My highlights of 2011

I thought, at the end of the year, it was worth picking out some of the things that I’ve found most interesting to write about here over the last twelve months. So here’s my top ten, in chronological order, with a few comments.

In January, I looked at the little things that make a PVR special. Once you’ve had these features, you start to rely on them – and it’s a shame many new models still don’t come up to the mark.

As in previous years, the publishing industry continues to confound people; the sales of eBook readers may be rising, but some of the big companies remain resolute in their analogue ways. In February, it was the turn of Harper-Collins to miss the point, with a suggestion that library copies of eBooks should wear out.

April was an important date for Freeview HD; it’s the date after which any new kit tested and launched on the market should support all the features needed for things such as iPlayer and the new IP TV services being launched on channel 110 and above. That’s when version 6.2.1 of the D-Book became mandatory.

Prompted by an impending holiday, in May I considered upgrading my camera – whether to go digital, and if so, how to do that, and take my existing lenses with me. My holiday was also the inspiration for another post in June, in which I looked at how to get cheap mobile data in Italy. If you’re travelling, I hope you’ll find it useful.

July saw lots of publicity given to an Ofcom map of broadband around the country. It might look pretty, but read my comments, and see if you agree that, for many purposes, it’s actually not very useful at all.

Back in 2010, I started the process of migrating all my phones from the old ISDN line that I had to a new VoIP system, running over my broadband connection, and powered by a software PBX running on a small Windows PC. In September, after I’d been using the new system for a year, I was able to answer the question – was it worth switching to VoIP?

Value for money was presumably on my mind that month, as I asked the same question of robot cleaners, too, after reviewing the latest Roomba model for RegHardware.

Another thing that’s been on my mind is changing my mobile phone, for one that is a bit better at web browsing than my current Nokia E72. But there are some things the old Nokia does very well – and very few more recent phones do. I think. The problem is that most phone reviews just don’t tell me what I need to know.

And finally, in November I was lucky enough to attend an open day at the BBC’s research labs in Salford. There’s a lot more going on there than just the Daleks!

VoIP – was it worth the switch?

Last year, I documented parts of the process of switching my phones over from a BT ISDN2e line to a VoIP service, using the 3CX software PBX. So, now I’ve been using VoIP for just over a year, has it been worth the work in switching over? And how much money have I saved?

Costs

As far as costs go, it’s a bit tricky to work out the exact figures, because obviously I don’t make the same calls all the time, but broadly speaking, I don’t think there’s been any significant change in my calling patterns – I’ve not suddenly acquired a need to speak more to friends and family abroad, and I’m doing roughly the same amount of work as I was before.

There are also some minor complications in terms of working out exactly comparable figures for billing, with VAT at three different rates in the two years concerned.

All that said, the costs have turned out dramatically lower. BT’s ISDN2e service is, in my view, massively overpriced, and you pay for just about every little extra – customer controlled call forwarding, caller ID, and for each of the extra numbers allocated to the line. The lowest recent bill I ever had was for £147 a quarter, the vast bulk of which was line rental and service fees. By comparison, switching to the SIP trunk from Gamma Telecom (provided via my ISP, Wizards) means I pay just £10 per month, plus VAT. That gives me two channels, which is what I had with ISDN, and there are no additional monthly fees for the numbers – which were all ported over – or for things like call diversion, and caller ID, which can all be handled by the 3CX software PBX in any case.

Compare that with the BT bill that I have for April 2010. Line rental and other ‘basic’ charges were £151.41 plus VAT for a quarter. £9.90 of that was for BT’s ‘Total Care’ package, which I took out after their mind-boggling incompetence caused me various losses of service in the past.

Even stripping that out, the rental of an ISDN2e line on its own is £103.41 per quarter; the basic two numbers numbers allocated to the line were an extra £2.40, plus an additional £19.20 for the next eight. Plus £8.25 each for caller ID and call forwarding. That’s £141.51 per quarter, or £47.17 per month. So, I’m now paying just 21% of what I was paying BT, for a broadly equivalent service.

