Does MB = Mb?

Not at all!

The difference between ‘MB’ and ‘Mb’ is common knowledge to the IT crowd and the more technologically literate web surfers out there. However, it turns out that, understandably enough, many punters who are getting connected to the information superhighway for the first time don’t know the difference between the two.

Unfortunately, it’s not simply a case of ‘you say tomato’, as there is quite a difference. An ‘Mb’ (with a lowercase ‘b’) is short for a MegaBit, whereas an ‘MB’ (with a capital ‘B’) is short hand for a MegaByte. A single Byte is the same as 8 bits meaning that 1MB is equal to 8Mb.

This is relevant to broadband customers, as you will note that whenever you are looking at services they will always have their connection speeds measured in Mbps (Megabits Per Second) to make it look like it is faster, in the same way that broadcasting weather reports in Fahrenheit makes places seem hotter.

This is particularly confusing when you consider that monthly data allowances and free webspace is measured in Bytes (GB or MB) and the speed isn’t.

Whilst this might be elementary computer knowledge for some of you, it turns out some customers are confused and potentially being misled – we’re just posting this up for clarification purposes, in case you were wondering why you weren’t getting a full 20MBpbs download speed down a Virgin Media XL cable connection, or being able to stream 16MB of photos a second through your Sky Max package.

You, Kent, always get what you want…

…and so do your chums in Folkestone and Dover it seems. Virgin Media are currently trialling their super-fast 50Mbps broadband service in the three aforementioned locations. The webpage on the Virgin Media site dedicated to the trial – located at www.vmpilot.net – screams thus:

“Virgin Media are piloting an exciting, new technology. It’s 50 Mbps broadband and it’s already available to existing cable modem customers in Ashford, Kent. Now it’s available in Folkestone and Dover, too!”

Ashford and Folkestone have both entered what is being referred to as ‘Phase 2′ of the trial, with all Virgin Media customers in the area being able to sign up for speeds of up to 50Mbps for a huge £47 a month. Up until the 1st of this month, signing up for the service was free – it is not yet clear if customers who signed up for the trial before October will still have to pay; we presume that this is the case.

Dover has been running the trial since the start of October 2007, although no pricing details have been announced as yet.

With traffic shaping in place at peak times in place, its doubtful that Virgin will be charging £47 a month for the service, even though 50Mbps is way beyond anything currently on offer from rival ISPs.

Interestingly, some internet rumour millers have suggested that because Virgin are the cable monopoly in this country, it is possible that they may be subjected to BT Openreach style regulations and have to open up their networks to competitors. The big hitters in the Broadband Premiership have all stated that cable is the future of broadband and telephony services. The future is in Virgin’s hands, for the moment at least.

Surf’s Up for Sky!

Last week, Sky connected its millionth broadband customer and was officially named the UK’s fastest growing broadband ISP, connecting new customers at a rate of once every 40 seconds. To commemorate this, Sky arranged for seven of the UK’s top pro-surfers to surf in line across Fistral Bay in Newquay (pictured below).

Sky achieved this million-man watermark in just 14 months, after launching its See Speak Surf triple play package back in August 2006 – consistent investment in LLU has seen Sky Broadband being made available to 70% of the UK, with the remaining exchanges to follow.

Sky boss James Murdoch, keen to champion the virtues of See Speak Surf said: “We’re not only the UK’s fastest ever growing broadband provider, but we’re also delivering a high quality service that is saving customers significant amounts of money. Thousands of customers are switching from other providers to get fast broadband that comes with Sky TV.”

Figures suggest that the majority of Sky Broadband customers – 58% – are those who have switched from other providers, whilst the remaining 42% are getting broadband for the first time. Market leaders BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse should be worried – in the last quarter, Sky added nearly 260,000 new broadband users, streaking ahead of BT with 146,000 new users, Carphone Warehouse with 126,000 and, most starkly, Virgin Media with only 50,000.

This news is something of a ray of light for Sky who have recently suffered regulatory clout from the Competition Commission over the ITV 17.9% stake, and threatened with the possibility of having to relinquish all of its shares in the new year.

Virgin demand on a full Sky stake sale

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Virgin Media have called on the Competition Commission to force Sky to cough up the entirety of their 17.9% stake in ITV.

