Posts by noideas

UK on track to miss even its slashed full-fibre gigabit coverage goals, warn MPs

Fibre for local people

I am fortunate to live in a recent development which has ducted cable right up to the housse. Openreach were around at all hours of the day and night this Summer connecting fibre up to and including the access chamber right in front of my house. This came out of the blue and they seem to have fibred up most of our small Somerset town AFIK. I don't know what we have done to deserve this honour though I'm not complaining. The village a few miles up the road where I used to live was blessed with FTTC about 6 years ago.

I already have a FTTC line which delivered about 30 Mbit/s up load (until BT unilaterally "up graded" me to Halo whereupon it dropped to a "guaranteed" 25 Mbit/s) which is plenty enough for my needs. I held out till I was offered transfer to 100 Mbit/s FTTP at no extra cost and now have an Openreach visit set for the New Year, but it won't make much difference to me other than to keep up with my son in Canada who has had fibre for years and keeps telling me how wonderful it is. I certainly wouldn't want to pay more for the faster options from BT. I get that some folk and businesses really need gigabit speeds but as others have pointed out fast enough is fast enough. Political w*lly waving on the other hand demands a snappy headline.

Rolls-Royce, Airbus, Siemens tease electric flight engine project

Elementary dear readers

This test bed ticks a lot of boxes in the aviation world at the moment. Aircraft are swapping hydraulic power for electrical power (especially the military who want power for laser weapons and such like) so there is great interest in high output electrical generators. There is a lot of interest in electric propulsion, whether as a primary or supplementary source, though its anybody's guess as to how effective it would be in practice for other than niche applications. Finally, there is concern over the corona effect and other issues with running Mw of power around an airframe.

If the three partners involved in this project were not doing this their investors would be asking why not!

Adpocalypse 'will wipe out display ad growth' by 2020

Is it just me ....

... or has the World gone mad? Why would I want to pay to not see something that I don't want to see in the first place? There is little point in flinging ads at me because I don't take any notice of them - whether they are on a hoarding, in a newspaper, on the television or on the Interweb. Adblockers to me are the equivalent of being signed up to the telephone preference service (a fat lot of good that does though). If I am forced to dodge web adverts I will probably stop viewing content that carries too much of this dross.

F-Secure makes SENSE of smart home IoT insecurities

Re: Interesting but flawed

I don't think that the underlying concept is flawed - it means that you do not need to rely on your vast array of internet thingies being indivuidually protected. The real questions in my mind are whether it would actually work and whether your average numpty could operate it successfully.

BT commences trials of copper-to-the-home G.fast broadband tech

Re: Here I am promised "60-70" getting 20-30...

I must be the lucky one. BT not only snuck in FTTC in our village well before the half-promised date, but having signed up for Infinity 1 I am getting the full 40Mbps up and 10 Mbps down (8X better than I had before) after being "guaranteed" 35 Mbps. I could apparently get Infinity 2 at double the speed, but didn't fancy spending the extra £7 per month for the privilege. It helps that I am only about 100 m from the cabinet and my phone line goes pretty well directly to it on an overhead wire. Those further down the road have been promised much less, though presumably better than they get at the moment.

Apart from better Skype performance and the ability to stream HD on my video box the extra speed doesn't seem to make that much difference to web browsing performance, so paying a premium for 330 Mbps doesn't seem like a great deal for the domestic user (except perhaps when the family come to stay with their iPads, phones etc.).