In terms of call charges, that same BT bill showed calls costing £24.96 plus VAT; in the first year of using the Gamma SIP trunks, my total call costs have been £75.46, so I can estimate a saving of around a quarter, depending on call patterns.

Of course, I still need broadband to provide the SIP trunks, but I had that anyway, so I’ve not factored that cost in to these calculations.

Roughly, I’m probably saving about £470 a year, plus VAT, even after ignoring the fees for BT care, and the £9 a quarter they have the nerve to charge people who don’t give them permission to dip into their bank accounts. That’s easily enough to have paid for a brand new PC to run the 3CX software and a couple of VoIP phones, if I didn’t have them lying around.

Reliability

What of reliability? That, of course, depends on the broadband, and I have had a couple of outages over the year, which naturally left me out of contact by phone too, for a few hours at a time. Depending on your point of view, that may or may not be critical. But I can live with the level of service I’ve received, especially since I’ve had problems with the ISDN line in the past that have left me with no service there – sometimes due to BT and at the end, due to a complete hardware failure of my ISDN PBX. So, broadly speaking, at the moment, I’d say things are pretty evenly split.

I’m certainly glad to have seen the back of BT’s over-priced ISDN2e service at last and all told, around £500 a year better off, too.

Well, that was quick

The news about Amy Winehouse has been all over the net this afternoon, and it doesn’t seem to have taken long for scammers to cotton on to it. In my facebook feed, around 7.25pm London time, I saw someone posting this:

This is doing the rounds on Facebook - only a few hours after news of her death

I’ve removed the name of the person who posted this, for security. Clicking the link does indeed take you to exclusiveonlinevid.com, which proceeds to run a ton of Javascripts. I’ve not looked at them in detail, and it’s not automatically propagated through my own Facebook account, but I suspect it’s another of the ‘survey’ type scams that’s been around on Facebook lately.

Updated: I’ve now also seen links to keywordcache.com – the second screenshot below – which once again claims to be a Winehouse-related video, and is definitely a survey scam.

A clear indication that the video is a fake is the supposed comments below it, the most recent of which is apparently from the 8th of June; it would be hard to have a ‘night before death’ video from six weeks ago.

So, if you see this link, don’t click on it. Tell your friends if they’ve posted it on their walls, and never, ever, fill in your Facebook password just to see a video.

The comments below this supposed video from yesterday are dated June 8th and earlier - clearly a fake

The scam is also linked to keywordcache.com - don't click any links!

Ofcom’s UK Broadband map is almost useless

Did you know that the City of Edinburgh has the fastest maximum average broadband speeds in the UK? So said Ofcom in a tweet this morning announcing their UK broadband map.

It’s a good idea on the face of it, allowing people to see where they’ll get the best broadband speeds, if you follow the link to the map, or look at the detailed data, it’s actually not very useful at all.

Nor, sadly, is the associated table of data, which you can download, or browse through on the website.

What the data tells you

The data tells you the overall performance, which is based on a combination of the other factors, the average broadband take-up, percentage of people receiving speeds below 2Mbits/second – which is the point at which it’s not much of a broadband service, and you’ll struggle with things like iPlayer – the availability of ‘superfast’ broadband, and the average modem sync speed.

The sync speed is sort of related to the throughput you’ll get; it’s the speed at which the broadband modem talks to the local exchange, and you’ll never get a faster connection than that.

You might, of course, get a much slower one – for example, if your ISP doesn’t have enough onward capacity, either from the exchange, or from elsewhere in their network, then you will be paying for a speed you will never get, or seldom in busy periods. But the data published by Ofcom doesn’t tell you that.

More missing information

In fact, this data is pretty basic; sure, it’s good to know if superfast broadband is available – and as the figures in each area rises, it’ll be trumpeted as proof that Ofcom, the government, or the industry is really doing wonderful lovely things for consumers.

