Convergence Conversation

Please excuse my appalling Freudian slip, placing Sand Hill Road erroneously in Mountain View rather than Menlo Park. I had Google on the brain. There are a couple of other mindless misstatements here, but on the whole I was pretty pleased with this one. Also check out Dirk van der Woude and Benoit Felten - hell, just watch them all!

James Enck @ NextGen09 from MDDA on Vimeo.

So much to do, so little time. Here is a semi-random selection of bloggables.

I've just experienced an object lesson in why it's difficult to get any form of web/Internet application and content filtering "right".

I'm sitting in a cafe using the MiFi device I got a couple of weeks ago, which still has a Vodafone HSPA SIM in it. I'm currently writing up some profiles of various voice and messaging providers for a forthcoming report.

But when I try to get onto some service/software vendors' website, I get redirected to Voda's overzealous "Content Control" page. Now I'm sorry, but no matter how much you might not like "over the top" VoIP services or their ability to offer unfiltered access to other content, there's nothing offensive on the actual website for Skype.com or Fring.com or Jajah.com - where I want to check up press releases, service details and so on. More...

Thanks to Rachel and Adam over at VikingFM

 

Viking FM has exclusively learned K-Com’s dominance in Hull’s broadband market could end within weeks.

We’ve been told a new company, called Fibrestream, has been given permission to start installing fibre optic cables into the city, providing internet, HDTV and phone services.

These are currently only available through K-Com’s Karoo service.

Once installed, users will have speeds of up to 100MB per second download speed. That compares to Karoo’s 8MB a second service, and Lord Carter’s pledge to offer every home has 2MB speed by 2012. More...

The injustice of the £6 per line annual broadband tax as proposed in Lord Carter’s Digital Britain Report is that it is applied to copper fixed line rental, a.k.a. dial tone, rather than to broadband itself.

As well as being regressive and a most unwelcome extra burden in the currently depressed UK Economy, this taxation is also wrong headed - put simply, why should people who don’t want broadband subsidise those who do?

By analogy, Carter’s Broadband Tax is like taxing Jews, Moslems and Veggies to subsidise the price of pork (…barrels?)

- a proposition that would certainly draw howls of protest, so why should the matter of broadband be treated any differently?

Whilst universal broadband choice is laudable and something that FibreStream exists to enable, setting out to achieve this outcome by applying taxation to those who do not necessarily want broadband is simply inequitable discrimination

- nothing le More...

There seems to be a common assumption among mobile broadband operators that when they put bandwidth caps on their offerings, most users will still only exploit a fraction of their allowance.

This is probably just as well, as there are strong signs that the underlying per-GB cost of many HSPA networks stacks up rather poorly against the revenues per-GB if customers do actually use all their allocation. In the UK, 3 is giving away 15GB per month for £15, for example.

At that price, I'm wondering if there's a risk that operators start attracting the "wrong" sort of customers.... for example other operators. More...

The Weekly Roundup: Friday 26 June

Read on to be informed, stimulated, agree and disagree with the hottest blogs from this week’s ConvergenceConversation.com

Elastic Domains - NextGen Killer App?
by Guy Jarvis of Fibrestream

Cloud Computing and particularly the endgame of Elastic Domains is a key driver for business competitiveness particularly in rural areas, as it eliminates the need for businesses to buy and maintain high cost desktop, laptop, telephone and server systems on site. In order to realise these benefits, this requires a quality, consistent and symmetric, same upload and download, of 1Mbps per staff member. More...

On Wednesday night I attended the 'Finding Value amongst the Clouds' at Bird & Bird’s London offices.

During the past few years a quiet revolution has occurred. It is changing the way in which our increasingly connected world operates. A range of new services and products are being made available to business and consumer alike as computing becomes a utility service, allowing us to pay for what we use and when we use it. 

This represents a huge opportunity for business, both in terms of using ICT to gain greater business advantage and also in being at the front of the wave, developing new services and products for a recovering global marketplace. More...