I recently covered the state of the Internet report specifically how the UK did not make it anywhere on the top 100 cities and has a much slower average broadband than well pretty much anywhere. Compare it to cities such as those in Japan which has most of the top 100 cities and you see a huge technological difference.

However, in latest studies by Ofcom Britons may actually not be as technophobic as the rest of the world thinks. The average Briton spends 45% of their time using some technological stuff be that the TV, Radio, iPhone, Computer or something else along those lines. The study has revealed that we have a social networking flair with the largest site in terms of mobile Internet access being Facebook.Which is sitting at more than 5 times the traffic sent to Google from the same medium.

Going with the data we cant even attribute this to younger generations taken over from the older generations. Old age pensioners are the highest growth for Internet take up service.  They claim 50% of old people now are connected to the Internet via broadband. Up from last years 43%.In contrast however the youth are best at multi-tasking such as using mobile phone, computer and watching TV whilst the older generation tends to need to focus on one goal at a time.

The figures also show that average spending on communications compared to general housing costs is around 4% or nearly £100 a month. This covers mobile phone, broadband, tv etc. With 50% of the market being covered by all in one service providers such as Sky and Virgin it is likely this has contributed significantly to the availability of services.

With information like that, one must really question is the Government responsible for slowing down the growth of technology in the UK? Our broadband infrastructure is far behind the rest of the world. Our government is using ancient browsers as recently discussed in the theme of security. Our government is perhaps reluctant to encourage technology to come to the UK as it would mean they can no longer watch our activities and tax heavily for it?

References
The Telegraph
ISPReview

Created by Whitebunnywabbit

Akamai has released its first quarter state of the internet report. The results are not encouraging for the UK. We have once again, came in extremely slow.With the South Koreans comming in at the top, our speeds are quite truely diabolical. Ofcom recently reported the average speed to be around 5Mbps , in the study by Akamai they rate our average speed as 3.8Mbps.

Given that their figures are from a much larger data sample I think it is safe to assume their figures are much more trustworthy than Ofcom.

To ensure that the UK stays in the dark ages, the goverment has dropped its plans to tax phone lines to fund high speed broadband roll out to the rural areas. Whilst dropping the plans for the tax is indeed a good idea, the plan to drop the plan is not such a good idea. The goverment needs to come up with other means of funding to support rolling out high speed internet. The plans by the Coelition to use the BBC License fee to fund the roll out would bring at last a benefit to the exhtortionet tax.

The report also shows that hostile activity on the internet predominately is still targeting Microsoft services: 74% hit the Microsoft -DS (Port 445) service.

References
TechWatch
The Inquirer
The Inquirer
BBC News

Created by Whitebunnywabbit

Not too many years ago many of us were sitting starting at our 56kbps modems wondering if this dial up was the one that would get us connected. I remember the day when broadband was finally rolled out to my village, I was hung over and slept through most of the event.

My freind’s dad worked with BT and he had informed me they had actually done the work weeks before but just had not got around to turning it on yet. How typical of BT. Well that day i was very excited at my first 512kbps connection it seemed unimaginablly fast.

Several years on and the technology has clearly improved, i now am sitting on one of Virgin’s 50Mbps cable connections, and like that first day of broadband, this too seems extremely fast in comparition to my previous connection, a Sky Max 20Mbps connection which acted more like 8Mbps!

It seems however no matter where I go I just cant get the optimal service, I moved here to a nice cable network area, and it turns out that not far away, they are testing out the 100Mbps service. The Virgin installer did hint to me that the trials were going well and they may be looking at rolling out nationally this year! Of course, now we’re looking at moving house so naturally i’ll undoubtedly end up outside the virgin network again.

Now I find that surveys, which may or may not be entirely trustworthy support rolling out fiber optical connections to the rural areas which once again means i’ll end up being the last one to get connected.

62 per cent of adults would like the UK government to deploy super-fast internet services in the countryside

This may be so but of that 62 per cent, how many came from the countryside, and how many of them were asked in a leading way? Would they have voted equally if the question had been reversed such that the question was in support of rolling out fiber to properties in big cities first?

Well no matter where I am, as long as I have broadband i’ll be happy. When we do move its likely to be on the edge of the city also so perhaps we will be lucky this time.

References

Top10.com

Created by Whitebunnywabbit