* Posts by Richard Grimwood

9 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jun 2007

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Richard Grimwood

“Any magic, insufficiently explained, is indistinguishable from technology." -Christopher B. Wright

Biden proposes 30% tax on cryptominers' power bills

Richard Grimwood

Decarbonising Crypto.

If they said instead "50% tax but only on the fossil fuel element of your miner's electricity mix" then I don't see a problem, only benefits. Crypto miners would be further incentivised to seek green energy as it would be cheaper for them. This would encourage them to move out of city locations to places where they can negotiate direct with wind /solar/hydro generators thus encouraging more such plants to be built or to expand existing ones. This build out should then strengthen state/national energy security as more capacity is then available for emergency provision. Crypto mining should be one of the easiest industries to decarbonise as it can move to where the carbon neutral power is rather than the other way around.

Switch and router sales surge, with 200/400 gigabit Ethernet kit growing fastest

Richard Grimwood

My experience is that 48/52 port POE Meraki and Cisco switches have been on 9 to 12 month lead times since April last year. This is suddenly starting to ease down to "just" a couple of months. I suspect that the POE silicon disappeared from the supply chain and Cisco have had to redesign with new chips. There will be a lot of SME switch refresh projects that have been on hold waiting for the drought to finish. So 2023/24 sales will no doubt benefit from that pent up demand .

New cig peril: Third-hand smoke coats puffers in poison

Richard Grimwood
Big Brother

E-fags solution not the problem

I never smoked a lot, thank god, and now I find that a puff on an e-cig satisfies the odd craving usually after ordering the 3rd pint. This new research will no doubt be trumpeted by those trying to ban the e-cig which would be a shame. A mass conversion of smokers to the e-cig would lead to cleaner streets, clothes, hair, smokers and their loved ones lungs. Tax the nicotine cartridges then the tax man doesn't lose out , the NHS will eventually have less big 'C' patients and the council can spend less cleaning streets and more recycling the lithium ion batteries.

Mines the one that doesn't stink any more.

Ofcom taps water network for next generation broadband

Richard Grimwood
Stop

7 years late

Waterways - was Ipsaris became Easynet now sky.

Railways - was Fibernet now Global crossing

Pylons - was SSE now NEOS as subdivision of SSE

All of this was 7 years ago. The problem is virtually none of this fibre gets into your local Telephone exchange. Which is where it is needed to help the LLU investors break the BT monopoly on fibre. BT fibre is the financial bottleneck to low contention high speed Internet connectivity.

Mines the one with the FC connectors in the pocket

Carphone Warehouse mulls Tiscali bid, report claims

Richard Grimwood
Go

My money is on Vodafone

They need this. They have to find a way to get a ton of bandwidth to lots of base stations cheaply if 3G at 7.2mps it to really take off everywhere. LLU kit in exchanges could feed the phone masts. Tiscali has a the right network that they could even put the GSM calls over DSL loops. It would save them a fortune. Also for feeding femto cells to cover little black spots or to offer mobile phone based hosted business pbx's.

But vodafone won't do it for those reasons they will do it for the triple play home phone,broadband,mobile to the combined user base.

Asus Eee PC 4G sub-sub-notebook

Richard Grimwood
Flame

Comparative size pictures?

If someone is going to review a device where the major feature of the item is its size then can we please have photos that show it in a real world setting with reviewers hands on keyboard, on laps or next to other desktop items. Regurgitating the the marketing pictures of the blond on the beach was just lazy and doesn't count.

BT declares ceasefire in broadband speed wars

Richard Grimwood

Central Pipe Pricing

There is no doubt that the BT pricing of its central pipes are the root cause of the speed capping/ fair use unhappiness. All the while it costs a UK ISP 100's of pounds per megabit of central pipe capacity (per month!) the pressure is on to prevent a customer from costing the ISP more money than they are actually paying BT. No tweaking of the tail cost is going to help. The LLU ers are equally stymied by being unable to rent dark fibre from BT from one exchange to another. This is insane because the cost of changing the speed of data transferred over fibre by changing the transceivers is very small to go from 100 mbps to 1Gbps. If BT upgraded the ATM network and delivered everything to the ISP over gigabit ethernet at a price comparable with internet transit pricing then we would all be a lot lot happier. The days of contention ratios should be over but unfortunately the BT charging of bandwidth to the exchange hasn't significantly changed for 3 years while end user capacity to consume bandwidth has trebled.