find ourselves craning our necks forward, and half closing the lid to get close enough to the mic to make ourselves heard by the other party.

Packard-Bell appear to have got over this. In the call that we placed, the other end reported they could hear us perfectly well, despite us being around two feet away from the laptop and the room that we were calling from being pretty noisy.

On reflection we realised that the palaver we go through with the Mac wouldn’t work on this machine as, if you were on a video call, they’d be getting a view of your space bar.

Video built-in
As I’m sure you know, video conferencing has been included in Skype for a while now (it was one of the most requested features). By including the camera at the lid, Packard-Bell have made it easy to video call while on the move – without having to lash video cameras to the lid of your machine.

Having seen the preview window, we can report that the results were pretty impressive. The quality appeared to be more that sufficient for video conferencing.

General spec and availability
The general spec of this machine is described by Packard-Bell as having a “high-performance Intel Dual-core.”

We’ve absolutely no idea what the general computing function of this machine is – that’s not what we were looking at. Given that PC designs has been perfecting since the release of the IBM XT, we’d suspect that it’s pretty much as you’d expect.

The Packard-Bell EasyNote ‘Skype Edition’ is expected to be getting to retail in August this year at a cost of E899.

Packard Bell

Net Neutrality Matters

Net Neutrality MattersImagine a world where Internet performance is controlled by the company who owns the cables and where speed is sold to the highest bidder. Imagine a world where some Web sites load faster than others, where some sites aren’t even visible and where search engines pay a tax to make sure their services perform at an acceptable speed. That’s the world US Telecommunications companies (telcos) such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner are trying to create.

The debate centres around the ongoing review of the US Telecommunications Act and the concept of network neutrality (net-neutrality). The telcos have been lobbying congress to allow them to introduce priority services ensuring that the fastest data transfers and best download speeds are sold at a premium rate. The telcos position is widely seen to be in conflict with the most fundamental assumptions about what the Internet actually is.

To the lay person, it may seem like a laughable proposition. As Cory Doctorow (FreePress) put it, “It’s a dumb idea to put the plumbers who laid a pipe in charge of who gets to use it.” And yet the US congress is swaying towards the view of the telcos, so what’s going on?

The debate was kick-started in November 2005 when AT&T CEO, Ed Whitacre commented, “Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”

Whitacre’s argument boils down to the assumption that services such as Google and Yahoo are somehow freeloading on the infrastructure owned by the telcos. Cory Doctorow points out a fundamental flaw in his reasoning, “Internet companies already are paying for bandwidth from their providers, often the same companies that want to charge them yet again under their new proposals.”

Net Neutrality MattersAs Doctorow and other commentators have observed, Internet users and businesses already pay proportionally for their use of the net, allowing the owners of the infrastructure to take a further cut distorts the market in favour of those with the deepest pockets and threatens innovation and the development of new services.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, weighed in to the argument saying “Net neutrality is this: If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level. That’s all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.”

The debate in the US is split largely along partisan lines with Republicans favouring the telcos and Democrats siding with the pro-neutrality lobby. Since Whitacre started the debate, the telcos have promoted their case heavily using extensive television advertising and lobby groups. The pro-neutrality group (comprising the bulk of the industry) has organised itself with activist Websites such as save the internet and has signed up over a million individuals to its petition, but the campaign is not going well. On May 8th the House of Representatives passed the “Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006,” or COPE Act while defeating an amendment (the so-called Internet Platform for Innovation Act of 2006) that would have provided protection for neutrality. The next opportunity for progress comes this week when the Senate votes on Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2006 which also carries a neutrality friendly amendment.

Today, the legal Website Outlaw reported that two US Attorney Generals (Eliot Spitzer and Bill Lockyer) have backed the pro-neutrality cause. Spitzer wrote a letter stating that “Congress must not permit the ongoing consolidation of the telecommunications industry to work radical and perhaps irrevocable change in the free and neutral nature of the Internet”.

