I tried using a broadband dongle down in Cornwall for a week without much success due the location of the house really, but now I’m back on the dongles because I’m on the move – not physically myself, but between landline broadband suppliers. I’ve done a lot of research again and decided that if you are lucky enough to be in an area covered by the BE Broadband up to 24Mb service then this is by far the best broadband deal available. I can’t apply for the new BE Broadband until my phone line has been taken over by BT so there are at least two delays built in to the transition. With a T-Mobile 3G pay-as-you-go broadband dongle I can activate it for one month and get up to 3 gigabits of transfer, and then a bit more. There’s no contract, so as soon as the home broadband is up and running again I can stop using the dongle, and keep it handy for future travels, simply activating it for any month it becomes necessary or even for one day at a time on day trips to work away from home perhaps.

Code agreed on broadband ads | Technology | The Guardian
More than 30 broadband providers including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk have signed up to a voluntary code of conduct designed to prevent consumers being mis-sold high-speed internet access packages.

Broadband advertising has become increasingly controversial because internet service providers ISPs often promote the theoretical maximum speeds achievable on their networks rather than the speed most customers can actually get.

A recent survey by the comparison website Broadband Expert found that actual speeds were often less than half those advertised, leading Ofcom to warn that it was prepared to enforce regulation if the industry did not fall into line. Just this week a further study found that there are also big discrepancies between speeds in large cities and rural areas.

Under the code, ISPs will have to give customers an accurate measure of the speed of their broadband service, offer a lower-speed package if those estimates are inaccurate and help resolve any technical issues slowing down connections. They will also need to give clear information about the limits of services and tell customers if they breach those limits.

Ofcom is also planning a comprehensive survey of broadband speeds as part of an attempt to determine the accuracy of advertising.

The chairwoman of Ofcoms consumer panel, Anna Bradley, welcomed the code, adding that the panel would scrutinise the results of the Ofcom study. “If they show that ISPs are not in compliance, it will clearly be time to call for a mandatory code of practice,” she said.

So what do the people who already work from home do to celebrate such a day? Go out and evangelise about the benefits of homeworking perhaps. Or get together for a social event like the Social Media Cafe in London.

Stay at home and make use of the broadband wifi by sitting in the garden and answering the occasional email.

Taking part in National Work From Home Day

Many people can easily do their jobs from home. Apart from enhancing work-life balance for staff, with added health and leisure benefits, and reducing the need to travel, working from home significantly improves productivity, enabling businesses to be more competitive.

Many smarter working practices are very simple to implement, and it is these that organisations are being encouraged to try during Work Wise Week:

* Allowing staff to come in either an hour later or an hour earlier, with a reciprocal hour shift at the end of the day. This would enable staff to avoid the busiest travel times, effectively staggering the rush hour and making the journey far more tolerable for everyone.
* Allowing staff to take a half hour lunch break each day, and then let them leave at 3.00pm on the last day.
* Allowing staff to work from home on Thursday May 15, National Work from Home Day. Even a small reduction in the number of people travelling on the roads or by public transport on that day will have a significant effect on congestion and overcrowding.
* During Work Wise Week, ask staff to cancel all external face-to-face staff meetings, and instead hold them by conference call, either video or telephone. This would save time and resources, and reduce congestion and pollution.
* Where appropriate, allow staff to roster their own shifts during the week.

Best cheap broadband internet and TV deals

I’m looking around for the best broadband deals for daily internet access in London and I’m seriously considering SKY TV. Now SKY may not be the first company you would think of as an Internet Service Provider but I figured once they decide to add a service to their core satellite TV business they are going to make sure it becomes totally reliable and fast enough for dependable use. That’s how they’ve maintained their dominant position in the subscription TV business for decades. The trouble with smaller companies is that they can get bought out by larger ones and then you can end up stuck with a legacy service that is expensive and of poorer quality. That’s happened to me twice already, which is why I’m looking at SKY TV with broadband as a possibility, in particular the SKY MID product which should give speeds of up to 8Mb with a 40Gb monthly bandwidth cap for only £5 a month. For the amount of youTube, TED and BBC iPlayer content I watch online that should be plenty, I spend most of the day working with text and graphics (email, web and RSS tools) which hardly use any bandwidth at all by today’s criteria.

In fact I could probably get away with the free SKY BASE broadband, which is definitely the best broadband deal you can get, but for professional purposes a little bit of overkill is not a waste of money.

SKY plus

I’m going to order the SKY+ ( Sky plus ) box for a one-off charge of £99 so that I can play with the linked series recording, and take advantage of pause and rewind of live TV, which is something I used to enjoy in the old Homechoice days. I won’t bother with the HD though, because my old TV and eyesight aren’t up to it. You’d need one of those new widescreen plasma TVs to get the full advantage, and five point one speakers surrounding the living room for the dolby digital lol.

No, I’m turning the offer round and regarding the SKY TV service as coming free with the fast reliable broadband, rather than the other way around as advertised, but they amount to the same thing really, probably the best broadband deals for the UK currently.

