Entanet and Plusnet make available the line speed distributions of their customers.

Microsoft has admitted it’s going to be playing catch-up in the British video-on-demand (VOD) marketplace. The Redmond corporation has announced its new service will feature content originally broadcast on BBC and ITV – just as Channel Five made it’s own announcement that it’s becoming the first new partner of Project Canvas, the upcoming IPTV system being developed by the very same terrestrial channels.

A review of the OFCOM broadband speeds report and subsequent reactions.

We knew it was going to happen sooner or later, and it has. Using SamKnows’ methodology, Ofcom has spent the past six months testing ISP speeds. And today the media and telecoms watchdog made the results public.
Over 1,600 users were tested and 60 million readings taken in the study, which confirmed what many people had [...]

Cybercriminals are turning in on themselves, the latest observations at the Information Security Forum reveals, and the security industry trade body’s President is not in the least surprised.
As a former policeman in the United States who did a stint as a security advisor at The White House, London-based Howard Schmidt has long maintained that cybercriminals [...]

The weekly Samknows.com news round-up continues, making sure nothing slips you by in your travels through cyberspace. This time we’re looking at alchemy, Big Brother and a Quantum of Torrents.

In Hull, when it comes to ISPs there’s only one game in town – and it’s cutting off suspected pirates without warning. Karoo, which is thought to be the only Internet Service Provider in the UK that’s adopted the policy, asks affected customers to sign a waiver before it’ll reconnect them.

It was back in February that the competition authorities delivered their knock-out blow to Project Kangeroo, the joint video-on-demand (VOD) service bankrolled by the UK’s terrestrial TV stations. Now, after months of the technology behind it being in the shop window, it finally has a buyer – and it’s British: Arqiva.

Virgin Media is to become the first ISP to use SamKnows’ broadband performance testing technology to discover the speed, quality and reliability of the service it offers to customers.
The SamKnows technology is already being used by Ofcom to monitor broadband performance across the country but this is the first time an ISP has opted to [...]

Be has rebranded its identity today in a bid to, it describes, get closer to its users by appearing less ‘corporate’.
The O2-owned company is centring its new identity around the theme of ‘Create The New’ through which it is promises its main priority will be to put its member community at the heart of its [...]

Privacy campaigners are often concerned about the amount of knowledge Google has on web users and so plans for its beta behavioural targeting platform, Interest Advertising Based, to go live before the end of the year will soon be big news.
However, the Senior Product Manager responsible for the service, Clay Bavor, is keen to point [...]

As part of its Digital Britain shenanigans, the Government appointed its first “Digital Inclusion Champion.” Now, over a month since the announcement, how much do we know about her?

The Internet may not be the “final frontier,” but it does at times seem like a “frontier” in a classic sense – new and outside the bounds of common law. That means there’s a lot of grey areas – especially in a British legal system that relies heavily on precedents. Now, after Google won a hitherto unique court case, we have a new one.

Mobile broadband has turned out to be a contentious issue since the publication of Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report. While many broadband experts and campaigners claimed there was too much of a reliance on wireless, Julian McGougan from Arquiva claims there was not nearly enough.
The company is the country’s largest independent provider of mobile cell [...]

Everyone’s got their own opinion of the Digital Britain report, whether or not they’ve actually read it. Over the past couple of weeks Westminster Forums has been getting together various experts to see if any kind of consensus can be reached. Samknows.com brings you the highlights.

In what sounds like a plot for a Dr Who episode that never made it to the screen, it’s being predicted that slow Internet speeds could one day “snuff out” life in Britain’s countryside. The Countryside Land and Business Association (CLA) is worried about a growing “digital chasm” and says a lack of fibre optic infrastructure in rural areas could “strangle” economic development in the future.

Under the Radar may have been more off the radar than anything in recent weeks but don’t worry: after a brief hiatus it’s back…

Just as the infamous Dragons return to their Den for a new BBC series of grilling budding entrepreneurs, it seems fitting that Rob Grimshaw. Managing Director of FT.com, should remind web publishers of the ‘turnover is vanity, profit is sanity’ line so often uttered to disappointed inventors.

Grimshaw is adamant that the measurability of online publishing [...]

Behavioural targeting may have been given a rough ride by criticisms levelled at the ill-fated Phorm platform but the technology actually already accounts for around 10% to 15% of the country’s £637m online display market.
Not only is that market share set to increase to around 20% by the end of the year, the practice is [...]

Virgin Media has announced a price reduction on its 50M product from £50 to £38 per month