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Gigabit? Who needs it?
Recently two things got me thinking a little: One of my main PC’s needed a little maintenance I visited the launch of Gigaclear’s Appleton network in Oxfordshire My main Windows PC developed a memory fault and I needed to get a little support from Yoyotech, the excellent people who made it for me. When I got
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National legislation with global impacts
The Internet blackout by many of the big names in response to proposed US legislation isn’t the first time law makers and internet pioneers have faced up to each other, and its also not the first time that national legislation, attempting to target a national issue, has had potentially significant impacts on the running of
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Open is the best (only) policy – Ghost of Christmas Future
In my last post (Open is the best (only) policy) I gave a high-level view on why I think open access networks are important today but I didn’t really explore why I think that offers just a narrow glimpse of why open access will become the single most important thing network operators can do for
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Broadband doesn’t need high population density or PCs?
I just re-watched the brilliant BBC programme “The Joy of Stats”, where the infectious Hans Rosling’s encourages you to explore the world of statistics. I’ve been hunting for a long time in search of a better way to present the mass of data on broadband and was left somewhat envious of the way Hans presents his world facts. Good news!!
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Homework: read the ALA documents
I received an email this week from the NICC’s Ethernet Working Group with links to the finalised Active Line Access (ALA) document. This is very exciting news for all sorts of reasons. ALA is the industry agreed model designed specifically for the next generation broadband world, and at any number of levels it fundamentally changes the way
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Why we should care about the US Internet “Kill switch” proposals
There is a proposal running through the US Senate at the moment which would give the President powers to shut-down critical internet infrastructure, the so called “kill switch”. Apart from any concerns at a distance we might have about free speech and rights, there is an equally big issue which may be more critical to our own homeland security.
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Broadcast Evolution
I’ve just come back from the Broadcast Evolution Summit, a three-day conference exploring how the world of TV and broadcasting is changing, where I was given an opportunity to present some ideas on how the changes in next generation broadband infrastructures will create new opportunities and business models for content providers. Its impossible to turn
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Where’s the demand for “superfast” broadband?
As we start to debate what “superfast” might mean in a broadband context, too often people are returning to the bigger “why” questions: Why do we need to invest at all? where’s the demand? The technology sector is an example of where Saye’s economic principles tend to trump Adam Smith; where intelligent supply tend’s to
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Boosting the funnel
It was reported this week that a group of British scientists at Southampton University have developed a technique for keeping the light in fibre-optic cables nice and tidy and in sync. I thought I’d write a short blog on it because the importance of the discovery seems have been missed by some commentators. For my purposes,
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Ambition is the new agenda
Last Thursday I attended the Government’s Industry Day where they laid out their key policy framework and work programme for broadband and the internet. If you hung around just long enough to hear Jeremy Hunt, Ed Vaizey and Caroline Spelman speak, and with only one ear on what was being said while you rushed to
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