Earlier this month, the Competition Commission deemed that it had found the stake detrimental to the interests of the public and created a ‘significant lessening of competition’ in the market. Options that the Commission will be considering involve forcing a complete sale of the stake, or a reduction to just under 15%.

The Commission begins its formal investigation today, but no action will be taken until January next year. ITV share prices have fallen – partially due to these developments, and the recent phone call scandals – if Sky were forced to sell up tomorrow, they would lose millions. Sky have stated that if they are forced into a loss-making sale come January, then they will seek legal action if some form of compensation is not made.

Many have speculated that if the market climate after the New Year is not favourable to Sky, then a partial sale, reducing the stake to under 10% will instead be enforced. Bitter rivals Virgin have made it clear that anything less than a complete sale is unacceptable and that Sky’s interests in ITV are not primarily financial, and that even with 10%, Sky could prove to be disruptive.

The genesis of the Sky/Virgin beef can be traced back to the NTL:Telewest bid for shares in ITV and the subsequent Murdoch midnight share raid last year.

AOL Dell Wireless Laptop offer still doing the rounds…

The AOL Free Laptop/2-years Wireless Broadband offer is still going strong; with plenty of laptops still in stock, AOL customers coming out of 12-month contracts will be able to sign up for this deal – existing AOL customers cannot sign up for the deal until their current contract is over.

The deal struck with PC manufacturer Dell sees customers who sign up with AOL Wireless Plus along with the AOL Talk Pay as You Go phone plan for two years qualifying for a free Dell Inspiron Notebook, which features:

• Windows Vista™ Home Basic
• 80GB Hard Drive
• 1GB Memory
• Intel® Celeron® Processor
• Dell™1390 Wireless Mini-Card
• Intel™ Graphic Media Accelerator x3100 Graphics Card

This default set up (Option 1) can be upgraded with a bigger 120GB hard drive for an additional £49.99 (Option 2) or with a faster dual-core processor – an Intel® Core™ 2 Duo – for £149.99 (Option 3). Both Options 2 and 3 also come with Vista™ Home Premium installed instead of Home Basic, with a basic £14.99 delivery charge applying to all laptops regardless of which option you go for.

We reckon that Option 3 is the way to go if you’re considering this deal, as it will greatly extend the usability of your laptop, and if you need extra hard drive space, you can simply attach an external HD via one of the USB ports. You might want to consider upgrading the 1GB memory in order to keep things ticking over nicely.

Technical support comes via Carphone Warehouse’s Geek Squad for an additional £10 a month, which is currently available at a discounted price of £7 a month for a year if an order is placed before the end of the month.

Branson’s Boys prepare a 50Mbps Broadband Broadside

Virgin Media are reportedly testing out the feasibility of launching broadband speeds of up to 50Mbps over their existing fibre optic networks. Virgin admitting that they are unable to compete with Sky on the TV front have instead turned their attentions to the strongest suit in their hand – the superiority of fibre over copper lines.

Acting chief executive Neil Berkett, the chap who is ‘most likely to’ take over the chair vacated by Steve Burch, said in a statement that “Despite our technical advantage we are still not really standing out from the crowd,” and that the way forwards would be to “re-focus our energies onto the broadband platform.”

Virgin have in the past muttered about the possibility of 50Mbps speeds after the initial upgrade of the Size: XL speeds from 10Mbps and 20Mbps was announced way back in March, but now it seems more of a possibility.

With BT continuing to set up the obsolete-out-of-the-box 21CN ADSL2+ network nationwide, which everyone, including Sky, relies on for their internet services, making the move to unroll a service over twice the speed of the competition should reinvigorate customer interest in Virgin Media broadband.

Virgin have also recently been making some minor technical upgrades to their existing networks, which has caused services to drop in some areas – we’ve had a few emails from Virgin customers saying that over the last couple of weeks service has been decidedly patchy – chances are it could have something to do with this speed boost, then again it could just be routine maintenance.

We reckon that customers living in cabled areas would flock to 50Mbps speeds, after customers on Be and UK Online extolling the virtues of 20Mbps+ connections. Whether the smaller Size: M and Size: L packages will see a speed boost remains to be seen; it didn’t happen last time, and theoretically, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.

Be Broadband Revalue Unlimited Package

Be Broadband have recently slimmed down the cost of their Unlimited package from £24.00 a month to £18.00, with the price of the Be Value package remaining at £14.00 a month.

