Posts by Nigel Whitfield. 1049 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
Well, indeed; with the piece coming out around Valentine's day, the lurve angle seemed like a good way to get into the subject, but as I pointed out at the end, communication is rather better for your relationship than gadgetry.
And, that's also why we included a mention of some simple countermeasures, too. Possessive behaviour's not cool kids. Please don't try it at home.
You're unlikely to get the original english soundtrack, I'm afraid. A lot of german channels have historically been broadcast in the clear on satellite. And, unlike the UK, where we have restricted beams that are supposed to minimise overspill, that's not generally the case.
Certainly last time I tried it, you could point a dish at 19.2 from the UK and get all sorts of European stuff, broadcast in the clear, including dubbed versions of US shows.
And while that's possible, you're very unlikely to get the english soundtrack - it would make those broadcasts appealing to many, many more people across the continent. A German broadcaster can buy, say, CSI, dubbed in to German and will pay less for that right than if they were - effectively - broadcasting the original version on a pan-european beam.
If, say, the Czechs were able to watch a German broadcast, and simply select the English soundtrack, then their broadcasters would feel less need to license the same show, dubbed into their own language. And heaven forbid the makers should miss out on some of their cash!
... all the reports of this that I've read have talked about how they're expanding the cable network, bringing them within reach of extra homes (maybe they'll decide they can afford the 20 foot of cable from my front garden into the house now...).
However, none of them has mentioned any corresponding investment in the core network. It would be good to assume that that will naturally follow, but I'm not sure we live in such an ideal world as that.
Are they really more interested in getting more people to pay for the cable TV services, and the fact that they'll be linked to the network for internet happens to be a handy side-effect for which they can garner much publicity?
I'd have been more impressed if there was detailed information eg "80% of investment on network expansion, and 20% on core upgrades"
I'm sure before too long, Ms Perry will turn her ample intellect to the child protection aspects of driverless cars. She'll likely conclude that there are certain addresses that will have to be filtered out of the destinations lists, just in case visiting them leads to people being corrupted.
The TV spectrum they have their eyes on extends down to the 700MHz area too; and while these lower frequencies will make it easier to cover large areas than chunks in the 2GHz+ spectrum, there's a good reason why, for example, Three started to build out their network at the higher frequencies - speed.
At 700MHz, you can cover more of the country (though experience suggests there will still be not-spots), but the speeds won't be so great. As you say, what's the point?
(Other than a "thin end of the wedge", a foot in the door to grab as much space as they can, in the hopes it can be monetised later, once DTT has been kicked to the kerb)
Quite, Vic. I don't think I saw a single display in any wider ratio at IBC; I'm pretty certain that if there was a move to anything else in broadcast, it would have been all over the place, or perhaps mentioned in the press materials from the likes of DVB. They're busy roadmapping 4K, after all, with plenty of talk about wider gamut, higher refresh rates, codecs, and so on. I can't believe a change in aspect ratio just slipped everyone's mind.
There are various mechanisms to cope with that. The most prevalent is probably to have a quad lnb in which one of the four parts is set to each of the possible options (High/Low, Vertical/Horizontal). That connects to a distribution system, and each apartment has however many connections it requires (usually, two per recorder, one for a standard receiver). The receivers act as normal, and the think they're talking to a standard LNB, sending the appropriate signals for the options required. The distribution system intercepts those, and connects that cable to the appropriate signal.
An alternative is called Unicable, which is a single cable distribution system, which allows all the signals to go across a single cable, to multiple recievers. It requires a Unicable LNB and support in the receivers too. And the one time I tried playing with a bit of kit that was supposed to support it, I had no end of trouble. To be fair, that was in 2008, in the very early days of Unicable. But it doesn't seem to have taken off, from what I can see
Those lines overlaid on the graph are based on average amount of viewing per day. Even if those programmes are timeshifted, the data still has to be shifted to people to enable them to watch it.
And the projections of how much mobile data will grow don't seem to show it being able to manage that for quite some time, even on the most optimistic projections.
