ASDA 160GB PVR

The Digifusion failed on me last Wednesday. Uh oh, Doctor Who episode on Saturday was scheduled right in the middle of the kids bath time as usual. Edict handed down from wife read " fix it or get another one right now!".

So against all my instincts to research the current state of the freeview PVR market on the internet for the next two weeks I instead went to a real bricks and mortar shop. ADSA! Didn't even buy any food just picked up the first thing that had a dual tuner paid and left.

As it turns out, this is a pretty sorted box considering it was less than a hundred quid. Doesn't record the last 15 minutes of what you are currently watching to provide the magic "rewind live tv" facility BUT then it doesn't have to constantly spin the hard disk so it is QUIET! Has series link a fast usable readable Electronic Program Guide (EPG). So far it has felt like a major upgrade in terms of usability and reliability. Coming out of PAUSE mode works flawlessly unlike the digifusion and subtitles are always recorded and there is a 'continue watching from where you last left off' feature for all the stuff you have recorded. I really really like it. You can switch it on set stuff to be recorded really fast compared to the Humax, Digifusion and Sony PVRs that I have used. A win. Wife likes it too!

The Register publishes my thoughts on LLU and ADSL economics and iPlayer bandwidth consumption

For my sins I run a small UK ISP. I am exposed to the Capacity Based Charging model both from BT (via 3rd party wholesale outfit 186K) and from LLU wholesale from Tiscali so I can see some differences. Nevertheless to get traffic from to and from my ADSL clients costs me 10 times as much in cost of bandwidth as to send or receive the same packets to the rest of the world. That includes you BBC. So it costs me probably 20 times as much as it did the BBC to deliver their content. Do I blame the BBC? No I don't. Do I blame BT? you're damned right I do.

As far as I can work out the major component of this bandwidth cost is fibre backhaul from the exchanges. If BT were to sell dark fibre pairs to the LLU players this price would fall though the floor and low contention ADSL would be available to all. But BT won't sell dark fibre because they fear that their ipstream model and 20 century network could be instantly replicated with a vastly lower cost base. Someone tell me why the annual rental of 1 GB wes/les/bes circuits costs a fortune compared to 100Mbps variant (which isn't cheap). It is the same fibre just a different transceiver. If Offcom had made the same pricing model of BT's costs for installing and maintaining fibre as it did for copper pairs in 2000 when LLU started we wouldn't be in this mess now.

So BT you need to upgrade your exchange links. Oh and while you are at it, your central pipes, deliver them as Gig Ethernet not this 655Mbps ATM stuff of yesteryear. Since no one is going to buy a central pipe of that size outside of a known data centre you could make them a few hundred pounds to install instead of the tens of thousands. You could ..but you won't will you? Not until someone makes you. Sad thing is you would end up making more money not less. All those little ISP's could start buying direct from you again. Didn't ADSL competing against your valuable leased line and ISDN business in 2000 show you anything. It was a good thing.

It is the price of fibre between BT exchanges that is the barrier to the UK internet services. I think Easynet was instrumental in getting a better deal with the BES service from BT but what it really showed was that BT will do anything not to sell dark fibre.

As soon as an LLU player could bring on another neighbouring exchange using a properly IP routed mesh topology with 100 times the bandwidth for the same cost as today you would see IP Multicast working. You would see packets for geographically close communications not being tunnelled half way across the country and back. You would have local resilience. ISP's might even run BGP in every exchange with other LLU isps. The UK internet wouldn't depend on a few data centres in London. Local data centres would pop up everywhere. People are used to Latencies of between 30 and 50 ms. But imagine if that was the worst you ever got and now your local VPN traffic got there and back in under 2ms and your London vpn head end was only 5ms round trip.

Ultimately LLU is completely held to ransom by BT determining the price of getting bandwidth to the racks in the exchanges. Unbundle the fibre and all the problems melt away.

Its a strange new world/craft fair

1st things 1st. Happy new year.

2nd things 2nd What is second life all about?
I didn't really know. So I took Linden Labs up on their kind offer of free beer last night and went to have a nose around their Brighton office. After about 2 hours I still only have an impression. Either SL is the cheap 3D universal interface that every one could use to interact/ do business with on line with or it is just a craft fair. That second option isn't how Lindens would recognise it and it isn't meant to be disparaging. There is a 3rd view held by some :- that SL is more along the lines of an open asylum that attracts a disproportionate number of people who need to express themselves in ways normal society would frown upon.

