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Disconnections plague network Orange UK users are reporting that the mobile data service is dropping connections and refusing to let some customers onto the internet at all.…
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(Source The Register)
Posts Tagged “connections”
Aug
19
2010
 
Multi-tasking media consumption on rise among Britons, says Ofcom studyPosted by in Mobile News
16 to 24-year-olds particularly adept at juggling act, cramming nine and a half hours of media into six and a half hours of actual timeBritons are juggling several types of media at the same time to sate their appetite and leave enough time for everything else in their lives, the Ofcom study reveals.The average media consumer’s digital day is seven hours and five minutes. From breakfast radio to peaktime evening TV, via surfing and texting at home or at our desks, media takes up 45% of our time.The actual amount being consumed is even higher, Ofcom believes, with the boom in mobile computing helping Britons to multitask. “The ability of people to surf the web on their laptop while also watching TV has given people a licence to roam while staying connected,” said Peter Phillips, Ofcom’s strategy and market developments partner. A fifth of our media time is this kind of “simultaneous” consumption.Those aged between 16 and 24 are particularly adept at this juggling act, and are mopping up more media than any other age group. They cram nine and a half hours worth of media into six and a half hours of actual time – data that suggests the cliche of the youngster loafing in the lounge is an unfair one.”Sixteen-to-24-year-olds go out more, and spend less time watching TV,” Phillips commented. He also acknowledged that this multitasking can mean we devote less attention to any one media source, although this was more pronounced when using new technology. It appears we are simply better at combining reading, landline calls or TV watching with another activity without our attention drifting.Discovering that teenagers are happier than their parents to combine web surfing, phone calls, tweeting and TV is not exactly a revelation, and Ofcom’s research does show that some other truisms also still apply. The over 55s are still wedded to their TVs and radios (67% of all the media they consume), while computers, mobile phones and handheld gadgets make up 58% of 16- to 24-year olds’ media diet.But there are also plenty of surprises in this latest snapshot of the UK marketplace. The gap between the way different generations use old and new media is closing fast. For the first time, more than 50% of over-55s have broadband at home, and a third are sending and reading emails each day.There have also been some interesting changes in the importance people give to different media activities. Half of all adults said they would miss TV the most, up from 44% in 2005, followed by 15% who cited the internet (up from 8%) and 11% who would pine for their mobile phone (up from 10%). Hi-fi equipment and CD players have fallen most sharply in our affections with a mere 2% of people saying they would miss them the most, down from 13% four years ago. For the 16 to 24 age group, though, the mobile phone would be missed nearly as much as the telly.But the death of television as the dominant media platform appears to be far away as ever. TV continues to take centre stage in the evenings, partly due to the success of talent shows. However the box in the corner of the room is increasingly likely to be a high-definition flatscreen. More than five million households now have a HD set, up from 1.9 million in March 2009.”Television still has a central role in our lives. We are watching more TV than at any time in the last five years,” said James Thickett, Ofcom’s research director.While Simon Cowell can take some credit for maintaining the nation’s TV fix (measured at three hours and 45 minutes per day), another factor is the growing demand for time-shifted viewing, thanks to digital video recorders as well as catch-up TV services such as the BBC iPlayer or ITV Player.”The ability to watch what we want when we want it is bringing people back into the living room, said Phillips. Commercial broadcasters should not rejoice too much, though, as DVR owners have the option to skip through the adverts.While TV appears to have maintained its ability to hold our attention, 17% of viewing is still taking place alongside another media format – typically a computer or mobile phone.Smartphone sales have risen rapidly in the UK in recent years, up 81% in the 12 months to May. The research shows this led to much more media consumption “on the go”, although in many cases people appear to be heading straight for Facebook and staying there.The social networking site makes up 45% of the total time spent online on mobile phones during December 2009, Ofcom said. This may have been skewed by a surge of family photos or amusing Christmas party pictures, although the regulator also cited more recent data that illustrates Facebook’s remarkable “stickiness”.”The average user spent around six hours and 30 minutes on Facebook in May 2010, compared with nearly one hour 30 minutes for users of Google, and nearly two hours for users of MSN [Microsoft] services,” said the regulator. Twitter holds second place on the social networking ladder ahead of MySpace and LinkedIn, with traffic to its website up 56% in the past year.Increased adoption of high-powered mobile phones also means that more young people are abandoning their fixed broadband line.Ofcom’s research also shows the impact of the recession. Revenues in the telecoms industry were badly hit in 2009, falling for the first time since the regulator started tracking this data in the early 1990s. Ofcom said this was also due to increased price pressure as operators try to lure customers to take a bundle of services, and a tailing-off in the boom in mobile phone and broadband connections.With TV revenues contracting, it was little surprise that the amount consumers spend on communications fell again to £91.24 per month. Five years ago we spent an average of £100.71 per month. “Consumers are using communications services more – including phone calls, texting and the internet. Yet they are paying less despite getting more, partly through buying in bundles,” said Ofcom.Digital mediaSocial mediaSocial trendsOfcomInternetMobile phonesGadgetsGraeme Weardenguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Terms & Conditions Read Original Story…
Avenir Telecom has been named O2′s number one distributor for connections in Q2, setting a new O2 record Read Full Story…
VoIP company Vonage launches app that lets Facebook friends call each other for free Heaven forbid, you forget your phone. You need to make a urgent call, but all you have with you is an iPod Touch. Well, now you can use your iPod to call your Facebook friends. A new mobile application enabling Facebook friends to call each other for free is being released today, and an app for the iPad is thought to be only weeks away. The app – produced by internet telephony company Vonage and available for iPhone, Android devices, and the iPod Touch (the latter only allowing outbound calls) – lets users call Facebook friends using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), providing both parties have downloaded the app. Users will eventually be able to make calls (both incoming and outgoing) through the iPad. Vonage Mobile for Facebook is free to download, free to use and works on Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G connections. Later versions of the app are expected to include premium functions and cater for the iPad, as well as encompassing instant messaging, SMS and the ability to make calls to mobile numbers directly from the application. But the release of this new app provokes an unavoidable question: how many of your Facebook friends would you feel comfortable being able to call your mobile phone? Facebook friends: an app to make you reimagine your “friendships”?
At launch, there is no way to block selected Facebook friends from calling your mobile – so, theoretically, anyone you’ve decided to accept as a friend on Facebook can call your phone. As we know, plenty of people accept Facebook friend requests from relative strangers, or people to whom they wouldn’t necessarily divulge their phone number. Michael Tempora, senior vice president of programme management and strategic initiatives at Vonage, said: “I expect that’s the case [that people don't want every one of their Facebook friends being able to call their mobile phone]. Certainly you always have ability to decline a call. Incoming calls will ring your phone and users still have the option to decline or accept. “Future releases will also add a call block capability. A consumer can always choose not to download the application or de-friend someone on Facebook. This app adheres to all Facebook’s rights and responsibilities.” In other words, your downloading of the app and accepting of Facebook friend requests are taken as double confirmation that the people you befriend online are the people you’d be happy calling your phone. Online social networking, however, isn’t as straightforward. That is, of course, unless you’ve adopted a personal Facebook policy readying for the day when your friends would be able to call your phone. Or preparing for a day when your child’s Facebook friends can call their mobile phone. I suspect we’ve not heard the last of this, though VoIP telephony companies moving towards social networks is not a new thing. Usurping mobile networks?
And what of the mobile networks we largely rely on to make calls to our friends? Is Vonage expecting a backlash? “It’s hard for me to speculate,” Tempora said. “Our customers will be delighted, Facebook users and iPhone users and Android users will be delighted. “It’s a paradigm changer for the consumer, and one that takes advantage of broadband networks. It’s exciting for consumers and another step for us in using VoIP technology to deliver great value for consumers.” Vonage advises users who don’t have an unlimited data tariff to contact their provider to see what charges apply. Making a call using the app uses approximately 250kb a minute, a Vonage spokesman said, adding that the number of minutes sold on contract mobiles is going down while the amount of data sold and used is on the rise – this new app potentially warranting a data upgrade depending on usage. It’s all about timing: a good day to bury bad news?
