The Weekly Round-Up: 16.03.07

When the Round-Up finally curls up its toes and heads to the great press party in the sky, it would like to think it could look back on a career of writing these weekly missives and feel as though it had brought some humour to people's Friday afternoons (keep that feedback coming in now).

But today the Round-Up realises it has something of a mountain to climb competing for laughs with none other than the day-long hilarity that is Comic Relief.

Realising 'if you can't beat them, join them', the Round-Up is getting into the spirit of things by typing this week's newsletter while sitting in a bath tub full of baked beans.

You'll have to take this one on trust - it's absolutely hilarious.

However, the Round-Up, while feeling parts of its anatomy slowly turning numb as they marinate in cold tomato sauce, can't help but reflect on whether this time-honoured tradition is the best way to raise money for the world's starving.

In fact, hang on a minute... If it takes 600 x 300ml tins of beans to fill a 180 litre bath tub, at a cost of 79p per tin, the cost of setting up this stunt is £474.

Before passing break-even by even £1, and meaning the stunt is more profitable to Africa's starving than a simple donation of £474-worth of baked beans, minus £50 shipping costs, the stunt must raise a further £426 above and beyond its set-up costs. And to ensure the stunt is more profitable than simply giving £474 to Comic Relief - and giving the baked bean shop a wide berth altogether - the stunt must raise £948.01.

All of a sudden it doesn't seem so funny.

However, later on this evening, Red Nose Day will culminate in a huge telethon which will no doubt be the usual priceless mix of BBC news readers doing song and dance routines and well, BBC news readers doing song and dance routines.

Now, the Round-Up knows comedy and that's comedy.

Other highlights of the evening, according to the BBC, will include "Dawn French in a special Vicar Of Dibley, featuring Sting".

To borrow heavily - but slightly improbably - from Jerry Maguire: 'You had me at 'Dawn French'.'

Of course, whatever your thoughts on Comic Relief and its wilful reinterpretation of the word 'Comic', the ends do justify the means. Even if it means every middle manager in the UK feels compelled to wear a Flintstone's tie into the office.

This year the charity hopes to crash through the £300m mark in terms of total funds raised, which is a staggering achievement.

So good luck to everybody involved (even Lenny Henry and Catherine Tate who have apparently 'teamed up' for the evening, possibly for a never-before-tried knife juggling feat, involving blindfolds, unicycles, a tight-rope and some crocodiles. The Round-Up can hope.)

If you want to find out more about the ways in which technology is helping the team behind Comic Relief then you can do just that by reading this story.

Or if you want to add further levity to your day, why not tune in to the Round-Up's podcast which you can listen to here - and you'll discover which member of the team is resplendent in sovereign rings and carries a money clip full of £50 notes. (Full details on how to download or subscribe to the Round-Up podcast can be found at the bottom of this email.)

One of the things Comic Relief organisers are looking to do in future years is put more content online to create a buzz around the biennial charity-fest. And recently the charity announced its ambitions to work more closely with YouTube - that channel of highly viral video content.

Now, YouTube's potential legal wrangling with US media giant Viacom aside, this reflects the growing trend among consumers for watching, downloading and using ever more online content.

And that will send people's bandwidth requirements through the roof, especially once IPTV and high-definition content over broadband connections become more the norm.

As such, those consumers already eyeing the full potential of fat pipes might have been slightly alarmed to hear news this week suggesting some 'unlimited broadband' services aren't quite as unlimited as they first sound.

And by 'sound' the Round-Up is clearly referring to their use of the word 'unlimited' - which it appears means something slightly different to people working in marketing functions.

The issue here is that customers of most ISPs sign an acceptable use agreement which means while they can use as much bandwidth as they like - in theory - action can still be taken if their behaviour is deemed to be affecting the quality of service for others.

This could include spending excessive time using their connection, according to a Virgin Media spokeswoman.

So it's very much unlimited in the limited sense of the word.

To be fair to the ISPs, the few instances of disconnections silicon.com has heard of often relate to users who were either moving impossibly large amounts of data - sometimes hundreds of gigabytes each day - or were running a business on a consumer broadband service.

But while that may well be the case, all it really means is a little more honesty is required on both sides of the fence.

