Tech Digest

Carphone Warehouse buys out AOL UK, becomes UKs 3rd largest ISP: silly name though

The Carphone Warehouse have bought out the UK subsidiary of AOL in a deal worth £370m. It's a somewhat bizarre merger in my view.

Even the names are odd. Take "America Online" but operating in the UK, and merge it with "Carphone Warehouse" whose name was compromised even by selling ordinary mobile phones, letalone branching into broadband and fixed-line phone services.

As to reputation: Well AOL has always been the butt of jokes at its questionable service (sending out landfill quantities of free trial CDs didn't help much either), and the Carphone Warehouse has recently had a ton of complaints to good old BBC Watchdog for being a potential death trap - err, well OK not quite, but for providing a shoddy broadband service.

A merger?? Whoa. I bet AOL UK's 2.1m subscribers are pleased...

Quite who's going to inherit and maintain the AOL broadband connections I'm not sure yet. AOL are still advertising their services profusely, so presumably the companies are still going to keep their individual branding. There'll be a degree of input from AOL/Time Warner in terms of content provision and advertising revenue sharing. CW will continue to charge AOL subscribers in the same way they are billed at present.

However it works, the deal will initially put CW in 3rd place, behind NTL:Telewest and BT, of residential Internet Service Providers.

What do you reckon to this deal? Good news or a mess?

Rent the Geek Squad for your home IT problems

The rise in home technology and high-speed broadband connections is apparently leading to problems when customers are left to their own devices (no pun intended). Sign up for broadband and, apart from an installation CD and some skimpy instructions, you'll probably be left with the modem or router and expected to set it all up yourself.

Now, for many, that's not a problem (in fact I'd rather do it myself to save the embarrassment of showing off my untidy working environment to a telecoms engineer) but to appeal to customers who have little time or expertise, and some cash to spare, many companies are setting up on-call engineers.

BT will charge you £50 if you want an engineer to come round and plug in the USB or Ethernet cable between your PC and modem. The Carphone Warehouse have set up a 'Geek Squad' and PC World have 'TechGuys'.

You can be sure there'll be some premium prices around, so if you're the techie person in your family, you may start getting more calls from your technophobe relatives when they realise how much it'll cost to hire a corporate geek for the day. They can use you instead - you only charge a beer or two, don't you?

It's a nice little moneyspinner for the companies, at least.

Mac gets Skype 2.0 beta: free video calls beckon

Mac users are now able to catch up a little with a free download of version 2.0 (beta) of the Skype software. This adds the option of free video calling to other Skype users with a webcam, regardless of their operating system.

These one-on-one video calls can be viewed within the Skype window or in full screen mode. There's also another window so the user can see their own appearance.

Skype have always claimed that their system just works, without messing with settings and hassles with firewalls and such like. Though Apple have been pushing their own multi-chat video system through iChat AV, that's only really good for connecting multiple Mac users. Not many of my friends have Macs (shame) so having Skype with video should make it a lot easier.

Then again, I'm not sure I always want my friends to see me on video...

It needs a G4, G5 or Intel processor running at least 800MHz, and obviously a webcam, as well as the usual requirements. Hopefully beta doesn't equate with unstable - but there's always version 1.5 to fall back on if it does prove unreliable.

Skype web site

Vodafone to offer fixed-line broadband deals in the UK before Christmas

A little later than most of the competition, Vodafone has announced it is to launch fixed-line broadband services in the UK, along with combined mobile/broadband deals. The mobile giant has announced a deal with BT Wholesale to provide the broadband service, which should launch before the end of the year.

According to Nick Read, Chief Executive of Vodafone UK: "Today's announcement is a strategically important step in the evolution of Vodafone's business in the UK.  Choosing BT as our partner enables us to provide high quality fixed-line broadband services to customers quickly and cost-efficiently right across the UK, and this perfectly complements our national mobile coverage and mobile broadband service. This news is further evidence of Vodafone delivering on its strategy and providing its customers with a total communications solution wherever they are."