The importance of this product for a company with a history of financial losses can be inferred from the launch date: the same date it will announce second quarter financial results. That said, Vonage posted a sharp increase in net income in its first quarter results, recording a jump of $8.7m (£5.4m) year-on-year to $14m. Though the short-term forecast underlying these headline figures would no doubt prove disconcerting to company bosses, recruitment of new subscribers to the Vonage World plan was expected to continue dropping, and loss of existing subscribers was also expected to continue. “It’s certainly very important to us,” Tempora said. “But it’s absolutely consistent with our vision that people should be able to call from anywhere they are using any broadband device that’s convenient. This is an important first step for us but it’s just the start, we expect in future to provide a wide range of apps. “Going forward, we will expand on the launch to add additional communities – some already existing online – or social communities like family. We will also add device platforms – other mobile devices, PCs, Macs and premium services like the ability to call from Facebook to phone numbers as well as instant messaging components.”
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O2 provider Barclay Communications has signed a corporate account from Vodafone understood to be worth more than 350 connections Read Full Story…
In your glum face, DunstoneSmartphone sales and American connections are keeping Carphone Warehouse healthy, with the CEO telling investors that things are only going to get better for Blighty.…
Free On-Demand Webcast – Virtualizing the Hard Stuff Read Full Story…
Imperial College London researchers dismiss link between living near mobile phone masts while pregnant and risk of cancer among children Pregnant women who live close to mobile phone masts do not need to move house, scientists said today, following the publication of a study which found no link to early childhood cancers. There has been public concern over the possibility that living near phone masts could raise the cancer risk of small children and clusters of cases around masts have been reported. But a study published in the British Medical Journal – the first to examine possible links between phone masts and childhood cancer across Britain – found no cause for concern. Researchers from Imperial College London identified 1,397 children under five who were diagnosed with leukaemia or a tumour of the brain or central nervous system between 1999 and 2001. They compared each child with four children of the same gender who were born on the same day but had not developed cancer. The researchers studied the distance of the mother’s home at the time of the birth from a phone mast, the total power output for base stations within 700 metres and the power density for base stations within 1,400 metres. “We found no pattern to suggest that the children of mums living near a base station during pregnancy had a greater risk of developing cancer than those who lived elsewhere,” said Professor Paul Elliott, one of the report’s authors and director of the MRC-HPA centre for environment and health at Imperial. The authors said they would like to investigate the exposure of the children to mobile phone base stations, which this study did not cover. In a commentary published with the study, John Bithell of the childhood cancer research group at Oxford University said the risks of cancer from mobile phone masts were dwarfed by those from driving while using mobile phones – even in hands-free mode. Doctors, he said “should reassure patients not to worry about proximity to mobile phone masts. Moving away from a mast, with all its stresses and costs, cannot be justified on health grounds in the light of current evidence.” The use of mobile phones has soared in recent years, the report said, from just under 9m connections in 1997 to almost 74m in 2007. There are 4bn connections worldwide. However, health fears have grown in parallel. Questions have been raised not only about a possible raised incidence of brain and other cancers but also a suggested increased risk of neurological conditions such as migraine and vertigo. The few reports there have been of cancer clusters near a mobile phone base station “are difficult to interpret because of small numbers and possible selection and reporting biases”, the authors wrote. They added that there is no known radiobiological explanation – although they said it is possible cumulative exposure is important – and the rise in the use of mobiles has not been matched by an upward trend in the numbers of brain tumours. Dr Eileen Rubery, former head of the public health prevention department at the Department of Health, said: “It is reassuring that no adverse affects have been found and this fits with the anticipated and known biological affects from such sites, and so is consistent with the physiology and biology.”