One ISP, Toucan, broke ranks almost immediately from the rest of the ISPs who have been accused of 'unlimited' honesty with the 'unlimited' claims. The company immediately dropped a claim in its marketing material that suggested consumers were entitled to 'unlimited downloads'.

And that new-found honesty earned major brownie points from online switching website uSwitch which had raised the issue this week.

A spokesman from uSwitch said: "There is no getting around it - a broadband service should not be classed as 'unlimited' when there are restrictions to usage."

You'd think that would have been obvious.

Not to everybody, it would seem.

"We will continue to put pressure on both the industry and the Advertising Standards Authority until this issue is addressed. In the meantime, we urge consumers to be aware of their broadband usage to make sure they are not caught out."

So think on before you go downloading your whole DVD collection via BitTorrent this weekend.

Also making some claims this week that have led to one or two raised eyebrows is payment processing giant Visa. According to Peter Ayliffe, chief executive of Visa Europe, speaking to The Independent newspaper, cash is on its way out and cards are the brave new world of the future.

Let's not dwell on Visa's interest in all of this but are we really all going to ditch cash in favour of cards?

In the words of one reader, have "the numpties" at Visa never been into a coin-operated launderette? It's a fair point.

And a spokesman from the British Retail Consortium added: "We don't foresee it. Cash is still very popular as a method of payment for a great many people."

That'll be builders, plumbers, car salesman... say no more squire!

Of course you can't halt progress.

But nor should we all embrace its unchecked advances and this most definitely stretches to the plans unveiled this week to trial mobile phone coverage on the London Underground.

To the Round-Up that sounds about as sensible as trialling fireworks on the Tube. Or sharks in the local swimming pools.

Make no mistake, this is dangerous - and we're not talking about the 'radioactive death rays' which may or may not be emitted from handsets. (Experts are erring on the side of 'not' and that's good enough for the Round-Up.)

But while mobile phone use on the buses and on overland trains creates a simmering threat of violence, the Round-Up is in absolutely no doubts that the pressure cooker of the underground needs absolutely no more encouragement.

This at a time when the issue of near dangerous levels of overcrowding are being reported on the capital's transport network.

The Round-Up can picture mayor Ken, sitting in his City Hall chair, stroking his pet newt like a latter day Blofeld, saying: "I can't help thinking there must be something more we could do to make the average Londoner's commute a whole lot less pleasant…

"I know! Let's get people using their mobile phones underground."

After much thought and discussion across the whole team, we cannot come up with a single reason why any passenger would want this introduced - though sadly that doesn't mean people will boycott it once introduced.

With cinemas or theatres we still hear people improbably arguing in favour of mobile phones 'in case of an emergency', which is strange because the only people whose phones go off in cinemas very rarely seem to dart from the auditorium. The Round-Up can't help thinking people are just selfish.

But deep down in a Tube tunnel there's still little benefit that communication can deliver.

Make sure you listen to this week's excellent Round-Up podcast for more of our views on mobile phones on the London Underground.

And finally, the Round-Up has a confession to make. Over the past eight years the Round-Up has increasingly become a fixture on the UK media landscape but this does not mean it has always been bound by the same values or principles as the mainstream media.

And in recent times it seems we have made a mistake.

You see, the Round-Up has never, at any time, run any controversial premium-rate phone competitions. What's more, the thought never even occurred to us to run phone competitions where readers were in any way misled.

Instead, all we do is offer you very straightforward caption competitions each week where the funniest entry wins a bottle of bubbly.

Last week's was a cracker and thanks to everybody who entered.

If you're one of the dozens of people who suggested "can I write the theme tune, sing the theme tune... " and you're wondering why your suggestion wasn't posted, we deliberately used exactly the same phrase in the strap-line as an attempt to head off dozens of people submitting it themselves. (It seems that didn't work.)

You can check out all the other entries, as well as the (very real and entirely genuine) winner (who is in no way a member of staff or relative of one of the team), here.

If you want to enter this week's competition click here. (And please, please, don't suggest 'can I write the theme tune, sing the theme tune... ' - it ain't gonna win.)

And don't forget to check out the podcast - it really will be the most rewarding 20 minutes of your working week. You can even subscribe to it in iTunes, here - or pick up the XML file, here.