In your glum face, Dunstone

Smartphone 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

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(Source The Register)

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
figures from Broadband Expert.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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:

“one streamed YouTube video has the same effect on the network as half a million text messages sent simultaneously, the equivalent of everybody in Newcastle sending a text at once.”

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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(Source The Guardian)

Virgin
Media has rolled out
TOA Technologies’
SaaS-based Mobile Workforce Management system to more than 1,000 field
engineers who are responsible for fixing and installing cable broadband
connections.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Virgin
Media has rolled out
TOA Technologies SaaS-based
Mobile Workforce Management system to over 1,000 of its field engineers who
are responsible for fixing and installing customers cable broadband connections.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Increase especially strong in the Midlands, distributor says

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(Source Mobile Today)

Cisco has unveiled a series of products for small businesses that it claims
will offer more energy efficient and secure connections.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

• iPhone and BlackBerry users may find services overcrowded
• General election could delay plans to liberalise airwaves

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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(Source The Guardian)

BT has released details of the 303 new exchanges that will receive optical
fibre-based network connections from their street cabinets.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

The UK broadband industry added just 963,000 new broadband lines in 2009,
less than half the 2008 figure, as the country continued to slump down the
European league table of broadband connections.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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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(Source ZDNet UK)

Eclipse
Internet is deploying businesses connections in areas with
fibre-to-the-cabinet connections despite BT’s rollout of the technology still
being in its early stages.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

More Connections from RIM

Research 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

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(Source The Register)

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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(Source ZDNet UK)

The UK continues to trail the rest of the world when it comes to the speed of
its broadband connections, an Ofcom report revealed today.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Google’s integration of Facebook and Twitter caught the eye, but it had other – perhaps more significant – developments to think about

I spent a good portion of Monday in the company of Google, as it unveiled a series of announcements about search technologies – such as the inclusion of new “real-time” results culled from Twitter, Facebook and the news media and planted, dynamically, into the results page.

Given the obsession with the real-time web at the moment, it was obvious that most of the attention would be focused on a sort of OMG TWITTERZ IN MY GOOGLE!!! reaction, but I was struck by a number of things that seemed highly significant. Here they are:

-Google’s user interface is getting more cluttered all the time. Yes, the famous home page may be getting lighter, but that doesn’t seem to apply to the layers of pages it takes you to. Finding real-time search results requires a series of clicks, none of which are blindingly obvious or quick for new users to get to. It’s time for Google to start applying its reductionist approach more widely.

This is a way to move into highly personalised search. Once you’ve got users looking at social networking results in their feed, it’s only a matter of time before they start demanding more access to the results that matter to them. Google’s always been slightly offish about giving answers based on your personal connections – it loves the feel of a cold, hard algorithm – but social search is a powerful idea. And it’s worth knowing that Bradley Horowitz – who outlined his ideas on social search to me four years ago while he was working as a senior executive at Yahoo – is now Google’s vice president of product management.

- Google’s mobile search is getting very, very strong. Even with the Android operating system and other developments, I think people underestimate how much mobile phones matter to Google. To me, it’s pretty clear that they think mobile will be the area where they will develop their next big cash cow. The company is currently working with two major US retailers, Best Buy and Sear’s, to include stock/inventory listings in mobile searches. The idea is that if you search for a product on your mobile phone, it will be able to hook into their systems and tell you if there are any items in stock nearby. That’s a big money-making opportunity. Really big.

- What is the possibility for Google Goggles? Computer vision has been the holy grail for all number of technologists over the years, and if Google throws its significant resources behind the effort, it could get somewhere. They could give it a better name, though.

In fact, in the process of asking a couple of questions, I pushed an idea that crossed my mind – focused on who “owns” the Goggles (the example, who decides that ). Vic Gundotra didn’t answer my question, but passed it over to Hartmut Neven (the founder of Neven Vision, a company Google acquired in 2006 and the developer of the system).

Neven said the canonical database of references was constructed algorithmically – unsupervised learning, he called it (it sounded quite a lot like Google’s general search system). If that’s the case, then, does that mean that the image of something could be googlebombed?. “Theoretically, yes,” he said – but, he added, they thought they had systems in place to prevent that.

What an idea. Computer vision is amazing, and if it can be applied to search then just imagine how powerful that could be. But, equally, imagine a situation in which, say, a product is googlebombed by its detractors – or even a competitor. Suddenly the idea of “image rights”, something usually associated with celebrities, becomes absolutely huge.

I’m interested to see where this all leads.

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(Source The Guardian)

• The group has increased half-year profits to £75m, from £40m
• Demerger to create two separate stock exchange listed firms

Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone condemned as “crazy” government plans to combat online piracy by severing people’s broadband connections . The mobile phone retailer and owner of TalkTalk cheered investors by raising its profit forecast for the year.

TalkTalk, Britain’s second largest internet service provider behind BT, has threatened to take legal action if plans championed by Lord Mandelson to cut-off persistent unlawful online file sharers make it into law. An e-petition on the No 10 website against the law, which is part of the government’s Digital Economy Bill, has already garnered 26,000 signatories and the support of such technophiles as Stephen Fry.

“I do get the sense that the debate is moving in our direction,” Dunstone said yesterday. “People are coming to terms with the fact that what is being proposed subverts some of the basic principles of British justice. What’s being proposed is just crazy.”

His comments came as Carphone Warehouse said half year profits increased to £75m, from £40m last year as revenues rose 13% to £789m despite the gloomy economic climate. Accounting for the impact of writedowns, profits were £30m compared with a loss last year of £23m.

TalkTalk and the company’s retail business – named Best Buy Europe after its tie-up with American retailer Best Buy – did better than expected in the first half of the year and Dunstone predicted a strong Christmas quarter, meaning profits will exceed the City’s forecasts. Dunstone is hoping for strong sales of pre-pay mobile phones helped by cheap touchscreen handsets.

Carphone Warehouse, which bought Tiscali in May, is planning to demerge its retail business from its TalkTalk residential telephony and broadband operation by the end of the first quarter next year gave details about the demerger process today. There will be two separately listed businesses: TalkTalk Group PLC, which will have a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange, and Carphone Warehouse Group PLC, which will have a secondary listing. The latter will comprise Best Buy Europe – its 50/50 partnership with Best Buy of the US – plus its 48.5% stake in Virgin Mobile France and Carphone’s property assets.

TalkTalk has secured £650m banking facilities for the post-demerger period meaning TalkTalk and Carphone will be fully funded for their anticipated medium-term requirements. Carphone Warehouse Group will not pay dividends for at least two years after demerger, while TalkTalk is expected to pay dividends from the outset equivalent to that of the current group with a progressive policy thereafter.

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(Source The Guardian)

BOSTON (Reuters) – Hackers have built a virus that attacks Apple Inc’s iPhone by secretly taking control of the devices via their Internet connections, security experts said.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

BT has launched its third trial of fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) internet
technology.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)