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Sales of mobile broadband connections are plummeting, according to new Read Full Story…
Only a tiny number of people use huge amounts of data – which means that many more have seen ‘unlimited’ contracts killed off. It’s a tragedy of the commons for mobile data So the free lunch – otherwise known as the unlimited data tariff – is over. O2 said on Thursday that it will no longer be offering new or upgrading customers its “unlimited” tariff for smartphone users – principally, it’s believed, the iPhone users, whose numbers connected to O2 have grown from 1m to 2m in a year. O2 isn’t the first: Vodafone ended its “unlimited” offering last month, and Steve Jobs had barely sat down after delivering his WWDC speech before AT&T announced that it too was ending its “unlimited” offering, replacing it with a tiered set – $15/month for 200MB, $25/month for 2GB. Orange is expected to follow suit in the next few weeks, though when asked the company simply says that it “constantly reviews its pricing”. However the noises we’re hearing from parts of the company suggest that a review will see it follow O2 to dump the “unlimited” offering. Why? Because a tiny number of users are slurping huge amounts of data. And because the mass of users are demanding more and more data (though lots less than the real slurpers). There’s all sorts of interesting information that we can pull out of this – especially with the help of O2′s chief executive Ronan Dunne, who signed a lengthy post at the company’s blog with a tortuous justification for why the company has changed its rules. The strange thing is why he hasn’t come out with the simple reason – because it would make O2 a lot more popular at a stroke. He goes over the points that were made in yesterday – that 97% of O2 smartphone users use less than 500MB, and that only a tiny number use more than 1GB. (Interesting to note that Apple-watcher John Gruber, someone who I’d expect to be a heavy user, says he uses about 500MB per month. So he’s clearly just one of the 97%, even if an outlier there.) Even so, smartphone users are a problem:
Well, yes, but nobody made you offer the iPhone, Mr Dunne. You were the ones who wanted it so much. This makes it sound as though you like getting peoples’ money, but don’t like offering them a concomitant service to go with it. However it’s more complicated than O2 getting a bit whiney. What we’re hearing here at the Guardian though is that Apple itself helped to kill off the “unlimited” tag, because it doesn’t like it being used with services that call it “unlimited*” and then explain further down the page in tiny print that that actually * means “subject to ‘fair usage’”. (We understand that Apple vetoed Vodafone’s initial pricing for the iPad data plans for just that reason.) It seems that just as broadband ISPs became addicted, when the race to sign up customers was on a few years ago, to the phrase “up to…” for their line speeds, so mobile data networks have gotten too comfy with the “unlimited*” word – where the asterisk is all-important. You could even call it Unlimited™ – which has quite a different meaning from unlimited. Apple’s weight isn’t the real reason for the change, though. Stay with us. There’s other interesting stuff in that blogpost: O2 says there that the average user uses 200MB per month; that FaceTime, the video calling offering introduced by Apple with the iPhone 4, will only be available on Wi-Fi (at least from O2); and there will be regular texts to let you know how you’re doing on your data allowance. And if you go over it without buying more, you’ll see your data speed slow down. Given those numbers, let’s make some assumptions. There are 2m iPhone users (and even more if you add in Android users). That’s a large enough population that you can treat it as a random sample. I’m told by one of the networks that data use follows the normal distribution (aka the bell curve – that mathematical prediction of where the members of a random population will be: it applies for things like height, for example). It’s probably not a perfect normal distribution – there will be a low-end cutoff, because any device connected to the network will use a least a little data. But for modelling, it’s a start. So: 200MB average; 97% use less than 500MB. Plus those numbers into a normal distribution calculator and you discover that those 0.1% who are annoying O2 so much consume more than 690MB of data per month. That’s about 23MB per day – roughly a megabyte every single hour. What, you think, are those folks doing? In fact, one network tells me that those people are downloading many gigabytes per month. That’s quite hard to do on a smartphone. Is it because of music streaming services