by Jay Garrett on January 22, 2010
BT has hopped onto the fibre-optic super highway!
BT Inifinity is aiming to nibble at Virgin Media’s pie with the launch of its first super-fast broadband service which is set to arrive early next week.
BT Infinity will offer 40Mb per second speed broadband from a choice of two different price plans.
The cheapest Infinity package prices in at £19.99 a month plus a £11.54 line rental – but then there’s a rather ouchy £50 connection charge! Lumme!
That package will get you 2Mbps upload speed, and a rather tiresome capped usage of 20GB. BOOOOO! 
For 24.99 you get free installation, upload speeds of 10Mb a second and, from what I can tell, no usage cut-off – Rah!! 
BT is naturally making a big song-and-dance of the fact that its cheapest plan is £7.47 less a month than Virgin’s 50Mb super-fast service.
But now Virgin Media has hit back by reminding consumers that its service is actually faster at 50Mb per second.
A Virgin Media spokesman said, “We’re not sure why people in the UK would want to wait for BT’s 40Mb service which hasn’t launched yet, when they can already get Virgin Media’s great value 50Mb service.”
OooOooOoOo! Handbags! :p
There’s also the point that Virgin Media’s 50Mb service does not have a monthly usage cap at all.
BT says the 40Mb broadband service ‘will be made available to 4 million homes and businesses by the end of December’. So you have plenty of time for the battle to continue and see who’s best value once the dust settles.
by Jay Garrett on October 31, 2009
After being pointed to a Twitter post that said that “The BT Tower is currently going nuts with little flashes of light firing off it” I decided to investigate.
Was this new flashy show an attempt to ward of Kitten Kong (see below)?
Was it a huge electrical fault?
Was BT just showing off?
Well, apparently it’s just a new lighting system.
Gone are the restrained and friendly lights of old and in their stead is the mother of all LED screens.
The screen is wrapped around the Tower’s 36th and 37th floors, 167m above the pavement.
Obviously it’s designed to withstand the glorious British weather as well as errant pigeons.
As with the more modest screens in TVs, red, green and blue LEDs give the screen its full-colour array.
The new screen will be readable from Waterloo Bridge by all accounts and be visible even on a bright summer day (in England???!!??).
Here’s the science bit: Its 177 separate panels consist of 529,750 LEDs. It has an area of around 280m2 and a circumference of 59m, which is the same as seven London buses end to end.
Although the new screen will use more electricity than the Tower’s old skool lighting, each LED will last many times longer than the old bulbs, according to BT.
For all you frequent fliers out there – the new lights have been welcomed by pilots and not been cited as a distraction. BT denied that the Tower will contribute to light pollution, since, apparently, London is already so polluted by light that you can’t make the situation any worse even with the world’s biggest LED screen, which, allegedly, is visible from the Moon.
The now permanent screen will start up officially this evening during the lottery draw, and will start its life by displaying a countdown of the 1,000 days or so until the London Olympics begin.
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