Posts by Owen Kerr

Virgin signals start of telegraph pole broadband test

Works fine in Korea

I've been in S. Korea for almost 2 years now and am still amazed at some of the places fiber has been connected to. I work about 15km from the nearest exchange but there is a connection to the centre I am in providing around 50Mbits/sec synchronous, the cable is mostly hung from telegraph poles, this is done by using a steel support cable then suspending the optical one plus a few others below this with supports every metre or so. In the cities and towns here there is fiber hanging everywhere and the connections are much more reliable than anything I used in the UK. I will miss 100Mbit synchronous in my flat for 15 pounds / month when I decide to leave here.

It's the end of TV as we know it

IPTV is a great step forward

I am currently living in South Korea and have recently signed up to an ISP who provides landline, broadband and IPTV all for the equivalent of £20 a month. The landline has yet to be used but the broadband in fibre to the house 100Mbps and I usually get speeds above 70Mbps. The IPTV shares this bandwidth but makes very little difference to internet use, I have a full range of approx 150 live broadcast channels plus a huge library of content on demand both free and paid for. The broadcast channels include 10 or more HD feeds with full 5.1ch sound while a large amount of the on demand content is also HD.

When comparing this to Virgin Media from 2 years ago there is a world of difference, the service works well all the time, the video and sound quality are much better and the price is a fraction of the Virgin price.

All of this is possible due to Korea investing in infrastructure before it is needed instead of 10-15 years after. The UK government and business need to work together fast to improve things in the UK, in Korea this year the government decided they need to upgrade almost all of the broadband lines to 1Gbps by 2012, this I can actually see becoming a reality here as people will just get on with it instead of arguing about it.

Project canvas is a great idea but in the UK may not be possible for a long time due to bandwidth issues, the service needs to be reliable, easy to use and cheap but without a massive improvement in broadband standards this is simply not going to happen.

Brit nuke subs exposed on Google Earth

IRA have been there and done that without Google Earth

The IRA managed to hit the MI6 building in 2000 with a handheld rocket launcher and they probably didn't need much more than a tourist map to find their way so if someone wants to hit a target like one of these sites Google Earth won't be needed. It just means they might save 20mins or so looking for a picture.

Free passports for WWII generation hit 500,000

Very generous of them

Ireland provide free passports to all OAPs.

Operators race to pre-empt Euro data roaming cap

3 takover the EU

Just need 3 to start a few more networks in the EU, handy using google maps on the phone when in Italy and Ireland and still just using included data with X series, I could even use it in Oz if it wasn't so far away.

Freecom Data Tank Gateway WLAN 2TB router and NAS box

Can be used with ADSL

This can be used perfectly well with ADSL, all you need is a modem which connects to the router using standard RJ45 instead of the cheap rubbish that most ISPs supply. Creative have a few models one of which I use fine with a wireless router connected with a standard patch lead.

A poor video which can be summed up in 1 paragraph, what is the point of the video reviews?