But what would be more interesting is a detailed breakdown. For example, on many exchanges a system called ‘LLU’ or Local Loop Unbundling is in place, which allows competitors to BT to install their equipment in the telephone exchange and connect it to the wires that lead to the subscribers’ homes.

Some of this equipment is better than others, allowing some companies to provide faster access. Some exchanges have a wider range of providers in them, which may mean faster or – just as important to some – cheaper services are available. But the Ofcom data tells us nothing about the penetration of LLU, or how many exchanges have cheap as well as fast services available.

Administrative areas?

One of the biggest flaws, however, in my view, is that the data is broken down by ‘Adminstrative authority.’ The intention is probably that this should be useful to local government, so they can see the lie of the land in their area. But whether through laziness, sparseness of raw data, or incompetence, the actual presentation doesn’t help an awful lot.

Look at Hampshire, for example. This is a fairly rural county, with a few sizeable towns and cities. Both Southampton and Portsmouth have ‘unitary authorities’ which is term derived from how the local government is structured. And so they count as separate administrative regions, and each has its own entry in Ofcom’s table. Neither Basingstoke nor Winchester does, and so the data for both of them is simply lost amongst the ‘Hampshire’ entry.

The same is true in Cambridgeshire, and at it’s most extreme take a look at the top of the Ofcom map, and click the large area there, labelled ‘Highland.’ It’s a mostly rural area, and pretty sparsely populated. It does, however, contain the city of Inverness, which has a population of around 60,000 (2008 figure).

A report from the Highland council puts the population of their whole area at around 215,000 (2005 figure). Allowing for changes since those two figures, we can estimate that around a quarter of the population of this area is found in Inverness.

It doesn’t take much common sense to realise that broadband is often much better in rural areas, with more services available and faster speeds, thanks to proximity to the phone exchange. So just how much are those figures for the Highlands skewed by the fact that 25% of the population are in one place, with better connectivity that the rest of the huge area?

Want to know where to get fast broadband?

If one of the intentions of this data is to tell people where they might get fast broadband, it’s next to useless. Not all the data will be as skewed as it’s likely to be for the Highlands, but it’s still not much use. Edinburgh has the fastest broadband, the headline says. But which parts of Edinburgh? Will you get the same speed in a desirable townhouse in the New Town as you would in an industrial unit close to the airport?

There’s no way of knowing. Just as there’s no way of knowing anything about broadband in London, other than one figure which covers all the boroughs – making it next to useless for anyone who wants to know what experience they might get if they were to move.

And there are other reasons to want to know some of this data, too. For instance, high speed broadband is seen as essential to providing access to government services in future. One of the aims is that most interaction will be done online, allowing post offices and local council offices to be closed to save money.

But many services are used by those with lower incomes, so it would be useful to know if those services are equally available or if, for instance, the companies investing in providing faster broadband are concentrating on the more affluent areas, where they can make a better profit, and ignoring those poorer areas.

Knowing that sort of information could be vital for public policy; it could reveal a need to invest in infrastructure in some areas, or to offer subsidies to help make sure a digital divide doesn’t worsen, for example.

But Ofcom’s map tells you none of this. You’ll never know, from these simplistic figures, if the provision of broadband to the people of Hackney is as good as it is to those of Westminster or the City of London. You can’t find out if some cities have a good service, because they’re lumped with a huge rural area.

Focussing on the administrative boundaries chosen might have made sense to whoever put the data together, but it doesn’t make it very useful for anything other than grabbing a quick headline.

Ultimate Guide on sale

The Computeractive Ultimate Guide to Home Networks and Broadband is on sale today, from all good newsagents as they say.

It’s got plenty of articles to help you set up a home network, choose a broadband connection and sort out file and print sharing, for XP, Vista and Windows 7.

There are also tips on avoiding mobile broadband bill shocks when on holiday, which could save you the £5.99 cover price alone.

The free cd has 6 months protection from Ad Aware Internet Security, and best of all there’s a lovely photo of me on the editorial page. What more could you want in a magazine?

