Rob’s Digital Life

There’s a lot of buzz on the web right now about Google voice going public. But there’s still a huge problem, text messages.
What people are looking to do is disconnect their number from their sim card. People are keen to have a number that’s theirs but not tied to a specific handset (voip, fixed [...]

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I’ve been playing with the two main connection managers for S60, Psiloc Connect and Birdsteps Connect. The idea of these apps is that they manage the connection your apps use, for example when at home they will prefer the faster wi-fi, but when there’s no wi-fi i.e. when you’re out and about, they switch to [...]

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It’s clear that privacy is a concern in today’s web 2.0 world; the post ‘Does Google’s flu-tracker raise privacy issues?’ talks about Google’s ability to mine data and its potential impact on privacy. This is a valid concern, but may appear insignificant  in the future, when simply walking across an airport, or even an office [...]

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My Dad lives in Spain, he’s been there a few years now and we’ve managed to keep in touch using BT, and then I changed that to first jajah and most recently to Rebtel.
However,  recently Dad had a visitor who brought a laptop when they came to stay. Dad’s lucky there a open wireless nearby [...]

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It’s only been a few months since the last time I mentioned that I’d got a new role within Orange Business, but it’s all change again, I’ve moved Managers and become the Manager of a new group, Telecoms Integrated Operators.
The Sourcing department of Orange Business Services (OBS) has created a new Telecom Integrated Operators Group [...]

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I’ve been using the E71 for a couple of days now and I don’t know what to think, but something is nagging at me, that maybe this isn’t the perfect phone I’d hoped it would be. It may be just me and how the device is used rather than the device itself being at fault. [...]

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There’s two reasons I ask this, because of the talk about selling laptops that I read about and an experience I had yesterday.
The selling laptops is interesting and broadband providers did it recently so it’s not a new model. TalkTalk and Orange offered either free or extremely cheap laptops if you signed up to [...]

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BMW is moving some car production to the US to save costs [via] This isn’t the first I’ve read about switching work back into the US. Infosys the India IT company was moving some helpdesk services back into the US and the mid west to be precise. The advances in remote working for call centre [...]

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The implication of truly unlimited bandwidth for the users can have huge impacts on the network. We’ve seen the impact of iPlayer on Easynet (a 20% rise in bandwidth and rising), is that there needs to be investment in the underlying backbones to cope with the data.
Take a look at data on GSM, 4Kb/s speeds, [...]

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Here’s 8 and a bit minutes of Pat’s interview on 96fm.ie radio on the subject of the O2 iPhone launch in Ireland. It’s almost 8mb in size.

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Reports already suggest that the ARPU is falling and that the uptake in data is expected to fill the gap. So we know that Carriers are pinning their future on the update of data packages both capped and unlimited.
So we’ve reached the point where an unlimited service costs $99 and now following on from what [...]

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As I mentioned in the preface post, SMS Text news has a post “US Carriers become dumb pipes”.
The debate on dumb pipes is obviously wider than that single post and is really around what the carriers should provide, i.e. just the bandwidth and nothing more. The question for the carriers though is how do they [...]

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I’ve been thinking about the implication of the $99 unlimited packages hitting the US shops and what the impacts of that would be if the model is adopted here in Europe. My musings then went on to cover the other challenges facing the mobile and fixed line carriers. So I’ve decided to split the post [...]

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I’ve been keeping this under my hat for a few days, but my Manager told the rest of the team last week so it’s in the ‘public’ domain. I have the name of the person to handover to and a date too, so I’m a bit more comfortable talking about it.
For the last 7 months [...]

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The register has an interesting post on the problems Sky has had moving it’s email over to an outsourced partner. What I found was interesting is that the email outsource is to Google. I must have missed this move by Google to move into the outsourcing space.
When you sign up with Google, you know they [...]

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