Posts by mlp

Norfolk children get £310,000 of free laptops

But why?

@ Jay Zelos - why not just have ten additional teachers then? Surely that benefits more people in the long term? There is a staffing shortage, especially here in "sunny" narfuk.

NorwichCC/NorfolkCC spent over a million quid trying to offer free wifi to some selected locations in the city center - the service is now defunct.

They spent a ridiculous amount fighting to become/fighting becoming a unitary council.

Why?

The ability of this government to spend money it can ill afford, on "projects" of limited tangible benefit, is staggering...

Petrol stations deploy anti-theft stingers

@ Chris W

You're not a thief, granted.

But by the same token Tescos isn't going to let you put their goods in your car until you've paid for them.

BBC should not pay for fibre, Ofcom tells MPs

re: AARRGGHHH!

...but...but...

The new building with it's big carpark has access restricted by a toll booth (which is the ISP) and it has a queue of ten thousand cars waiting whilst the guy at the toll booth goes and takes a slash...

The problem isn't the Internet or the content or the amount of it being viewed as such - the internet is fine and everyone is peering with each other and it's all fine.

The problem is that every ADSL subscriber sits on (one of a number of) "home gateways" at the ISP. It has a pipe of finite capacity. If each subscriber wants to run @ 8Mbps then you can have Y users. The ISP will put Y users times ten thousand on that gateway.

They do this because BT charge them to add the subscriber.

So the problem lies either with BT charging too much, or the ISP not charging enough...

BBC vs ISPs: Bandwidth row escalates as Tiscali wades in

General consensus...

Well it seems here just about everyone is agreed - it's the ISPs problem.

When plus.net started bitching a couple of years ago that if you were using your connection excessively then you must be doing something illegal, people let it pass when the service they were paying for became throttled, subject to AUP and people got booted off. Other providers followed suit soon after when they realised they could get away with it.

Now people have a legitimate reason to use (lots of) bandwidth and the ISP's have to sort out their shit. Admittedly the problem lies with BT and their pricing model, as discussed in Andrew's Mailbox thread... So we find ourselves in the position of having to pay to watch the BBC (again - like the licence fee isn't enough), because the (heavily regulated) BT have artificially high pricing on their wholesale product/backhaul?

If your business model supports 1-2GB transfer a month (the figure quoted by plus.net as the average used at the time), then you make that the data allowance advertised/allowed in your rock-bottom-no-frills service. Tiscali don't seem to be able to support checking Hotmail at 6PM so I suspect their usage allowance is even lower. Right about now you'd expect the ASA to step in and stop people from advertising an "unlimited" product that quite clearly isn't...

Nevermind the fact that the BBC has the iPlayer and it's a bit popular, doesn't YouTube account for something like 10% of all Internet traffic? Will they go to Google and ask for a hand-out... not likely they'd get told to f*ck off in no uncertain terms! The BBC is just seen as an easy target.

Perhaps if Tiscali didn't spend so much on wanky ads and trying to buy market share they could spend some cash on actually providing the infrastructure they're over selling...

IFPI wins Danish block on Pirate Bay

How about...

OpenDNS? I know they're probably susceptible to lawyers and the like, but they do sidestep the flakey DNS at ISP's quite nicely, and they're quick too...