A few weeks ago, I got an Android-based HTC Desire mobile phone for some of the work we’re doing on thinkbroadband looking at broadband speeds. It has taken a while to get used to using a next generation smartphone, as someone who has been a Nokia s60 user for quite some time.

This is a list of some of my favourite apps..

TweetCaster Pro
Also known as TweetCaster Premium, this is the first app I purchased. It is far nicer than the built in HTC Sense twitter client, supports multiple twitter accounts, and generally runs well. It has crashed a few times, and doesn’t have the same search functionality I’m used to on a desktop, but overall seems good.

Tweetcaster Pro

ShapeWriter keyboard
An alternative way to type, a keyboard that allows you to simply ‘swipe’ the shape of where your finger would go between the letters, so to type ‘hello’ you would simply drag your finger from ‘h’ to ‘e’ to ‘l’ and finally ‘o’. Obviously requires some prediction/correction to make it work.

ShapeWriter alternative keyboard

Note: Having played with Swype a bit more, I think it might just be a bit better (edit – a lot better!!)

NetMeter
If you’re abroad, then data roaming can get very expensive. It’s therefore quite useful to be able to keep an eye on it. Although there are probably better applications, the one I’m using is NetMeter which splits usage across Wi-Fi and and your mobile data provider.

Android NetMeter

ShopSavvy
Good application for use when shopping. Just scan the barcode of the product you’re looking for and you can instantly get pricing from both e-commerce websites as well as nearby stores to compare.

thinkbroadband speed tester for Android (beta)
Part of the reason I bought the HTC Desire is our development of a mobile version of our popular speed test tool which measures the speed on a Wi-Fi or 3G/HSDPA connection. This mobile speed test for mobiles running the Android operating systems is now in public beta so anyone who wants to test it is welcome to download a copy (link above). We hope to add a lot of features so it’s just a very basic speed tester at the moment.

This is primary for those using Wi-Fi at the moment as it does consume quite a bit of data. Please make sure you never use it abroad when roaming. It runs in the same way as our Java speed test and is therefore not a ‘web’ download, so you will see any traffic shaping taking effect.

London Tube Status
A very useful app which warns you of maintenance work on the Tube as well as providing you wish platform signs showing how long until the next train arrives. It also shows where the train is currently in the tunnel system; unfortunately it needs Internet connectivity to work so will be of limited use actually on the tube, but excellent for finding out when to leave if you’re near a tube station.

London Tube Status 1

London Tube Status 2

London Tube Status 3

Sudoku
This game is useful for spending time on a train when you want to use your brain a bit. There is a free Sudoku application which did have some nicer features including more appropriate ‘hints’ but the Mighty Might Good Games Sudoku app looks good and is also available for the iPhone.

Sudoku

Task Manager
Very useful for terminating those applications which you don’t need running, especially where you want to ensure they aren’t doing anything unexpected. There are others but I like the simplicity of this one (and it’s free).

IP Address Widget & BatteryLife
These widgets show you instantly which Wi-Fi network or data service you’re connected to, what your IP address is (on the phone as well as the ‘real IP’ you are accessing the Internet from, with reverse hostname if applicable) and battery capacity/temperature respectively.

Layar Reality Browser
An augmented reality browser with all sorts of layers from tube stations to property prices. Absolute must on any smartphone.

Wifi Analyzer
The perfect program for working out what channel you should use for your Wi-Fi connection. It will show you among other things how other networks are spread around in your vicinity, and help you track the signal strength to find the best location for an access point.

Wi-Fi Analyzer for Android

wardrive
Allows you to map Wi-Fi (open and/or secured) access points as you roam around the city/country.

Wardrive for Android

Other apps
I haven’t actually used the Ocado app yet, although apparently it’s very useful. I don’t tend to listen to music much on the move but the Spotify app is a must if you do

Also I have a ZXing Barcode Scanner and IM+ for Jabber. The IP Address Calculator may be useful for network admins although unfortunately you will be disappointed to hear it does not support IPv6.

I haven’t found yet a good SIP client which works with our phone system (and I’ve not had time to debug it extensively), but in preparation I have the Nominet ENUM application called ENUMDROID. Last but not least, the must-to-have RingDroid which makes creating ringtones from WAV files easy.

I also wish Taste London developed an android app but alas they only have an iPhone version at the moment.

Android Apps

The Digital Economy Bill is expected by some to be passed by the House of Commons in the ‘wash-up’ phase just before a general election is called. This proposed legislation has been somewhat controversial because it includes provisions that enable the Internet access of a household to be restricted or cut off.

The nature of the Internet

It has been interesting to watch this legislation develop, trying to understand how non-experts (politicians) debate legislation. I am still somewhat baffled by how much ignorance there is as to how the Internet works; many people don’t seem to grasp the concept that by putting in place systems to block illegal activity, this simply results in those engaged in such activity to work around any restrictions, possibly making identifying the infringements even more difficult.

