The Weekly Round-Up: 06.06.08

Now, there's no denying we love our broadband in the UK. But love is a rose with many barbs and those barbs are irking our country-dwellers more than greenfly and bypasses. The problem is that broadband services aren't great.

It particularly irks rural folk when our London-based communications regulator goes to great lengths to tell rural broadband customers that they've never had it so good.

This week's thorny bone of contention, to mix a metaphor or two, is a report by UK fat pipe watcher and advice website thinkbroadband, which says the countryside still lags some way behind urban areas - contrary to last week's Ofcom report hailing the end of a geographical digital divide in the UK for internet access.

Fat pipe speeds rarely live up to the theoretical maximums advertised by ISPs. The website has also done a comparison of broadband speeds around the country and - surprise, surprise - London comes out top.

Londoners enjoy an average download rate of 4.5Mbps - almost double the rate in Northern Ireland (2.3Mbps), the region with the slowest average download speed.

Next most sluggish is Wales at 2.6Mbps, then the South West and Scotland, both on 2.9Mbps. Fastest after London are: the North East with 3.6Mbps, the North West with 3.4Mbps and the East Midlands' 3.3Mbps. Statistics never lie - honest - and this lot makes a pretty convincing picture of a rural versus urban split based on fat pipe speed.

It's all looking a bit bleak for Ofcom's brave vision of a division-less broadband Britain.

But wait. Good news - Ofcom has published a voluntary code of practice that sets out guidelines for ISPs to come clean on the download speeds that customers are likely to achieve from their broadband service.

ISPs signing up also agree to try and resolve technical issues to improve speed and offer customers the choice of moving onto a lower speed package when estimates prove inaccurate; ensure all sales staff have a proper understanding of the products they are selling; and provide customers with information on usage limits and alert them when they have breached limits.

So good news all round. But will it placate the countryside? Will it hell. Being a bit grumpy about piffling affairs is what makes Britain great...

Day by day, the things that made Britain great are being slowly eroded by the passage of time. Personal technology is playing a major part in this and we're all culpable. All of us.

What's this about? Good old telephone boxes. BT is looking to close more public call boxes as usage continues to slide - thanks in no little part to the ubiquitous mobile phone.

BT is writing to local authorities to test the water about closing 14 per cent of its remaining estate of call boxes - or around 8,700 out of some 62,000 street payphones - as consent is required to remove them.

A BT spokesman said: "Some local authorities understand that if a phone box has only received one call in a year then it might not be entirely reasonable to keep it there for any business. Some local authorities... think that they provide an important service and in those occasions we leave them."

Payphone usage has halved in the past two years and calls are declining at 20 per cent year-on-year. Almost 60 per cent of its payphones are unprofitable, he added.

It's nice to think that BT profits are actually at the mercy of local councils, isn't it?

But what of the rapidly diminishing red boxes? Sturdy enough to survive a direct hit from an asteroid, full of cards advertising the services of professional ladies and smelling faintly of wee, few now remember that back in the day those iconic boxes even allowed you to communicate to the outside world (so long as the phone hadn’t been vandalised).

Bah! Nostalgia doesn’t wash with BT. But without phone boxes what will happen to those people who need to make a mobile call in the phone box to avoid rain or background noise (the Round-Up did this once) or indeed - not though we approve - those people who just want to do a wee (not guilty on this one, by the way).

It also means that there's an increasing lack of places for superheroes to get changed in - portable latrines being the most popular alternative location. Just think of the soaring crime figures.

But as Tennyson wrote, "The old order changeth yielding place to new" and we must bid a fond farewell to red phone boxes which continue their inexorable journey towards extinction.

So, with poesy in mind the Round-Up offers the following eulogy:

'So farewell then, telephone box,
BT wants rid of you,
You don't represent value for money,
Then again neither do rural broadband services,
Thanks in part to the slow unbundling of the local loop,
But we're certainly not going to bring that up again...'

No, it doesn't scan but you can't deny it delivers a poignant message about life's ephemeral nature while sticking close to the contemporary tech agenda in the UK.

What's that? You can deny it? Bugger...

Yet more innovation from Microsoft this week. Yep, that's twice in two editions the Round-Up has said that.

This week Bill Gates found himself on stage with the Ballmer Bot, and diminutive tin version of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

The machine, part of Microsoft's robotics research division, was making its first public appearance at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Orlando, an event also notable for being Gates' final keynote appearance for the company.

The robot made its way to centre stage on a pair of sturdy wheels, waving its arms and shouting "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" just as the real Ballmer did a few years back at Microsoft developers' conference.

Ballmer Bot also sported an LCD monitor where its head should be, with an image of Ballmer's grinning face on it.

Just to be clear, the Round-Up is really not making this up. Really. If it was, it would be under heavy sedation by now.

Patrick Deegan, the nice robotics expert controlling the robot, demonstrated that Ballmer Bot's arms have an impressive range of motion by waving them around enthusiastically.

He said: "This makes it so that it's even able to throw eggs," a reference to a recent incident at a Hungarian university where eggs where thrown at the Microsoft CEO as he was delivering a speech.

You can check out the Ballmer Bot here. You also have a chance to win a bottle of bubbly because by some happy coincidence it's also the Caption Competition for the week. Take a look, pour yourself a stiff drink and lie down, add a reader comment and then go and lie down again.

Once you've recovered, the Round-Up is sure you'll agree that the Ballmer Bot's resemblance to the real thing is impressive.

Finally, some bad news for Apple this week and its quest to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of the year.

IDC has reported that while the new kid on the block with a pretty (inter)face has hung on to second place in the smart phone market, it has ceded a sizeable chunk of market share to industry leader RIM.

RIM's market share went from 35.1 per cent in the fourth quarter to 44.5 per cent in the first, while Apple's dropped from 26.7 per cent in the fourth quarter to 19.2 per cent in the first. Palm also made gains on the Cupertino firm.

So what's the problem with the iPhone? Nothing, in fact the Round-Up would sell its own mother to get hold of one if it hadn't already exchanged the old dear for a PS3.

The problem with iPhone sales in the past month is that it's pretty much impossible to buy one, something which will obviously have a detrimental effect on any company's sales figures no matter how slick the marketing. Everyone's sold out of the 8GB version and the 16GB device is in short supply in the sales channels.

The other reason is that on Monday, there's a reasonable chance (if you believe the rumours) that Steve Jobs will take to the stage in front of a whooping, overexcited crowd of thousands - and that's just the journos - to unveil the 3G version of the device, the second coming as some Apple fans would have you believe.

Says who? Well, says everyone really, including silicon.com's Apple columnist Seb Janacek, who by his own admission has an atrocious track record when it comes to predicting product announcements. But, as Paul McGann once opined: "Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day."

Another big question is whether the company will stick to its guns and the personal touch eschewing the Qwerty keypad of competitors, like RIM. Personally, the Round-Up doubts it, despite assertions by some media sources.

Still, a keyboard-driven iPhone would find favour with many silicon.com readers. A recent poll found that Qwerty rules the roost over touchscreen, suggesting that most of you are CrackBerry addicts rather than iPhone nuts.

And if you missed it earlier, don't forget to give the Caption Competition a crack…