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The other option is satellite downloading or ADSL/DSL via various ISP's. But all of these companies have to rent lines from British Telecom "OpenReach", who in turn have the final say when an exchange will be upgraded to high-speed internet. Anyone living in rural areas is at the mercy of the "London First" policy of always upgrading London exchanges first, then gradually moving out to the other cities, towns and villages (usually about 20 years later)..

Well it's subtle. The Blair government forced BT to provide broadband and for that matter phones in rural areas where un unregulated company would just not bother to operate. BT of course makes excess profits in other areas due to regulation - the government basically forces them to use some of them to subsidise rural areas and has always done so.

The government does force them to allow other ISPs to resell their DSL connections. So even though BT has a monopoly on the actual DSL exchanges in an area, they're forced to sell DSL at a wholesale price to competitor companies. Which means consumers have a choice of DSL providers. So in a rural are you at least have that.

Of course if you're out the country you'll get a 1Mbit connection tops and in a city you'll get a much faster one. But like, like I say, in an unregulated market you'd be stuck on a modem in a rural area because there aren't enough customers to make replacing the exchange a viable commercial proposition - BT only did it because the government forced them. It's true the government doesn't force them to upgrade all the exchanges in lock step, but then I'm not sure it should.

I know some people who lived out in the country in the UK. Theoretically there's a mechanism where enough local people sign a petition BT will upgrade the exchange. The problem being that in a sparsely populated rural area where a lot of people don't care about the Internet that might be hard to do. Eventually they moved a couple of miles into a city area and got a much faster connection. At that point they could choose between fast DSL, fast cable and so on. This was not in a major city.

Probably people out in the country will be stuck with 1Mbit DSL unless some future UK government forces BT to upgrade again in future. People in towns or a city will get much faster connections and a choice of cable or DSL connections - i.e. not just the slightly artificial choice of DSL reseller. This is mainly because there's a business case for digging up the streets to install cable or fibre once population density reaches town or city levels but there isn't if you have isolated houses in a city. Arguably something like WiMax and a microwave link is the way around this - you'd have a microwave link to the nearest town and WiMax to connect to all the houses in a village. If I was still based in the UK, I'd look into this. Of course it's a overregulated place - getting the permission to run the microwave link and the WiMax network would probably be a complete bureaucratic nightmare.

UK Regulation is basically a double edged sword. Regulation means people in a rural area get DSL and a choice of providers. On the other hand it probably makes it very hard to run a company which does point to point microwave links and a WiMax network which would be a commercially viable way of giving people in that area a choice of ways to connect to the Internet.

Of course if you're really lucky you'll have a decent HSPA, HSPA+ or LTE connection even out in the countryside. I suspect that's pretty rare though. If you do there are some MVNOs in the UK which offer unlimited data

https://recombu.com/mobile/art...

tl;dr - both ISPs and telcos concentrate on upgrading their equipment in the city because high population density gives them best return on their investment. The government forces BT to provide at least DSL in the countryside. It also forces BT to allow third parti

Samsung do it too. The show "Suits" on USA being the most obvious example. The characters basically do product demonstrations and even drop Samsung's name as part of the plot of one of the episodes.

Not blatant at all.

Are you kidding? Some are predicting the Kindle fire to sell 3.9 million this quarter http://recombu.com/news/amazons-kindle-fire-sales-second-place-to-ipad-set-to-vaporise-other-android-tab-sales_M15995.html, and others are predicting Apple to sell in the order of 13 million iPads http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-28/tech/30449262_1_ipads-piper-jaffray-apple-stores .100,000 Xooms is less than a rounding error. To put it in perspective, Windows mobile 7 has more of the phone market than any of the non-kindle android tablets have of the tablet market.

Correct me if I am wrong, but aren't Sat Phones exactly this? Also Walkie Talkies meet much of what he was talking about. Additionally, he predicted the transmission of pictures, music, speeches, etc. wirelessly from a central station. Isn't this what Television and Radio does, and don't we have wrist watch TVs and radios? Radio (AM) can reach the entire world with the proper frequency and proper weather conditions. While he may not have directly predicted the cell phone, and certainly didn't predict the blackberry in particular (slashvertisements are annoying), he absolutely predicted something very close to it (just like people say Jules Verne predicted rocketry, even though he talked about shooting the craft out of a barrel like a gun, which is not exactly like what we do, but close enough to say he predicted rocketry).
 
Some of the other parts, such as wireless power, were just part of his personal obsession with this idea, but some of what he talked about has been invented. He talked about remotely controlling a boat with wireless controls. RC boats anyone? Also, satellite navigated boats seem to fit this idea (though through a reflection of wireless signal off a satellite, not directly). He also talked about personal aircraft (ultralights, and vehicles like terragfugia's "roadable aircraft" certainly fit the bill - only laws keep these out of the sky at this point).

"What will be accomplished in the future will baffle one's comprehension. - Tesla

 
The man was a visionary.

We have a video test of the iBand that shows how d3o works and features a drop test. http://recombu.com/news/tech21-iband-serious-impact-protection-proved-on-video-_M11064-1.html