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They can predict reasonably accurately how fast the line will go to your house because there's a whole bunch of historical data to pull from https://www.dslchecker.bt.com/...

Don't ask me how this works for averages though... an ISP that has more customers on lower speed lines presumably would have their average pulled down even though they themselves might not be the bottleneck. Meh... nothing's perfect and it's a better rule than it was...

The debate about "autopilot" versus "fully autonomous" is a very real concern, validated by Tesla drivers themselves. You have drivers that stop paying attention to the speed limit, abuse autodrive to violate traffic laws, take their hands off the steering wheel, or just climb into the back seat and let the car drive itself creates not just a danger for the Tesla driver but for every car on the road. This despite Tesla's insistence that people must still stay at the wheel and drive; the technology has advanced enough that people get a false sense of confidence to push the limits even if the technology is not truly ready for it. That's the point that the Volvo engineer is making.

Actually I have the latest build when this happened. Tried sfc /scannow and it failed. Actually tried the things listed here http://home.bt.com/tech-gadget... and tried to reinstall apps as well which didn't work. They're right that if you create a new account it comes back.(Or install classic shell.) Oh to make matters worse I actually did a clean install of Windows 10. (I upgraded my system to register it with Microsoft and then wiped the disk and did an install.) Before anybody asks I have an Asrock Z77 extreme6 motherboard and a i5 3570 cpu with a 970GTX so pretty standard parts too. (As I've mentioned I've worked around it by installing classic shell which reminds me. I really should give that guy a donation for it.)

And what of Tommy Flowers?

No, it's because BT doesn't like this.

Many of those ISPs are just reselling BT bandwidth. If BT throttles certain sites all these will be effected.

BT do not resell bandwidth to the Internet, it operates a packet switching network over ATM that connects you to your ISP. You ISP connects you to the Internet and might filter or throttle some sites. BT does not look inside the ATM packets that travel over its network and so does not throttle some traffic - in theory anyway.

BT also operates as an ISP which is probably where the confusion lies.

http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/products/broadband/packages

Doesn't include line rental which is another £15.45 per month and only gives you 10GB of data. Line rental is extra for the dial-up package as well. In terms of units better understood by the general public, that is about 8 hours of BBC iPlayer per month.

Really? Because yours is the only industrialized nation that I know of that has data caps on landlines.

Let me introduce you to Canada and the UK.

Free landline internet to those that make their internet connection available to mobile users of the same carrier.

At least one UK broadband provider provide WiFi routers that present two networks: a private one, and a less-private one. The less-private one is available for use by anyone with that provider (so in return for potentially sharing your bandwidth, you can potentially get free WiFi. But probably only in residential areas.)

http://www.bt.com/btfon is one, but I think there's another.

They claim is "Unlimited" but are getting taken to task by OFCOM for lying, as its really capped at 100gb per month, on their most expensive package.

Its not capped now - they abolished the old fair usage limits (which was 100gb and then increased to 300gb)

They now only cap p2p during peak periods and nothing else.

http://community.bt.com/t5/BB-Speed-Connection-Issues/BT-TO-SCRAP-300GB-LIMIT/m-p/141429#M65392 [bt.com]

Well, it seems BT's services have caps -- lower tiers have a pay cap, and higher ones have a cap (admittedly fairly high -- 300GB) after which service is throttled.

BT abolished the 300GB cap on its unmetered/unlimited tariffs earlier this year

They now only restrict P2P traffic during peak periods

http://community.bt.com/t5/BB-Speed-Connection-Issues/BT-TO-SCRAP-300GB-LIMIT/m-p/141429#M65392

BT,Talktalk, Tiscali & Virginmedia (90% of the ISP market in the UK) all continue to hijack DNS and you have to specifically opt out.

https://my.virginmedia.com/advancederrorsearch/settings

http://preferences.webaddresshelp.bt.com/selfcare/preferences.cgi

BT = British Telecommunications. But, I had to open up the court order PDF to find this. I'm not sure if you can even find what it means on their website.

Far more worryingly than a CDN in the exchange which people might *gasp* be expected to pay for, the page promoting it http://www.contentconnect.bt.com/ Seems to include clips of "Elephants Dream" which is CC-BY licensed without any attribution anywhere that I can see.

Wouldn't it be simple to put out an update on your average home router with a list of porn sites that parents can switch on and off

No. There are perhaps somewhere in the region of 4 million porn sites out there (source, possibly biased, but probably somewhere in the right ballpark). Assuming an average site age of 5 years (which is probably way too high), that's about 2,000 new sites per day to maintain that level. You'd need to update the list very frequently to keep it up to date, and even then, who's going to compile it?