So, surely that does make DTT pretty efficient; it's also in place now, which makes it a better bet than telling people "Oh, never mind, replace your kit with a satellite box" - and I'm sure it won't be too long before someone else says "Hey! Why don't we interleave wireless data amongst the satellite downlink frequencies" as well.
There's an existing, efficient infrastructure that can deliver a massive amount of programme data to people, using the equipment they already have in their homes. In some cases, that equipment is only a few years old.
Aside from anything else, telling people "hey, we're going to switch that off really soon now" isn't really going to help mass take-up of other new technologies in future.
And doing it so that we end up paying mobile networks monthly fees, and they pay Qualcomm huge royalties, just so that we can continue to receive what we currently pluck of of the ether for nothing?
I'd prefer to see the mobile networks actually use the space they have first, then perhaps they can have some of the unused chunks the military don't use. There isn't, as far as I can see, any pressing technical need for them to mess up the space used by DTT. There may be a commercial imperative (for them), but that's a different matter.
Facebook's got form for manipulating feeds to see how it affects people's moves; some reports on this explain how they have tried things like different placements, or even hiding the "I'm voting" button in the past, to see how it affects response.
So, while I think anything that gets people to register is broadly a good thing, I think a clear an unambiguous statement that all people who are determined to be in the UK will receive the same notifications would be helpful.
Given the information that the company gathers about its users, it can quite easily determine which political things they may have liked, or engaged with, including those elsewhere. It would be entirely possible, and staggeringly inappropriate, if reminders to register, or to vote, were selectively shown to people.
You could imagine - I'm not suggesting they would do this, but it's technically possible - that a company in such a position might choose or be pressured to use this ability to show reminders more often to people who, say, have never clicked "Like" or shared stories about corporate tax issues, or various other policies.
So, yes, getting people to register (and to vote), a good idea in principle. But with some reservations.
Don't worry. I'm sure they'll be able to launch a "Laundry hub" that plugs in near your washing machine and bridges the magic ball Bluetooth connection to the wifi. Or perhaps they'll be able to do a deal with appliance manufacturers for 'smart' washing machines that have Bluetooth built in an ethernet connection on the back...
<hides, whimpering, in corner>
My favourite bit of the video is the bloke uttering "This could change the way people do laundry" with a straight face.
And, honestly, I'm not sure I could cope with the awesomeness of a notification when the laundry is done. I think if I ever felt awe at any aspect of housework, I'd need a lie down.
Plusnet is what I have for my own mother's connection, which I took out when they still listed their low usage 10GB package at 5.99 a month. It's crept up over the years to 7.99, but for the few emails she sends, that's adequate.
However, since they're a BT-owned company, and not quite as small as they once were, they probably don't fall into the 'boutique' category anymore. But I suppose that's as good a way as any to illustrate that while these more customised outfits may be ideal for reg readers, if you just want a basic connection, sometimes using one of the big outfits may be a better choice.
I do. I've run my own mailserver for years (we did a two part piece in PCW about setting one up, using a small Via system, and OpenBSD). I hoard all my mails, and having them on a server here means that even if the net connection is down, I can still find that contact I asked about something for an article donkeys years ago.
Admittedly, that may be something of an edge case for many. But it ensure that I have an IMAP server (which back then, wasn't so common), with all my mail available on every device, should I need it. When out and about, it's easy to send something via that server, with my own domain details, too. It's all under my control, and no one else is logging. Now that people are worrying about the NSA, Google and record retention, I'm even happier.
Similarly, I run my own SIP server for the phones; again, likely an edge case as I work from home, and have a range of numbers used for different things. Some of it could be done in the could, but I prefer to have the control here.
The final one I a VPN server; seldom used, but can come in handy when I am on an insecure connection, or just want to appear to be at home. Again, I could subscribe to a VPN service, but I prefer to keep control for myself.
You're right in that much of this can be done in the cloud, and for many people that will be better. But some of us still enjoy a good tinker.
