Branson Pickle

According to the Evening Gazette, Blackpool's "broadband connection" is about to become "one of the best in the country".

These opening words in the article left me a bit confused. Is journalist Nick Hyde telling us that Blackpool is so behind the times that it has only one broadband connection? Or maybe, just maybe, he is a lousy reporter that has been fed by Virgin Media's publicity machine and knows absolutely nothing about the subject he is writing about.

The latter, I think.

So lets digest the article. Mr Hyde is saying that people in Blackpool can now acquire "one of the best" connections in the country. Best in terms of what?

I can tell you now that Virgin Media is far from the best Internet Service Provider in the UK at the time of writing. My history with them is well documented on this blog: to summarise:

• I've been a customer since the year dot
  
  
• I was very happy to pay premium price with Telewest due to second to none reliability and completely unlimited connection.
  
  
• Virgin took over and offered me a 20MBit package, then applied throttling across the board once I was locked in a 12 month contract.
  
  
• Their Chief Executive declared that net neutrality is "a load of bollocks".
  
  
• They proceeded to sign deals with music/film lobby groups to monitor internet usage.
  
  
• They are more interested in sucking up to lobby groups and the Government than they are about their customers' privacy.
  

Anyhoo, according to the article in the Gazette we "have only been able to get broadband speeds of between 8Mbs and 20Mbs" in Blackpool. What the hell is a Mbs? A Major bullshit story? I'm sure we get more than 20Mbs in Blackpool from the Gazette alone if that is the case. Another sign that the author, Nick Hyde, is completely clueless about the subject and by this point his journalistic oesophagus was probably full of the advertising that Virgin had sent him.

Next we have a cracking technical case for Virgin being a "massive boost" for business.

Steve Pye, chairman of the Blackpool-based Federation of Small Businesses, said: "My connection at the moment is 8Mb and sometimes it can be a little slow and even crash." Time you switched from Virgin then Steve? Internet connections don't crash: computers do.

He follows on to say: "When you are part way through putting a deal together this ("crashing") is not a good thing." How is 50MBit going to help then? If your connection sucks, increasing the bandwidth will make no difference; you will just be paying more for a connection that still sucks.

I'll give him the benefit on that but it's still not all good with Virgin. Lets say the 50MBit was needed to conclude the deal: with Virgin Media's Stalinist throttling policies the deal could similarly be lost if the connection was used for for more than 30 minutes at full speed. This is because after that point Virgin Media has decided that you are in the top 5% of users and as a result your bandwidth is cut by 75% for the next five hours. It's automatic, there is no discretion and it will not be revoked. Bye bye deal.

I am absolutely baffled as to why our local newspaper is freely advertising Virgin Media and clearly the article writer has done very little of his own research. Given that it's not uncommon for the Gazette to publish Government policy and agenda as news, a part of me believes it's an active push for Virgin to be the preferred provider of broadband services because they are currently the only ISP to have caved in to the Government and the BPI.

Virgin's 50MBit rollout isn't even news. It has been available for ages and in fact I was offered it a few months back when I left them. The only reason to have it is if you have lots of money to waste on having the "fastest".

For normal web browsing and average iTunes use, you don't need it.

For heavy downloading, there are much better and significantly (5 or 6 times) cheaper products around.

Andy Murray Top 10

I accept Andy Murray is a good tennis player, even though he may be about to be despatched from Wimbledon by some guy I have never heard of.

Regardless, here are my top 10 reasons to hate Andy Murray.

10. His fake American accent.

9. His annoying fist pumping.

8. His typical dour Scot personality.

7. The "Come on Tim" annoying middle class toffs that for some reason are waving Union Jacks at him.

6. He hates England.

5. "Murray Mount"

4. His clone like failed tennis player mother that groomed him because she was crap.

3. His gold digging girlfriend.

2. The fact that they are touting him as the winner of Wimbledon and it's only the third round. For the Scots, it's like England being touted as World Cup winners before a match has been played. And I know how much you hate that.