Also: a typical home router has between 16MB and 64MB of flash for its firmware. To block those 4 million porn sites without collaterally blocking other sites hosted on the same servers, you'll need to encode exact addresses, at probably around 20 bytes or so each (once compressed), so you simply can't fit that list into the memory of existing home routers. I mean, this is one of the best you can get, and only comes with 24MB of flash by default. You can expand it to 56MB if you need it, but even that wouldn't be enough.

I know there's one just round the corner from me. Then another right down the road. And many many more that are around that I usually just ignore, but now that I think about it, they're there. They're very common here in the UK. You can even send texts and emails from them now.

They even had one at the end of the road leading past the hamlet/village area my family lived in until ~4 years ago. That was over a mile from the nearest town, and 25 miles from the nearest city. Pretty much the middle of nowhere.

BT alone have 63000 payphones around the UK.

"BT" stands for "Big Titties", something the British are particularly fond of. In fact, they are so popular, they even have a website for them here.

• Pause rewind and record Live TV
  The Vision+ box is a digital TV recorder that lets you pause, record and rewind live TV.
• 160 GB hard drive
  Record and store up to 80 hours of Freeview TV with the huge 160 GB hard drive.
• # Dual tuners
  The Vision+ box's dual tuners can record one or two programmes at once while you watch another recording.
• Record whole TV series
  The TV guide shows scheduling 14 days in advance. Simply press the R button twice to record a whole series.
• HD Experience
  The HD Vision+ box gives you selected films and TV in crystal clear, High Definition picture and sound quality.
• # Convenient billing
  Any pay per view movies, sport, music or TV shows you watch will be added to your next BT Vision bill. If you take one of our Value Packs, you will be billed in advance each month.

Combined with bittorrent, I already have what they are offering. Except their speeds are derisory. I recently switched provider to Be, and experienced a doubling in download bandwidth, and a trebling in upload bandwidth, for 25% less per month including a fixed IP. Plus BT claimed that "it was not possible to get faster speeds on my line". Funny that, considering you need a BT phone line to sign up with Be. But now I'm not with BT broadband, I can't get BT Vision. So there was no net neutrality in this case. All their stuff was prioritised already.

FTLA:

http://www2.bt.com/static/i/btretail/webwise/help.html#how-do-i-prevent-webwise-from-scanning-my-site [scroll down]

Alternatively, you may request specifically that your website is not scanned by Webwise. To request that your website not be scanned by Webwise, please email:
website-exclusion{at}webwise.com.

So would that just earn you more bigpenis spam? It's hard to guess what low tricks these scum won't stoop to.

I think you have to email them.
http://www2.bt.com/static/i/btretail/webwise/help.html#how-do-i-prevent-webwise-from-scanning-my-site

I've emailed them for my domains (they're very small and insignificant).

Always wondered how British Telecom got away with this.

BT deny any form of throttling, yet if I download at any time of day via FTP I get ~450kB/s, it is morning now and with HTTP I can get 300kB/s, in the evening more like 50-80kB/s. Crazy, seems BT throttle port 80.

Deny?

BT's Fair Usage Policy states:

BT continuously monitors network performance and may restrict the speed available to very heavy users during peak time.

... and they explicitly mention P2P:

we restrict P2P speeds if it's having a negative impact on the online experience of the majority of our customers. We normally place restrictions in the evenings at peak time, but we do apply them during the day if a lot of customers are using P2P at the same time.

...

we are not stopping you from using any P2P service. P2P will just be slowed down in the evenings and during the day if a lot of customers are using it.

You might not have looked hard enough to find this, but that doesn't make it a denial.

My BT Broadband connection gives me about 6.5MB/s for non-P2P traffic, but that's because I'm only about 1/4 mile from the exchange.

P2P is slower than dial-up in the evenings, but is generally fast enough between midnight and 8am, and even to late morning on Saturday/Sunday, so I just schedule my big BT downloads to run overnight.

Wealthy enough? I take it you don't live in the UK. Smartphones are ten a penny (the biggest phone company BT has started giving them away for £5 over their normal broadband subscription.

If there was an issue with class/wealth then it would be that the damn park is really expensive and that most of us are struggling to afford the diesel in our cars to get there, its £1.25 a litre (in Suffolk) - in other words approximately $19.50 for a little over two gallons). This may seem off topic but the bank holiday monday tommorrow will be one of their biggest times of the year and the roads will be packed.

Secondly, we don't track or interfere with any DNS requests. Webwise only looks at opted-in data coming from a list of known parties that have chosen the service. We don't look at all traffic - we don't look at opted-out data, secure pages and we don't look at non-browser data (IM, POP3, etc)

p.s. as some may know, BT has now (some unofficially) announced that it will have an account level setting you can use to opt-out so you do not have to rely on this crap cookie method. Hopefully they will announce this in mainstream press next week see this thread for the talk about it.

