Posts by John Geddes

Correction - "an hour of calls"

Correction to my comment about "an hour of calls" being quoted for Battery Backup (above).

I quoted Ofcom as having put out this phrase - having checked, I can't find Ofcom having said this - for all their faults, they do seem to have been consistent in talking of backup that would last for an hour.

I did find the phrase "an hour of service" in an EE answer to a user query (https://ee.co.uk/help/home-phone/fix-problem/problem-with-my-battery-back-up-unit#:~:text=You%20can%20buy%20a%20Battery,do%20this%20once%20a%20month.)

Fined 0.5p per call

At 0.5p per call, the expense of the fine (if ever paid) is a modest part of the cost structure of such a business: even if you only get one lead for every thousand calls, that is only £5 per lead. If we can't prevent operations like this at the outset, then the fine needs to be high enough to make it uneconomic. ICO seem a soft touch!

Nice idea on Download, shame about the Upload

Ofcom's proposal to cap the cost of 40Mbps fibre appears to be silent on the upload speed to be offered. Knowing the creativity of profit-hungry firms, they will try to make the capped product as unattractive as possible - 40/0.4 anybody?

Of the current 40Mbps offerings, the lowest at 40/2 isn't really up to the job of being a "reference" product - the time taken to set up Cloud Backup runs into many days for a reasonably sized PC setup.

If Ofcom understands the upload question, it would have been clever of them to acknowledge it and to have explained what they are requiring. Their seeming silence raises the worry that it simply hasn't occurred to them

Benbecula=abroad?

Not yet!

Ofcom implies that houses with thick walls are an oddity that they can't be expected to consider. But here in the Peak District (and in may other rural areas), thick stone walls are the norm. By ignoring such needs, Ofcom neatly understates the extent of coverage problems - and so reduces the pressure to do anything about risible rural coverage (eg domestic roaming). How convenient.

When will Ofcom accept Broadband as Essential?

The problem in many parts of the UK is that we have a monopoly provider of telecoms circuits, and their licence was written in the early 1980's before home data was on the horizon for anything beyond hobbyist use (and then only by dialup modem).

While Government and commerce are increasingly migrating their services onto an Internet-only basis (most job applications, university applications, many travel reservations and confirmations just for starters) - so the regulator Ofcom still treats the provision of a data service to homes as an optional extra, which can be repaired as slowly as it suits BT to do so. Our village lost electricity due to a substation failure and a team worked 24/7 to restore service. A few weeks later, an exchange fault took a dozen or so Broadband users out of service: repair action couldn't be countenanced until their homes had been visited by office-hours-only engineers, with appointments at least a week away.

Ofcom's explanation of why this is OK: "... despite its popularity, broadband is not regarded as an essential service, i.e. there is no risk to safety of life and consumers living conditions are not affected detrimentally by them losing their broadband service."

Is anyone game to help me come up with a "No 10" petition that government shouldn't extend use of the internet as a means of interaction with citizens until it has modified the BT licence to make Broadband an Essential service that is to be repaired as quickly as electricity supplies?

Refund just the COMPLAINANTS?

Phonepay plus have always struck me as caring much more about the industry than the consumer.

In this case, it appears they are only requiring reimbursement to those who actually complained. Why on earth are they not requiring the company to refund everyone who was charged for their service - automatically. Scamming large numbers of people for relatively small amounts works because people are too busy to bother complaining about small sums lost. And yet Phonepay Plus compound this effect by only requiring refunds to those who a) realise that they have lost money to the scam, b) realise that complaining might get them their money back, c) value their time at a low enough rate to bother to chase the possibility of getting a few pounds back, d) work out how to complain, e) follow through and actually complete the documentation required.

Even then, as others note, the penalty needs to be a mutiple of the money scammed: £10k seems about as severe as slapping someone with a wet lettuce-leaf.

Isn't it about letting kids make things happen?

Don't teach coding because it is a Good Thing.

Give kids from about 7 or 8 the chance to work simple chips, sensors, lights, speakers and solenoids - and let them make machines that do things.

At that age, few have the skills to create mechanical machines, drawings or creative writing that will genuinely impress peers and adults - but with some imagination and a bit of patience, they can develop a bit of kit that is reasonably impressive.

All will learn about logic and problem-solving, which are real skills that would be good to see more widely in the population. And some will find a joy in making physical things that might just help reduce the UK's century-old prejudice against working to design or make useful objects.

My late father worked at Kingswood Warren from its opening until 1967, and as a child I remember it as a wonderous place - a spooky anechoic chamber and a mindblowing first encounter with stereo.