Be Value was introduced earlier in the year, for Unlimited customers who were only getting speeds of just around 8Mbps, and not really getting their money’s worth.

O2 enter the British Broadband Bundesligue

Today marks the entry of O2 Broadband into the UK Broadband league, and with it, the hope that its presence alone will help shake up the quickly condensing market place.

O2, which will be selling its service on the Be Broadband network, have delayed their entry into the market many times now; determined not to be another two-play ISP, O2 wanted to do things differently.

“We have been criticised for coming late to market but we did not want to rush it,” said an O2 spokesman. “Earlier this year we were not happy with the service so we have waited.”

O2 also insist that they will not offer high-end services to those who cannot realistically achieve the top-tier speeds: “If we think they can only get 8Mbps, we will not even offer them the other two packages […] A month in we will recheck and if people need to downgrade we will suggest that they do.” said the O2 spokesman.

This falls in line with the introduction of the Value package from Be, offering a better value for money service to customers who could not expect to get the full 24Mbps speed. O2 have been vocal in their support of the Crystal Clear Broadband campaign, a petition set up to ensure that ISPs are more up front about the typical speeds customers can expect.

O2 Mobile subscribers pay £7.50 per month for up to 8Mbps, £10 for up to 16Mbps and £15 for up to 20Mbps, with non-O2 customers paying a £10 surcharge. In addition, O2 customers get 100 free messages a month with their mobile.

O2 have also secured exclusive coverage rights for the first generation of the Apple iPhone, making the offer of O2 Broadband a more tantalising prospect during the Christmas run-up.

Home Hub Version 1.5 Arrives

BT currently supply over 4 million UK customers with broadband – when you consider that the wireless BT Home Hub router comes free with Options 2 and 3 and is available as an upgrade to Option 1 customers, that means there’s a lot of shiny white (or black) boxes in people’s homes.

The Home Hub has been something of a success story for BT, although there has been a fair amount of criticism – firstly, it emerged that part of the Hub runs on Linux-based code which is open source based and under the terms of General Public Licence, should not be sold without the complete code being published.

Then it was suggested by Messers. Adrian Pastor and Petko D. Petkov that the security features of the Hub could be easily compromised by malicious drive-by pharmers attempting to freeload off of others connections and steal sensitive data. When you consider that, according to surveys by anti-virus firm Symantec, around 50% of broadband users in the UK don’t know how to fully configure the security settings of their routers, this means that up to 2 million UK residents are vulnerable to some potentially nasty hackage.

To address this, BT have announced the release of their new Home Hub, which comes with vastly improved security features which will automatically refresh and update every time a user logs on.

According to BT, the new Hub “has been redesigned to make it even easier for the customer” to set up security details, plus the new Hub boasts a “sleeker, smaller” exterior and ” a built-in firewall that we’ve pre-configured… to keep hackers and other intruders out, [to] make sure [that] computer and personal files are kept safe.”

The new look Hub will eventually be dispatched to new BT Broadband customers, with Option 1 customers being able to pay the one-off fee as usual. As of yet it’s not known whether existing BT customers with the version 1.0 Hubs can trade in their older models for this fitter, happier more productive edition, but we assume that it would be entirely possible.

Broadband ads aren’t “up to” the job

ISP bosses in the UK have been given a stern telling off by the Ofcom Consumer Panel chairman over the advertising of “up to” speeds which, as we all should know, are rarely achieved by the majority of customers – the average UK connection speed is said to be 2.8Mbps, despite the 16Mbps+ speeds on offer from the likes of Sky, Virgin, Be Broadband and UK Online.

In her letter to the six leading lights of the Broadband Bundesligue, Ms Bowe wrote: “We are of course aware of the technical reasons for the ‘up to’ terminology that you use. I would however like to have your views about how these technical issues might be better addressed in terms of giving clearer information to potential customers.”

O2 Broadband, set to launch next week, have made a point of advertising their services as being well below that of the theoretical capabilities of an ADSL2+ connection, presumably to avoid customer dissatisfaction.

Customers buying broadband services can help themselves by doing a bit of homework and finding out what speeds they can expect to get in their area.

Former press advisor to the head of the DTI back in 1985, Colette Bowe was a key figure in the notorious Westland Affair.