So Ofcom has the mobile user at heart, does it?

I punted this question over to the telecoms watchdog yesterday half an hour after noon: "Just wondered about the 3G coverage maps. Could I put a question to somebody at Ofcom who could say why you have not made available high-resolution 3G coverage maps with a quality of service rating (1-10) - wouldn't that help mobile customers far more than anything else?'"

Did I expect a reply? Well, not really, but had I received one I expect it would have been of the "sorry we couldn't possibly do that" variety.

It is time to really get tough on the mobile operators, because Ofcom has never really stepped up to the plate. The argument on the mobile operator's side is: "We paid billions for these licences, and unless we get to stiff our customers for at least that amount, we're taking our radio access network (RAN) home with us."

There is another way to produce these maps – “crowdsource” it. Invite everybody with a 3G dongle to email a signal strength of the “x bars out of five” type, together with an associated postcode. It should then be easy to combine the lot into a spreadsheet and write an application to combine the data and draw a contour map of signal strength vs location for the UK. Post it onto YouTube and Robert’s your mother’s sister’s husband.

Would that work? Probably not, the mobile operators would immediately say: “Well, the times and the days your crowdsourcers emailed in their data are not representative of the overall 3G signal strength of our RAN” – and they would probably be right – statistically, anyway. Of course the mobile operators have all this data immediately to hand, and could make it available so that we could really see who has the best coverage.

What’s been fairly obvious for years is that we really need somebody who can deal properly with the mobile operators. Like Viviane Reding of the European Commission for instance, who has already forced down mobile roaming charges.

Employed as an Ofcom spearhead - a kind of shock trooper if you will - to boot open the doors of the mobile operators and say, as the character Switch tells Keanu Reeves’ Neo in the classic film The Matrix – “It’s either my way – or the highway.”

If only.

By Dave Bailey

A report in the Wall Street Journal that the Obama administration will be shovelling out $7.2bn for stimulating broadband rollout looks to be another case of the US showing the UK how things should be done.

But, hang on a minute – none of the big US carriers such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast have started to fill out the forms for this cash bonanza.

The reason looks to be the US communications regulator applying a shedload of red tape to the contracts and putting profit-sapping restrictions on network connections built with the funds.

On this side of the pond, UK regulator Ofcom and BT have already shaken on the deal, and allowed BT to make a good “return on its investment” for rolling out optical-fibre connectivity for high-speed, 100Mbit/s-plus connections.

So it looks like a tale of two countries, with the US carriers begging for Ofcoms approach to regulate future government “broadband stimulus”, and BT saying “not in my backyard” to the fiscal strictures being applied to US carriers if they bring their wheelbarrows along for some broadband funds.

As Joe Brown once sang – "What a crazy world we're living in!"

By Dave Bailey

Tomorrow afternoon in a building designed by Scottish neo-classical architect Robert Adam, close to Charing Cross railway station, Lord Carter of Barnes will rise to his feet and deliver the final Digital Britain report.

RSA House is the venue for the report's final disclosure. However, Lord Carter is still working on the implementation plan which will fill in the detail about exactly how all the mission statements will be delivered – the who and when – and hopefully the how much.

I'll be at the event, and I would like to think I'm going to hear something amazing tomorrow, that Carter will blow everybody out of the water with a succession of stunning announcements designed to move the UK's communications infrastructure into the 21st century. So, are we going to get visionary thinking from Lord Carter - or a point release of January's interim Digital Britain report plus small tinkerings at the edge?

The big problem for Carter is that he's hamstrung by the government's aversion to stumping up a serious amount of folding drink vouchers to deliver the proper digital IT infrastructure needed by the UK to compete effectively with our global competitors.

At the last forum organised to discuss Digital Britain, Gordon Brown took the stage and said: "We can't leave this to chance." Unfortunately I suspect that is precisely what will happen after tomorrow's announcement - Brown will be leaving the country at the mercy of Lady Luck, and if his recent luck is anything to go by, that doesn't bode well for the digital future of the UK.

By Dave Bailey

As well as putting meter readers out of work, the government’s plans to install smart meters to remotely monitor every household’s gas and electricity use by 2020 may hit other snags.

Neither Whitehall mandarins nor the utility companies have yet outlined how they plan to pull off this ambitious project, preferring to muse on the potential reduction in the average household’s bills and national carbon footprint.

Smart metering works by replacing existing meters with equivalent devices that are able to transmit data about customer use to a central office via a communications network.

That network can be wired or wireless. Existing schemes use cellular GPRS and SMS communications, for example, which is unlucky for those living in areas with no reliable mobile phone signal.

Network transmission based on Wi-Fi, WiMax and other licensed and unlicensed radio wavebands is being explored, and there are wired alternatives such as analogue modems (dial-up over PSTN), broadband, and power line communication (PLC) where the electricity supply cable carries data.