The way the Internet allows individuals to circumvent centralised restrictions can be used for both good and bad. It can enable increased transparency and accountability but also can intrude on individual rights such as privacy and copyright. However, most important of all is the way it can multiply any effect, because communication is fast, global and targeted. In other words, when something is posted online by one person, within minutes it could be around the world, be it exposing corruption, or something that should really have remained private.

Debate over figures

I read an interesting blog item on the figures used to justify action on the grounds of protecting jobs in the creative industries. It raises some fundamental questions about the claims made by the rights lobbies relating to the losses they incur as a result of unlawful file sharing. I am in no doubt that unlawful file sharers gather collections of content which they would never have purchased (and possibly never even consume), but there needs to be additional quantitative research in this area.

Anyone who has worked with statistics is aware of the ability of those designing a study or interpreting its results, to influence the result in a particular direction. This is why so much weight is put on ‘independent’ studies, but how do they get their figures? The blog also refers to an article in Ars Technica which queries the origin of the figure that there are just under 7 million illegal file sharers in the UK:

“The number was quoted in a recent government report, but it’s not a government number; it turns out that the government commissioned a report from the CIBER research group at University College London, which contained the number. CIBER’s report cited the number four times, noting that it came from yet another report from consultancy Forrester.

Still with me? Get ready to go down the rabbit hole, because it’s here that things get weirder. The Forrester report in question does not in fact contain the “seven million” number, despite the CIBER citation. The number actually comes from a separate piece of research called the Jupiter Industry Losses Project, which attempted to quantify losses for the recording industry due to things like P2P usage. And who paid for the Industry Losses Project? The British recording industry, of course.”

The government is known for its poor performance when it comes to IT implementations, which is no surprise given the bureaucracies that exist within its various departments. IT systems help when they decrease the work which humans need to do, thus increasing efficiency. Often the problems associated with IT are in fact social problems, something which is often missed. The current legislation is very much focussed on technical measures, rather than dealing with the underlying social problem, or tackling the root cause of unlawful file sharing.

I hope that parliamentarians don’t make the same mistakes and vote blindly in support of some of the quite draconian parts of the Digital Economy Bill, as I very much doubt many of them have their focus on scrutinising legislation at this point in time. Lobbyists from the ISP sector will talk about all the problems associated with implementing these restrictions and how ISPs shouldn’t bear the costs, and the creative industries focus on how all this activity is resulting in lost revenues and jobs. MPs need to look beyond these and address the key issue of why this is a problem in the first place.

The Liberal Democrat policy set out on the blog of Bridget Fox, a prospective parliamentary candidate on the Digital Economy Bill has been rather promising. Whilst there remain questions, it firmly sets out their current objections against some of these controversial elements without a full debate. There are campaigners from other parties who are also campaigning for a full debate.

Broadband is becoming the favourite utility of rants. As more and more of the population upgrade to fast always-on Internet connections, we are starting to see more problems arising indicating that the market is maturing. In the late nineties, we had the Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications that pushed for changes from “per minute” charges to unmetered, so called ‘flat rate’ plans. Broadband has changed all this, and whilst ‘unlimited’ plans exist, there is an increasing move to limits, not in the form of charging but more ways to limit the ability of a small number of individuals to abuse the concept of unlimited.

The reason why unlimited broadband is a problem is rooted in human nature. When there is no cost to an activity, users start behaving in the optimal way which maximises their personal benefit which sometimes translates to ‘downloading the entire Internet’ to their PC (metaphorically speaking). In most other unlimited offers there are some kinds of restrictions. So, if you have an ‘all you can eat’ deal in a restaurant, you are limited by the fact you physically can’t eat more than a certain amount. Unlimited entry to an attraction is also limited by the fact you only have so much leisure time. But, what about broadband? You can leave it downloading whilst you’re at work and asleep.

Say you have ten cars and take up all the parking on the road outside your house.. Your neighbours would start giving you strange looks.. But, do they know that you’re the person hogging the Internet pipes? Bear in mind your ‘broadband neighbours’ aren’t necessarily physically that close to you anyway.

On his Blog, Ashley Highfield argues that we need a Broadband Charter which among other things sets out arguments that service providers should guarantee minimum speeds, not ‘up to’ speeds.

One suggestion Ashley makes is a standard of “high definition broadband” or HD broadband which would help to unify standards. This is something we (I and my colleagues at thinkbroadband.com) have thought about in the context of providing effective comparisons between different packages. The problem is, it’s not easy to come up with specifications which you can’t, as a service provider, work around to drop the cost (and level of service).

I think there is a significant misunderstanding in the general population that broadband is just about speed with suggestions like connection speeds should be 8 meg or higher.. Previously, users used to look just at price.. now it’s price and headline speed. This is just as bad as those shopping for cameras looking just at “how many megapixels will it do?”.

An Internet connection is about a number of factors including actual speeds , latency, packet loss, connection reliability, support all at various times of the week/day as well as financial stability of the operator and much more. Most users could not begin to understand the complexities of what it takes to provide a good service. Someone could offer you an 8 meg service which seems fast, but if you start running VoIP applications through it, you might find the quality isn’t up to it because latency is too high.