This is a big problem; it's pretty much impossible for any ISP to have enough capacity for all their customers to be running flat out at the same time. They rely on the fact that most people's traffic is a bit stop-start - load a web page, the line sits idle while reading, then load another, and so on.
That just about got them through to start with, and they were happy to throw money at marketing and boasting cheapest ever deals to get punters through the door, rather than at investing in support or actual internet infrastructure.
Over the years though, thanks to YouTube, iPlayer, and now things like Netflix and Amazon Prime, that model has changed, to the degree where a substantial number of their customers aren't doing stop-start traffic, but are streaming.
When that started to bite was when some ISPs decided to try and make a noise about the BBC having to pay them for traffic. And it's caused real problems for some who chased the budget market; I suspect it's what put paid to some of those who fell by the wayside over the years - the investment required to catch up and cope with modern traffic patterns just became too large for them.
Various fudges have made the crunch perhaps a little less awful than it could have been, and modern codecs mean you can stream video in much less than the capacity of an average broadband connection now, so that leaves wiggle room.
However, there does seem to be a fairly big difference in terms of capacity management these days; smaller outfits will try to do their best and not be the bottleneck, as much as they can. Larger ones will do what they think they can get away with, and try to avoid mentioning it, or waffle about 'network management' and 'traffic shaping' if you really try to get them to say something.
Twelve month contracts are the norm; with loss leader three month periods, and options to grab money via domestic phone calls, line rental and so on, they probably do think it's worth the money to pay a few people (probably on min. wage) to stand around and sign folk up. Give it a while, and it wouldn't surprise me to see some big ISPs trying to shift up to 18 month contracts, just as we've seen with phones.
Well, it's certainly not advertorial - no consideration asked for, offered, or received in respect of any of the ISPs mentioned.
Weekend features have less hard tech in them than weekday ones. We wanted to explain the possibilities available, rather than give an exhaustive list. So I aimed to mention a few examples, based on both personal experience and who I could get comment from in the time allowed.
Yep; and around 10-15% of people may be connected to 20CN rather than 21CN.
However, while in a Market 1 exchange you may still have to rely on BT wholesale for the DSL link, that doesn't mean you can't go with some of these ISPs. You may be limited in terms of speed (especially on 20CN) and companies rely on the LLU offerings from C&W or TalkTalk are out, but you should still be able to find someone who can offer you a more customised service, even in Market 1, than if you simply take the BT option.
There certainly has been a hell of a lot of consolidation - many of the names that featured in some of the early ISP roundups I did for PCW have long since vanished.
But a lot of the others do seem to manage to remain independent, either through being so small that they're probably not a likely takeover target, or through doing the sort of hybrid trick of being both an aggregator and a direct seller (Zen, Merula, ICUK, AAISP).
It's possible that, in time, some of those might be swallowed up by some of the big four, certainly. But by and large they seem to have enough scale to keep going on their own, and they've never really been chasing the low margin end of the market.
I think that in the case of a fair few of those that fell by the wayside, it was the chasing after volume and low price at the same time that tended to prove their undoing.
I'm sure some of them try; I did have the fond idea of publishing my SIP info in the DNS so people could use my main work email address to reach me via SIP, if they had a suitable setup. But I quickly realised that allowing just anyone to talk to my SIP server was a recipe for disaster - even if they don't crack a password, the sheer number of attempts would bring it to its knees.
So now, I restrict incoming call notifications so they have to come from the provider of my SIP trunks. It means people can't call me free via SIP, but at least I'm safer from script kiddies and very likely spammers too.
(Of course, for VoIP spammers, even if they do manage to find a SIP system to call into, they still need to know more; it's not like the phone book where you know there are always a certain number of digits. Connecting to someone via SIP, and you don't know if they're using 2, 3 or 4 digit extensions, for instance, or even names rather than numbers on the handsets. Without a list of actual confirmed SIP addresses, you'd be doing a lot more brute force than simply working through a traditional list of phone numbers).
Some companies do apparently consider it.
