It’s certainly a much more forward looking document than anything we’ve seen come out of the UK government for some time, and rather than attempting to just get its citizens connected, the strategy hopes to get them connected at a very good speed; one that will still prove useful years down the line.

Normally UK schemes focus on connectability rather than future proofing, with the now delayed USC only ever promising 2 Mbps, slow by today’s standards and possibly completed outdated for most UK net users by 2015. The reports suggests that the average user will be using about 10 Mbps by 2012, and suggests that any attempt to seek high speed broadband in the area should aim for at least 20 Mbps by 2017.

Speaking to the Southern Reporter, Jeremy Purvis said:

“It is totally unacceptable and extremely bad for the economy if almost half the entire population of the region would be excluded from the higher broadband speeds up to 2017.

The meeting by the UK Government and operators (last week) is a positive move and I am also making contact with them about a combined effort to put forward a market-led solution for delivery. That should be used as the basis to lobby the government for specific support for the region.”

Of course, announcing a plan and writing a strategy is one thing; actually putting the plan into action is quite another. The plan suggests helping homes rewire their telephone cables to get better speeds, supporting a more widespread and efficient mobile broadband network and extending free Wi-Fi networks.

The ISPs themselves have remained anonymous, but it’s pretty likely from previous opposition to the act that one of the providers is TalkTalk, and the other may be BT. Anonymous spokespersons from various ISP told the BBC of the problems they are facing in sending out such a huge amount of letters:

“It’s a monster thing to do, to write to hundreds of thousands of people. Some will move to another network, there might be thousands of appeals.”

“Will they have to secure their wireless networks, or sit over their children’s shoulders making sure they’re not being naughty, or perhaps stop using perfectly legal peer-to-peer services like Spotify? It’s a dog’s breakfast.”

Indeed these letter figures don’t seem all that exaggerated, especially when you consider that the British Phonographic Institute (BPI) is suggest that there are between 6 and 7 million people in the UK who regularly engage in illegal filesharing. However, the BBC have suggested these figures could easily be wrong.

Last year the BPI sent BT over 20,000 cases of file sharing, but only a small percentage of those were actually potentially valid cases. Many proved to be duplicated, unmatched with a proper address or non BT addresses, so it’s not hard to imagine the BPI aren’t being that rigid with their data collection in this case.

Either way sending out this many letters is going to be a massive undertaking for any provider, and for many this won’t be the end of correspondence either, as others warning letters will have to be sent before any further action can take place. The government and record industry are hoping that a large volume of letters will be enough to stop people from filesharing.

However, that hasn?t stopped Virgin Media from announcing plans to launch a 100 Mbps package before Christmas and beginning trails for 200 Mbps in some areas, ready to be released to the public within a couple of years. Those speeds are pretty impressive when you consider the average speed in the country is only about 4.6 Mbps, and even the planned next gen BT rollout is likely to only see speeds between 40 Mbps ? 60 Mbps available to residential customers.

Now Virgin have even hinted that they plan to expand even beyond 200 Mbps and are looking at developing the technology to speeds of up to 400 Mbps; 100 times faster than the countries average speed.

Executive Direct of Virgin Media, Jon James explained Virgin?s ideas in an interview with TechRadar:

?We are also doing 100Mbps ? launching in Q4 this year ? we are trialling 200Mbps but that’s a very commercial trial in the sense of working out in the real life what you can do with 200 Mbps.

We know very well we can do 200Mbps and we could do 400Mbps. We are launching a new modem by the end of the year that will be 400Mbps capable. And that’s a vehicle for the evolution of our speed portfolio in the next two years?

Even more exciting for those outside the reach of a cabled area, Virgin have suggested that they could reach an extra million homes without needing a subsidy which could mean a big portion of those previously stuck with DSL as the only option could see the ability to get massive speed gains.

Do you really need 400 Mbps or even 200 Mbps internet? Right now, probably not. But just as Dial-up now seems incredibly outdated and most sites have given up even trying to work properly with dial-up speeds, one day we?ll look back at speed of 10 Mpbs and 20 Mbps and wonder how we ever managed to use the internet at those speeds.

Meanwhile 50+ Mbps services are likely to appeal to people who do a lot of download, or large families that would like to stream multiple HD channels at once of their connection without slowdown.

