Re: "I'll look elsewhere" @guybles

If you "switch" to Tesco you'll still be using O2 since Tesco is only a MVNO piggybacking on O2's network just like ASDA uses Voda or Virgin uses T-Mo :)

Handset incompatibility

"one shouldn't expect to see 3G spreading immediately as there's neither the infrastructure nor the handsets to support that just yet"

I beg to differ. OK for the infrastructure not being there, but 3G handsets on the European market have been compatible with 3G on the 900MHz band for ages. Operators should concentrate on deploying 3G there rather than on 1800 MHz.

803.11n

Is this a new standard?

ITYM 802.11n...

Who do they think they are?

At £649 a pop they don't seriously think they'll have any impact on the market, do they?

Maybe they'll sell a handful of the devices. There's no way they'll sell in any volume at that ridiculous price.

Cheap at twice the price

Must be a typo. I can't see the 640GB model being cheaper than the 250 and 500GB models. $150 instead of $50 maybe?

Toothless

The internet pharmacies are all hosted in China anyway, with infected machines dotted all over the world, mostly in the third world where bootleg copies of Windows with no security updates are the norm, acting as reverse proxies directing traffic to them. The spammers also use Chinese registrars alot of the time. How does the FDA think they're going to have THOSE services taken down? Despite making noises about stomping out spam coming from China, the Chinese government is more than happy to accept all the hard currency coming into the country from US-based spammers paying for bulletproof hosting in China.

Fantastic!

This is excellent news.

All you have to do now is make the reader comments section mobile-friendly too :o)

"Targeted" ads?

Dollars to doughnuts the ads will be "targeted" at as many users as possible, ie. sprayed all over as many twitter users as possible.

Nobody can direct-message you if you're not following that person, but I'm guessing we'll all end up with a few thousand spammers following each of us with links to ads for acai berries, penis enlargers, pyramid scams and colon cleansers in all of their tweets.

Verisign sitefinder again?

I remember when Verisign tried to pull this trick a while back and got shot down in flames for it.

Also, the ISC released the delegation-only patch for BIND in order to neuter sitefinder.

Boy am I glad I don't use NTL/Virgin/whatever-their-name-is-today for DNS, preferring to run a caching nameserver (in delegation-only mode!) on my own network, which also allows me to NXDOMAIN various domains notorious for hosting ads...

@captain veg

Errm.... You're saying that this bunch actually has a clue? As a former free.fr customer I can assure you that these people have about as much clue as a freeze-dried slug. Atrocious QoS (dialup was faster, and forget the phone communications), a customer service that must have been running competitions to see which member of staff could blame the user the quickest, and no response to written requests, even when sent registered.

I ditched them, shacked up with nerim.net (much more expensive but you get what you're paying for, right?) and immediately enjoyed a connection at 20-23 mbps on a non-unbundled line instead of the 3-4 kbps with free.fr that was my fault because I happened to use Linux on my machines.

Please don't try and tell me that these retards with no concept of customer service actually know what they're doing.

Huh?

How does this differ from call divert?

Mostly ok

In Horwich, near Bolton, Lancs.

The mobile.o2.co.uk APN seems to be working normally here but the wap.o2.co.uk ones (WAP and streaming) are down.

This is at 10.55 on 22/07/09.

And so the web divide continues

Will this new tech be compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer? Will there be a GNU/Linux or FreeBSD or (insert name of favourite O/S here) ......... version?

The web is supposed to be about getting information out there to people, making it as accessible as possible. I'm guessing this will only be available to a subset of internet users.

Disconnected from the Internet?

Now all we have to do is convince the Chinese authorities that the internet is bad for China as a whole and maybe they'll turn China into a massive intRAnet.

That'll bring down spam levels for the rest of the world by about 50% and will make it alot harder for pillz spammers to find bulletproof hosting for their illegal pharma sites.

Re: @AC 10:04

Been with T-Mobile for 18 months now, more or less since I came back to the UK after 24 years abroad.

Coverage is indeed excellent and there's a comprehensive HSDPA network there.

But...

Packet data is important to me, which is why I'm on a web'n'walk plus deal with a 3GB allowance and streaming allowed. And this is the reason I just jumped from T-Mobile to O2. Even though I get a full 3.5G signal on all 4 of the phones I've tried this with, and the packet data connection is established, no data actually flows half the time. When it does, it's sometimes slower than GPRS (ie., forcing the phone to GSM mode results in faster data). If it does speed up to a dizzying 300 or 400kbps, it'll run like that for a minute, cut out for 30 seconds and then start again. This makes streaming wholly impractical.

O2's coverage is less impressive than T-Mobile's, but at least the data connection works.

Oh, and I have loads of contacts throughout Europe, none of whose networks have agreements with T-Mobile UK for MMS reception. T-Mobile UK users can only send MMS messages to users of SFR in France. Users on all other networks simply receive an SMS (in English so they can't read it) with a link to a page on t-mobile.co.uk and a password. With O2 (and any other network in the UK for that matter) I can just send an MMS and the recipient will receive an MMS. T-Mobile customer service spun me some cock and bull story about how they have roaming agreements with Orange and Bouygues as well, and how it should therefore work. How stupid do they think users are? Anyone with half a brain knows that this has nothing to do with roaming agreements and I resent T-Mobile thinking that I _don't_ have half a brain.

My number is being ported to O2 this week.