1. That if he does ever win any Grand Slam competitions, particularly Wimbledon, we'll never be allowed to forget it.

Skool iz kool

The schools in my hometown of Blackpool apparently have the fifth highest truancy rate in the UK.

Not a good statistic. Blackpool also has below average figures for GCSE passes and it can be said that the product of schools in Blackpool are low quality.

In true Labour style, their implementation of an education system is out in force blaming someone else: the parents. In this case it is for taking kids out of school for holidays, and apparently they are thinking of locking up parents of truants. Hmm. Stopping parents going on holiday by sending them to a holiday camp. Not sure about that.

I'm baffled as to how - even if the parents took the child out of school for the entire holiday - a few weeks missed can cause grades to be so poor and cause truancy to be so high. Well, unless the parents are extremely rich and they are constantly going on holiday. Call me a snob if you want but rich parents tend to know better than that.

Parents do try to take their kids out of school towards the end of term time, just before the holidays in order to save quite a bit of cash on the holiday itself, because clearly holidays are expensive when all the kids are off school. Toward the end of term, exams are done, the curriculum is basically complete. Why does it matter if someone takes a week off?

I think the schools are looking for an easy way out by passing on the blame. Kids skip school because they are bored, because they think it's cool to skip school, and in Blackpool at least, there's no inspiration or aspiration driving through the system to bring people back.

I was taken out of school a few times and I don't think I came out any worse off for it but I didn't skip school at any other time because I didn't want to and because my peer group was not doing it.

It's simply not feasible to blame family holidays for poor grades, and it's not feasible to say that families in Blackpool go on more holidays in term time. It's a bizarre statistic not linked with anything.

The boss of "childrens services" in Blackpool, David Lund, states the obvious when he says there is "a clear link between pupils with high attendance and those achieving well in exams". Is there a clear link between authorised absence (holidays) and really poor grades?

At Palatine School, or Palatine Sports College as it is called now, one in five pupils were persistently absent in 2008. That means they were absent for more than 20% of the term time. And they're trying to attribute that to too many holidays?

Try looking closer to home.

Boring lessons
Low quality teachers
No classroom control or discipline
No out of school activities
Low quality parents

...

Total Recall

Lately I am liking more and more the idea of being able to recall Members of Parliament, or in laymans terms, kick them out if we get sick of them.

It's how Arnie got in in California: a percentage didn't like the existing Governor and forced a new election, and he won.

This would be particularly useful right now with all these expenses related resignations, or rather steppings down. As you will know, all of those MPs that have been caught with their snouts in the trough are "stepping down at the next election", although they all say they were intending to step down and that the expenses scandal is nothing to do with it. Right.

They are hanging on because they will receive a £70,000 "readjustment" payment if they simply quit being an MP.

Had they gone now, they wouldn't get it. Had they been recallable, they would most certainly not get it, and I think there should be an option to recall their pension to spend it on something more useful.

Bore draw

So Andy Murray has been slagging off British tennis because 9 of the 11 Brits went out of Wimbledon in the first round. He should have admitted that he was almost the tenth, having been taken to the wire by a no hoper.

It looks like Murray has the easiest draw ever seen, you know, almost as if they have set him up to win the competition. I don't think anyone outside the top 20 is actually in it.

I don't know why they don't just have him play Federer now. I was there last year and was hoping to watch Spanish ace Nadal wipe the floor with Murray. But Nadal destroyed him so fast that I ended up getting the womens semi finals which were just a Venus and Serena cruise.

British Hero

Looks like Andy Murray won today, after scraping past Robert Kendrick who looked like he could have beaten him.

I was all ready for the Scottish Loser headlines as well.

Maybe Gordon Brown will do me a favour and make a speech.

Mother of the Free?

Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political system that strives to regulate nearly every aspect of public and private life. Totalitarian regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state, personality cults, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of state terrorism.

Sounds like the UK.

I'm voting Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Vive la Legislation

Lord Steve Carter and Ben Bradshaw have revealed their plans for "Digital Britain".

