Broadband users

The number of broadband users have overtaken dial up accounts increasing by 59% in the last 12 months. The top four being providers being, BT, AOL, Tiscali and Wanadoo (formerly known as Freeserve).

BT and AOL have over a million users each with the other two providers following close behind. Tiscali, the Italian based ISP revealed it had a customer base close to a million, which was more than the combined number of broadband lines in Italy, Holland and Germany; and with increased profits of €325 million.

This was helped by the ISP providing new products and services to its customer base. It started offering 1mb and 2mb products as well as its bundled voice and date services. Another service which it has already started offering is the “local loop unbundling” LLU, where they started the trials in London 2005. The company has already set a target to invest €90million into unbundled broadband services by 2009.

Wanadoo on the other hand are finding it a bit more difficult in attracting new customers. It slipped from third to fourth, losing the position to Tiscali. Increasing competition is also pressuring the ISP provider, with new providers such as Carphone’s Talk Talk, Easynet (whose parent company is Sky) and the UK’s number one supermarket, Tesco as well as existing broadband providers.

The cost of broadband is also dropping, (whilst the speeds continue to increase) which is adding extra pressure on the UK based provider. In order to compete, they have re-done their broadband packages and are also offering new services when they launch a broadband TV service. Wanadoo’s parent company, France Telecom has decided to re-brand under the Orange logo after a massive corporate make-over. This will allow the company to target new customers (existing Orange customers) under an established and successful brand name.

Google in China

Google has caused controversy by censoring its search services in China. The company set up a new site, Google.cn, which will censor itself to satisfy the Chinese authorities.

The move came in late January 2006, where critics have warned the new version of the website could restrict access to thousands of sensitive terms and web sites. Topics such as the independence of Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre are more than likely to be censored.

The Chinese government has been widely known to keep a tight rein on the internet and what its 45 million users can access. At the moment the internet users can only access the web through government- run ISP’s. Existing sites that have been banned are the BBC news service and Altavista search engine.

Google has defended itself by saying in a statement, “while removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”

One person who has defended Google’s move in China is Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, who themselves came under fire when they agreed to censor some sites. Mr. Gates’ commented that, “I think (the internet) is contributing to Chinese political engagement… Access to the outside world is preventing more censorship.”

Bill Gates strongly believes that Google are contributing towards democracy rather than the other way round, with internet users predicted to increase from 100 million to 187 million in two years time.

Hackers

Hackers have a way with the internet- they can cause major problems or just have a quick look round on the World Wide Web.

A severe problem has come to light with the way browser’s Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox are affected. The translation of the soft- hyphen (alt + 0173) character can be used by malicious users with a multitude of injection methods to gain un-authorised access to websites and to change the content on them.

One way of preventing this from happening is by having secure passwords on your CMS’s (content management system). At least this way you have control over what’s on your web pages- you wouldn’t want strangers to change things on your website, would you?!