May 2010

One in eight to cut cable and satellite TV in 2010

Despite rising cable and satellite TV prices and easy access to streaming TV and movies on the Internet, few consumers have cut the cord. But that looks like it's about to change. One in eight consumers will eliminate or scale back their cable, satellite or other pay-TV service this year, according to a new study released this week by Yankee Group. The study, which was the result of a survey of pay-TV operators and more than 6,000 U.S. consumers, found that many will choose to drop premium channels or cut their service down to a basic package, while others will choose to cut off their service completely.

One Laptop per Child targets Middle East and E Africa

The partnership between One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and the East African Community (EAC) aims to deliver 30 million laptops in the region by 2015. OLPC has also announced a partnership with a UN agency which aims to deliver 500,000 machines in the Middle East. Both the UN agency and the EAC first need to raise cash for the laptops. The two groups aim to find donors to help pay for the machines, which currently sell for more than $200, despite intentions to sell them for less.

Millions of UK children lack home broadband

More than a third of British families with children do not have broadband access at home, potentially putting four million children at a financial and educational disadvantage, according to a new report.

The report, released on Wednesday, suggests that of those families, about two million choose not to subscribe to broadband in areas where a reasonably good service is available. A poor selection of ISPs and a high overall cost were the determining factors for those families choosing to stay offline, according to analyst firm Point Topic, which released the report.

Average Dutch download speed increases to more than 10 Mbps

The average actual download speed in the Netherlands has grown from 8.97 Mbps in the third quarter of 2009 to 10.21 Mbps in the first quarter of this year, according to Telecompaper's Dutch Broadband Speeds Q1 2010 report.

At the same time the average offered download speed improved from 14.89 Mbps to 16.19 Mbps. As a result, the average actual/offered ratio of Dutch broadband connections increased from 60 percent in the third quarter of 2009 to 63 percent in the first quarter. The majority of the Dutch broadband users (75%) had a DSL, cable or FTTH connection with an offered download speed of 6 Mbps or more in the first quarter of 2010, growing from 71 percent during the third quarter of 2009. At the same time, the share of connections with a download speed up to 1.5 Mbps dropped to 0.3 percent of all connections, as DSL ISPs have been upgrading their entry-level packages to 3 Mbps or more. The report also found that fibre offers the highest average actual speed with 34.6 Mbps

New Questions Over Google's Street View in Germany

Google's plan to offer Street View photo mapping in Germany, which has bumped up against the country's strict privacy laws, has come in for renewed criticism after regulators learned that the company, a search engine giant, was also archiving the locations of household wireless networks.

Google's Street View technology has been accepted in countries like Britain and France, but has encountered greater resistance in Germany and Switzerland, where data privacy laws are stricter than in the rest of Europe or in the United States. German data protection officials had initially questioned the legality of Street View but dropped their objections last July after Google agreed to hide details of faces, license plates and house numbersthrough pixilation, and to give citizens the option of removing their property entirely from the 360-degree photo archive. Since then, hundreds have made such requests. Google intends to activate the service in Germany by the end of the year.

US, Europe press China to drop tech security rule

Global technology suppliers face a looming Chinese deadline to reveal the inner workings of computer encryption and other security products in a move the United States and Europe say is protectionist.

Suppliers must comply with the rules that take effect Saturday or risk being shut out of the billions of dollars in purchases that the Chinese government makes of smart cards, secure routers, anti-spam software and other security products. Encryption codes and other trade secrets would have to be disclosed to a government panel, and the foreign companies worry they might be leaked to Chinese rivals. Washington and the European Union say no other nation imposes such a demand and want Beijing to scrap or at least postpone it. Washington wants China to "follow global norms," said Nkenge L. Harmon, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative, in an e-mail Wednesday. In a meeting this month, she said, American officials "pressed China to address the concerns of foreign governments and industry before implementing the testing and certification rules." The requirement "has no real base in reality," the visiting EU trade commissioner, Karel De Gucht, said Tuesday. "We cannot see what they see in regard to security, so we are in fact disputing this."

Benton

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