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Gloucester residents will have access to improved internet services by the end of the year with the National Broadband Network (NBN) on its way.
Two companies, NBN Co and Countrytell, are preparing to switch on towers to provide fixed-wireless broadband services to the town.
Countrytell aims to start rolling out its service to Gloucester customers by the end of the year, while NBN Co is anticipating its tower will come online in mid 2014.
Countrytell has already built one tower on Cemetery Rd and is considering building a second at Kia-Ora.
“The commissioning or ‘switching on’ of the Gloucester tower does not rely on Kia-Ora,” a spokesperson for the company said.
NBN Co has approval for a tower at Stratford and is looking at erecting three others in the district.
“There are three additional sites planned for the Gloucester local government area, two sites for Gloucester (one of which will utilise existing infrastructure) and one site for Barrington,” a spokesman said. The NBN Co rollout is being funded entirely by the federal government while Countrytell hopes its service will provide another option for locals.
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Radioactive ocean water from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster was first detected along the coastline of California in March of 2012. Researchers already know that radioactive iodine from Fukushima has arrived in California, and expect peak levels af radiation to hit California in 2016. The problem appears to be worsening as typhoons have caused overflows of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.
With the radiation already rolling in, a group of advocates called the Fukushima Response Campaign organized a "human mural" protest Saturday morning, spelling out the words 'Fukushima is Here' in letters 100 feet in length on San Francisco's Ocean Beach.
Organizers are alarmed at the increasing levels of radioactive steam and radioactive iodine being found in coastal California waters, all the result of fallout from the earthquake and tsunami that hit the Fukushima plant more than two years ago. "A threat of this magnitude to the health, economy and culture of California is certainly grounds for concern," Fukushima Response Campaign said in a press release.
"Organizing people to spell our message is not meant to spread fear and panic, said event organizer Jina Brooks. "It’s more like Paul Revere’s ride, citizens trying to alert other citizens to a real danger on the horizon. My heart breaks when I think of what mothers must be experiencing in Japan."
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A new study commissioned by Intel Corporation and conducted by Penn Schoen Berland examining global attitudes toward technology innovation challenges existing perceptions on technology champions and hotspots. The research reveals millennials (ages 18 to 24) are the least enthusiastic about technology today yet are optimistic for future technology that delivers a more personalized experience, while women in emerging markets are the most optimistic about innovations in technology. The "Intel Innovation Barometer" reveals millennials globally show a stark contrast to their reputation as digital natives who can't get enough technology in their lives. A majority of millennials agree that technology makes people less human and that society relies on technology too much. However, millennials also believe technology enhances their personal relationships (69 percent) and have great hope that innovations will positively impact education (57 percent), transportation (52 percent) and healthcare (49 percent). This generation is also slightly more willing than their oldest cohorts to anonymously share birth dates, GPS records and online shopping history if it helps to improve experiences. "At first glance it seems millennials are rejecting technology, but I suspect the reality is more complicated and interesting," said Dr. Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and director of Interaction and Experience Research at Intel Labs. "A different way to read this might be that millennials want technology to do more for them, and we have work to do to make it much more personal and less burdensome." Millennials want future technology to make life better, more simple and fun. Eighty-six percent believe technology innovation makes life simpler, and more than one-third think technology should know them by learning about their behavior and preferences. They want experiences that help them stay in the moment and be their best selves.
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AT&T today announced it has agreed to lease exclusive rights to its nearly 9,100 cell sites and sell outright an extra 600 towers to Crown Castle International Corp. for $4.85 billion in cash, filling the wireless company’s coffers for possible acquisitions, especially in Europe.
Under the terms of the deal, Crown Castle will lease and run the towers for an average of 28 years, after which the company will be able to buy them outright for around $4.2 billion.
AT&T is seeking to monetize its extensive portfolio of cell towers while protecting rights of access. The cell phone company is guaranteed subleases on the towers for at least a decade for $1,900 per month per site, with annual rent increases of 2 percent, with a right to renew for up to 50 years total. AT&T will also have access to reserve capacity on the towers for future use.
The money will help AT&T’s balance sheet as it undertakes a $14 billion network upgrade and plans a shareholder-friendly stock buyback that may top $11 billion.
After the deal closes, Crown Castle will become the nation’s largest provider of shared wireless infrastructure, operating more than 40,000 communications towers in the United States alone. This is not the first deal Crown Castle has done with major wireless carriers. In November 2012, Crown acquired exclusive rights to lease and operate 7,100 T-Mobile USA cell towers.
