…getting back to the issue of onboard broadband Will Knott believes Irish Rail are missing the opportunity to make a lot of money, “and the mobile carriers are missing out by leaving ‘coverage holes’ on the route.”. Conor O’Neill has been documenting those coverage holes on both the O2 and Vodafone networks and while O2 is the winner of his tests it’s clear that neither option is satisfactory.

Frankly, I do not believe for a second this is an opportunity to make a lot of money. While it may be convenient for those of us who do jump on the train and need to work for the 2 hours from Belfast to Dublin or the 3-4 hours from Dublin to Cork, it’s not going to be an earner.

Why?

Without some sort of mesh network, with a node every 100 m or so, protected from the hooligans and yobs on the way, there’s no way to ensure a connection the whole way. And it’s the yobs and hooligans who ruin it really.

IrishBroadband’s wireless broadband would seem to me to be the most obvious contender against the 3G networks of the carriers but then again, there’s no sense of competition there. If a 3G carrier could offer me broadband using a dongle with some reliability, I’d not use a landline based broadband!

The 3G network USB dongles available from most phone carriers would seem to be the cheapest way to go though when I tested one the other day, I got speeds that I would expect from GPRS which did not enamor me of their services: in fact, my iPhone was able to render pages faster than a dual-core laptop on 3G from Three (in a Three store). That’s pretty crap.

Anyone seen good speeds on a 3G network dongle?

A new knowledgebase page from Apple:

If you are using Wi-Fi on iPhone or iPod touch and you experience unexpected results when tapping the Location button in Maps, you can refer the respective wireless router administrator to the following URL to update information that Skyhook has about the wireless router’s information:
http://skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/submit_ap.php

This riffs off the last post. If you enter in these details, are you implying that you are permitting others to use the MAC/hardware address of your wireless router to help locate themselves.

I caught this piece on Radio 4’s “You and Yours” last Thursday. I was so incensed by the lack of balance they were giving the issue of people accessing open wifi networks that I went back and listened again.
…
The Home Office call it “theft of bandwidth” and that “stealing that internet space is potentially an offence under the Computer Misuse Act and Communications Act”

The penalty is up to 5 years in prison!

I think that Darryl agrees with me when I suggest that anyone running a Wireless network in 2008 should reasonably be expected to secure their network to their desires. I wrote about it here and here.

As I said:

Next they’ll be arresting people for illegally smelling the perfume and aftershave of people as they walk past. Or illegally hearing conversations spoken aloud in a public place.

The government are taking this very seriously of course and have assigned someone to look after all of this. He has to, of course, be utterly out of his depth when talking about technology. Days like this make me want to become a politician. But not that much.

Careful, Darryl, your blog could be considered an admission of guilt.

Here’s the details.

Hot on the heels of Auntie releasing a selection of videos for sale via the iTunes Store, we somehow missed yesterday’s sneaky revelation that the BBC is intending to release some form of the BBC iPlayer for iPod touch and iPhone ‘in the coming weeks.’

iPlayer is a mixed bag. For Windows users you can stream Flash versions or download DRM-laden episodes of your favourite BBC content for offline viewing. For Mac users, there’s just the streaming option.

So what does this mean for iPhone/iPod touch users?

I reckon it means that they’ll do a Youtube and re-encode their iPlayer content into H.264 so that we can watch it over WiFi. I do not believe for a second that the BBC will re-encode and allow us to download content to our iPods. I’d certainly be more impressed with an iPlayer application for iPhone and would actually use it. In comparison, the Youtube player in my iPhone is seldom used because, frankly, Youtube is crap for anything other than showing people the “This is Karate” or “The Baron” sketches from Blunt.

Of course I don’t expect the BBC to do more than that but consider sitting anywhere there’s WiFi and catching up with last nights Eastenders or watching the so-far extremely compelling “Ashes to Ashes” (episode 2 expires today). This is why we pay our license fees, so we can have content on demand, over the t’internet, delivered to our desktops and handhelds.

He’s right, of course. There is a disconnect between what is happening and what the “gubmint” thinks is happening. When you see people organising themselves for events because there’s a dearth of adequate direction from our governmental overseers, then you know there’s money being wasted. I was told categorically by InvestNI that the technology investment model they were pursuing was to invite large technology and creative companies over here to presumably fill the large empty warehouses they built a few years ago. That’s also effectively sounding a death knell to any SMALL companies that are looking for funding. This somewhat mirrors the experience I had with InvestNI the first time round where they told me they weren’t investing in IT-style companies at all, nomatter the service or business model. Ouch.

So, David, what do we need? We need a building or a room at least. We need broadband. We need light, heat, power. I’m less concerned on the creative industries because, frankly, they get enough help. I know one company funded entirely by the Arts Council. They’re unlikely to give an IT company anything

Let’s get a list, check it twice and see how much it costs. My company will pledge a percentage of the costs of a co-working space assuming we get that far!

They’re also looking for some Professional Mac users who might want to show off a demo of what they do with their Macs. Or why they use the tools they do.

Anyone fancy a few minutes of free advertising?

First they LIED about the activation date for the line itself and now they can’t give us any forecast of when the line will be made available to broadband.

They claim to have no idea.

What’s more: BT reckon that my entirely NON-rural address should be capable of a maximum of a 256 kilobit download speed.

I’m completely underwhelmed.

[ UPDATE: I will have broadband in 7-10 days. Whoop de frigging doo. At a seat-of-pants-tearing 512Kbits. Maybe.]

Add some more in? What about your own?

Direct Link Here

Time in seconds taken to render the following web sites

Webseite	iPhone (EDGE, 2.5G)	Nokia E61i (UMTS, 3G)
Die Zeit	76	79
EBay	30	26
Applephoneinfo	31	27

You also have to consider that the iPhone renders it better but that may be an entirely subjective thing.