This is the comment from Experian:
http://www.experian.co.uk/consumer/questions/askjames244.html
In my experience, which has involved horrific amounts of overcharging from BT, I wouldn't dream of letting them anywhere near my bank account.
I've had them apply a call package to my business line without my asking for it, which required a minimum spend. That resulted in a huge bill a year later to make up the minimum spend, hundreds of pounds.
I've also had them screw up after a fault, removing caller ID from the ISDN line, then reapplying it, and suddenly charging for each of the MSNs instead of for the line.
If you can't trust the phone company to bill you correctly, you'd be mad to let them help themselves to your bank account. Yes, I know there's a direct debit guarantee, but I'd rather not have to fight to get my own money back. I'd prefer it if they actually billed correctly in the first place.
As far as I'm concerned, BT have lost that trust. That they then decide I should pay extra because they're untrustworthy is more than a little annoying
Yep; I can easily spot the sequential diallers, as my SIP numbers are the old ISDN MSNs, so ten in a sequence.
Before I put in the aggressive filtering, it was not at all uncommon for me to get a call on two of the lower numbers that I currently use, and find it silent, before finally, when it rang on one higher up in the sequence, to have some useless telesales wonk on the end of the line.
You can fondly imagine that not giving anyone your number will help, but it doesn't. There are a huge number of companies out there that just don't give a damn about the TPS. Yes, some of them are abroad, but many are in the UK too. As them the name of the company, and they'll hang up damn quickly if they think you're about to complain.
The TPS and ICO really don't seem to give a shit about this, their blather about how it's hard to stop overseas calls merely helps to disguise the fact that they do sod all about the ones in the UK as well. Given that the TPS is run by people who actually think 'Direct Marketing' is a good idea, it's not that much of a surprise.
Certainly, you won't be £2.50 broadband without some sort of rental. But it's the slow creep that is so objectionable and the piling on of things like that compulsory weekend calls bundle that is objectionable - and dishonest, to a degree.
Of course many firms do this. My mother's phone is on Orange on what used to be a 'Virgin Equivalent' price plan. In the name of 'simplification' that now bills not by the second but by the minute or half minute.
Bundling things together can be a good idea and save people money. But in not allowing unbundling, firms like BT are just using it to hike their margins while they cling to old business models
Back before the merger, when I enquired about broadband and TV (just after OnDigital had packed up), I stressed that I didn't want a phone line, as I was perfectly happy with the ISDN. At that point, I was told that if I didn't have the phone line, I'd have to have the most expensive TV package.
In the end, it was pointless anyway - they claimed they didn't have the budget to cable all five flats in the house, so I couldn't have service. No one else actually wanted it, but they said it was their policy to do the whole building, and they couldn't afford that, so I couldn't get service.
That dates back to when they cabled the street, and we didn't sign the papers for wayleave, so they just left the little flap at the end of the garden, and that's it. Even now, if I check the coverage on the website, selecting my house number says I'm not in a Virgin Media area, while the houses on either side are able to get everything.
There isn't necessarily a monthly fee for a phone number in the UK, though most VoIP providers would doubtless like you to believe that's not the case.
Typically, they'll charge you a few quid a month for a geographic phone number, including on you've ported from another phone company (such as BT).
On of the reasons I went with the VoIP service that I have now (which is Gamma telecom, resold by my ISP) is that while there was an initial fee for the number port, there wasn't an ongoing charge per number. Since I was porting my ten number block from the ISDN line, at some providers charge £2 or more per number, per month, that was a fairly important consideration.
Indeed; we used to use an analogue pair like that at university to link the radio station to some of the halls of residence.
However, I suspect they're going to cost rather more than the wholesale line rental, because BT has always used dedicated circuits as a cash cow. And they're probably not set up to have a line that has an A end (premises to local exchange) and then just a link to a DSLAM inside the exchange.
One way round that is to filter to an IVR, which is what I do.
If a number's withheld or unavailable, it can go straight to voicemail, which is what I do on my business number.
But on the number in the phone book, people get a message telling them to go away if they're a cold caller/survey, to press one number to reach me, and another to leave a message.