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Another leak has been released from Edward Snowden's files, this one covered by French newspaper Le Monde. Sam Jones, writing for The Guardian, breaks down the details.
The report in Le Monde, which carries the byline of the outgoing Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who worked with Snowden to lay bare the extent of the NSA's actions, claims that between 10 December 2012 and 8 January 2013 the NSA recorded 70.3m phone calls in France.
According to the paper, the documents show that the NSA was allegedly targeting not only terrorist suspects but politicians, businesspeople and members of the administration under a programme codenamed US-985D.
"The agency has several collection methods," Le Monde said. "When certain French phone numbers are dialled, a signal is activated that triggers the automatic recording of certain conversations. This surveillance also recovers SMS and content based on keywords."
Le Monde says "recording" but according to the Washington Post, the NSA grabbed the metadata on 70 million calls and recorded an unknown number of calls originating from certain phone numbers. Even considering the fact that intelligence agencies consider foreign surveillance to be completely normal (and, importantly, not granted the limited protections provided to the American public), the breadth of this collection has drawn some harsh criticism from French legislators.
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A $32-million commercial fishery has inexplicably and completely collapsed this year on the B.C. coast.The sardine seine fleet has gone home after failing to catch a single fish. And the commercial disappearance of the small schooling fish is having repercussions all the way up the food chain to threatened humpback whales.
Jim Darling, a Tofino-based whale biologist with the Pacific Wildlife Foundation, said in an interview Monday that humpbacks typically number in the hundreds near the west coast of Vancouver Island in summer. They were observed only sporadically this year, including by the commercial whalewatching industry.
"Humpbacks are telling us that something has changed," he said. "Ocean systems are so complex, it's really hard to know what it means. For one year, I don't think there's any reason to be alarmed, but there is certainly reason to be curious."
Humpbacks instead were observed farther offshore, possibly feeding on alternative food sources such as herring, sandlance, anchovies, or krill, but not in the numbers observed near shore in recent years.
The sardine, also known as pilchard, has a uniquely fascinating history.
Sardines supported a major fishery on the B.C. coast in the mid-1920s to mid-1940s that averaged 40,000 tonnes a year.
Then the fish mysteriously disappeared - for decades - until the first one was observed again in 1992 during a federal science based fishery at Barkley Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
With the re-emergence of the sardines came the humpbacks, around 1995, becoming so numerous in coastal waters off Vancouver Island that they supplanted grey whales as the star attraction of the whale-watching industry.
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Tough times loom for U.S. cloud companies selling into Europe. On Monday, the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs voted overwhelmingly in favor of toughening up the EU’s privacy regime.
The EU’s new Data Protection Regulation has been crawling through the European legislative process for more than a year and a half now, and it began as quite a strident proposal for boosting Europeans’ privacy. Then the U.S. corporate lobbying machine sprang to life, gutting key aspects of the new legislation.
And then Edward Snowden leaked the NSA documents, showing the world how the U.S. is subverting web services from Google to Microsoft in order to spy on everyone, including those in Europe.
Following months of revelations, and on the same day that France heard its citizens’ phone calls were being reportedly recorded en masse by the Americans, the Parliament’s committee gave a resounding thumbs-up to every single amendment proposed by industrious German Green MEP Jan Phillip Albrecht (pictured above).
Now, this was only a committee vote – this stuff will only go before the European Parliament for a full plenary vote in April 2014, ahead of the parliament’s elections. There will probably be quite a few further amendments made before then, so lots of fun lies ahead.
However, Monday’s vote represented a pretty stunning turnaround for the legislation, and one that should explain why the online ad industry is so mad at the NSA. Here’s a quick run-down of Albrecht’s best bits:
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Whether you're growing wine grapes or mixing cement, there are some situations in which it's vitally important to monitor moisture content. Normally water sensors are used, although these can be both large and expensive. Now, however, a team from Cornell University has created a water-sensing silicon chip that's not only tiny, but is also reportedly "a hundred times more sensitive than current devices." What's more, the chips might be possible to mass-produce for just $5 a pop.
Known as a "lab on a chip" device, the chip contains a tiny water-filled cavity. Once placed in soil, inserted in the stem of a plant, stuck in a cement matrix or put somewhere else, the chip exchanges moisture from that cavity with moisture in its environment via a nanoporous membrane. The chip measures any changes in the pressure within the cavity, that result from water either entering it or being drawn out.