The conservatives have stated their intention that 100 Mbps will be available to most homes by 2017. It?s a similar pledge to Labour which aims to bring next generation services to 90% of homes within a similar time frame, but it?s inclusion of a solid goal on the actual speed makes it all the more exciting. Even more, the conservatives plan to fund the investment using the BBC licence free rather than the 50p broadband tax.

Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne talked about their broadband plans on the BBC this week:

?You know, you look at countries like South Korea, Singapore – they are way ahead of us, and they seizing this new technology. So the next Conservative government is going to aim to have a 100 megabit Broadband to a majority of the population by 2017.

In the 19th century we built the railways; in the 20th century we built the motorways. In the 21st century, let’s build the super-fast Broadband network. That will create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Britain.?

Currently 3.5% of the BBC licence is being used to fund the digital televisions switchover. The plan would be to use this case to fund the rollout in rural areas relying on the private sector to develop the broadband structure of towns and cities. The party has also mentioned that reducing the fibre tax could also be a good way to fund investment in next gen broadband, something that?s infinitely more palatable to many consumers than just taxing them.

One of the biggest problems with the faults process right now is the inevitable BT visit if tests over the phone fail to find anything conclusive. This is a common occurrence for a fault like line noise that could have multiple causes and can be difficult to diagnose remotely. The problem is that openreach engineers charge you if they don?t find a problem or if the problem was outside of BT?s area.

BT will cover free repair to faults resulting to anything that they conceive as belonging to them, which is essentially everything from the phone jack in your premises out onto the street and beyond, but? doesn?t over you own internal wiring. The problem is that most consumers don?t really have a clue about what constitutes internal problems. Many line faults are also intermittent ? fail to have a problem when the BT engineer shows up and you could be charged just for the callout.

BT has announced that some of this process, that it calls Special Faults Investigation (SFI) will be changed for SFI2 that allows a more modular approach and is focused on tackling the issues caused by Local Loop Unbundled (LLU) broadband which the majority of UK consumers are subscribed to.

However, while the new service may solve some problems, it comes with another new callout charge that could see consumers getting charged twice ? once for a test on the internal wires and one on the external connections. There?s also no independent way of telling if a fault simply wasn?t fixed or there wasn?t one to begin with, thanks to BTs monopoly on the network.

Adrian Kennard, Direct of AAISP commented on the charges and lack of third party regulation:

“Even what he says misses the point that they do not “prove the fault not to be in openreach’s (or just BT’s) network”.

What they do is *fail* to identify the fault in their network as so *assume* it is in the end user equipment. They do not prove it is there. But that is the basis for them charging.”

A statement from BT stated that new tools could mean charging could be lowered:

?Depending on these engineering work packages carried out, the charges may be lower than today’s standard charge. Additionally the investigation itself will be more ‘intelligent’ with Openreach engineers using the latest test and diagnostic tools available in the industry in a structured procedure to trace a complex fault.?

The three reports entitled ?Business to Business Interfaces?, ?Competitive models in Gigabit Passive Optical Networks? and ?GPON Market Review? are all fairly heavy articles that go into a large amount of technical depth, although they do also mention a few things that will be of interest to consumers. The reports detail whether not GPON would use Local Loop Unbundling (LLU), the same technology that ADSL has used to expand the market.

Importantly, the reports also mention the relative price of the GPON system:

?Cost modelling showed that the recovered cost per line per month for the Base scenario is GBP22 for a retail market with three operators. This figure is sensitive to the amount of existing duct that can be reused. The cost per line for 25% coverage ranges from GBP27 per month if ?low? amounts of duct are available, to GBP15 if an operator selectively deploys in available duct. Our result for medium duct availability (GBP22) compares well with BT?s proposed pricing for GEA, which is GBP25 per month for a 100Mbit/s peak rate product.?

Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) technology that we have mentioned on this blog in the past is much cheaper than GPON because FTTC utilising the existing copper wire already in place for phone lines, meaning that the length of new cable that needs to be laid is kept to a minimum. However, this method also means that FTTC will not be able to support speeds of anything near 100 Mbps, with ?up to? 40 Mbps being a likely starting point.