In other words, if you're a Vodafone customer, expect a competitive price deal for your landline and mobile through the letterbox before Christmas.

Vodafone website

More broadband:
Sign up with Virgin Mobile - get free Virgin broadband
Carphone Warehouse "free broadband" - demand means long wait

Virgin Mobile launch free broadband offer

Not to be outdone by everyone else offering free broadband for a year so long as you take some other service offering, Virgin will be offering free broadband to anyone who signs up for a new Virgin SIM-only mobile contract at £15 or £30 per month. The broadband service on its own would cost £17.99 per month for 8Mb download speed and 6Gb monthly usage allowance.

As there's no contract for a Virgin mobile, if you actually want a mobile phone and broadband and don't have either, you could sign up, take the year of mobile use and get the free broadband, and then either scrap the phone or the broadband after the year if you find another deal. Of course, they'll hope that you won't.

I'm no great fan of these 'free' offerings but then I tend to shop around for each service individually without going for bundles like this.

Sign up with Virgin Mobile - get free Virgin broadband

  Another week, another free broadband offer - this time, courtesy of Virgin Mobile (now, of course, under the NTL:Telewest brand), which is offering free high-speed access with Virgin.net if you sign up to a Virgin Mobile monthly deal.

The deal seems fairly straightforward - if you sign up top one of Virgin Mobile's SIM-only pay monthly tariffs, you will be offered a year's worth of up to 8Mbps broadband, a service that would normally cost £17.99. The offer is available between now and 31st October. Once your SIM is activated, you can get the free broadband service by dialling a number you'll be given.

Last month, NTL:Telewest launched Britain's first quad-play service, offering digital TV, broadband, fixed-line phone and a mobile phone deal from Virgin for £40.

Virgin Mobile

Via The Register

Boeing Axes In-Flight Internet

Here’s some more bad news for travellers, Boeing has just announced that it is scrapping its Connexion division, which was behind the plane-maker’s in-flight Internet service. Boeing has spent upwards of $1.5billion over the past six years rolling out the satellite-based system and users were mostly enthusiastic but clearly there weren’t enough of them and according to The Seattle Times Business & Technology report it just didn’t bring in enough revenue to make it viable and it will close down by the end of the year.

Kids' favourites to kick off BT Vision broadband TV service

Perhaps BT are hoping to appeal to young families with the announcement that its soon-to-be-launched BT Vision broadband TV service will feature Basil Brush and Postman Pat, in just one of a collection of deals BT have struck with content providers.

Oasis will also be making some kind of appearance on the new service (presumably not launching it in a grown-up version of how the Spice Girls opened Channel Five)

Actually, the service will air Oasis: Live by the Sea and Duran Duran: Live at Wembley.

There's a few comedies and documentaries in the offing too, including Doc Martin and Rosemary: Queen of the Kitchen. Err, yeah OK. And we already know we'll get time-delayed coverage of selected Premiership matches.

BT Vision will be non-subscription based, with some content on a pay-per-view basis, though it sounds as if customers will have to cough up about £100 for the set-top box, plus of course they'll need BT Broadband.

What do you think about BT Vision? Does it sound like a worthy competitor to standalone Freeview, Sky and Telewest, or are BT a bit late to the party?

Read

Monday interview: RawFlow on why Peer-to-Peer technologies will revolutionise webcasting as we know it

Peer-to-Peer technology isn't just about cheerfully downloading the new Justin Timberlake album from some bloke in Greenland. Really. In fact, P2P could be the gateway to watching legal, full-screen webcasts from big broadcasters and media companies.

At least this is the view of RawFlow, a provider of, you guessed it, live P2P streaming technology. So why are the concepts that powered Napster, Kazaa, BitTorrent and co now being taken up by Big Media? Tech Digest talked to RawFlow's Mikkel Dissing and Ian Keeling to find out.