Electricity supplier First Utility, which says it has already provided smart meters to more than 10,000 households in London, uses PLC, GPRS, SMS, PSTN and low-power radio (pagers).

The suppliers hope that, somehow, every household ­ even if they are halfway up a mountain where no existing phone or broadband operator offers a service ­ will be able to get their smart meter connected to head office one way or another.

The biggest winners are the electricity and gas companies, which get to remove a substantial part of their expenditure on the engineers who currently come out to read our existing meters.

And with so much consumption information at their fingertips, suppliers also get to match supply more closely to generation. So they know in advance when to deliver additional capacity in busy periods, and slow down supply at other times, and negotiate the best wholesale price accordingly.

So far there is nothing to suggest these private firms will be duty bound to pass on opex savings to consumers in the form of lower prices. Even then, only those with smart meters may benefit.

For those in deadspots, the traditional method of billing may continue, effectively creating a two-tier utility pricing system. Those living where smart meters work might get lower-cost power – ­ those who don’t could pay a premium.

By Martin Courtney

After all the hoo-haa has died down, partners’ backs have been patted and the triumph of getting some of the biggest tier-one vendor chief executives altogether on Cisco's telepresence system been trumpeted to the rooftops, what exactly is all the fuss about?

Cisco has launched some partner-supported hardware and services for unifying datacentre compute, network, storage and virtualisation, which it claims will drop datacentre capital expenditure by 20 per cent and operating costs by 30 per cent. Well, if those figures are correct, which customer could argue

But cynics might well point an alternative explanation to Cisco's plan. With revenue in enterprise networking flat, and with the prospect of a relatively deep recession compared to what's gone before, it may well be that Cisco has thought: "What markets can we expand into?"

Look no further than the datacentre. With rollouts increasing as businesses seek to get the edge on the competition, the network giant's move into what many analysts currently see as a “commodity” server market, gives 25 per cent of the datacentre spend to aim at, rather than the measly nine per cent Cisco would be competing for if it focused solely on networking.

Are firms going to rip-and-replace already hefty investments in datacentre infrastructure? Well, upgrade cycles in the datacentre seem to be shorter than those concerned with office desktops – especially if firms are running Vista – normally three years compared with maybe five years for non-datacentre-related IT. That is, unless a “game changing” product appears. Cisco say this is what its Unified Computing System is, while competitors you suspect will say, nothing new there at all – we've been doing that for an age.

When asked how long he would let the new architecture loose to dent the server and datacentre market, Cisco chief executive John Chambers said: "We're on a suck-it-and-see approach – we normally let new businesses go for a year and see what happens."

A year is a long time in the datacentre, and if firms are not going to upgrade immediately, they'd probably want to check out what their current provider is offering, before undertaking the dreaded “market survey”. It's hardly likely that the vendors at which Cisco has aimed its UCS salvo will be resting on their laurels for 12 months. HP and IBM have probably already been considering their response to Cisco's highly trailed server entry into enterprise and service provider datacentres.

By Dave Bailey

Over the past four years I have covered my fair share of top-level domain (TLD) launches. Think of .eu, .mobi, .whatchamacall it; they have all kicked off to great fanfare, then slowly reached respectable if not earth-shattering registration numbers.

That’s the problem with them –­ there are so many out there, companies tend to snap them up out of obligation, and for brand protection reasons. In reality they end up relying on the old favourites –­ .com, .uk and so on.

The .com TLD is pretty much a must-have if your firm wants to compete at a global level, and if you are reaching out to a specific national market, a country code TLD has its advantages.

Well, .tel is very different. “Game changing”, “innovative”, and “very significant” are just some of the terms being used to describe the latest TLD to be launched. The domain is being promoted by London-based registry Telnic as a one-stop shop, allowing individuals or companies to display in one place all their contact details –­ phone numbers, web and email addresses, physical address, Skype, Twitter, social networking page, GPS co-ordinates –­ the list goes on.

In technical terms, the domain is also different because a .tel URL will not point to a web site stored on a local server. Instead, it will return information stored on the internet’s Domain Name Server.

So what’s the value of having one of these?

Well, if you have a business, it would be incredibly handy to have a place to point people if they needed contact information from you.

And that’s not all. It will allow firms to offer up particular contact details depending on the location and device of the user. A customer could be offered the phone number of the nearest branch of a particular store if they access a retailer’s .tel site via mobile phone, for example. Those nice people at Telnic have also thought about potential privacy issues ­ allowing the domain to only be viewed by those you authorise, although this is more likely to be a concern for individuals than it is for businesses.

In general then, it is meant to cut out all the hassle of ploughing through the web to find a company’s contact details. Now, this column is not meant to be an advert for the new domain, but most of the experts believe this is a big one, and could experience significant take-up, given its unique proposition. So with all this at stake, organisations that missed the initial sunrise registration period –­ which was reserved for trademark holders to put in their applications –­ could be missing out. It’s now landrush time, open to all-comers.

