Category Archives: In the News

Tech news and opinions

Credit crunch still having shocking effects

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The credit crunch is still causing problems, even after almost 2 years of battering businesses across the globe.

Sony has today announced the first loss in 14 years, which was a big shock to the company. The loss was caused by the recent fall in sales of Sony equipment because of the decrease in market. 

The Japanese company has reported a £685m loss (98.9 billion yen; $1.04 billion) for the year to the end of March. The company has said that they will be cutting 8,000 jobs and closing 10% of its factories.

So it looks as if the credit crunch has not finished yet. How long will it be before we finally see an increase in the market? The predictions stand that it will be another difficult year for the financial market, but we’ll have to see what happens.

Tiscali to be bought by Carphone Warehouse

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It was announced this morning that Tiscali, a large internet service provider that supplies 1.76 million people with internet, is about to be sold to the Carphone Warehouse for in excess of £236 million.

The Carphone Warehouse hopes to merge Tiscali into it’s current broadband service within the next 2 years, however they have said that Tiscali email addresses will be spared.

Tiscali has recently lost customers as they seek other broadband companies with better customer service.

This is not the first time Tiscali have been on the market. In fact, they’ve been on the market for over a year now, and they’ve had talks with Sky and Vodafone although both potential deals fell through.

Tiscali is currently suffering with the large amount of debts it is currently in.

When the Carphone Warehouse and Tiscali are merged together, the Carphone Warehouse will supposedly have more than 4.25 million broadband subscribers and that will place it 2nd in the broadband market.

I’m currently using Tiscali as one of my ISPs and to be quite honest the longer the wait for them to merge, the better. I am quite happy with Tiscali’s current internet plan and I hope that their current plan isn’t overwritten. Their current 8MB broadband is really decent value, especially baring in mind that their fair usage policy states that they won’t get at you for your usage unless your nearing 100GBs per month in bandwidth – and that’s tonnes. TalkTalk’s similar current plan has a 40GB usage and costs £17.74 per month, however Tiscali’s up to 100GB usage plan costs just £14.99.

So the longer the better in my opinion. But that’s where Tiscali is heading anyway.

Three UK announces unlimited Skype for everyone, forever

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Three UK mobile announced on 1st May 2009 that it was editing its usage policy of Skype on user’s mobiles. From now on, all users of Three mobiles will receive unlimited usage on Skype no matter whether you top up or not. So basically that means that users can now have free calls to anybody in the world, as long as they are on Skype.

The plan used to be that Pay As You Go customers had make a £5 top up once every three months to get Skype calls, and Pay Monthly customers had to have an internet plan. From now on, as long as you are on a 3 mobile you will get free Skype calls anytime, to anyone (on Skype).

I am glad that Three are finally using VoIP to a new level, and hopefully this will cause other mobile operators to follow on.

Windows 7 Release Candidate now available to public!

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Yep, it’s out. Anybody can now download it and install it for free. It will be usable until March 1st 2010, and Microsoft want as many people as possible to try it.

You can grab a copy here – but as usual be aware Microsoft servers are overloaded again so it will probably take a while to get through.

I’ll be posting a review of it in a few days when I’ve done some testing of it. Enjoy 🙂

100MB broadband available for the first time ever in the UK!

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It’s called Velocity 1, and a very small new building development in the UK has been given fibre optic cabling from the exchange right the way to the ethernet sockets in your living room. Tenants of Wembley City development in London are the first ever people in the UK to be able to get 100mb broadband on demand.

This means that for the first time ever, 100mb is not the theoretical outcome for the speed of broadband because the fibre optic cabling spreads the whole way from your local telephone exchange to the ethernet plug on your computer. No ancient copper cabling whatsoever.

However, there are a few small glitches. The main one being that it isn’t permanent – you pay £1 for 30 minutes worth of 100mb broadband on demand. It isn’t technically possible to provide 100mb broadband 24/7 in this country, yet. The rest of the time you’ll get either 8, 16, or 32mb broadband depending on what you are currently paying.

Still, you can’t get 100mb broadband anywhere else in the UK so it must feel good to be able to say you are one of about 30 people in the UK who can use 100mb broadband on demand. Pretty awesome.

Most of the UK generally gets a theoretical maximum of 8MB (megabit) per second. And most of the time that isn’t the case because of our poor copper cabling and long distances from our exchanges. But for the means of this, I am going to suggest that I did have 8MB (megabit) per second speed. Now think about the fact that a megabit is not a megabyte. 8 megabits translates to approximately 1 megabyte, so if you had perfect 8 megabit download speed, you could download a file at 1 megabyte per second.

Now, think about this – 100 megabits translates to 12.5 megabytes per second. That is pretty amazing. That means that providing the source server is fast enough, people with 100mb broadband could download three 128kbps MP3 songs in just one second!

Now that might seem like absolute gobbletygook to you, but considering the UK’s  current average broadband speed of 3.5 megabit (0.4375 megabyte) per second that is pretty awesome.

So, maybe in 10 years time a lot more of us will be able to indulge on 100mbps broadband. Unlikely, but it would be nice. We’ll have to see what happens.