The problem with current video streaming technologies is that they're costly for the content providers, says Keeling. “Right now, when you broadcast over the Internet, there’s a success penalty. Every new audience member incurs a cost for the broadcaster in terms of bandwidth and server capacity."

His view is that this is why webcasting hasn't taken off properly yet. In a layman's nutshell, RawFlow's P2P technology harnesses the unused bandwidth of internet users to provide more efficient streaming, and lower the costs for broadcasters.

 

The firm is ultra-keen to make a couple of things clear, however. Firstly, this is a live streaming service, it’s not about downloading stuff. And secondly, this isn’t piracy – a stigma that Keeling says has been attached to P2P technology since Napster was in its heyday.

“It’s live, and it’s not possible for an end user to capture the content,” says Keeling. “You consume the content, and it’s gone. It doesn’t download onto your computer, so you can’t pass it on or share it in any way.”

Rawflow’s technology also supports full copy protection technologies as well as ‘geo-locking’ – where webcasts can only be viewed by users with an IP address in a specific country or territory. That’s great news for Big Media, but what's the benefit to us consumers sitting in front of our PCs?

“The bottom line is that now, if you’re an end user who wants to watch video on the Internet, chances are you’re watching it in a small window not much bigger than a business card, and if lots of people log on, you get buffering and jittering,” says Keeling.

“P2P is a more efficient way of using bandwidth, so if a broadcaster invests £100,000 in webcasting a music concert, rather than watching this little window, you could be watching it full-screen. And because P2P is more cost efficient, they don’t have to roll the costs of the webcast onto you, the consumer.”

Keeling says there’s a big surge in the number of large broadcasters and media firms who want to use P2P technology for live streaming, naming the BBC, Disney and Warner Brothers as examples. However, CEO Mikkel Dissing says that P2P streaming also suits smaller companies who want to broadcast online, but haven’t been able to afford the bandwidth before.

“Say you were Swindon football club, there’s no way you’d be interesting enough for Rupert Murdoch to put you on the Sky platform,” he says. “But that’s the beautiful thing about the Internet, as you can do it yourself. But it’s not been affordable for a lot of these smaller broadcasters and companies before.”

With that in mind, RawFlow has just announced a new tool called QuickStart, aimed at small-to-medium sized broadcasters, media companies and presumably home counties football clubs. The results will hopefully be an explosion in niche webcasting.

But back to Big Media. In its dealings with broadcasters, Keeling says he has seen a number of them loosen up when it comes to their attitude towards copy protection and digital rights management.

“We’re seeing content owners be a lot more relaxed about how content is being used,” says Keeling. “The biggest earner is advertising, so the more people you can get in front of your content, the better.”

To take the example of a music concert, this might mean that you could live stream a gig, which when it finishes downloads to your computer, although you'll have to pay to watch it again. Or you might be able to share it with friends, although again, they'll have to pay to watch the whole thing. There's still plenty of work to be done though in convincing the Hollywood studios and record labels to make full use of P2P.

 

“We see ourselves as spokespeople for P2P,” says Dissing. “We want to convince people that it’s not bad, it’s good. And in my opinion, it’s the only way the Internet can become a broadcast medium. There’s no way you can build proper business models around a model where every single new viewer costs more money than you can demand.”

Post Office looking to enter UK broadband market

Oh no, not another company looking to offer broadband? Yep, the Post Office is apparently looking at ways to introduce broadband to UK homes. They already offer a BT-competing phone service, and look like they want to expand that and offer high-speed Internet access at the same time.

I'm all for competition but this is starting to get ridiculous. I suppose it's vaguely ironic, nearly 25 years on, that the Post Office is seeking to compete with British Telecom, given the history. But anyway, to the bigger picture, why does every company now seem to think broadband needs to be a core part of its business?

Still, it keeps the broadband comparison websites in business. I'm just waiting for those little Post Office ants to start running around my TV shouting about the Internet. Joy.