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Another great video from Australia makes many salient points regarding the debate over their national broadband network. One key point to take away is that it is possible to talk to non-technical normal people about this subject without overwhelming them or boring them.
Another is that FTTH = fiber to the nowhere, not fiber to the node.
When it comes to building infrastructure, we should make smart long term investments. That said, we are strongly supportive of locally owned, fiber networks. Local ownership trumps national ownership because proximity lends itself to accountability.
Click headline to watch video clip--
Raymond quickly strengthened overnight, becoming a major hurricane off the southern Pacific Coast of Mexico.
The powerful Category 3 storm was about 165 miles (266 kilometers) west-southwest of Acapulco on Monday. It had maximum sustained winds of 120 mph, with higher gusts. The threshold for a major hurricane is 111 mph.
As of 8 a.m. ET, the storm was crawling north at 2 mph.
"Some additional strengthening is possible during the next day or so," forecasters said. "A storm surge is expected to produce significant coastal flooding."
Raymond is forecast to dump heavy rain along the south-central coast of Mexico, bringing 2 to 4 inches of rain, and there may be areas in Michoacan and Guerrero states that receive as much as 8 inches.
The storm is forecast to slowly close in on the coast through Tuesday, although it's expected to take a sharp turn west before the eye of the storm reaches land, the National Hurricane Center said.
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Although four months have passed since Edward Snowden’s explosive NSA surveillance leaks, the most revealing details have not yet been published, and could be rolled out in the international media over the coming weeks and months, beginning with U.S. spying activities involving Spain and France. That’s according to Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who broke the Snowden story last June, and whose life has been drastically upturned since. “There are a lot more stories,” he said on Monday in Rio de Janeiro, where he lives. “The archives are so complex and so deep and so shocking, that I think the most shocking and significant stories are the ones we are still working on, and have yet to publish.”
Greenwald was speaking in a packed university gymnasium to hundreds of journalists, who are gathered here this week for the Global Investigative Journalism Conference, a two-yearly event that rotates around the world, bringing together writers, television producers and editors to share information and collaborate on work. Here, Greenwald was something of a hero — the entire thrust of the conference centers on ferreting out secrets and wrongdoing—and the journalist received a rock-star welcome. And while Rio was chosen as the location for the conference years ago, it proved a fortuitous spot. Greenwald recently revealed on Brazil´s hugely popular Globo TV that the NSA had spied on President Dilma Rousseff, as well as the government oil company Petrobras. The news caused a furor in Brazil, not least from Rousseff herself, and she canceled a White House visit, originally scheduled for next week.
But in an hour-long discussion on stage with a Dutch journalist, Greenwald suggested that his life was now immensely complicated. A New York lawyer before turning into a high-profile blogger in 2005, he revealed that he was in daily contact with Snowden—a fact that came as a surprise to most in the audience—in what is an active collaboration to sift through the mountain of documents Snowden carried out of the U.S. Snowden contacted Greenwald and U.S. filmmaker Laura Poitras after taking the information to Hong Kong.
Snowden, who had top-level U.S. security clearance, spent a month in Moscow Airport’s transit area until Russia granted him asylum; the U.S. has indicted him for stealing state secrets and exposing them, charges which would likely land him in jail for the rest of his life.
In addition to his contact with Snowden, Greenwald said he was in daily communication too with Poitras, who is based in Berlin, continuing to dig into what Greenwald says is “thousands and thousands of documents.” The challenge of sifting through the information is now itself a risky endeavor. “We go to extreme lengths to make sure our communication is protected,” he said.
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An increase in smart meter deployments will see the global market for wireless communication modules approximately double in value over the coming years, jumping from $532m in 2012 to $1.3 billion in 2020, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12 percent, according to a new report from research and consulting firm GlobalData.
The company’s latest report states that North America, currently the dominant player in the market for global wireless communication modules for smart meters, will be a key driver behind the leap, with its own market revenue expected to climb steadily from $379m in 2012 to $433.7m in 2020.
Europe will also continue to account for a considerable share of the global market, thanks to a significant number of pilot-scale projects getting underway across the region. The uptake of wireless communication modules in the UK, Denmark and Ireland in particular looks promising, according to GlobalData, and these countries are predicted to occupy an even larger share of Europe’s wireless smart meter communication market by the end of 2020.
Cellular and Radio Frequency (RF) communication modules are the two key technologies used in smart meters for two-way data transmission. RF modules account for an 85 percent share of the North American market, thanks to their low cost, high bandwidth and efficient performance in industrial areas.
