Re: Works as designed.
Pronounced as "Designed in a tent".
43 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Dec 2013
Vodafone 2G/GPRS service is in use by huge number of M2M devices - most of them in the SIM cards installed in car satnavs.
While these are still out there in sufficient numbers Vodafone will be reluctant to decommission 2G. The new/next generation M2M devices support 4G, ideally 5G?
I don't think anybody would really want their voice calls to fall back to 2G - limited Codecs supported and quality was pretty bad!
"Lawful intercept" is a thing, and has been a thing for decades.
Here is a Cisco overview (though from 2008):
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/routers/10000/10008/feature/guides/lawful_intercept/10LIovr.html
So Huawei will have had the REQUIREMENT to have something similar in any high-end routers.
Whether they built any nefarious ones in? Personally I doubt it - I'd bet on sloppy code or significant misunderstandings.
Regarding FTTP in rural areas.... suspending fibre from posts is the cheap solution. And it's being done in many rural areas eg Fastershire serving Herefordshire and Gloucestershire.
I'm guessing it may actually be more economic to string fibre for several hundreds of meters rather than up/down every suburban pavement?
I think the India requirement is originally to do with voice - India is divided into 22 Circles, and different licenses/telecom operators in each. So there was roaming issues if you lived in one circle but regularly visited your family in another, plus also sometimes operators offered deals. I think the Indian's were generally very careful with their phone usage/billing.
Last time I looked the customers of BT's FTTP/B products were likes of Hyperoptic (Oh, yes, "full fibre all the way" - mostly from BT - and then Cat6 inside the Multi-Dwelling Unit) and also Mobile network operators such as Vodafone for their backhaul. These operators will likely squeal like crazy - while hoping to get alternative solutions from other operators such as Virgin Media Business?
The Irish have actually done their thinking, their planning, and their execution of their plans to bypass the UK over the last few years. The use of the UK as a "land bridge" to the Continent much reduced.
From March 2019:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/brexit-buster-sister-ship-begins-sailings-to-mainland-europe-1.3842933
From May 2020:
https://theloadstar.com/port-of-cork-wins-new-transatlantic-deepsea-call-on-icl-service/
Well worth looking up Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by economist Carlo M Cippola.
He defined a "Stupid Person" as someone who repeatedly behaved in a manner which harmed everyone for no personal gain to themselves. So more based on behaviours rather than any ability to pass an IQ test.
And there are more Stupid People around than you'd imagine (for UK I'd say a first approximation could be 17.4m or maybe 13.9m?)
Rishi Sunak - non-entity??? Sunak's wife is Akshata Murthy, the daughter of Indian billionaire and co-founder of Infosys, N. R. Narayana Murthy.
I think he'll know a thing or two about IT outsourcing and contractors. If he hasn't an agenda already, he'll soon be given one.
Newtonian physics... well yeah, but I would guess most of the difficulty is solving second order differential equations. And for this they could have used Analogue Computers instead they went Digital I think because of weight constraints. Bit like giving up on a hammer drill and using a penknife?
Hunting Boomerangs - apparently called kylies can take out a kangaroo or parrot at about 100m according to Wikipedia. So must be capable of taking down a drone with minimal risk of collateral damage? Just need someone trained in throwing them.
Or what about Killer Drones? Surely you just have a bigger, more powerful drone. Equip it with Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence... powered from the Cloud... and just get it to perform a quick hard reset on the intruding drone?
And Robert's your mother's brother.
I was introduced to Skyscanner by a work colleague in the early 2000's - so presumably soon after it was launched. Pretty unimpressed at the time.
Then in early 2014 I needed to book a (business) flight to Barcelona - I tried Skyscanner after a couple of work colleagues said that was how they have been arranging flights. Wow.. impressed.. took me though to a ticket agency and I got some decent flights.
However since then, whenever I've tried using Skyscanner I have been disappointed. Is it just my impression or has Skyscanner passed it's peak? And if so.. £1.4bn is a nice little stash for the owners.
1) The Yuan has been kept low to encourage exports/discourage imports into China.
2) Chinese Central Bank has essentially kept it's reserves in US$ and in the US. Built up by accepting the $$$$ from the Chinese exporters.
3) If the Yuan was allowed to rise in value then these assets are correspondingly devalued.
4) Therefore it's virtually unthinkable for the Chinese Central Bank to allow the Yuan to rise.
BIG problem....
Worth noting that the victories at Trafalgar and then Waterloo ... THANKS in part to people from other countries:
"The crews of the ships that fought at Trafalgar included sailors from America, Ireland, Prussia, Sweden, the West Indies, Africa, and even France and Spain against whom the British were fighting. On Nelson's ship HMS Victory there were 22 nationalities involved in fighting on the British side."
Ditto at Waterloo..
200+ years later we think we can be great standing on our own? Errr no.
I would suspect that VM will be borrowing in £ in the city. [Indeed probably borrowing in the city to provide funds for other parts of LG - shipped though some Luxembourg type arrangement (?), and using interest payments made in the UK to offset/reduce their profits to zero - thereby paying no UK corporation tax.]
But ultimately LG reports its financials in $, so these will be negatively impacted as will any dividends paid to US investors.
All those companies (NTL, Telewest etc..) laid HFC = Hybrid Fibre Coax, so it was only fibre in the aggregation network, then a fibre node to convert to Coax cable to your home. And it was all analogue. Now it's digital.