On the ex-directory number, they get told to enter the results of a bit of maths. I don't see why I should have to speak to stupid people :)
And, numbers for the elderly and/or technologically bewildered members of the family are whitelisted.
Bonkers. Completely and utterly bonkers.
Who's going to decide which apps are required to be ported? Will it only apply to the ones he really wants? Will organisations be fined if they don't port an app?
Who will cover the cost of this? Will Blackberry provide lots of lovely free tools, and education material?
Will they be setting up re-education camps, to ensure that wayward developers recognise the folly of their discrimination in platforms?
You might think, but right now, that's not quite so simple, at least in the UK, for the BBC.
BBC HD is not yet fully regionalised, while the SD channels are. There would need to be a fair bit of rejigging to be done to make that work, and in the meantime people would lose their (in some cases, much loved) regional news programmes.
This, incidentally, is one of the reasons why the forthcoming BBC 1+1 will be accompanied by an extra hour of kids programmes. Those currently finish at 7pm. So if, when BBC 3 vacates the stream it's handed over to BBC 1+1, if it were to start at the same time, what would be the first programme of the day on the timeshift channel?
The six o'clock news sequence. Which contains the lengthy regional opt-outs, which aren't provided for on that stream. So if the kids programmes continued to stop at 7, for a bit chunk of the first hour on the +1 channel, you'd have swimming hippos and the "we can't show you regional programmes" message appearing.
The solution that requires the least re-engineering, then, is to extend the cut-off time for the kids' programming to 8pm. The Corporation gets to look like its being fluffy to the kids, and the timeshifted BBC 1 + 1 doesn't suffer the embarassment of kicking off the day with huge gaps in its content.
Nice in theory. Just how well in practise remains to be seen.
I have my old Nexus 7/2012 and a Moto X 2014; the latter is on Lollipop, and the former was but the experience sucked so much I've gone to the CM version of 4.4.4.
Blinkbox works on the phone, but entirely arbitrarily, doesn't support downloading of movies onto phones.
It works on the tablet too, but even though the most recent update was flagged as fixing downloads to tablet, it still doesn't actually support tablet downloads on 4.4.4 or 4.4.3. It apparently would if I went back to Lollipop, but then it's so sluggish I almost killed it with my hammer.
So yes, while on the face of it Android should make everything happy and charming and lovely, I'd say there's still going to be a good chance that you'll still suffer from that kind of issue, unless Google is really working hard to ensure that everyone a) has a decent hardware spec in their TVs to cope with future updates and b) makes an effort to port those updates to whatever their TV built on, asap.
Android on TV could turn out to be a great idea. But it's way too early to say so yet.
Some continental operators, like Belgium's Telenet, have dropped support for older receivers using MPEG2 - and it caused a fair bit of angst among some of their customers. And that's an inevitable side-effect of making HD the default, at least for distribution, which I presume is what you mean.
To drop SD distribution means everyone's going to need an HD receiver; and while 75% of sets may well have HD in the US, that still leaves 25% that don't. Those will be second sets, portables, perhaps things like hotel rooms, and of course the poor and elderly will likely be quite widely represented amongst them as well.
You would potentially be imposing costs on a lot of people who may not be able to afford the move - even if you do provide low cost adaptors; 25% is still a lot in a country so large.
Such a move will come - or if not a move to all-HD, certainly to HD technologies, like H.264 and (outside the US) DVB-T2 - in order to save bandwidth, but it will be slower than you think.
Telenet's pissed off a lot of their customers; I doubt other operators are in a rush to follow suit, and governments won't be keen to tell people - espeically the old ones who vote - that the box they bought for switchover just a few years ago is going to be useless very soon, and they'll have to buy another one.
Operators that supply equipment with their subscription services are best placed to do this; the could upscale all SD material and use HEVC or H.264 to save bandwidth, and many are only dishing out HD-capable kit anyway. I suspect even those will wait a while, gradually swapping out SD-only receivers as they fail, before embarking on anything as radical as a mass replacement scheme.