If second life is to scale Linden Labs must allow other organisations to build and run servers located around the globe. In fact Linden Labs themselves should probably give up running the majority of servers they currently do. This is a cost overhead they just don't need. Ownership of protocols and the and the ability to block access to any rogue server as the one and only sanction is all that is required. Probably only allowing legal entities other than individuals to own and run servers would be a useful raising of the bar. Oh and obviously people need a lot more hand holding before they will commit their time and energy to SL. I would say that the majority of the people I spoke to last night don't actually use SL beyond an initial foray.

On a more cheerful note having a poly pin of Harvey's best bitter was a good move and I scored a Linden Labs re-badged Rubick's cube. Also bumped into Iestyn Lloyd from Littleloud whose appearance on ch4 shows that at least someone did something useful last year even if it was just playing dead.

Nokia 770 and Bluetooth Keyboad

Got a dell branded igo slimline keyboard as a present from the wife. She in return got a yamaha digital piano. We both love our respective keyboards. Using mine right now to type this. Have also used it paired up with the HTC phone. Bit pointless really as the thumb keyboard on that device is adequate.

Central Heating doom redux

Just about to go away for the Christmas Holidays and Wife points to puddles of water below boiler (furnace for non Brits). Since this is next to the loo I get ready to tackle the issue of pointing with number one son. He is however blameless.When not heating water or the house a steady drip every 20 secs or so is emerging from the wall mounted boiler. Nothing I could do about it there and then so I put a bowl underneath and hoped for best. On return no disaster but I have to do something. Rather than dissasemble it and risk no heating over the new year period I gamble 8 quid on some screwfix brand no nonsense leak stop and throw it into the header tank for the system. Bottle claims a fix within 24 hours. Yeah right! 3 days of contemplating the horrific cost of a boiler replacement and then suddenly, praise the lord, all is well. Drip has stopped.It is going to be a happy new year after all!

My next mobile phone

I have an HTC TyTN from Vodafone I originally loathed it. However de-branding and putting the HTC Windows Mobile V6 on has made it much more stable so I tend to swear at it much less.

Like all 'do everything' phones it is a compromise.

What a I have realised, in using such a device, is the phone I really need has:-

3G for connecting another device (laptop or pda) to internet
Bluetooth for connecting headset and laptop pda
Fantastic voice control like orange wildfire.
fold out keyboard like a Nokia 6820 for texting
and a black and white e-ink display I can read in daylight that shows the time without me having to use a back light.
A 2.5mm stereo headphone / mic connector
and a standard mini/micro USB cable connector /charger.


Equally important I don't want to :-
browse the internet on my phone
read e-mail on my phone
take pictures /video with my phone
view anything in colour
listen to mp3's or radio.
Use a stylus on my phone

I used WAP once 5 years ago and have never sent or received an MMS

also

For mobile media / internet applications the Nokia tablets are great and paired with the phone I imagine would make me happy. If only they had coupled the latest tablet hardware with the psion MX 5 case and keyboard.

Piertopier neeeds you! Because it can't have me!

Piertopier the Brighton free wireless hotspot network has been a hobby for 3 or 4 years now. However expanding family commitments mean I can't do what I used to do. So if anyone want to sign up to helping with a worthwhile community project please let me know.

Nokia 770

OMG ! After years of proudly showing off the £400 zaurus I go buy a £70 toy for the wife and it is better than the zaurus! Right now I have a Nokia 770 tablet in front of me. Using its wifi connection it is vpn'd into the office network via a cisco PIX firewall and is showing me a windows xp desktop via vnc. 800 x 480 display so it is actually usable. This is so cool.

The opera browser works great with gmail (if you switch on the javascript). Lets say this again 800x480 display and fits in your pocket. Oh and it has decent battery life.

Downside is my better half is wondering what happened to her new 'palm'. I am going to have to buy another one. Then work out how to make it accept Chinese character input for her msn friends. The joys of open source!

My mate Sevan has probably done more with his 770 in a shorter space of time.