Virgin Media trials complicated new traffic management policies, touting "efficiency". Uh-huh?

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Virgin Media has been throttling its customers’ broadband speeds for at least a year now, but it seems that the traffic management policy wasn’t complicated enough for them, so they’ve started trails of a new one.

Oh, it nicely messes up our Virgin Media Speed Throttling FAQ, too. Thanks Mr Berkett.

From now on, if you’re unlucky enough to be a Virgin Media broadband customer in Preston, Wigan, Blackpool, Camden, Dalston, Enfield and Haringey, you’ll have to get your head around some new policies. Here goes my attempt at explaining it. Let’s see if I get there before my brain numbs…

Opinion: Super fast broadband via the sewers is fine, but ISPs need incentives to improve

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Ofcom has decided to conduct a survey of Britain’s pipework to test its suitability for carrying fibre-optic cabling for use in high speed broadband networks.

Bournemouth Council has already tested broadband via the sewers, so it’s possible, but the main problem is that most ISPs don’t have a real incentive to roll out faster services.

Two issues — the growing use of mobile Internet, and Internet users’ skyrocketing demand for Video on Demand and other bandwidth-intensive multimedia — were never envisaged when the Internet was born.

BT Home Hub defaults to being insecure, sez security firm

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With the ongoing marketing push for BT broadband and other integrated goodness via their Home Hub, there’s a good chance that a large section of the population are using an insecure router to access the Internet.

These are generally the same people — he says both stereotypically and self-righteously — who don’t install and keep anti-virus software up-to-date, or have the faintest idea what a firewall is…

3 mobile sees traffic rocket sevenfold thanks to USB broadband adaptors

It’s the future. It’s definitely the future. One little USB dongle that’s your broadband connection wherever you go. No hotspot fee rip-offs, no internet separation anxieties, no worries.

And this attainable futuristic dream has resulted in a traffic bonanza for 3, with its newly cheaper USB broadband adaptor making web traffic on its network rocket by seven times in the last six months alone. Here, look, it’s so happy it’s made a graph about it:

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“Sometimes the core network has been running at 102 per cent of capacity, at other times…

ISPs really not happy about iPlayer, Tiscali wants BBC to foot the service bill!

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There’s trouble a-brewing between Auntie and the UKs Internet Service Providers over the recently launched video-on-demand iPlayer service.

iPlayer lets users stream or download recent BBC TV shows as a kind of ‘catch-up’ service. In its first month, the Beeb reports that over 1 million viewers downloaded some 3.5 million program. As you can imagine, this caused a bit of strain on the networks…

The internet will stop in 2010 – I'd throw your computer away now if I were you

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The internet is going to explode in the three seconds!

No, of course it isn’t but these are the kinds of things some newspapers would like you to believe.

The latest piece of semi-cataclysmic fear-mongery comes from the Metro and – just in case you weren’t worried enough about climate change, terrorism and immigration – they’re asking you to add to the list that the internet is doomed to grind to a halt in 2010…

Wi-Fi hotspots are "telephone boxes of the broadband era" claims Ericsson exec

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Mobile broadband offerings are growing at such a rapid pace, and becoming affordable enough to make Wi-Fi hotspots irrelevant, according to Ericsson’s Chief Marketing Officer, Johan Bergendahl.

“Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era,” he claimed at a recent conference in Stockholm.

Quite a different viewpoint from the likes of Apple, then, whose latest offerings — the iPhone and MacBook Air — rely heavily on the availability of Wi-Fi to perform at their best…