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Copper telecommunications networks used for delivering DSL broadband to most homes today in Australia and around the world are capable of faster internet speeds than they are now, but only if the networking community gets working on speeding them up.
That is the view of Patrick Lo, the global chairman and chief executive of home networking giant Netgear. Speaking to Fairfax Media while on a visit to Australia last week, San Jose-based Mr Lo said he believed the networking and research community was likely to find even better ways to deliver broadband via copper at much faster speeds than are achievable today.
Mr Loh's comments come after opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull recently leapt upon a new technology standard that networking vendors say will deliver 1 Gbps speeds over copper. The technology, called G.fast, uses a combination of DSL technologies to produce maximum 1 Gbps speeds over short distances of copper that are between 100 metres and 200 metres long. The International Telecommunications Union is moving towards making the technology a DSL standard by March 2014.
"Even though today you could argue that copper has a limitation in speed – maybe up to 100 Mbps into the house – there's the possibility going forward that we [the networking community] will make the copper even more efficient," Mr Lo said.
"... We don't know [how fast] because as long as the copper is not broken people will still find ways to squeeze more transmission into the copper."
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Bitcoin, the virtual currency beloved by dreamers, speculators and criminals, is on a new upswing as the popular Mt. Gox exchange showed it trading slightly above $200 late Tuesday afternoon ET:
As the chart shows, Bitcoin is trading on other exchanges at a price closer to $185 (trades on Tokyo-based Mt. Gox come at a premium, possibly due to its recent legal and regulatory troubles). But, by whatever metric you pick, Bitcoin is soaring — up over $60 this month alone. And the current price is up more than $150 from the low of $50 it hit after a spectacular crash in April.
The gains are also notable because Bitcoin has weathered a series of wrenching shocks in the last six months: the FBI’s takedown of Silk Road (a criminal marketplace that relied on Bitcoin); the feds’ seizure of millions from Mt. Gox; an ugly lawsuit that blew up plans for a series of U.S.-based Mt. Gox franchises.
So why has the currency proved so resilient? As with the April crash (and those before it), no one has a definite answer. But the recent steadiness may be the result of support from established investors like Fred Wilson and Second Market, and the efforts by the Bitcoin Foundation to tame political hostility in Washington. And the currency’s October boost may stem from Chinese internet giant Baidu’s decision to accept Bitcoins as payments.
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Panasonic and Tokyo Gas have continued joint development of their "Ene-Farm" home fuel cell unit, which became the world's first commercialized fuel cell system targeted at household heating and electricity generation when it went on sale in Japan in May 2009. The latest model is aimed at use in condominiums and features a number of modifications to ensure the units meet the more stringent installation standards placed on those buildings.
Like previous Ene-Farm units, the new model uses a fuel processor to extract hydrogen from the city gas supply and react it with oxygen from the atmosphere to generate heat that is then used to generate electricity as well as supply hot water.
By increasing the airtightness of the unit and thickening the exterior panels, the companies have made it possible for the new fuel cell to be installed in a condominium's pipe shaft in the open hallway. Pipe shafts run vertically through condominium floors and house water and gas pipes, while open hallways are hallways with residential units on one side and exterior space on the other.
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There are no prizes for guessing the hot topics at the Broadband World Forum will include Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV). This has certainly been the case as I have travelled across Europe, the Middle East and Africa speaking directly to service providers. This is echoed by my colleague Brian Levy, CTO EMEA Service Provider Sector in his conversations. Last week I caught up with Brian to compare notes.
First off customers want to cut through the hype surrounding SDN and NFV. They just want to get to the basics; What is SDN? What does it mean for Service Providers? And what does it enable a service provider to do for their customers?
We both agree that genuine use-cases help people understand the advantages of SDN/NFV. For example we talk about the ability for SP’s to generate new revenues by providing more agile services on top of the traditional connectivity. One example is to virtualise certain network functions which can transform the enterprise CPE into a virtual CPE (vCPE). We also talk about how SDN helps service providers insert themselves in the cloud value chain. By highlighting the value of the network allied to the intelligence SDN extracts and an end-to-end service wrap with a single point of contact, with the necessary compliance to have data in the right place, SP’s begin to see how they can develop new value propositions.
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I love the idea of Bitcoin. I really, really do.
