Information Research Weblog

Broadband again - in Thursday's Guardian Online, Victor Keegan pointed out that while Britain has wonderful, DSL-provided "broadband" running at half a meg, France has announced a programme which will start in Paris and roll out to the rest of the country - but twelve times faster. At 6Mb, customers will be able to have streaming video and Web-delivered films whenever they are prepared to pay for it. Does the government in the UK believe the hype or are they desperate to persuade the citizen to believe it?

Meanwhile, broadband is said to be set to boom in the USA.

Internet and taxes - it seems that the US Senate is determined to encourage Internet growth. It has just voted 93 to 3 to continue the ban on taxing Internet access for another four years. However:

McCain's successful compromise measure includes specific language that attempts to ensure nothing in the bill will affect state and local taxation of voice telecommunications services, VoIP, or other telecom services that are not purchased or used directly to provide Internet access.

Wi-fi in Westminster? - a story in The Register got me interested, but it turns out to be less exciting than it promised. Westminster City Council is to extend its Soho test to cover the whole of Soho - for its own purposes, however, not for general public access. That means wi-fi CCTV cameras instead of the wired kind and other Council applications; eventually.

A kind of Weblog is produced by the "Wi-Fi Guy", who appears to be travelling around the USA, discovering the state of wi-fi connectivity. Now that's what I call a true nerd!