NOBODY puts Coax in the ground anymore.
Project Lightening is laying modern fibre to the home. I think they are genuinely extending their coverage. Though I think much of it will still behave like HFC (RFoG). I would suspect they want/need better coverage to increase their potential number of customers (Homes Reached To Marketing) and compete with Sky and BT. Not sure how the reported price increases will help them though!
Just a minor correction: It's Liberty MEDIA are taking over control of F1. This is a US/media company. Liberty GLOBAL is an international telecoms company - mostly Cable, mostly Europe+South America. The latter was spun out from the former, though both are still controlled through special shares by John Malone.
Nicely written - inflammatory and humorous - article, but I am not convinced El Reg has its facts quite straight.
An article on IP Watch (OK, probably batting for the Sony-side of this argument) gives a more complete view. http://www.ip-watch.org/2016/09/15/wifi-providers-can-be-forced-to-require-passwords-on-rightsholder-request-ecj-rules/
To me this says that a rights holder can ask for an injunction on someone operating an open Wifi hotspot to secure their internet connection by means of a password.
So Mr Sony et al, are you going to order all open wifi hotspot operators to secure their internet connections? Really? One-by-one! Nah.. so most of the little guys will carry on BAU. At least I hope so!
As for the bigger hotspot operators - eg BT, Sky/The Cloud, or Virgin Media/Arqiva Wifi are already authenticating users.
I too had a 2008 Toyota with a D4D with the DPF fitted (a T-180 Avensis). And yes, MPG would peak at 38MPG, usually averaging about 33MPG. Much worse than the older Avensis with same engine, but without the DPF. Unimpressed.
In hindsight I think the problem was a gradual build up of soot in the EGR valve/Exhaust manifold - strip it and clean this and people claim that MPG > 40MPG can be achieved. Should have been a service item?
So were Toyota being incompetent, and/or unethical towards their customers?
VW engineers clearly were competent but highly unethical with their cheat devices.
And even if Ofcom were to judge VM to have Significant Market Power (SMP) in Fixed Broadband services, I believe it's very difficult to unbundle an HFC-based network.
ACM (the Dutch regulator) is keen to impose some requirement on Ziggo to unbundle, but there seems to be many technical hurdles that nobody is very motivated to overcome.
I've just been reading "The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became A Tax Haven For Fat Cats And Big Business" by Richard Brooks. It's a good read, written by an ex-tax inspector doing some investigative journalism.
However it's hard to actually comprehend how all this tax avoidance malachy is actually done - it really does seem to be down to big business and accountants working with HMRC to set favourable, and highly complex tax laws which allow multi-nationals to circumvent paying much (any?) company tax.
Gives multi-national companies an even bigger advantage over small/medium sized businesses.
What I'd like to see on the next "fleet" of business laptops is:
a) Bluetooth enabled (maybe even properly secured - if that's possible?) so that I use a Bluetooth mouse directly instead of a silly little USB dongle
b) Windows 10 - with Miracast. So somehow you can use Miracast to connect a laptop to those big screen/projectors in meeting room. So no more palaver with HDMI cables, or God forbid those old VGA cables with the bent pins!
Well, OK.. I guess you are entitled to your viewpoint :-) And I hope do you know that big companies like Google/FaceBook actually support Net Neutrality because that way the telco's are not allowed to charge them for carrying traffic originating on their servers. They don't want to pay what you are calling a bribe.
But I'm not arging for/against Net Neutrality here. And I'm certainly in favour of Human Rights.
Just please, please don't waste your time on CoE declarations on Net Neutrality.
Rather pay attention to the Consilium and http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2015/07/08-roaming-charges/ You'll see - in the EU at least - we're heading towards a "Weak" Net Neutrality. The complications are to do with what's "reasonable traffic management", and what exactly is a "specialised service".
Oh, and BTW this stuff struggling down the EU track is framed as a "Regulation" rather than a "Directive" which means it becomes EU-wide law without having to be passed at the Member State level.
Please note that he "Council of Europe" has NOTHING to do with the European Union.
The CoE is a body that represents 47 European Countries. It has more to do with Human Rights - and it includes the European Court of Justice. Concerned about freedom of expression - so WTF do such people know about Net Neutrality? As long as someone can access FaceBook or Reddit - with some degree of privacy/anonymity - their job is done!
Net Neutrality, and overall digital/telco regulation, within the EU is for EU bodies to legislate on. And yes, they've been struggling with Net Neutrality legislation for the last 2-3 years. And they are more concerned about Customer protection and balancing European investments, than human rights.
Note: the two executive EU bodies are the Council of Ministers and the Consilium, supported by the bureaucarts in the European Commission, and with the European Court of Justice being the judiciary.
Much of the "science" of market research is built on the election polling industry - all going back to George Gallup as far as I understand.The dismal performance of the pollsters in GE2015 makes me wonder whether market research should now be rebased on weather forecasting - after all the science, or at least the mathematical models they have, seems to be improving!
I doubt that it was anything so, so COTS as those!
From what I can see it's probably a Frequentis VCS 3020X system that was at fault.
One of these systems http://tinyurl.com/oplnucd
And I think relatively widely deployed? Although possibly each system has to be customized?