I love the concept of separating money from government control and of enabling truly anonymous electronic transactions. I love the fact that it's decentralized and open source. I even love the notion of "mining" Bitcoins. It's so much cooler than, say, printing money, much less having to earn it.
I get excited every time I hear of another legitimate vendor deciding to accept Bitcoins in payment for goods or services (last week, it wass beer in Holland). I applauded the announcement of an ATM that lets you easily convert cash into Bitcoins (though an ATM that let you do the reverse would seem far more useful). And I actively follow my friends' and acquaintances' adventures with Bitcoins.
I don't even have a problem with seamier side of Bitcoins. I don't care if alleged Silk Road marketplace mastermind Ross Ulbricht amassed an $80 billion Bitcoin wallet from a site built on selling drugs and murder-for-hire. To me, it's absurd to think that a payment mechanism has a moral responsibility to control how it's used and what it can buy. Cash isn't evil because you can buy bad things with it, and it's not saintly because you can give it to charity. The good or evil lies in what you do, not with how you pay for it.
More fundamentally, I even think its fine that Bitcoin isn't backed by any real-world value. The reality is that even government-backed securities are pretty much polite fictions -- they work because enough people are willing to agree that they work. The U.S. Government prints money as it chooses, and the market determines what those dollars are worth. Bitcoins are not so different -- as their market value fluctuates according to perceived value.
There's nothing wrong with that concept, but how it plays out in the real world is Bitcoin's fatal flaw.
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Approval of the Keystone XL pipeline could generate $100 billion in profits for billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, according to a report released Sunday, which revealed the extent to which the Kochs would benefit from the tar sands development the proposed pipeline would help spur.
A progressive think tank called the International Forum on Globalization completed the study, which found that the Kochs and their privately-owned company, Koch Industries, hold up to 2 million acres of land in Alberta, Canada, the proposed starting point of the Keystone XL. Several Koch Industries subsidiaries stand to benefit from the pipeline's construction, including Koch Exploration Canada, which would profit from oil development on its land, and Koch Supply and Trading, which would benefit from oil derivatives trading.
The report also estimates that the Koch brothers have given about $50 million to think tanks and members of Congress who have pushed for the pipeline to be built.
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Cloud traffic is becoming the dominant growth engine in data center traffic, according to Cisco's third annual Global Cloud Index.
Between 2012 and 2017, cloud traffic will grow at a 35 percent combined annual growth rate (CAGR) from 1.2 zettabytes of annual data center traffic to 5.3 zettabytes.
Likewise, global data center traffic will grow threefold and reach a total of 7.7 zettabytes annually during the same period.
Out of this figure, about 17 percent of data center traffic will be driven by end users accessing clouds for various web-based applications, including web surfing, video streaming, collaboration and connected devices.
Besides end-user traffic, data centers themselves will generate about 7 percent of their own traffic via data replication and software/system updates. Cisco said another 76 percent of data center traffic will reside in the data center and will be generated by storage, production and development data in a virtualized environment.
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Campaign groups in the UK say the fossil fuel industry is too deeply entwined financially with British universities and urge them to disinvest within the next five years.
The groups have published a report, Knowledge and Power – Fossil Fuel Universities, in which they accuse the universities of allowing the industry to hide behind a coating of greenwash.
It warns: “Universities offer their credibility for cash when they sign deals sponsoring staff positions, buildings, conferences and lectures with fossil fuel companies. These deals play a key role in shoring up the fossil fuel industry’s public image.”
The report, which calls on universities to phase out fossil fuel research and refocus their work towards climate solutions, says universities have an estimated £5.2 billion invested in the fossil fuel industry – £2,083 for every student in the UK.
“A small proportion of the wealth of university endowment funds is invested directly in the shares of oil and gas companies,” the report says. “A far greater proportion supports the industry by investments held in pensions, unit trusts, and other financial products.”
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I'm here in Poznan, Poland – a town I'll admit I never knew existed until I bought my plane ticket. Which is a bit pathetic of me, since "Poznan" more or less translates as "the town everyone knows." Whoops, I guess I missed that memo. It's a typically charming European town with a gorgeous city square, a 1,000-year plus history full of horrific wars and destruction, a Catholic bent and a surprising number of sex shops per city block.
I'm here to visit Blow Up Hall 5050, one of the most unique hotels in Europe, attached to one of the "best shopping malls in the world" and a pet project of Grażyna Kulczyk, the richest woman in Poland.