Its ultimate success, of course, will depend on whether these companies actually choose to market their .tels, or if they see it as just another expense, another domain they have to register to prevent cybersquatters and domain name speculators nabbing them first and possibly abusing their brands.

It will also be interesting to see how creative firms get with their marketing. For example, sports apparel titan Nike might want to register a domain such as heretofindyourshoes.tel ­ – to integrate some new marketing campaign with geolocation capabilities. The possibilities are enormous.

But .tel still faces the challenges of any new TLD ­ – to serve a particular market need, increase use over time and therefore sustain long-term popularity. But people are inherently lazy, and .tel has the opportunity to make peoples’ lives easier by offering one place to go which contains all the contact information anyone could need.

It is for this reason that I think the domain will prosper where .biz, .mobi and others have failed.

By Phil Muncaster

Virgin Media plans to bump everybody on its 2Mbit/s broadband service straight up to a minimum 10Mbit/s – at no extra cost apparently. For people languishing on what Lord Carter's Digital Britain report says will be the target download speed to aim for by 2012, Virgin's altruism seems very laudable.

The brownie points earned by Virgin Media with this announcement will be banked in May, just a month after Lord Carter's final, final Digital Britain report sees the light of day. With BT still rolling out 24Mbit/s – for people close to their local phone exchange - the Virgin Media upgrade looks like another turning of its broadband speed dial. Being able to say that on average, your download bandwidth is greater than BT's, always goes down well with salespeople.

By Dave Bailey

A few years ago I was questioning an industry analyst about the early mobile broadband dongles and services, and he was all in favour of them. His boss, too, thought they were the bee’s knees – until the bill arrived. After that the dongles were locked in a cupboard, never to see the light of day again.

Having just finished a group test of all the mobile broadband services available in the UK, I can honestly say the technology has improved significantly since those early days. High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) has improved download speeds, and trials of further enhancements, such as High-Speed Packet Access Plus (HSPA+) are currently being performed.

For most users of mobile broadband, the technology being used to move their data does not concern them – as long as they have proper coverage where they work, they are happy. But as it happens, HSPA+ offers some hidden benefits that IT leaders will care about.

HSPA+ includes an option to move to an all-IP architecture, allowing mobile operators to connect their base stations to Gigabit Ethernet backhaul infrastructure. That could provide big savings on deployment and operating costs – and potentially provide a faster network at lower costs.

But even if the result is lower bills for users, the big question remains: Will the productivity benefits outweigh the cost?

Most of the mobile operators impose a 3GB per month download limit on their mobile broadband services, and punitive fees for exceeding that limit are likely.

Similarly, if users go abroad, charges can ramp up fairly quickly – charging more than £4 per megabyte is not unknown. Downloading a service pack abroad could easily have the finance chief reaching for your P45. Until Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, finally gets her way with data roaming charges, mobile broadband abroad is definitely a no-no.

The fact is, for many companies mobile broadband is still unlikely to generate enough cash through increased productivity to offset the cost of using the technology. And this is likely to remain the case until the nirvana of truly unlimited download data for mobile broadband devices finally arrives.

By Dave Bailey

David Cameron's recent statement on fibre-optic broadband as part of a speech he made on Monday may seem as though it differentiates the Conservatives from the Labour Party in its approach to next-generation broadband rollout. It doesn't.

Labour isn't advocating a massive state-funded rollout of fibre-optic broadband connectivity to people's homes – and neither are the Conservatives. Ironically, this is one thing both parties seem to agree on.

"I am not talking about massive state-financed investment - that would be extremely expensive for the taxpayer and it would also risk stifling the innovation that comes from private sector competition," said Cameron, a statement perfectly in alignment with what Labour proposed through the Caio report, and what Ofcom has been saying all along.

You have to laugh at the “private sector competition” part of the speech though. Remember it was the “Chingford skinhead” himself – Norman Tebbit - at the time Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, who was chiefly involved in privatising BT.

Had Tebbit separated BT from its exchanges, thereby introducing proper competition into the market, then maybe the fibre-optic network both Conservative and Labour are hoping will be rolled out by the private sector, would already be here.

What about global competition? Well, "when it comes to investing in next-generation broadband networks, we're doing very badly compared to countries like Germany, Japan and America," Cameron informed us. Actually, compared to Latvia and Estonia – we're doing very badly. These countries are trendsetters compared to the UK – having a massive 0.99 per cent of their population connected fibre-optically!

As a by-product of a rush into fibre-optic broadband, we would be spared Samuel L. Jackson - or Master Windu as he's known to Star Wars fans - continually informing us of Virgin Media's fibre-optic “Mother of all broadband” - which is actually delivered into your house from the street cabinet over co-axial cable and not fibre-optically