Webwise does not leave any HTML tracking code. HTML is not a software language which allows applications, it is simply a markup language for displaying pages

BT have a site about this, called Webwise, http://www.webwise.bt.com/webwise/index.html?com.bea.event.type=linkclick&oLName=link.searchresults&oLDesc=KB_1167
They state customers, like me, can turn this new "service" off, here's the FAQ, http://www.webwise.bt.com/webwise/help.html?_faqs=13,14,15,16,17,18#f13
Bloody BT. This is the final nail in the coffin for me.

BT have a site about this, called Webwise, http://www.webwise.bt.com/webwise/index.html?com.bea.event.type=linkclick&oLName=link.searchresults&oLDesc=KB_1167
They state customers, like me, can turn this new "service" off, here's the FAQ, http://www.webwise.bt.com/webwise/help.html?_faqs=13,14,15,16,17,18#f13
Bloody BT. This is the final nail in the coffin for me.

We have tiered pricing in the UK too. I think British Telecom and Virgin Media (formally NTL) are the biggest players. I don't see anything wrong with tiered pricing.

On a side note, dial up internet access. It used to be possible to have unmetered dial up internet access for a monthly fee, but as the price of broadband has come down, and availability improved (I think most broadband is over phone wires in the UK, ISDN?), dial up internet access seems to have shifted to a metered, local phone rate package.

Here in the UK, British Telecom has partnered with FON to sell global WiFi access.

That's a pretty big endorsement of WiFi sharing from one of the main players in the UKs broadband market. When you think about it though, it's a huge added value with little investment. Smart move on their part I think.

Caps? On transfers? you must be thinking of most of the world. I think that in the UK were extremely lucky for caps. Almost every ISP's gold service is unlimited downloading. I work for BT so I might be slightly biased but we already offer a movie download service and it doesn't touch your monthly limit (if your on opt 1 or 2).

I imagine that as many ISP's move be be media providers, movie downloads (esp from themselves) wont count towards your monthly limit. I recommend everyone checks out http://www.bt.com/btvision for the here and now on internet movies to your TV.

Maquis196

P.S - Our bandwith does suck to most places though, 8mb is great if you can get, I only get 4 to the door which is what you need for vision. However look out for 21cn (100mb to door via fibre in most places) which is due 2011 onwards.

If Comcast are as process driven as BT, they will have a cost for every line item that's been repeated more than twice, and let's not fool ourselves here, they've done it more than that.

One of the features of this little spat is that iPlayer is designed (actually, bought in from Verisign...) as a P2P application, so most of the data shifted will not originate from the BBC in the first place. So this is really an attempt by ISPs to charge the BBC for data that is actually moving between ISP's end users.

Interestingly, both Tiscali and BT (cited as participants in this by El Reg) have their own video-over-IP services (Homechoice http://www.homechoice.co.uk/ rebranded as Tiscali TV and BT Vision http://www.bt.com/vision) and it's probably not a surprise they'd like to disadvantage the BBC in that marketplace.

I tend to the view that iPlayer is a broken means of distributing TV-on-demand, but it's broken partly because the ISPs don't seem interested in developing better mechanisms. It's certainly not going to get fixed by ISPs whingeing that consumers want what they've been sold at the cost they were promised. But since a recent survey (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/08/line_rent al_cost_discouraging/) revealed that consumers are very resistant to broadband price hikes, it does seem like the ISPs have dug themselves a hole that can only get deeper.

...BT Vision (http://www.bt.com/vision is a fairly good option, especially if you already have a subscription with BT as an ISP.

I'm a BT internet subscriber and got my Freeview-supporting DVR from BT a few months ago for £90 installation fee (the box was free), but apparently there will be a self-install option later this year that will bring the cost down to about £30.

The BT solution also connects to your DSL line and allows on-demand (pay-per-view or subscription) viewing of TV and Movie content (plus Premiership football later this year) at near-DVD quality. Apparently some HD content may be added in the future but this will be downloaded to the DVR rather than streamed.

I won't go into more detail on the box as there are loads of reviews around the net, but one of the nice features is the HDMI output which upscales the Freeview picutre to 720p or 1080i (there are only test broadcasts in the Croyden area of HD Freeview at the moment) and also displays the interface in the higher resolution.

P.S. I'm not affiliated with BT in any way, just a satisfied customer.

1) What is "the BT"?

... that the Beeb didn't mention British work done on this topic eg here http://research.bt.com/pict/TraffimaticsProject.ht ml

So it will be a while before the US sees something like this:

http://www.btfusionorder.bt.com/?s_intcid=con_intb an_btcom_con_hub_Fusionpromo_buy

See the BT homepage for more.

I think the point is not that the phone can make VoIP calls, but that it automatically selects VoIP when its available. BT offer a similar service under the BT Fusion brand.