like Spotify or We7 or (in the US) Pandora? The networks say no: audio doesn’t take up that much bandwidth (certainly compared to video), and they haven’t seen much takeup. So those gigabyte users aren’t listening to streams. (The iPlayer is only available via Wi-Fi on most networks.) Yet O2 says that while it has doubled the number of iPhone users, mobile data use is doubling every 4 months, equivalent to an eightfold growth every year. So: lots of growth, but some real extremes. What is causing it? Closer investigation suggests that this is a sort of collateral damage from the rumblings that preceded the Digital Economy Act – that it’s caused by peer-to-peer users who were perhaps worried about the “three strikes” talk, and figured that their landlines (if they have them) might be monitored or throttled if they download a lot of P2P data; or they might be surcharged. For as we’ve pointed out before, “unlimited” doesn’t mean unlimited on landline broadband. So those wary folk – put by one network as numbering “in the few hundreds” out of millions – have signed up on “unlimited” plans, taken the SIM out of the phone, and then use it in a 3G dongle to download stuff. Because it’s unlimited, they can get what they want. And as they don’t mind how quickly it arrives, the speed isn’t a particular issue; they’re just after volume. O2 says that 0.1% of its smartphone users – that’s about 2,000 people – are consuming 36% of its data. Other networks indicate the same. It’s also a bit foolish on the part of the downloaders, because the Digital Economy Act does actually allow for measures to be taken over illicit filesharing over mobile networks. But possibly the people doing it don’t think they’ll be noticed. Here’s news: the mobile networks have noticed. So it’s not really down to the iPhone or Android phones, which are more of an annoyance to the networks, because they make multiple, frequent requests to the network – but those are small amounts; those aren’t the reason why O2 is ending the unlimited package. It’s because some people took it at its word when it said data access was unlimited. At this point, your – and our – reaction is “so tell that 0.1% to stop being data hogs – shape their bandwidth, send them letters, that sort of thing. Because obviously you’re not going to want to burden yourself with having to set up new billing for millions of customers just because you’ve got 0.1% who are a bit annoying. No, that would be silly.” It’s certainly puzzling that O2 isn’t being clearer about the reasons. But the networks say they don’t want to annoy those big downloaders. That’s because they want to keep them as customers; but as paying customers. Yet the unlimited contracts aren’t being withdrawn; they’ll simply not be renewed. “At some stage, people will want a new handset or a new contract,” an O2 spokesperson said yesterday. I wouldn’t be so sure: someone who’s using their iPhone SIM as a dongle really isn’t worried about upgrading; they’ve probably got a PAYG SIM stuffed into their iPhone for their phone calls. They’re not stupid. Unless O2 – and the other networks – start taking some aggressive action, such as throttling their connections, then the faux-iPhoners will carry on. It’s a tragedy of the commons, mobile data-style. Just like spam and comment bots, the tiny number of P2P mobile downloaders are screwing it up for everyone else. It’s odd that internet evolution is going in reverse here: I thought that ISPs had learnt that offering broadband was far better for retaining customers than the penny-per-minute dialup nightmare of 1990s internet connectivity (yes, children, we used to have dialup modems, and paid per minute we were connected. And you couldn’t use make a phone call while you did). It’s a retrograde move – and even though the networks insist that most people won’t be affected, the fact is that we’re data-hungry. Eventually, we’ll all be over the limit. Will the P2P donglers still be on their unlimited contracts even then? One feels that it’s time for the networks, if they’re really serious about offering a good service to all their customers, to have a think about that “fair use” clause. Meanwhile, the 97% get a little inconvenienced, plus the constant worry that they’ll go over their limit. That’s actually the worst thing about what’s happening here: that the confidence that you can use the mobile internet anywhere is suddenly gone, replaced by a nagging worry that this page or that service will land you with a big bill. The mobile internet shouldn’t be like that: it should be like the landline version, where you don’t worry about the megabytes. It’s not a free lunch – but it’s not a system where the person in front is treating the buffet as an all-you-can-eat either.