Well, it is theoretically possible to broadcast 4K over terrestrial, using DVB-T2 and the HEVC codec; the BBC have run tests of that. But longterm, it's extremely unlikely to happen because of the bandwidth squeeze. It's going to be hard enough to maintain the current level of service as the mobile providers snaffle up more of the space as it is...
On satellite, all the major platforms have plans for 4K and there are already some test streams on Astra. Of course, you're going to need 4K receivers for that too, which I expect we'll see more of over the coming year or so - especially once the DVB group has firmed up specs.
Astra for has quite a few new satellites coming on stream, so there should be a reasonable amount of capacity for 4K transmissions.
As ever, you can probably expect that the majority of these will be premium services from subscription companies like Sky, with maybe the odd "Oh wow look at the Olympics in 4K" type of thing from some PSBs.
... but the Wizard of Oz did come out in 1939, so was around 75 years old at the time of the story.
I would venture that sheer age (as with Casablanca and Gone With The Wind) is a pretty significant factor. Those films have had at least three times as long to embed themselves in the collective consciousness as those at the start of the 25 year period suggested in the paper.
I wonder if quantity of releases in any given time frame makes a difference, or other factors - for example, It's a Wonderful Life wasn't immediately a massive success, but a subsequent copyright lapse made it a TV staple, and probably resulted in more people knowing of it, and so citing it.
The Wizard of Oz, which is way ahead in the number of citations has, as far as I know, been pretty successful for most of its time. It's been a pretty constant presence on TV for a lot of my life, it seems.
Were the majority of films in technicolour at the time of its release? Were there as many films being made in 1939 as there are now?
Certainly, you might hypothesise that with no TV around at the time of its release, films could perhaps make a bigger impact on their viewers than they do now, when visual entertainment is available at the click of a button.
Also, I see King Kong is in the list at number six. I wonder if the citations for that include Twinkle.
I was one of the founder subscribers to Demon. It grew out of a conference on Cix called "tenner_a_month"
From memory (and it was a long night last night in Dublin, so forgive any errors)
Essentially Cliff Stanford of Demon realised that if a group of people each contributed a tenner a month, it would be possible to afford TCP/IP connectivity to the Demon office, and then provide access to it using SLIP or PPP.
The original plan may have called for a direct link to the US; however, Pipex announced the launch of the commercial TCP/IP service, and so Demon ended up with a leased line from them.
For people who've been around Demon for that long, you might remember there was originally a limit of 8 characters for your Demon host name. All except one, which was nine characters long, and caused no end of trouble with special exceptions in scripts. Because I pestered Cliff and asked nicely, he let me have stonewall.demon.co.uk
That was, pretty much, the start of domestic internet access as we know it today; there had been other things, like CompuServe, and the IBM PC User Group's service, whose name escapes me. But it was essentially a UUCP-based email system wrapped up in some Windows software.
(In the past, I've done odd bits of work for Demon and the IBMPCUG; perhaps I should plunder my memories of some of that for more Reg pieces).
Lots of reasons. Some can certainly be laid at the door of the left's favourite bogeywoman, but not all, I think.
Housing density does have an impact; those figures in the article for Seoul show not only a massive rate of building, but a big change in the type of tenure. The English, historically, tend to deisre houses far more than flats/apartments. So, to provide fibre to the 250 or so houses in the street where I live, for example, means a lot of bits of fibre, and a lot of work
If all those dwellings were in a block (or even a substantial chunk of them), putting fibre into the block would provide high speed residential service to everyone. Yes, if they wanted a direct fibre connection, there would still be 250 outlets, but more alternatively - as companies like Ask4 do - you would provide Ethernet in each dwelling, and it would still be faster.
As well as housing density, tenure has an impact, too. Most apartment buildings in England are leasehold, rather than commonhold. When I looked at this back on PCW, one of the points made to me (may have been by Ask4; I'd have to dig out the notes) was that to provide service to a whole building, once it's been built, you have to conclude a separate legal agreement with every single person. That's why it's much easier to put this sort of stuff in with new build, when you can just deal with the developer. Even in social housing, you have to do that, because of the council house sales (see, there's Maggie again), so a block is no longer owned just by one organisation.