The difference here, is that the entire site including the internet cafe is owned by the incumbent telco in the UK - BT. The site is also the major landing point for transatlantic fibre and cable coming into the UK, besides all the satellite capacity. This is probably the cheapest place in their network for BT to offer a 1Gbp/s pipe.
The internet cafe there doesn't have to make money itself, it is probably sufficient for it to pull a few extra people into the visitors centre that BT operates there.

The difference here, is that the entire site including the internet cafe is owned by the incumbent telco in the UK - BT. The site is also the major landing point for transatlantic fibre and cable coming into the UK, besides all the satellite capacity. This is probably the cheapest place in their network for BT to offer a 1Gbp/s pipe.
The internet cafe there doesn't have to make money itself, it is probably sufficient for it to pull a few extra people into the visitors centre that BT operates there.

The total telecom costs are more competitive and come out less expensive in a system like ours (North America - mobile party pays for incoming and terminating calls; no landline to mobile termination fees).

In the UK (and most other countries), the landline-to-mobile rate is fixed at a high price. The mobile companies have no strong incentive to lower their termination fees, because they're not charging "their" customers - it's the other schmucks (landline customers) who get the shaft (customers they want to steal away from landline!). Of course there could be some limited competition on the landline side to get the "lowest" mobile termination fees, but in the end the landline carriers still have to negotiate that with the mobile provider. How much would 1000 minutes cost from landline to mobile in the UK? £36.10 - £215.40, depending on the carrier and time-of-day?

In the North American system, the entire minute bucket of incoming and outgoing minutes is negotiated between the mobile provider and their direct customer. Therefore, there is significant competition between carriers to provide the lowest total price. In other words, when you select a carrier here, you are negotiating the price on both sides. Over there, you are only negotiating the outgoing side of the equation (for the most part). How much would 1000 minutes (either direction) cost in the US? $40 (or free on nights/weekends)?

In the future, it seems like unlimited wireless is a distinct possibility (it already exists in my market!). In North America, that means that there will be no mobile-related charges whatsoever for incoming or outgoing. Do you think that foreign carriers will let go of mobile termination fees even if/when outgoing calls become free (unlimited)? In my case, I could pay $70/month and nobody would pay any per-minute fees to or from my phone!

They were also taking about putting television content down the line as well... I don't know when they were thinking of trying to get this sytem out but it sounded interesting
BT's TV-down-a-wire project is called BT vision, info at http://www.btvision.bt.com/
The clever thing about it is that is integrates video-on-demand coming down a wire with on-air content via Freeview ("Freeview" is the UK's name for digital terrestrial TV).
Translation: if you want to watch a movie on demand, it comes down your ADSL line. But if you want to watch the FA cup live with 10 billion other Britons, it goes through the air, thus reducing the network congestion issues you get with webcasting. Both forms of content are controlled from the same integrated electronic programme guide. Or that's the plan anyway...

It does work. I use the BT Fusion service here in the UK and the transfer between mobile/cell network and VoIP is almost seemless everytime. http://www.btfusionorder.bt.com/

British Telecom's "Fusion" service already provides this. It uses a variant of either the Motorola Razr V3 or Motorola V560 cellphone with Bluetooth, and is shipped with a dedicated BT Bluetooth & WiFi ADSL router that handles both the VOIP calls and regular broadband access for home computers. It's available to anyone in the UK with a British Telecom phoneline that supports ADSL broadband - which is over 99% of the population, including almost all rural areas such as mine.

Most people think the calls route over the normal analogue voice line, but the giveaway that it is VOIP is on this page where they state "can make up to three simultaneous calls", obviously this is must therefore be routed over the ADSL side rather than the voice side.

British Telecom's "Fusion" service already provides this. It uses a variant of either the Motorola Razr V3 or Motorola V560 cellphone with Bluetooth, and is shipped with a dedicated BT Bluetooth & WiFi ADSL router that handles both the VOIP calls and regular broadband access for home computers. It's available to anyone in the UK with a British Telecom phoneline that supports ADSL broadband - which is over 99% of the population, including almost all rural areas such as mine.

Most people think the calls route over the normal analogue voice line, but the giveaway that it is VOIP is on this page where they state "can make up to three simultaneous calls", obviously this is must therefore be routed over the ADSL side rather than the voice side.

And they are already available in a variety of forms.

Many ISPs in the UK now actually give out free wireless routers with a new broadband connection - it is seen as an extra draw for new customers and a marketing advantage to get them to sign up for more expensive packages. And no, most are not encrypted by default.

BT Broadband give away a wireless modem with their more expensive connections and Wannadoo include a wireless router and claim that it is secure, although I haven't tried it.

With BT Privacy Caller Display is now free, and 1571 gives you a (very basic) voicemail for free.

By the way, the site was donate.bt.com. I would have gotten much better information had he just picked up a phone and called BT and asked them if it was legit.

No, you wanna click this link. :)