Multitasking on the iPod touch

I have recently bought an iPod Touch, to replace an old iPod that got dropped in water. One of the reasons for choosing the Touch was the ability to run apps, including the 3CX softphone, allowing it to be used as an extension to my phone system.

I know this will not be a popular post with some people, but I have to say that my experience of multi-taking on the iPod Touch is horrible, and it’s certainly ensured that I won’t consider an iPhone when I next look for a new mobile. Apple makes some great products, and I just can’t understand how they came up with an implementation of multi-tasking that is so clunky, and actually makes Symbian S60 look like a shining example of good UI design.

3CX phone allows me to use an iPod touch as an extension to my phone system

This is the 3CX phone in action. It works pretty well, and means that I can effectively use the iPod Touch to replace my DECT cordless phone, when I’m around the house or in the back garden. Pretty neat; as I’ve mentioned before, my phone system is all VoIP now.

Of course, for a soft phone to be useful, it has to be running, and 3CX goes into multi-tasking mode. That’s fine – I don’t want it to suddenly disconnect from the phone system and miss calls as a result. But what happens when an app is multi-tasking? You get a big red pulsing bar at the top of the iPod screen, that’s what. It looks like this:

When an app is multitasking, this red bar appears at the top of the screen

In a way this is useful, as it lets me know the application is running, and I haven’t accidentally quit it, but I can’t help thinking it could have been a little more subtle, perhaps? Just turn the title bar red, maybe? That’s particularly important, because not all apps appear clever enough to know about this, and in some of them, if the red bar is at the top of the screen, the labels for some buttons disappear off the bottom. Oh dear.

Now, let’s see what happens when you double click the button on the Touch, to see the app list.

In the list of apps, there's no context to say 3cx is different

This is the task switcher / list of recent apps. First, it seems to be essentially doing two things – allowing me to either close a running app, or remove something from the recent list. That’s fine, but there’s absolutely no context here. If the way that 3CX is running is significant enough to merit that pulsing red bar elsewhere, why isn’t it indicated here in some way too? If the app is multi-tasking, then closing it from here will stop it doing so and that might be important – in the case of 3CX, it means you won’t get your phone calls.

So, why can’t there be something to indicate that?

The other bugbear I have about this is that it all seems a hell of a palaver; I’m used to Symbian, and I know it’s fashionable to knock it, but if I wanted to kill an app, I’d hold down the menu key, pick it from the list, and press the C/Delete key to kill it. Job done.

Here, I’ve got to double click the button, then hold my finger on an icon until they all wobble and the minus sign appears, and then tap the one I want to kill, and then press the button to get back to ‘normal’ mode.

I really am struggling to see that as an advance. Yes, I know there are lots of things that iOS does that people think Symbian makes impossible; I know that many of the settings in Symbian are tucked away and confusing; and I know that I can just tap on an app in iOS and it’ll carry on where I left off, which is probably find for most users.

But I still really find this multitasking business – as described here, with 3CX – utterly bonkers on the iPod Touch. And since SIP functionality is something I consider very important in a mobile, it really has put me right off having an iPhone.

Technology to watch out for: DTCP-IP

I’ve been meaning to explain this acronym for a while, and a recent announcement from the DLNA (who create some of the standards that are supposed to make home streaming simpler) is probably as good a reason as any.

Regular readers will recall that I’ve seen various recorders over recent months that have fairly advanced functionality, allowing you to record programmes on the hard disk and then watch it over the home network, and predicted we’ll see more of them.

For example, last year’s Panasonic FreeviewHD recorder could do the trick, and it’s due to come to the Humax FreeviewHD boxes too. But, right now, it’s a little limited, because of content control issues – that’s the rules that say, for instance, that some material broadcast on FreeviewHD can only be copied to disc once.

Now, I know that to some, the very idea of content controls is horrific, but I think for now at least we have to accept that they’re here, and take organisations like the BBC at their word when they say that without them, they probably wouldn’t be able to broadcast some of the material from big Hollywood studios in HD, unencrypted. Whether that’s really the case is an argument for another day; for now, we have to live with this technology.