Whatever Spitzer and Lockyer’s influence, many commentators believe this kind of corporate influence on communications can only lead to economic censorship. As law professor and copyright activist Lawrence Lessig said in 2004 “The Internet was designed to allow competition and let the best products and content rise to the top. Without a policy of network neutrality, some of those products could be blocked by broadband providers”.

BT Home Hub Examined

BT Home Hub ExaminedTo date, most ADSL equipment that BT has put out has been pretty …. functional … or put another way, ugly. Their ethernet routers have been transposed from office equipment, and their USB kit, the Frog as it was known … well don’t get us started on that*.

This has all changed with their latest packaging of broadband. Released alongside this, the newly-announced BT WiFi Home Hub has been designed to seduce people into pulling their router out from it previous position in the study or under the stairs, and putting it in to their living space.

Why would they care about that? Well it’s important for the success of products like BT Vision, their autumn-release IPTV service, as the connection between the Home Hub and the BT Vision box currently has to be wired ethernet. Given most people don’t have their house cabled for ethernet, the Home Hub has to be located close to the main TV in the house, normally in the lounge. It also doesn’t hurt to have their new wireless-DECT VoIP phone handsets sitting in the main room in the house either.

It’s a looker
BT Home Hub ExaminedBT have clearly had the industrial designers on the case and what they’ve turned out is a bit of a looker.

Being white, you can’t but fail to be reminded of Apple (being that they own the colour white). It’s like a cross between a small, white, upstanding PS2 and an iPod, but lacking the curves of the iPod.

The BT VoIP handset, or BT Broadband Talk handset as they call it (sssh, don’t mentioned VoIP), sits in an integrated docking unit that is slots in the front of the base of the Home Hub.

BT Home Hub ExaminedWhat can you connect to it?
Apart from the 802.11G/B wireless connectivity, there’s six physical connectors tucked away at the back of the Home Hub.

There’s the connector that runs between the phone line and the box, a slot for you POTS phone, two ethernet connectors (one of these will be used for BT Vision) and two USB connectors.

One of these USB ports is intended for computers that don’t have ethernet ports on them (are there any of these still in circulation?) and the other is for an as-yet unannounced use.

One trick I feel they’ve missed is using the Hub as a print server, but discussing this with BT’s, they suggest that this is something that could be introduced later, via a software update.

Disco lights may drive you mad
BT Home Hub ExaminedThe only issue we raised after spending a brief time with it was the usage indicator lights that sit at the top of the unit, which flicker whenever data passes through the box. Sadly, as yet, these can’t be turned off.

We’d imagine that while having these beauties flickering away may be a novelty initially, but long term, people are going to find it _really_ annoying, as they catch them out of the corner of their eye. Expect either the addition of some masking tape over them or a software update giving the option to kill them.

Over broadband software updates
Keeping equipment up to date is a expensive and risky business, especially if you need to get the customer involved.

Like their video phone handsets, the Home Hub can be updated remotely by BT over the broadband connection. This gives them a chance to provide new features in the future, or to fix an problems that they might find, without having to bother the subscriber.

Do you need a Home Hub?
If you want to carry on using the Internet as you have previously, then the short answer is no, _but_ if you want to use any of the new BT services like BT Vision or BT Homesafe, their home security system (more on this soon), then yes.

For BT Vision to work, the STB that comes with it has to be able to control the flow of data over the broadband connection, because frankly, getting TV to run over a 2Mb DSL connection is asking a lot of it. If little Johnny is sitting in the bedroom downloading goodness knows what, he’s going to have to have his connection throttled, which Dad is watching the Football on Saturday night.

* Thank the gods of USB that BT have finally dumped the USB-connected Frog that used to ship in previous version of their broadband offering. We found this an odious move purposely designed to limit the number of computers that connect to one. In our book, this was detrimental to the wider adoption of broadband in the UK.