Until 2006, Kulczyk was also married to the richest man in Poland, but while her ex-husband's business ventures are quite dry – oil, gas, coal power, mining and beer brewing – Grażyna sees herself much more as a passionate patron of the arts.
She calls her signature approach to business the 5050 model: everything should be 50 percent art, 50 percent business, each side supporting the other. In this spirit, she bought up the crumbling carcass of a gigantic old brewery in 2003 and began development on a mammoth 120,000 square-metre complex that houses two high-class shopping malls, a free art gallery where Kulczyk shows her personal collection of modern art, and the Blow Up Hall hotel.
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The meltdown at the Post Office's home phone division continues, although its telephones are now being answered again. We have many other letters similar to these, and it appears to have been caused by the company switching its wholesale supplier from BT to TalkTalk.
We forwarded these letters on, and the Post Office told us it is doing everything it can to get MS's parents-in-law reconnected. However, it says that following an investigation the problems SC is experiencing in Bristol are unrelated to the main problem. This was caused by a switch between other unrelated suppliers.
"We are extremely sorry to hear of the problems our customers are experiencing with Post Office's broadband and phone service," a spokeswoman say. "We fully accept that our current levels of service have fallen below our usual high standards, and this is unacceptable. We would like to reassure customers that we are committed to resolving these service issues and are working hard to rectify these problems swiftly."
This looks like a case of a firm switching supplier to save some money, only for it to end up costing more than the savings made in lost customer goodwill. If you were thinking of signing up to the Post Office's home phone/broadband service, you may want to want to wait a while.
Click headline to read the letters--
Fire fighters in Australia's New South Wales have worked throughout the day to battle bushfires across the state, amid fears three blazes could merge.
New South Wales has been badly hit by bushfires after the hottest September on record. It has declared a state of emergency. Early on Monday, the fire commissioner said three fires near Lithgow could be at risk of joining into one fire front.
Officials say conditions will worsen this week, with a peak on Wednesday.
NSW Rural Fire Services Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons told a news briefing early on Monday that the State Mine fire was at risk of merging with a fire at Mount Victoria.
"Modelling indicates that there's every likelihood under the forecast weather conditions that these two fires, particularly up in the back end of the mountains will merge at some point... there is every likelihood that these two fires will join up," he said.
He added that in a "worst-case scenario" the fire could merge with a third fire at Springwood but said: "With the continued success of the fire-fighting effort, let's hope that it doesn't extend all that far eastward."
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It's been somewhat incredible to watch government officials try to claim that reporters covering the NSA revelations from Ed Snowden's leaked documents are somehow "traitors." Last week, in the UK, the head of MI5, Andrew Parker, made a fool of himself going around telling other newspapers that The Guardian had somehow helped terrorists. However, as Amy Davidson at the New Yorker reminds us, when the government suddenly starts calling journalists "traitors," it pays to be skeptical, because it's most likely that the government is just very embarrassed about some news that makes them look bad.
Davidson relays the story of "the Spiegel Affair" from 1962, in which German officials went completely insane in attacking Der Spiegel for supposedly "putting lives at risk" by revealing 41 "highly classified state secrets." Officials also claimed that the publisher and the reporter were fleeing the country and needed to be stopped and arrested. The publication's offices had to be raided. Of course, it all later turned out to be almost entirely bogus. The report was certainly embarrassing to German officials -- highlighting how ill-prepared the country was in the case of an attack, because a simulation had resulted in fifteen million West Germans dead. Many of the official claims were outright lies (like the publisher skipping town to Cuba, which never happened). While that doesn't mean that reporters can't sometimes reveal too much, it's a good reminder that when the government flips its lid in situations like this, it pays to take the claims with a very large grain of salt.
The key paragraph from Davidson makes the point clear:
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When is a “fibre optic” broadband service not fibre optic? The answer might seem obvious but if so then it’s not something that the industry appears keen to respect. But just what does the term fibre optic actually mean and why are ISPs so eager to use and in some cases abuse it.
The use of common terminology, such as “broadband”, to describe internet connectivity is both useful and fraught with difficulties because of the way in which everybody can choose to define the same thing differently. We explored this problem in detail with our 2010 article – The Definition of UK Superfast Next Generation Broadband.
But the term “fibre optic” is different from traditional service separators like “super-fast broadband”, “ultra-fast”, “hyper-fast” or possibly even “mega-awesome-lolcat-fast” because it defines a very specific kind of cable and thus, one would hope, should not be as open to misrepresentation. Think you know what fibre optic means? Think again.
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