Streaming content

One of the consequences of content controls is that it can make home streaming fiddly (and, to be frank, DLNA can be quirky at best of times, as it is). With the Panasonic recorder I looked at last summer, for example, I could access both SD and HD content remotely on a 2010 Panasonic TV set, but I couldn’t access anything at all on my 2009 Panasonic; a Sony set with DLNA support could access only the SD material from the recorder.

At a Humax presentation where in-home streaming was discussed, we were told that, initially at least, streaming would be from the Humax recorders to other Humax set top boxes.

Essentially, a bit like the early days of WiFi, if you want a painless experience making it all work together, and all your TV programmes available to watch on any set, you’re best to stick to one brand. Go with a Panasonic recorder, and make sure you have recent Panasonic TVs on which to watch over the network. Or go with a Humax recorder, and put one of their set top boxes underneath each telly.

If you’re starting from scratch, that’s simple enough, but of course many of us aren’t, and we can’t afford to replace everything.

Why does this happen? It’s because of those content controls; if a programme is protected so that it can only be copied to disc once, or perhaps isn’t supposed to be copied at all, sending it over the home network to a random device about which you know nothing is not exactly within the spirit of things, is it? That other device could be a PC with software to record the stream, for instance, or a disc recorder.

Introducing DTCP-IP

And this is where DTCP-IP comes in; it’s a mechanism by which devices on a network can establish a secured connection with each other (a bit like using SSL for a browser) and use that connection to transfer not just the content, but also the information about how it has to be protected, such as whether it can be saved, or sent to an analogue output, and so on.

You might think from the name that it’s something to do with the TCP/IP networking protocol, but that’s not wholly accurate; the DTCP part actually stands for Digital Transmission Content Protection, which is the basic encryption and control system. It can be used over a variety of connections, including FireWire, but what we’re interested in here is DTCP-IP, and in this case the IP stands for Internet Protocol.

In other words, DTCP-IP is the variant of the Digital Transmission Content Protection system that works over the internet and home networks. It’s licensed to manufacturers by a group called the DTLA, and the major backers of the standard including Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba.

In late May, the DLNA issued some new guidelines which included the use of DTCP-IP (and much overuse of the word ‘leverage’, but I digress). This will hopefully mean that more manufacturers will include the technology in their products.

What does that mean?

In theory, if DTCP-IP becomes more widespread in devices that can access your home network, such as TVs and media players, as long as those devices that can share it also step up to the plate, then instead of having to stick with a single vendor to ensure compatibility, you’ll be able to pick and choose your equipment, and know that even if you have a Sony TV in the bedroom and a Panasonic recorder in the living room, you’ll be able to watch recorded shows in bed, without any problems, including those in high definition.

There are almost certainly bound to be teething problems; as many people pointed out when RegHardware looked in more detail at DLNA, if two boxes say ‘DLNA certified’ on them, there’s still no real guarantee that one will play content from the other, and right now a lot of consumers could be forgiven for thinking that DLNA certification is a bit of a mess.

If that can be sorted out, however – which means specifying which file formats players and servers should handle – then DTCP-IP will make it simpler to pick the kit you want for home streaming. And potentially, it’s not just streaming from your home recorder to your TV that’s involved here. It can be used over the wider internet too, and that could make it easier for online movie services to be available on a bigger range of streamers – instead of having to restrict, say, LoveFilm to boxes that have done a deal and had their software tested for security, they could be available to any that support DTCP-IP.

DTCP-IP is also – as far as broadcasters and content owners are concerned – a crucial component of the long mooted move to ‘home gateways,’ where a single multi-tuner receiver somewhere in the house is the only thing connected to the cable, satellite, or internet feed, with all the content available on any screen in the home.

One to watch

So, you might not have heard of it yet – and it’s probably unlikely that you’ll see stickers on boxes proudly proclaiming ‘Supports DTCP-IP’ – but I think this is a technology to watch out for, especially if you want to make the most of your home network, and watch your recorded TV wherever you like.