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Apr
22
2010
Virgin Media expects big savings from workforce management systemPosted by in Mobile News
Virgin Read Full Story…
Apr
22
2010
Virgin Media expects savings from SaaS workforce management systemPosted by in Mobile News
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Increase especially strong in the Midlands, distributor says Read Full Story…
Cisco has unveiled a series of products for small businesses that it claims Read Full Story…
• iPhone and BlackBerry users may find services overcrowded Britain’s legion of smartphone users may have to watch their iPhone or BlackBerry become potentially useless as the UK’s mobile phone networks face a potential “capacity crunch”. This week’s expected call of a general election may send plans to liberalise the UK airwaves back to the drawing board and deprive an incoming government of the early windfall it could have bagged by selling off the old analogue television signal next year. It could also leave the newly merged Orange and T-Mobile in limbo while management wait to see whether they can use their existing mobile phone spectrum for the next generation of super-fast mobile phone technologies – known as “long term evolution” or LTE. Any delay to the liberalisation of the airwaves or sale of a new spectrum would leave mobile phone operators with a serious headache. Last year, according to Ofcom, mobile data traffic increased 200% and some networks – most notably O2 in London – are creaking under the strain. They need more capacity so users of smartphones that can access the web or download applications do not see their connections slow down or fail. After almost five years of wrangling, the mobile phone industry, Ofcom and the government’s own spectrum adviser Kip Meek last year thrashed out a deal that would allow the mobile phone companies to use their existing spectrum for mobile broadband services. It involved caps on the amount of wireless spectrum they could own but did allow them to take part in an auction of a further spectrum – including the old analogue TV signal – planned for next year. While that auction was not expected to raise anything like the £22.5bn that the original 3G spectrum sale earned back in 2000, it would still have raised hundreds of millions, possibly even a few billion pounds. The plan was complicated by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile, but in order to avoid a lengthy competition inquiry the two companies agreed to sell a quarter of the spectrum they were granted in the 1990s for voice and text services. The deal, which required Lord Mandelson’s personal intervention, also included extending indefinitely the 20-year licences that the mobile phone companies picked up in the dotcom boom for so-called 3G mobile data services. In fact it emerged last week that one UK operator – 3 – has already factored the extension of its 3G licence into its financial figures. The whole spectrum package has been working its way through parliament as a statutory instrument that instructs Ofcom to implement Kip Meek’s plan. It has progressed alongside the controversial passage of the Digital Economy Bill which includes provisions for punishing persistent unlawful internet file-sharers by severing their broadband connections. If Gordon Brown calls a general election tomorrow, as widely anticipated, the digital economy bill is likely to be pushed into law in the so-called wash-up of legislation that will occur this week. In order for it to become law, however, the statutory instrument needs to be debated and voted upon in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The party whips are understood to have given the instrument time in the House of Commons but no such provision has been made in the Lords. “It looks very, very precarious,” said one mobile phone industry insider last night. “If it does not get through there is every likelihood that a new government will review the whole matter again, delaying the process for a year, perhaps more.” Even if it does go through, BT is understood to be considering legal action against plans to extend the networks’ 3G licences, having already sent a strongly worded letter to Lord Mandelson about what it sees as an unjustifiable subsidy for the mobile phone industry. Despite the potential capacity crunch, O2 and Vodafone are actually likely to welcome any delay in the process of implementing the statutory instrument. They believe the merged Orange and T-Mobile will still have too much spectrum. Orange and T-Mobile, however, will be dismayed at any delay to the liberalisation of spectrum. There has been speculation recently that the two companies want to use the capacity they were given when they started operating in the 1990s for LTE services. They would be the first UK network to run LTE services.
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Mar
30
2010
BT announces more exchanges ready for optical fibre connectionsPosted by in Mobile News
BT has released details of the 303 new exchanges that will receive optical Read Full Story…
The UK broadband industry added just 963,000 new broadband lines in 2009, Read Full Story…
In response to an e-petition, the prime minister’s office has said disconnecting people for unlawful P2P activity would be disproportionate
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Eclipse Read Full Story…
More Connections from RIMResearch in Motion (RIM) is packing more support for IBM’s Lotus platform into BlackBerry smartphones with a new mobile application for Lotus Quickr.…
Offloading malware protection to the cloud Read Full Story…
The networking giant wants to provide consumers with video-conferencing experience home, using high-definition TV sets and broadband internet connections
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