One of the inventions at Kingswood was TARIF - kit to rebalance the colours in old movies where deterioration of the dyes had distorted the colour balance. The story was that its working moniker was originally TARRIF - "Tony and Ron's Remedy For Inferior Film", and that it was only when it won a Royal Television Society award that a more respectable name had to be developed. Dropping one "R" it became TARIF - "Television Apparatus for the Rectification of Indifferent Film".

Has Apotheker's speech been translated from another language?

"There’s a clear secular movement in the consumer PC space" - I really don't understand what that means.

Has it been (badly) translated from another language, am I just too ignorant to be worth HP communicating with, or does it make Leo Apotheker a bit of a pseud?

Brilliant move by Google

Alongside the "we just want to help people get results quicker" angle, there is a subtler motivation for Google.

I am pretty sure that more people enter search terms from the General to the Specific than vice versa: people enter "Kitchen Worktops in Coventry" more than they enter "Coventry Kitchen Worktops".

By serving results before the customer has finished typing, Google are encouraging more people to act on a broad search term rather than a specific one.

That hands a gift to national/international operators whose sites make onto the front page of broad-term results an organic basis. So far, that’s not worth anything to Google. But everyone else will find themselves competing for Sponsored Links using the same few broad search terms, which will result in the auction price zooming up. That does make a difference to Google.

It will make life more expensive for mid-scale operators, who will end up spending more on Google if they want to keep their traffic flowing. But it might have even bigger impact on smaller players.

A small hotel in Coventry might have featured well on “Hotel in Coventry” – or might have been able to afford to buy a Sponsored Link for “Hotel in Coventry”. But with Google Instant, they will see a proportion of those searchers being tempted away by the listings that appear as soon as they have typed “Hotel”.

That small hotel will not have a hope of a front-page organic listing for “Hotel”. Nor will they have a hope of affording to bid for a Sponsored Link for “Hotel” (their click-through rate would be so much lower than a chain that their bid would have to be astronomical).

So, forget the disintermediation that we were told would be the result of the web. Google Instant is just one small step along the road which is forcing that small hotel to pay to appear on an aggregator site which can compete on a national/international scale.

(I don't live in Coventry, or run a hotel, by the way).

My first (10Mb) Hard Disk ...

... for my IBM PC in about 1988: a bargain at £100 from Morgan.

What constitutes a link?

Banning links seems futile - even if you had sympathy with the need to censor. In order to point users to a page that upset the censors, surely one could simply create a link that creates a Google (or other) search that would be fairly sure to present the relevant page in top position. Or is Australia planning to ban their citizens from suggesting search phrases that might lead to information that they consider inappropriate?

Harris here we come?

One of the impediments to generating electricity from the copious wind power in the Outer Hebrides is the cost and ugliness of great thick copper cables to bring the electricity to the cities where the it will be used.

So why not move power-hungry Data Centres to the Outer Hebrides to exploit both the locally-generated electricity and the superior natural cooling from the colder/windier climate there?

Ofcom need to get serious about systematic abuses

Ofcom are limp and cowardly and need serious beefing up if they are to be a match for the aggressive telecom operators.

From online posts, I am not the only one to find that one major mobile retailer is very slow in issuing PAC transfer codes - 10 working days (even when chased up) against the Ofcom standard of 2 working days. When pushed to explain the delay, the operator explained that they "only collect mail from the PO Box twice a week".

How do they get away with it? By being regulated by lets-not-rock-the-boat Ofcom.

Ofcom's reaction to my experience "we will remind them of their obligations". Wow, bet that will scare them into behaving properly (at the expense of the extra profit to be made by delaying transfers out). Were Ofcom interested in the (properly notified) recording I had of the conversation? No. Did they check performance by making test transactions themselves. "Not sure" was the best I could get.

What about indirect Telecom operators?

If Ofcom doesn't get excited for any broader reason, they ought to be very troubled by the impact on indirect telecoms operators - the ones where a BT customer dials a prefix before the call (or opts for CPS - Carrier Pre-Selection) and then pays the rival operator rather than BT.

As I understand it, these operators use CLI to identify which account to debit for the cost of each call - which becomes useless if CLI spoofing becomes widespread.

OK, at the current 50p per minute to Spookcall, CLI impersonation would only be cost-effective for calls to a few high-cost destinations, but it doesn't take a genius to see that if Spookcall get away with it, there will be others piling in at much lower charges.

Ofcom seem very good at turning a blind eye to abuses that aren't specifically covered by their terms of reference, but surely they have a pretty specific need to make sure that rival telecom operators can continue in business?

John Geddes