• Application of a £6 per year phone line tax to fund the 2MBit broadband expansion into rich suburbs.

• ISPs are forced to hand over customer details on request to Ofcom which can be dished out to media conglomerates so they can monitor and sue you more easily.

• All peer to peer is illegal, full stop and Ofcom is tasked with blocking it.

• "Online piracy is wrong" and "unacceptable", and anyone caught "downloading illegally" will be shot at dawn.
  

Superb. Another double helping of spin complete with the bitter aftertaste of legislation. I thought this report was supposed to take us forward. Taxing everyone to pay for old copper wire technology to be rolled out whilst everyone else on the planet is rolling out fibre is a sure fire winner!

If you check out what Ben Bradshaw said in the Commons today, it's clear he was just reading his script and had no idea what on earth he was talking about. Bullshitting it about fibre rollout when it's not even on the radar and there is no incentive for any company to take a lead on it.

I was under the assumption this report might be a really important step in making Britain a digital leader. In fact, having read the report, all it proposes is a new tax and a few analyses. No doubt incorporating more and more reports from Lord Snooty, more taxes and even more legislation.

So, they intend to eradicate their perception of online piracy by providing Ofcom with powers to obtain your personal data from ISPs to give to third parties so they can sue you. Currently this cannot happen due to the Data Protection Act. I really am against this action, as I believe most ISPs are. It's just another step to policing the internet and is a burden they do not want.

We've had Feargal Sharkey on again, totally missing the point and pushing his own agenda to make himself more money from his single hit song. Yes, he is chief executive of British Music Rights: another self serving music lobby group that labels all music downloaders as thieves.

He obviously has no idea of reality when he talks about a small number of people not being happy about this. Nobody is happy about it, because its the music industry pressuring the Government to push legislation through to support their failed business model. We don't need these aging, overgrown, monolithic music companies any more given the other means of distribution for music.

Apparently piracy in the UK costs music companies £175 million. The Government has already handed banks hundreds of billions, so why doesn't he just subsidise the music industry like he does for manufacturing, farming, and so on.

“If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And If it stops moving, subsidise it." - Ronald Reagan

If you download music or movies, the BPI try and convince you that you are wrong, that you are the problem and that you are a criminal. You've no doubt seen the "Knock off Nigel" adverts and associated parodies: likening people that download a few tunes to someone that would rob their grandmother is just bizarre and laughable. It also implies that there's something wrong with doing things on the cheap: something I would vehemently disagree with.

The Government reckon that their measures will reduce "illegal downloading" by 80%, but there is no such thing as illegal downloading. It's like labelling people that buy fake brand name clothes as criminals. They're not. The crime is in the distribution: in the case of file sharing it's the making available of contents and not the downloading of it. For those that use peer to peer, the technology relies on sharing and most peer to peer clients enable sharing by default.

I am sick of people like Feargal Sharkey and BPI boss Geoff Taylor labelling internet users as criminals for downloading something that was available online. I am sick of the Government pandering to these industries. Unfortunately the Government and media lobbies are so far behind on all this, that by the time they legislate for Bittorrent, it'll be yesterday's technology anyway.

I also feel some sympathy for the many businesses that distribute their software and updates using Bittorrent, because they will have to go back to old style leased line technology to provide this to their customers if the Government decide to force ISPs to block it.

I personally believe that these draconian measures will simply benefit other more liberal countries with a more modern attitude to business. Should they ban and block Bittorrent, peer to peer users from the UK will purchase remote servers hosted there in order to operate peer to peer software under different legislation. They will then use a virtual private networking connection in order to download their content from it. In fact, this already happens and is something I certainly would consider if the UK Government bans peer to peer as it suggested in the Commons today.

They should take a look at the case of Comcast in the USA. They blocked Bittorrent and ended up being sued because of it. They lost and the FCC forced them to stop it.

Maybe some day once someone in power actually thinks for themselves and has a background in the subject (rather than getting all their opinions from a board of self serving quango sitters) they will make progressive legislation to improve everything for everyone. This smokescreen only benefits music companies. Everyone else gets taxed or sued.

