Posts by Tom

Panic in smartphoneland

Demand for mobile data

If they are so concerned that no-one is using the Internet on their phone, maybe they should make it cheaper...? The main barrier to me using it is the ridiculous cost. This is especially true for "casual" users who aren't going to buy some bulk data access package - we're the ones who end up paying £3/MB or something similar.

Bank of Scotland blames human error in data screw-up

Encryption

Mad Mike, when you were getting your information out of that Computer Science textbook, you obviously didn't look in the "practical uses" section, where you would see that you can indeed break the encryption, as long as you have a few hundred years spare.

BT declares ceasefire in broadband speed wars

Oh dear

I'm a bit worried by these comments. First of all, BT are saying that the entire UK wants exactly the same thing from their home broadband - which they DON'T.

Second, while I agree that the majority of people don't currently need as much as 8Mbps, that doesn't mean that this isn't going to change. All these applications and services they are talking about are going to consume a lot of bandwidth, and the requirement is only going to increase over the next few years, as people decide they want to use 3 or 4 of these things simultaneously. With this in mind, I see that their 21CN programme has my exchange pencilled in for "Q4 2010". So I could get 24Mbps by 2010, while countries like France and Korea already have this now, and must be laughing at us. 21st Century Network indeed.