Reviving the UK Manufacturing Base for Growth
In July the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills brought out a paper called “A Strategy for Sustainable Growth”. I took encouragement from the paper in that it represented a continuity of industrial policy, even through the UK has gone through a change of government. Continuity of policy is an absolute pre-condition for the re-building of the UK manufacturing base since it will not happen over-night or even over one Parliament.
Read more →US Net Neutrality debate…where is the real consumer interest?
The difference in temperature of the Net Neutrality debate on both sides of the Atlantic is quite remarkable. Is Europe missing something or has the US debate lost its way…a good place to start is what exactly has been changing on the Internet that is generated the perceived problem…
Read more →Lies, damn lies and advertised broadband data speeds
Ofcom has just published the results of the UK’s most comprehensive broadband data speeds research. It revealed a growing chasm between the advertised speed and the speed actually experienced by customers. By looking at the results, and the driving forces behind ISP marketing, we can draw a number of interesting conclusions.
Read more →Your Mobile Broadband Coverage – Are Better Maps the Answer?
Recently I was pleasantly distracted by Ofcom’s Mobile broadband coverage checker when I dropped in on their web site. It has been up there for a while but was new to me. I was enticed into a second look. It was like going into the car sales show room to look at a glossy new car…what was I going to find under the bonnet?
Read more →Smart Meters, Smart Grids or really Smart Investments
When the subject of “smart meters” was first brought to my attention it seemed such a simple technical issue. On the contrary is has proved to be like peeling back layers of an onion and where I finished up was a realisation that the real challenges were not technical at all…as my journey of discovery will now reveal.
Read more →SMS – the “Sleeping Beauty” of GSM standardisation
Hot off the press is a new book edited by Fred Hillebrand that is a celebration of the 25th anniversary of SMS standardisation. And what a well deserved celebration – with an estimated 4.5 trillion short messages sent (and received) in 2008 across the globe. The book itself will appeal to anyone and everyone involved in GSM standardisation.
Read more →Big Video over the Internet – miracle or madness?
What the Internet has delivered has been nothing short of a miracle. But just how far can you push a network in a direction it was never technically (or economically) designed to deal with? I am talking about video over the Internet. Not the tiny 60 second clips of dubious quality but TV programmes watchable on fair sized screens, full length movies and all that may follow…I term it…”big video”
Read more →Femto Cells – The Essential Survival Kit for the future Mobile Broadband Internet
I sat in the Science Museum last week listening to a panel of distinguished speakers talk about the future of UK mobile radio. Dr Mike Short from O2 highlighted the mobile machine to machine future (well worth returning to in a future blog). But following him was a number of speakers emphasising the mobile broadband Internet as the centre piece of the mobile radio future and, in particular, this would be driven by what customers wanted. I could easily buy-into the mobile broadband piece but I was not too sure how the mobile operators’ business models might survive giving customers all that they wanted from a future broadband mobile Internet.
Read more →Greening Mobile Radio with a Climate Change Agenda
Mobile radio is more of a solution than a problem in regard of the climate change agenda. Mobile radio is used to make more efficient use of transport. It has been estimated that the annual CO2 footprint of the average mobile subscriber is around 25kg – which is comparable to driving an average car on the motorway for one hour (Source: Eriksson). That said a typical UK mobile radio operator’s network consumers over 400 GW-h per years and produces 200,000 tons of carbon emission per year (Source O2 2005) and no sector of the economy can be allowed to consider itself off-limits in seeking out ways to make radical reductions in energy consumption.
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