ISPs review last decade ... and look to future

All the usual end of year reviews are coming out from the tech sites, but Broadband Genie has been talking to the various ISPs about the last decade and what their predictions are for the next ten years.

While it's quite long to summarise, they have spoken to Virgin Media, Be Broadband and TalkTalk amongst the big players.

Virgin Media's Jon James emphasised how far the market has come since they (then Telewest) first launched broadband in the UK in March 2000, and looked into the future with the company's 200Mb trials, increased upstream speeds and convergence opportunities.

Sylvain Thevenot of TalkTalk - who the site recently did a more detailed interview with, in which he was unconcerned about the impact of Tesco entering the market - believes that mobile based services such as mobile broadband and smartphones has been the big development in the last 10 years, and also refers to convergence along with different needs for different generations being what he expects to see in the future.

For their part, O2-owned Be Broadband highlighted the higher speeds delivered by ADSL2+ services and that they believe fibre is the future - with the next decade to be dominated by the possibilities that FTTC and FTTH services will bring.

Operations head Tom Williams also plugged their 'premium' broadband service, believing that users will gravitate more towards the quality end of the market.

Some comments from other providers and analysts can be found in the full article.

How the good guys took out a botnet

Botnets are the scourge of ISPs, authorities and the public at large as they pump out spam, phishing, DoS attacks and all kinds of other nasties.

Many have put resolving the problem in the 'too hard' bucket before, and will be relieved to see the news that some great work from a security researcher at anti botnet vendor FireEye actually managed to destroy a botnet by targeting its control machines and the domain names it used - hopefully putting in place a model for use by others in future.

With other techniques such as ISP based filters starting to become more prominent and governments finally showing an interest, hopefully the teens is the decade when the fightback against botnets is a major trend.

Microsoft rolls Word patch to comply with court ruling

After a court upheld a patent claim against Microsoft Word last week, the company appears to have already made available a patch to the popular word processing software to ensure that they can continue to sell it whilst complying with the ruling.

Microsoft expects to have copies of the software that comply with the ruling for sale by January 11, but it seems the patch - entitled 2007 Microsoft Office Supplement Release (October 2009) - is already available on their website.

The patch notes emphasise that it is compulsory for all US users of Microsoft Word, suggesting it will be a forced update in Windows Update very soon.

Italian court clears way for torrent censorship

The Italian Supreme Court has cleared the way for ISPs to be forced to block access to pirated torrent files, even if they are not hosted in the country.

The court ruled that torrent tracking sites are not just simple search engines like Google, saying that they play a key role in facilitating the upload and download of copyrighted content and hence are illegal under the country's laws.

With the court having ruled, copyright holders can now request ISPs block sites like The Pirate Bay, which you may recall was already blocked before in Italy in August 2008.

Sex sites blocked in India

Yahoo (including Flickr) and Microsoft's Bing have blocked the ability to turn off safe search functions and search for sex content in India after some recent changes to the country's laws.

Anyone trying to search for sexual content from Bing gets the following message instead of their results:

"your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content".

The country's laws covering pornographic content were expanded in October to allow the government to take action against search engines, ISPs and cyber cafes - with anyone failing to disable access to pornographic content liable to spend three years behind bars.

Scots MP calls for free hotel broadband

Anyone who has had to do some travelling with work could tell you just how haphazard Internet connections are in hotels - often expensive, often slow and often with no WiFi. The worst I experienced was £15 for a day for broadband that was less than 500Kb - and in a hotel room so remote that my mobile broadband dongle didn't work!

A Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) is now calling for all hotels in the country to make free broadband available as part of their services to guests, which would be a welcome development and would help the perception of the country for both business visitors and tourists.

John Park said:

"This is about offering a better service to guests and making Scotland a more welcoming destination. No good hotel would charge guests to watch TV or take a shower and I want them to think of broadband the same way."

Mr Park also called for ratings companies to include the broadband access as a factor when awarding hotels 'stars', which is a great idea.

Search Neutrality

The subject of Net Neutrality has been done to death, but an interesting comment piece at The New York Times is calling for 'Search Neutrality':

"the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance."

Written by Adam Raff, a co-founder of technology firm Foundem, the article highlights the impact on online businesses should Google effectively 'penalise' them by de-listing them from their search engine:

"One way that Google exploits this control is by imposing covert 'penalties' that can strike legitimate and useful Web sites, removing them entirely from its search results or placing them so far down the rankings that they will in all likelihood never be found. For three years, my company's vertical search and price-comparison site, Foundem, was effectively “disappeared” from the Internet in this way.

Google's treatment of Foundem stifled our growth and constrained the development of our innovative search technology."

While it's an interesting idea that the FCC may want to consider - regulating what are effectively the gateways and signposts to the web - it raises huge questions as to the impact it would have on the Google in particular, who make most of their money from sponsored search results such as companies 'buying' keywords.

Google are, however, very aware of the importance of search relevance to have users coming back to their search so it's in their interests to strike a balance.

One thing that is needed though is for it to be much easier to get a site listed on search engines, and re-listed if it falls off for any reason.

Microsoft targets Chinese search market

Microsoft have stated that China is the biggest strategic market for them (and one in which they are trying to gain a foothold for their Bing search engine, in a country where Google runs second in terms of market share to the dominant Baidu).