Like ADSL, FTTC also means that the further you are from the exchange the worst your speeds are likely to be.

The project has a lot of BT investment involved ? the company are throwing ?30 million in while another ?18 million is being funded by the Department of Enterprise Trade and Investment. BT will be deploying FTTC cable technology to businesses who can expect speeds of around 40 Mbps. Upstream speeds will range from 2 Mbps to 15 Mbps.

Arlene Foster, Enterprise Minister said:

?Following a competitive tender exercise, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment has entered into a contract with BT for further development of Northern Ireland?s telecommunications infrastructure, specifically the provision of Next Generation Broadband Services.?

?All of the technologies to be used will be fixed line with fibre being the predominant solution. There are few, if any, parts of the British Isles which will have anywhere near the amount of fibre that is going to be deployed in Northern Ireland, particularly in our rural areas.?

Along with rolling out new cable there will also be equipment upgrades in 166 exchanges across the country.

Northern Island has some of the slowest overall speeds across the entire UK, so it?s good to see some extra investment being thrown into bringing speeds up to scratch and the promise of a 10 Mbps service for urban areas puts the government 2 Mbps offering to shame.

The technology developed by firm Detica will use Deep Packet Inspection in order to determine the level of piracy on a network. This form of inspection is believed by privacy groups to be an invasion of the online privacy of individual users.

A previous company to trial a similar technology called Phorm has failed to gain a foothold in the UK market after rising privacy concerns and secret tests of the service were discovered.

However, Virgin has signed up to work with CView on a trial basis as part of its planned new music service.

Detica claim that the technology is totally anonymous and, complies with their own ?strict design principles? to ensure privacy. It will be a full automated process that?s working to dedicate the level of privacy overall rather than that of individual users.

However, a detail of the real technology behind the service and how much data it will collect from individuals is still unknown. At least Virgin Media are announcing trials openly, but it?s still hard to see such technology as anything more than an invasion of privacy.

Despite this, such procedures could become law in the near future should the government have their way, whether ISPs like it or not. Executive director of Broadband at Virgin Media, Jon James said:

?Understanding how consumer behaviour is changing will be an important requirement of Virgin Media’s upcoming music offering and, should they become law, the Government’s legislative proposals will also require measurement of the level of copyright infringement on ISPs? networks. Detica’s CView? technology potentially offers a non-intrusive solution which enhances our understanding of aggregate customer behaviour without identifying or storing individual customers’ data.”

It?s not yet known when these tests are due to begin and whether or not they will be rolled out across the entire Virgin network.

The campaign is aimed at helping people make sure that they keep their computer and internet connections as secure as possible to keep them at a minimal risk from threats such as viruses, Trojans, hacking, fraud and ID theft.

The recently released Get Safe Online report revealed that 14% of people felt at risk from internet crime in their everyday lives while over half of all respondents reported that a friend or family member had been a victim of some sort of online crime.

Among other interesting figures from the report:

34% of people have had a computer virus

22% have experienced a phishing attack ( an attempt to get them to visit a false site or talk to a contact who pretends to be from an organisation in order to get your personal details )

21% have been a victim of online identity theft

15% still open email attachments from sources they do not know

10% believe they have been hacked

12% don’t use privacy settings on social networking pages

8% suffered online harassment or bullying

Those are some pretty astounding figures, so if you happen to have experienced any of these for yourself – or even if you just want to make sure you’re taking the right precautions, we recommend heading over the site.

The campaign speaks to users in plain English and explains everything brilliantly. Even better you won’t be sold anything or find any misleading or alarmist material over the GSO – just a lot of information on how you can keep your computer and your details protected online.

Watchdog then demonstrated this by using equipment available online in order to hijack the traffic at a mixture of hotspots.

All three of the main providers have responded to the program, letting people know that they all follow the standard protocols for UK Wi-Fi and all have suggested using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in order to secure their data online, although this is a solution that is likely to confuse more casual internet users than it’s likely to help anyone.

If you can, try to make sure to use WPA2 encryption on your network and keep your passkey as long as possible to make it much more difficult to crack. However, it’s ultimately down to the provider – if they don’t provide WPA2 support the best you can do is complain to them in writing.