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 G on April 7, 2009
Can you smell that?
That’s the distinct whiff of 1984 in the air.
A new EU directive means that from today all Internet service providers are required to keep data on your user habits and usage.
It states that all ISPs in the Union have to, by law, keep records for a year of online communications.
Thankfully, your emails and Internet phone calls will not be stored, as the directive is designed to establish only “whether there has been contact between suspects”. This data is protected by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
A warrant will be required to see the data on connections, but civil liberty campaigners are still concerned that the information will be accessible to other public bodies and local authorities other than the police – probably for a small charge 
This legislation is a lead-up to the proposed centralised government database which the government reportedly plans to use this kind of information for pre-emptive searches “for suspicious patterns to identify suspects”.
The BBC reports that some governments can see where this is going and actually stood up to the directive.
Germany has mounted a legal challenge and Sweden is going one better by simply ignoring it. Cool huh?
Our beloved government, however, has grabbed its ankles and agreed to reimburse ISPs the cost to them for storing this info.
Yup.
Not only are we being spied on even more now – we’re also going to be chipping in £46 million for the privilege over the next eight years.
So? Does this make you feel all warm and fuzzy knowing that we’re being so “well protected” or would rather carry on your private business – and it be private?
Why not leave a comment below?
That is if you don’t mind having it stored on a government database :0
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