BE Broadband ADSL2

My BE fast broadband box arrived today but I can’t start using it before the activation date on Friday, which is a bit frustrating on the one hand but on the other it’s great that they actually sent it out two days earlier than they said they would. I only actually got my home land line switched back to BT last Friday so that means only one week without home broadband while making the two-step switchover. It seems to be a good idea to do this at a time of year when most people are thinking about going away on summer holidays rather than upgrading their info telecoms systems.

The BE Broadband deal is the best for me because of the ADSL2 technology which allows speeds up to 24Mb and the Professional deal which has an option for faster uploading at the expense of a little bit of the huge download bandwidth. Upload speed is important to me when moving websites from one host to another, uploading high-definition theatre breaks video or loads of pictures to Flickr. It should also be just the job for ensuring my Tuesday Night broadcasts on Ustream.tv run smoothly. Not everybody can get the BE broadband deal, you have to be lucky enough to live near a telephone exchange which is equipped with ADSL2 capability and that hasn’t been rolled out all over the country yet. Well neither has ADSL1 yet! So location is still very important for getting the best broadband deals.

Mobile Broadband Dongle Deals

In the interim we’ve been making do mostly with a couple of T-Mobile pay as you go mobile ‘broadband’ dongles. It’s the only deal we found that doesn’t tie you into a 12 month or longer contract but hasn’t been as successful as I’d hoped due to the 3Gb monthly data transfer limit which I quickly used up in less than a week. All the dongle deals have that though, even the longer contracts After that I expected to get progressively capped the following month, but no – the service just stopped working until the next calendar month which is no use to me. In fact the realisation that mobile broadband just isn’t good enough yet for business use makes the whole idea of location independent living seem more like a dream for the future than a practical reality for here and now.

Getting by temporarily without Broadband

I found it much harder than I expected to adapt to offline working with sporadic broadband access. After a few days I’d resorted to installing google gears for offline gmail reading, re-installed an old client RSS reader and installed WordPress Turbo (google gears again) on quite a few blogs for faster updating when I did get through. I finally got around to looking back through some old mini-dv tapes to capture some old video clips – very time-consuming, and I tidied up my applications and downloads folders a bit. I couldn’t really settle down to proper ‘flow state’ work though, and I suspect it would take weeks or more to really get back into the habit of working mainly in batch mode offline, if at all. The conclusion therefore is that a good, fast and 99.99% reliable broadband connection is absolutely essential to the conducting of any business even with just an online element to it. I would happily pay upwards of £100 per month for such a system if it existed, so the difference between a £9.50 a month cheap broadband deal service and a £24 one is not the price but the vital quality of service which needs to be the best.

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BE Broadband ADSL2 – Best Broadband Deals

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I think the Post Office might be one of the best broadband deals for anybody making the move from dial up to broadband for the first time because of the hand-holding you get with the setting up. It’s also a serious contender for anybody disatisfied with their present broadband provider and considering switching over. The Post Office have a simple choice of broadband and/or telephone package with a free calls option and either medium usage or unlimited downloads. With all broadband options there is no connection or setting up charge and with broadband unlimited you get a free wireless router. The homephone option also includes free calls to UK mobiles and twenty top international destinations.

Q Which are these top 20 destinations for free international phone calls?

A According to this new release from Royal Mail Group the list includes:

Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, USA.

For alternative broadband suppliers maybe check out Best Broadband Deals .org.uk

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The Post Office for Best Broadband Deals

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Which are the best broadband deals?

When you look at the newest cheap broadband deals or the latest supercharged fast connection with unlimited downloads promised, it’s hard to tell which broadband provider’s connection will be reliable and up to scratch until after you’ve already signed up for a 12 month contract or even longer.

But the great thing about the internet is that we no longer need to rely on advertisements for all the information that’s necessary to weigh up a service or product before buying. With a little bit of digging around, or just by keeping up to date with what friends are saying, it’s possible to get direct reports from real customers experience of a product, good or bad. In the past this would all have been screened out, and the only source of advice away from the salesmen in the shop would have been “the man in the pub”.

Vigin Broadband Example

For example, Steve Purkiss had a very bad experience with Virgin Broadband and published about it on his blog where anybody could see:

http://purkiss.com/2008/04/14/virgin-unlimited-broadband-one-week-was-all-i-could-take/

I’ve just cancelled my broadband service from Virgin after only one week. Why? Because today I woke up to find my ‘unlimited’ service had been throttled because I apparently used it too much. I’m now getting less-than-dial-up speeds and the service is all but useless to me

That’s just one really valuable piece of consumer generated information which can help anybody trying to work out which is the best broadband deal out of many under consideration with the main contenders being probably Virgin Broadband, BT, Tiscali and SKY.

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Best Broadband deals – Virgin BT Tiscali or SKY

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Best broadband deals – cheap broadband or Free Sky TV?

Working from home on the internet, one thing you absolutely have to to depend upon is a reliable and fast broadband connection. It’s a serious matter to consider changing Internet Service Provider(ISP) and start looking around for the best broadband deals.

