Is the Internet really struggling?

If you listen to many ISP’s recently the future of the internet is pretty bleak. ‘Selfish’ p2p users are slowing the service for everyone else, and superfast 20Mbit connections with ‘no boring download limits’ are really hamstrung by speed caps. On top of the virus, spyware and trojan threat the internet might soon just fall over under the ever increasing traffic of Youtube and the countless other video services being unleashed each day.

To get a more honest opinion read the article posted at Ars Technica a couple of days ago. It makes a pleasant change to read an informed and intelligent assessment of what is really happening to internet traffic levels. The summary is that the internet is doing quite well and coping through ongoing upgrades and improvements, but the last mile connections to our homes are in need of upgrading. Our ISP’s control this part of the chain and they don’t seem too keen to spend the money to drag us into the 21st century. When legal video streaming is looking more like the next big thing it’s not going to be a case of if we all need high speed internet, but when.

Safari 3.1 released

Apple has today released Safari 3.1, a far more impressive update than the .1 suggests. Apple promise  huge speed increases for this latest version for both page rendering times and javascript execution. Support for the latest web standards such as the new video and audio tags in HTML 5, CSS Animations and CSS Web Fonts has been added. I’ve been playing with the recent Webkit builds and can definitely see a speed improvement, so if Foxmarks can make a plugin to sync Safari to their service I might just have to switch back from Firefox,

Online banking security problems

There’s a scary article at Tech.co.uk concerning the safety of online banking systems and new trojans. It appears the crooks are getting sneakier than ever to get their hands on your money. I’ve been fortunate so far having not been the victim of online fraud (and I buy a lot online), the only credit card fraud I suffered was after using my card to reserve a hotel room. When I reported the crime to my local Police station I was told I was the 21st person in my town to suffer credit card fraud in 20 days. It’s not a big town so this gives an idea of the massive scale of the problem. I never received any further information from the police so have no way of knowing if the perpetrator was caught. We in the UK can’t even report credit card fraud to the Police anymore, it’s now a problem for the Banks to deal with. If you’re worried about online security there’s some good advice at fraud.org.

What happened to Virgin Broadband?

I’ve been on the Telewest/Virgin Broadband service for many years. So many in fact I can’t remember when I joined. I have emails to my Blueyonder address from early 2001, so that’s at least 7 years. Without wanting to sound like a preachy old git, it used to be a good service. I started on the 512Mb connection, and always got it. 2Mb, 4Mb, 10Mb and now 20Mb speeds have followed, but the last one was a very mixed ‘upgrade’. I was happy with the Telewest Blueyonder 10Mb service. Download speeds were usually over 1 megabyte a second.
Then Virgin took over, and heavily publicised the doubling of broadband speeds. My connection went to 20Mb, but I saw very little speed improvement over the 10Mb service. The biggest shock came when my download speed started dropping. I eventually found out that Virgin were capping the download speed at 5Mb if you used too much bandwidth between 4pm and midnight. I say eventually found out because unlike the 20Mb upgrade Virgin didn’t publicise this change. The 20Mb service is still sold as unlimited, as shown here, or here. No disclaimers, asterisks or anything else to say it’s not an unlimited service. Only it isn’t, as shown here.

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