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Broadband love and Arthur C. Clarke

By Graham Hayday

Published: Friday 07 December 2001

As we're now just a whisker on Santa's chin away from Christmas Day, it's time for a heart-warming story.

A man called Robert Pawass has just got married to a woman called Christina Hernandez - and it's all thanks to the Cupid-like qualities of an NTL cable modem.

The happy couple met in a chat room last year: Christina lives in the US, so Robert, who at the time used a bog standard dial-up modem, began to run up some pretty hefty bills.

But fear not: our intrepid hero switched to NTL.

He said in a statement (which we're sure wasn't prompted in any way by NTL): "My phone bills were horrendous at first, but then I got the free NTL internet service which improved things... The romance really blossomed when I got the cable modem because it gave me a permanent and much faster connection so we could be constantly online with no interruptions."

To cut a long story short, they eventually met each other in the real world and got married last Friday. Bless.

In extremely related news, new NTLworld customers will have to pay £10 per month for their narrowband internet access from January - a service that was previously free (Robert was on a flat rate broadband tariff). Existing customers will only have to pay £5, and new customers with only moderate surfing habits will have the option to pay 1p per minute instead.

But what will happen to all those frustrated young lovers out there in cyberspace who were happy with their narrowband access but will now have to pay to flirt? Will we there be no more Cupid stunts coming out of NTL? Let's hope not...

A couple of Intel researchers have been riding around in London buses conducting an astounding survey into people's use of technology.

One of Intel's people said: "Our job is to find new uses for technology by spending time with people in their daily lives. Being on a bus is part of what it means to be urban in London."

And what did they discover? Well, apparently a lot of people hold their phones in their hands a lot of the time to make sure they don't miss a call or a text message. And many of us on the Clapham omnibus (well, it was a number 73 actually) use mobiles for what is now called 'microco-ordination' - which is when friends phone each other to make sure they all end up in the same place at the same time.

Astounding, I'm sure you'll agree. Now all Intel needs to do is design a kind of mobile phone that doesn't work on public transport so we can all get some respite from the bleeps, rings and quacks which have become the leitmotif of modern life. Bah. Humbug.

Using interactive TV is only marginally easier than flying a plane, apparently.

In a survey commissioned by the Independent Television Commission, more than 1,000 consumers were asked to rate 19 products in terms of their perceived ease of use.

Interactive TV was seen as the fourth most difficult item to fathom, only marginally less challenging than flying a plane. Computers don't fare too well either: PCs came fifth on the list. Digital TV was sixth, and the humble video recorder is still baffling us all in seventh.

Fortunately, the workings of kettles and hair-dryers aren't so confusing for the man and woman on the aforementioned Clapham omnibus/number 73 from Victoria.

If people can't work out how to press a few buttons on a remote control, then maybe Intel's research isn't as daft as it first seemed. Roll on voice recognition, that's what we say.

While we're on the subject of such groovy things, Arthur C. Clarke has been making some predictions about the technology of tomorrow. He reckons artificial intelligence will have reached human levels by 2020.

He also believes that full-immersion virtual reality - Star Trek's holodeck in other words - will be available five years later.

Meanwhile, complete control of atomic-level matter will be a breeze by 2015.

By 2040, scientists will have developed a universal replicator based on nanotechnology capable of creating any object (sounding suspiciously like Star Trek's replicator), and by 2095, humans will be scooting around the galaxy in spaceships powered by "space drives".

These claims provoked some interesting feedback from our readers. Some of them hailed Mr Clarke as a genius. Others pointed out that it's 2001, and yet we're hardly rushing around in space suffering at the hands of a bitter and twisted computer, so why trust him this time? And then there was this comment...

"This 'chap' is a sci-fi writer, that's 'fiction', meaning untrue! What can he possibly tell us about the certainty of any of these things happening at any time, if at all. In Britain we have a newspaper called the Sunday Sport, no news and no sport, full of naked women and fantasy. These comments from the fiction writer can be taken no more seriously. He can't know! He doesn't know! He's just talking, and you're all listening. A replicator my arse!"

Fancy joining in the debate? Then have a look at http://www.silicon.com/a49699 and post a reader comment at the bottom.

And finally, a piece which combines two of our favourite obsessions: silly names and BT.

A reader called Simi Belo (no, that's not the silly name bit) runs a company called Guru PR, and placed an ADSL order with a BT sales rep who, sadly, must have had cloth ears.

As far as BT is concerned, the company isn't Guru PR but Gruper, giving rise to the email address gruper@btclick.com, which doesn't really sound particularly fluffy and PR-like.

Our correspondent didn't really fancy using this as a business address, so tried to get it changed. He spoke to the sales department again, who said they couldn't make the alterations and told our friend to speak to customer services. Customer services said, 'Nope - we can't do it either, talk to technical support.' Technical support said speak to sales. Sales said, 'Ah, right, you'll have to go for a 'cancel and reprovide' option,' at which point they'd ensure the details were recorded correctly.

Only slight problem is that if you cancel an existing service like this, you're still liable for the term of the original contract (ie. a whole year). Simi isn't entirely happy. If you know how to get out of this conundrum, do email gruper@btclick.com .

That's it for this week. If you're short of a few Christmas pressie ideas, then why not check out our review of the latest high-tech gadgets? Have a look at http://www.silicon.com/a49767 , and you could be in with a chance of gaining some inspiration - and winning some prizes for yourself (including a 15" flat screen monitor and a Palm m505 PDA. Cor, aren't we generous...)

The Round-Up will be on its way late next week with some vague and not wholly successful attempt to review the high-tech shenanigans of the year that was 2001. Anything you want us to cover? Email editorial@silicon.com with your ideas.