Communication Breakdown

According to an article in the Times, Orange will soon introduce data bundles for its customers. We expect this to be formally announced in a couple of days' time, but the current info suggests that Orange's flat-rate bundles will be a tad more expensive than T-Mobile's... unless of course Orange bypasses the tiered system that T-Mobile uses (i.e. you pay more for IM and even more for VoIP).

We'll let you know the full details ASAP, but it does seem that the operators are slowly cottoning onto the fact that, if they want people to use the mobile internet, they'd better emulate broadband's flat rate norm. Now, how about data roaming...?

Orange subscribers who have taken up the mobile phone company's offer of free broadband haven't had a terribly good experience with it, by all accounts. They've even had to put up with an outage lasting weeks but, as it turns out, it seems the poor sods aren't even covered by the broadband industry code of practice!

According to the Register, the Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) does not include Orange in its rules because, being tacked on as a freebie, Orange Broadband is apparently not eligible. Yet Orange is still a member of ISPA.

Confused? You should be. I certainly am.

Here's an entry on the blog of VoIP company Rebtel that looks very familiar to me. That may be because most of it is cut'n'pasted from our own story on the disabling of the Nokia N95's VoIP capabilities by some operators. Dear Rebtel: next time you might want to write your own words, or at least credit the authors of those you take - especially when you're trying to take the moral high ground (as in this case).

And, while I'm on the subject of our original piece, I'd like to call out Vodafone for saying: "There is a misleading perception that VoIP services are 'free'. This is however not the case when it comes to using VOIP over mobile where customers will need to use data connectivity to establish a service and may incur further charges. Vodafone feels responsible that customers should not incur unnecessary charges when competitive mobile rates are a cost-effective choice for customers."

As you know perfectly well, Vodafone, services like Truphone (the main company to complain) tend to operate over Wi-Fi rather than 3G/HSDPA. So, true, it's not usually free to do that - but I suspect the main problem for you is that you wouldn't be getting the revenue (especially in a situation where the customer would otherwise be roaming), rather than you being concerned about customers incurring high data costs. So, if you will excuse the pun, your statement does not ring true.

OK, rants over. Time for lunch...

OK, so it's about a month since I installed Vista on my lovely 2GHz Core 2 Duo home laptop, and I can't say I'm unreservedly enthusiastic.

Let's start with the look of the thing, which is clearly one of the OS's main drawing points. It does look pleasant - so much so that when I changed the theme to "Windows Classic" in an attempt to get the performance back up, I actually missed the Vista feel and switched back again.

The other thing I like about it is the fact that I very rarely hear my laptop whirring anymore. This is fairly important.

What I don't like is that it takes longer to start up than XP did, and certainly takes about twice as long as XP to shut down. Hungry games like Oblivion also no longer run as efficiently. What does bump my Oblivion back up to normality is utilising ReadyBoost (pseudo-RAM from an SD card in my case), but frankly that technology doesn't seem to make as much of a difference as it should.

(Gamers: please note that I have Oblivion on pretty much the lowest settings. My laptop only has a gig of RAM, but the game ran fine on those settings under XP. It seriously struggles under Vista.)

Now, I understand that Vista is the OS we're going to be using for the next few years, and I understand that, while my laptop is new, a gig of RAM is going to be considered pretty weak in a couple of years' time. However, if I was thinking like a consumer here, and if I'd really been expecting "the Wow" to start now, I'd be pretty cheesed off.

As it happens, I'm thinking of it a bit more like a tech hack, and taking the long view makes me feel a little less cheated. But thinking that way also makes me wonder when a truly user-friendly version of Linux is going to become available.

Not that it will let me play Oblivion...

The Oxford Tube - aka the coach between London and Oxford - is now Wi-Fi-enabled.

I can't help thinking that our former news editor, Graeme Wearden, would have appreciated this on his daily trek to work from Headington! His 3G connection was notoriously patchy (especially for our VPN) - let's hope Wi-Fi does the trick.