For example it’s no use being a cheapskate and putting up with an average or poor service when it comes to having an efficient tool for the trade. On the other hand, whilst the cheap broadband options are sure to be compromised at some point, the most expensive broadband isn’t always the best broadband.

I mentioned on twitter that I’m looking for the best broadband deals and was then recommended Tiscali. I found out that my current ISP has actually been taken over by a company which has been subsequently bought up by Tiscali, so I’m already a customer of theirs by default, yet their website tells me my phone line is ineligible?!

Shifting Marketplace for cheap broadband

This is a constant change scenario. A few years back I was lucky enough to live in an area where the revolutionary Homechoice were piloting a new service. This included fast 1Mb broadband internet at a time when everywhere else was limited to 256 or 512K, bundled in with an on demand TV via copper wire (almost IPTV) which was superb in functionality.

As a broadband service provider this was easily the best deal available but they never managed to raise the cash to buy enough content to take off. That was before the unbundling of the local loop for telecomms, so BT were able to hold things back for them. Unfortunately Homechoice pulled out of my area when they moved on to the next generation of the IPTV service, and have since been acquired by O2. So I would not recommend using any of the smaller companies because you never know who you are going to end up with.

Free SKY TV

This history means that I am amenable to the idea of fast broadband internet being bundled in with a TV service, which is why I’m looking at SKY digital TV and broadband. The interesting broadband deal on offer currently is the basic SKY TV and broadband package for £16. You can look at that as either a free SKY TV service, bundled in with what you would normally pay for cheap broadband only, or as a free broadband offer for people who have always wanted the huge number of extra TV channels. If you have internet access out at work and mainly only use the home connection for browsing in the evenings and weekends then the best broadband deal is probably the SKY broadband Base package, whereas a home business worker or gamer would probably need to upgrade to the even faster speeds with totally unlimited bandwidth for an extra £5 or £10 a month.

SKY + and SKY HD

I’m not that bothered about the additional entertainment channels on offer at £1 a bundle, nor the premium films or live football but I must admit I’ve always been interested in the huge number of niche channels which become available free to air, upon becoming a SKY subscriber. Turkish TV, Punjab, Arabic and NTV for a start, and then the enormous back catalogue of nature documentaries and comedy which are not always available anywhere on freeview for example. And the geek in me is dying to have a play with the extra technology that can be added as a one-off. The SKY PLUS (SKY+) box which gives TIVO like functionality (pause and replay live TV, record one or two channels while watching something else) and clever software to record linked series. The Sky Multiroom client server network could be fun or the High Definition TV Sky HD box. There’s not much point in getting the HDTV though without getting a new TV set to do it justice, but if a new TV is on the cards then it might be worth making sure the best wiring and connections are installed ready for it as part of the setup deal.

Best Broadband Deals

Back to the broadband though, which could be the real justification for subscribing to SKY. I’ve noticed that the free basic broadband package is at 2Megabits per second, which is actually twice as fast as my old Homechoice connection used to be. The one that everybody envied. So that might well suffice given that a lot of what I do is text and graphic based interaction and browsing. It’s probably only if a lot of large downloads or streaming video are required that the upgrades would be required, but that’s completely flexible on a month by month basis anyway, so for the advantage of getting all those extra TV channels, functionality and gadgets the free broadband ‘base’ has to be one of the best broadband deals around. That’s without even mentioning the free weekend and evening telephone calls, cheaper than BT Together for calls to mobiles and international numbers, nor the “SKY Anywhere via TV” on-demand service which is included with any SKY+ box.

Reservations

My only reservations are that satellite TV is perhaps not the future. In the longer run, some people think that TV channels wont exist in the present format at all. It will all be “on demand” so nobody is ever watching the same programme at the same time. But the availability of on-demand music hasn’t killed radio has it? I have a theory that channels will be with us for a long time to come, alongside all of the personalised browsing, on-demand, skip and fast forward stuff. Besides it’s still the best broadband deal that is the main consideration for business, with the free Sky TV as a nice bonus for myself.

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Best broadband deals

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Here’s the Metro version of the news

Glastonbury ‘too middle-aged’

This year’s Glasto turned into a mud bath

Missed out on a Glasto ticket this year? Well, blame the broadband revolution … and your mum and dad.

Well-heeled thirty and fortysomethings used their super-fast Internet connections to beat teenagers to tickets for the festival this year.

Selling tickets online meant the three day festival – traditionally the preserve of a younger crowd seeking parties and musical debauchery – became ‘too middle- aged’ and even respectable, claimed event organiser Michael Eavis.

 

He said the lucky few who snapped up this year’s 137,500 tickets in just 1hr 45min were likely to be older people, with the money for fast Internet connections, while the number of 16 to 18-yearolds had fallen.

 

A silly story really, but informative concerning perceived and actual demographics of internet access and broadband penetration.
The BBC Radio 4 Today Programme presenter though that it was extraordinary to suggest that teenagers couldn’t access the internet, but at what time of day did the tickets go on sale?

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Broadband demographics evident at Glastonbury Festival

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