The "Digital Britain" report

Tuesday saw the completed Digital Britain report, compiled by "lord" stephen carter, (quite possibly another rat leaving a sinking ship that is the UK government) released to the public (warning - PDF's). Prime minister Gordon "no more boom and bust" Brown hopes this will help make Britain, "the center of the digital world". Well Gordo, you attempted to make London/the UK the center of the financial world and look where that got us!! Not to mention that the UK was the first country (through its lead operator/network owner and maintainer: BT) to introduce Bandwidth capping on a retail and wholesale level only because BT were up keech creek with no canoe financially at the time (i remember this because I was working as a Phone Lackey for them at the time), and that showed the rest of the world - somewhat wrongly - how to do things.

I've not had the time to go over the report itself yet, but techradar has chopped it into bite-sized chunks for us. (techradar also has other coverage on it here: 7 things you need to know)

I'll try and offer more on my take on what techradar covers...

Universal Broadband.

Quoting techradar..

"Essentially, this means that every home in the UK will have access to 2Mbps broadband speeds. This is something of an arduous task, considering around a million homes at the moment have no access to these types of speeds."

Getting access to that kind of speed should be a good start, hell getting that speed to every home in the welsh valleys and the Scottish Highlands & islands will be some challenge. However according to another techradar article, this seems such a low figure to aspire to considering "The rest of Europe already experiences over 6Mb as an average." The article continues... "If this is a headline speed then experience would indicate that many recipients will actually get only a fraction of this."

Yup 2MB/sec, Dizzy heights indeed!! At this rate we'll have our Empire back before we know it :P. Methinks Online gamers in British rural areas Should just collectively Invest in a Winmo Phone w/unlimited data and take frequent trips to their nearest HSDPA zone for what it's worth. The British way of working has become so bogged down in red tape and bureaucracy that things always end up delayed beyond deadline and costing far more than what was originally intended, at one point I honestly thought 3drealms were British... I can see this going the same way.

Beating the pirates

OH Boy!! Here we go again...

Again referring to the article..."The Government believes piracy of intellectual property for profit is theft and will be pursued as such through the criminal law [courts]."

This has come in the form of legislation which puts the control of piracy into the hands of the ISPs. This allows service providers to send letters to persistent illegal file-sharers and, if necessary, quash the speeds of persistent offenders.

This is going to be overseen by Ofcom and not a digital rights team as first mentioned in the interim report.

The full report states: "The Government intends to provide initially for Ofcom to have a duty to secure a significant reduction in unlawful file sharing by imposing two specific obligations: notification of unlawful activity and, for repeat-infringers, a court-based process of identity release and civil action.

"The Government is also providing for intermediate technical measures by ISPs, such as bandwidth reduction or protocol blocking, if the two main obligations have been reasonably tried but, against expectations, shown not to have worked within a reasonable but also reasonably brisk period."

It is also noted that the report wants illegal file-sharing to be cut by at least 70 per cent.

How are they gonna monitor folk that don't use P2P technology? not to mention folk that use sites like Skreemr and Project playlist? as well as folk that use browser plugins like firefox's download helper?

I can't really add more to it than what was in that campfire topic of yore, apart from maybe this... @>:-(

BBC partnership

When it comes to the broadcast industry, Lord Carter has put forward a partnership between BBC Worldwide and Channel 4, to help plug the money gap left by the lack of advertising and secure the future of the channel.

I hardly ever watch standard British TV these days, As stated elsewhere the amount of regular TV programs i watch these days can be counted on one hand.

I think the real reason TV is still around today is that those who still watch it haven't yet worked out how to connect a net connected computer to it and watch stuff through that, whether it be a blown up flash video from youtube or Vimeo, or something attained from Bittorrent. Hint... watch this...


Home Entertainment: How To Connect Your Laptop To Your Television

Whether what I'm watching is/was Hi-def or not, in most cases, I don't really care with the odd one or two exceptions :P .

PEGI, the victor

Long story short, The "Pan European Game Information" system will take charge of rating videogames instead of the BBFC. Doesn't really affect me too much since If I want to play a game i will, via whatever means, I'm (physically at least) old enough to play any games that come on the market now :P

And Lastly DAB hand

This is particularly interesting to me because As I've stated elsewhere I'm a huge fan of DAB, at least the content that's broadcast over this medium in the UK. Outside of the interwebs, my media consumption is taken up through this.

According to the article "there are plans to switch off the analogue radio signal by 2015.".
Problem is, coverage and sound quality of DAB radio hasn't been that great a success here in the UK. When I got my Bug, I was so happy with it that I decided to install a DAB radio system in my car. This wasn't particularly wise since DAB coverage and reception on the move is total gash. A lot of money and research will have to be piled into getting the medium upgraded to a good enough state for clear reception on the move at speed, The report states that they will work with car manufacturers to make this happen though. If that can't be achieved then it will be back to Analogue audio signals before we know it!!

all in all I'm not too optimistic about the "digital outlook" for this madcap island, I should be living farther away by the time this all kicks in anyway. if they can get DAB right I'll be very happy, however I'm not best pleased at their plans for the net and how they plan to go about it's "supervision" @>:-(