Putting stuff into new build would, on the face of it, be one of the easiest ways of moving stuff along. But we just aren't building homes at anything like the rate we need them. And the ones we do build are all too often designed more as investment vehicles than anything else. Much as people who work in our big cities might long for genuinely affordable flats with great connectivity built in, they're not going to get them when it's easier for housing companies to make swanky pads that can be used by wealth investors to make a killing or launder their ill-gotten cash.
As others have mentioned, there are issues with the regulation in the UK, which is constantly struggling to enforce competition because that's apparently a universal good, even if it means that the major operator is disadvantaged and may be less likely to invest (the consumers, it seems, don't actually come into it, beyond some policy wonk saying "but competition always works in the best interest of consumers"
Sorting out the broadband in the UK isn't, in my view, simply a technical matter, or one of investment in the right technology. It is bound up with our dysfunctional housing system, rampant short-termism in the markets, and a regulatory regime that concerns itself more with dogma than with outcomes for the consumer.
I used ISDN myself for telephony until just a few years ago. I had the a range of 10 MSNs, which made working from home much easier - numbers for work, personal, really personal, and so on. It all ran through a Euracom 141 ISDN PBX, which allowed me to use analogue phones in some rooms, and I had a few ISDN ones as well.
But, of course, BT's pricing - as ever - was annoying. And when anything went wrong, their engineers seemed utterly flummoxed by the presence of ISDN2e in a residential building; one time they cut it off themselves, because they were doing a different job (which hadn't actually been ordered) and since there was no dial tone in their cans for the ISDN pair, they assumed it was free for reuse.
In the end, the Euracom died after a power cut, and by that time it was feasible to port the MSNs across to a SIP service, so now I have them all coming in via two SIP trunk channels on my ADSL, and pay a fraction of what I used to pay BT.
The Fritz boxes are handy; I use one of them as a VoIP/Analogue gateway to my entry phone (wrote about that in Breaking Fad a while back), and for a while also used it to drive some of the old ISDN phones following my switch to SIP, while I hunted around for decent VoIP handsets.
Nice idea, however they seldom manage to put their foot down when it comes to existing rules on affordable housing, so don't go holding your breath.
The glacial pace of housebuilding in the UK, and our relatively low housing density are both holding back deployment, I think.
Even if you pay by BACS with BT, you still have to pay the surcharge - it's about screwing the customer, not about covering the costs of their payments. And given the horrific overcharging I've suffered from BT in the past, I refused to let them dive into my bank account at will.
In the end, fed up with the extra fees for a line I never even use, which slowly edged the price up towards the £20 a month level, I had the phone service unbundled and taken over by my ISP as well.
Incidentally, my understanding is that - originally at least - payment services companies were a super duper VAT wheeze (certainly in the way supermarkets used to use them). I'm not sure if hole's plugged now.
Freeview itself is, essentially, just a marketing operation for free to air TV. For the vast majority of receivers, they have no way of monitoring what people are watching, because there is no return channel available, or if available actually connected.
The main purpose of Freeview initially was to ease the transition to digital (and, to a degree, to ensure that the primary channels maintained their pre-eminence in a digital landscape).
It's now, especially after some of the escapades of the past, also involved more in helping set standards, to ensure that kit marked with their logo performs in the way expected, and gives a consistent experience for users (channels in the same place, trailer booking works, audio description supported, and so on). But the end game is the same - to ensure there is a free to air TV service built around the PSBs.
The only sense in which Freeview gets money from advertisers is in that it is part-funded by the broadcasters, who themselves get money from advertising, in most cases. In terms of the service they offer to you, the consumer, there is no fee.
You could argue that then that makes you the product, but unlike people who data mine, that's only in the sense that they are delivering your eyeballs to the programmes made by people on the platform.
If Freeview kit was reporting home about what people are watching, I rather think someone would have noticed by now.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