Microsoft launched Bing in the country in June, but only as a beta release while they work to understand and cater for the needs of the market in the country further.

Microsoft said in a statement:

"Microsoft is committed to the China market and the search market in China is the most important strategic market for Microsoft.

We specially set the search technology center in China to get a deeper understanding of what Chinese users need, to be able to deliver the best product to them."

China has more Internet users than any other nation, with 350m citizens online.

Why Twitter filters are needed

One Twitterer passed on this link as to why businesses should be careful to ensure they have appropriate filters in place if they are going to include a Twitter stream on their website:[Click on Image for a larger version]

No doubt there are some red faces over at Domino's Pizza then!

Twitter Genius wanted

It was reported a couple of weeks ago that a man managed to pick up a job at a marketing company on the basis of one Tweet, and now there's another interesting Twitter job being advertised on Craigslist.

The advert for a 'Twitter Genius' (a social media expert for an e-commerce startup in Greenwich Village) calls for:

"I need someone who tweets in their sleep and updates their fb status before calling their mom on Mother's Day."

And has some interesting ground rules indeed. Have a read of the ad for more details.

Google's cheeky YouTube promo

Google have done a cute bit of PR in telling TV and media companies that they would be better to leverage their YouTube platform than collaborating on their own initiatives such as Hulu.

Speaking to The Financial Times, Google president of global sales operations and business development Nikesh Arora is quoted as saying:

"At some point in time it becomes an economic choice by the content owners. It's a matter of core competencies."

Mr Arora went on to question the ability of traditional media sales teams to effectively sell advertising around the content when compared to Google's AdSense and DoubleClick operations.

O2 apologise for London data network

O2 have apologised about frequent service interruptions to users of their mobile data network (handset and mobile broadband users) in London attributing the problems to their network being overwhelmed by smartphone demand.

O2 head Ronan Dunne:

"Where we haven't met our own high standards then there's no question, we apologise to customers for that fact."

Mr Dunne emphasised that the problems are largely in London and said they are installing an additional 200 base stations in London to ease the load as well as working with smartphone manufacturers to better understand future capacity needs.

In the meantime Vodafone have seized on the problems to promote their own reliability.

ISPs call for action on BT's Next Generation Network

With BT's new fibre network to start operating next year, TalkTalk and Sky have called on BT's Openreach access division to get moving in agreeing wholesale deals for the ISPs to provide services over the network.

At present Openreach has agreed no commercial deals, with TalkTalk's Charles Dunstone saying that the product offered is "not acceptable" in its current form, and Sky's Dougal Scott saying:

"We'll continue to work closely with BT to provide input on how the trial products need to be modified. It's important that future products are attractive to potential wholesale partners if BT is going to see a return on its investment."

BT said in response:

"Following a successful pilot, Openreach is confident its superfast broadband product delivers sufficient speed performance, reliability and flexibility. We will look to develop even greater flexibility should there be commercial demand."

BT considers spectrum court action

BT are threatening to take the government to court over proposals outlined in the Digital Britain report that would extend the 3G licenses of providers indefinitely in return for using spare spectrum allocated to the mobile companies to ensure a minimum of 2Mb broadband service to all.

They have written a "letter before action" to Lord Mandelson threatening action should the government go ahead with Kip Meek's proposals.

Confirming they had written the letter, a BT spokesman said:

"BT has major reservations around the wireless spectrum proposals from the Independent Spectrum Broker.

The proposal to extend current 3G licenses indefinitely represents a gift of several billion pounds from the UK taxpayer to the mobile operators and is a barrier to competition and innovation in the mobile market."

Should a court case happen, it would be bound to hold up the implementation of the Digital Britain recommendations.

Calls for Google ad deal to be blocked

Two advocacy groups in the US have asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to block Google's proposed USD$750m purchase of mobile advertising company AdMob.

As reported last week, the FTC has already asked Google for more information about the proposed purchase's impact on competition in the market - and now Consumer Watchdog and the Center for Digital Democracy have written to the FTC to voice their concerns.

Along with echoing the concerns about competition in the mobile advertising market, their letter highlighted privacy issues:

"Google amasses a gold mine of data by tracking consumers' behaviour as they use its search engine and other online services. Combining this information with information collected by AdMob would give Google a massive amount of consumer data to exploit for its benefit."

Naturally Google rebuffed the privacy concerns (as they always do):

"Google has a track record of providing strong privacy protections and tools, like the new Dashboard, for users to take control or opt out of data collection, and it will apply the same approach to privacy following this acquisition."

Should the FTC not request further information, approval of the deal would be expected within 30 days of Google answering the regulators questions.

Sony chief hails piracy plans

Michael Lynton, the chairman & chief exec of Sony Pictures Entertainment, has hailed the government's plans to tackle piracy as part of the Digital Economy Bill.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Lynton said of the proposals that are expected to cost each ISP customer £25 per year:

"If this legislation goes through, it will serve as a real example to the rest of the world."

However, the paper also reminded us that in May he said:

"I am a guy who hasn't seen any good come out of the internet."

Surprising that the company has a website then isn't it?