Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Thursday 8 March 2007, 12:36 PM
Introducing the iLaunch
Gawd bless The Onion - check this out - even CNet gets a mention!
Tuesday 6 March 2007, 10:56 AM
NPfIT doublespeak of the day
A couple of days ago the Guardian ran a story alleging that the NHS was seeking "alternative software suppliers" for the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), following a less than sterling performance from subcontracted suppliers iSoft and Cerner.
Naturally we rang Connecting for Health to check this out, and duly received a reply denying the Guardian's angle completely. "We anticipate that we will be advertising through normal competitive public sector procurement rules to put in place framework contracts to ensure there is an available supply route of additional capacity [my italics] and availability of resources to the NHS to meet future needs if required". Right, so additional capacity not replacement. OK. We'll see.
What got me was the marvellously disingenuous bit at the bottom of the reply: "Already we have seen the large scale delivery of systems which are providing better, quicker, safer healthcare, many of which have been on time and all of which are either on or under budget."
In other words, nothing that's already been delivered has been over budget, but CfH are conveniently leaving out the natural flipside to that. What about everything - and we're talking significant majority here - that hasn't been delivered yet? How's the budget doing on that?
Monday 5 March 2007, 12:03 PM
Hands-on with Fon... but why?
I really wanted to love Fon. I hoped to glowingly write up a crucial stage in the spread of ubiquitous Wi-Fi and, heck, the evolution of society itself! But, well, read on...
Fon is a Spanish-based global "Wi-Fi community". When you sign up on their website, you get a subsidised (it only costs €40/$40) wireless router in the post, which you then hook up to your broadband connection. The router provides two SSIDs, which effectively means you then have a private network for your own use, as well as a public network. You can choose how much bandwidth you allocate to this public network, but basically you're creating a new Fon hotspot.
A few weeks ago Fon celebrated its first birthday by giving away its routers to those who signed up on the day. So I put my name down, and my router pitched up about a week ago. I tried it this last weekend, and here are my thoughts.
Firstly, and somewhat crucially, it's not a very good router. Now, this may have just been an issue with my unit, but I had dismally patchy connectivity through both private and public networks, and that factor alone meant I was soon back on my trusty Belkin.
But even without that issue, I was left less than impressed with the ethos behind the thing. When you install your router you can become either a "Linus" or a "Bill" (geddit?), with a Linus being someone who "shares" their Wi-Fi at home and gets to use other Fon hotspots for free, and a Bill being someone who charges people to use their Wi-Fi (albeit at a very reasonable €3/$3 a day) and keeps half the takings, with the rest going to Fon.
And here's the thing. If you have a coffee shop or whatever, and you want to set up a cheap hotspot (free hotspots are better, but hey), then getting Fon and becoming a Bill makes pretty good sense, as the split SSID thing is really handy. Unfortunately, being a Linus... well, being a Linus is being a bit of a sucker. If you were really just giving away Wi-Fi, then the idea would earn a great big socialist "yeah" from me (and, I like to think, Mr Torvalds himself). But you're not - all you're doing is letting Fon make money off people by using your connection and giving you diddly-squat.
What do you get out of that? For a start, it makes very little sense in a UK residential neighbourhood where most people have their own connectivity anyway. If someone was visiting your home and wanted to use the internet, it wouldn't exactly be sociable to have them pay for the privilege - you'd just give them your password. Yes, you could theoretically surf other Fon hotspots for free but, although there are a surprising number of them out there, there are not nearly enough to make it a certainty that you'll be passing one when you need it.
It's not yet a mature network or a mature business model. It's not nearly as "community"-oriented as it makes itself out to be and, if it is to succeed, Fon will need to form a lot more partnerships with ISPs like BT (who may or may not be in talks with Fon). For a provider like BT, it would obviously make sense to turn all their "home hubs" into hotspots, thus expanding their hotspot/hotzone coverage at the cost of, well, nothing - their customers would be paying for it all. If they managed to sell their customers on the profit-sharing "Bill" model, then maybe it would fly. Otherwise, I don't think many people would be too keen to spread the Wi-Fi love for someone else's profit and little more.
Thursday 1 March 2007, 11:36 AM
Biscit - Is the end nigh?
This is starting to be a bit like watching a car crash in slow motion. I'm not even going to retread the long, increasingly ugly saga that surrounds Biscit, but you can catch up if necessary by clicking here to read up on the ISP's recent withdrawal from the ISP Association and find links to older stories.
So today it seems that the connection problems have started. We already know that Biscit's customers are no longer covered by any kind of industry code of conduct, and have no-one left to complain to if things go wrong. Add to that some bouncing cheques, not to mention allegations of some extremely dodgy business and... well, let's just say I would be calling around for a new ISP if I was a Biscit/V21 customer.
Wednesday 28 February 2007, 10:16 AM
'Handbags at dawn' redefined
What every eco-friendly/tech-savvy lady surely needs: a handbag covered in little solar panels. Cleverly, it has a USB connection inside it, drawing on the beneficent rays of Sol to charge your mobile phone or MP3 player or whatever. Superb! Let's have one for us guys now...
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