Vive la Revolution?

So, Lord Carter today will be announcing a £3billion "Digital Britain" project for delivering broadband internet to every home in the UK as well as plans for "combatting" piracy.

Their benchmark for bandwidth is 2Mbit which, yes, compared to dialup is fast but compared to all broadband connections in the UK at the moment is the slowest and is certainly not a speed that will provide good content delivery for much longer than a couple of years.

In some countries such as Sweden and South Korea, the norm is 100MBit with some homes able to have 1000MBit. Investment was placed in better, future proof technology and they are benefitting from the foresight of their Governments by having the means to deliver high speed data into almost any home.

In the UK we are stuck with DSL: if you can get a BT telephone line - which everywhere other than extreme rural cases can - the chances are you can easily get 2MBit already and have been able to for 4 or 5 years. Standard broadband speeds in the UK are between 8 and 20MBit depending on what you want to pay for. Yes, there are a few rural villages that consist of a few giant farmhouses, mansions and barn conversions that are so far away from urbanisation that they can only get dialup, but having seen some sob stories from these people about it my conclusion was that they probably have enough money to buy the entire internet.

So where's the story?

The story, I believe, is that the "broadband in every home" chunk of the forthcoming statement is a whitewash for the underlying business deal that I suspect has occurred between the music industry lobby groups and the Government in relation to the other part of the story.

Remember I said it would cost £3billion for the broadband project? Well, that money has not been allocated by the Government, which means somebody else is paying for it and I believe it's the music industry.

But what would be in it for the music industry? Simple really, the license to continue to bully people into believing that downloading a few tunes turns them into a criminal with the percieved backing of the Government and Police.

I would even go further and suggest that these internet connections that the Government is wanting to put into homes would come with a caveat - that the music industry can monitor them and can freely acquire personal details and surfing habits of users in order to build a case against them.

Currently this isn't possible, because ISPs are not allowed to disclose details of their customers due to the Data Protection Act. Most of them do not want to either. The only reason anyone would even want to pay for a premium 20 or 50 Megabit connection is to download movies, music and games and if ISPs decided to hound them about it, they'd either leave or cut their subscription to a cheaper one.

Richard Branson's Virgin Media is "leading the way" on this so called anti piracy jaunt. Given their love affair with the BPI I was not shocked to hear that they are now promising to disconnect people that they percieve to be downloading copyrighted content.

We already know that the BPI crawls torrent sites, tries to download complete files from people and then sends a threat to Virgin who pass it on to their customer. I have had one myself, and due to my own anger at that and Virgin Media's throttling policy I am now an O2 Broadband customer. I suspect this is how Virgin will continue to determine someone that is using their network for distribution of copyrighted content, but given their acceptance of spying services such as Phorm I would not be surpised if their statement that they will not spy on users is a complete lie.

In fact, Virgin said they wouldn't disconnect users for file sharing less than a year ago but a quick wave of the wallet from Universal and they have gone back on that promise.

Thankfully they are the only ISP as yet that is persecuting its users in this way and actually there are plenty of superior ISPs in terms of performance these days. When I phoned them to cancel I was told all other ISPs throttle like they do and they started offering TV packages and so on. I was leaving anyway.

As I said I am with O2 Broadband (also known as Bethere/Telefonica) now. I was told I'd get 13MBit down my phone line, and I get 13MBit so I am happy about that. I got about 14MBit with my 20MBit Virgin cable line. The big difference is that after 30 minutes of downloading on Virgin, they cut the bandwidth by 75% for the next five hours, completely nullifying the point of having a high speed "unlimited" connection.

Working it out, it appears that in any 5 and a half hour time bracket on Virgin Media, I was able to download about 10GB. 3GB in the first 30-40 mins and the rest across the next 5 hours. On O2 Broadband I can download 26GB in that time and the best bit is I'm paying four times less for it than I was for Virgin Media. Winner!