My biggest gripe is with those calling for unlimited broadband.. because it shows the clear lack of understanding that costs of providing a service are very much based on how fast you want the service to be and how much it’s used (by time and amount of use).. Why should service providers subsidise some users who want to use 100 times more than the average user? Shouldn’t that cost be borne by the user who does the downloading?

Service providers can do more (admittedly only with help from wholesale operators) to tackle the issue of making users aware of what they are getting, but demanding they provide a financially unsustainable service is no different to expecting to pay £30 a month at BP and receive unlimited fuel.

These two words are the most abused terms in broadband advertising. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) did publish an critical adjudication against Carphone Warehouse using “free forever” in its TalkTalk advertising, but there is still a lot of marketing material which is open to misunderstanding by naive consumers in particular as to the nature of the costs and limits of a particular product or service.

Let me be clear about this – There is no such thing as “free” or “unlimited” anything which doesn’t at the very least rely on the law of averages. Any company using these terms is relying on income from something which helps make particular options or features available at no additional cost. Usually they are suffixed by an asterisk or other reference to a footnote detailing the terms, or worse, text such as “Terms and conditions apply. See website for details”.
So why am I so wound up about this? – I view using these terms as being dishonest.. Let’s look at the word “unlimited” for a second. It means “without limit”. Therefore by definition “unlimited internet” means “internet without limits”. Now I can understand that it is not possible to run a service which is not contended (and thus limited in some way) but my issue is where the small print includes concepts such as a ‘Fair Usage Policy’ (which comes under various names including Acceptable Use Policy, Sustainable Usage Policy, etc.)

These policies effectively place limited on what is and is not acceptable, thereby rendering the product no longer unlimited. The honest service providers call these services ‘unmetered’. I am not suggesting that all products should employ charging by usage, but if they have limits in the form of FUP/SUPs, they should be clearly labelled as such. ‘Unmetered’ is understood to mean you won’t get a meter reading each month on how much you’ve used.

Recently, several broadband service providers have started offering ‘free broadband’. This is another term I taker issue with–It’s not really free.. you have to subscribe to some other service to qualify so in reality there is a cost. This is slightly less of an issue as it can be argued the broadband is free whether you take it or not, however I am quite concerned many users do not see past the headline when choosing a provider.

Following my discussion on social exclusion if Internet sites have to resort to micropayment charging for visitors, a comment asked if I believe that Internet access is a social right, like housing and food.

The modern economy is making increasing use of the Internet to lower transaction costs which seeks “Internet discounts” for everything from insurance services to banking benefits and accessing government services online. Even HM Revenue & Customs is giving financial incentives to companies who file annual employer returns electronically (with a view to making it compulsory for the remaining businesses – It already is for larger ones). The capability of the Internet to lower barriers to entry in markets, increase competition and increase access to information (a key requirement for a ‘perfect competition’ economy) is phenomenal and it is something that every part of society needs to be able to access.

I guess by that I am indeed arguing basic Internet access is a social right just like housing and food. In the modern economy, exclusion from this can restrict your career prospects, access to online learning material, etc. If on the other hand you’re asking me if playing online games, and downloading movies online is a social right, clearly the answer is no. I am therefore not arguing the government should be running a national UK Broadband Service, but that we should be conscious that the ability to access the Internet can have significant social benefits. Premium Internet access is still a luxury.

The question I was posing in my micropayments article was whether a trend towards usage charging might lead to exclusion of those who can only just afford the cost of accessing the Internet.

No this isn’t a rant about service providers, or UK ones anyway. Imagining life without broadband these days is very difficult as most airports, hotels and cities have widespread wireless access points and the few instances they don’t work my 3G card is not far away, at least until I travel further away. I’m sitting writing this on the end of a GPRS connection that took a long time to get sorted, but let’s start from the beginning.

Arriving at Jyväskylä Airport on Wednesday afternoon I logged into the wireless at 8 euros for an hour’s surfing to catch up on my e-mail knowing that after this I would incur a £10/MB fee for international data roaming, a ridiculous charge which makes Internet use more expensive than a premium rate phone line. I have never seen an airport so deserted but when my flight landed and took off with a new load of passengers, the entire hall was empty and I had to wait at the cafe till to pay for my drink and sandwich. Apparently this wasn’t very unusual which doesn’t surprise me.

Jyväskylä Airport – Deserted

The following day I pop into a shop to buy a pre-pay SIM card. When I tried this just over a year ago there was no data/GPRS service on pre-pay cards but this time the pricing is printed on the back of the pack at 1.50 euros/MB which is more in line with the not-so-bulk packages available in the UK. I spent the best part of two hours trying to configure it both on my phone and using my data card. On my phone I needed to send a text message “GPRS TILAA” to a short code number to activate GPRS services on the card but I wasn’t able to send any SMS messages. In the end I found that this was related to the configuration options on the phone relating to using GPRS to send the SMS messages in the first place rather than a GSM link. The DNA (the phone company) helpline was friendly but didn’t really help me fix this problem so I was left to my own resources. The error messages given out are just about useless in diagnosing the problem.

I also tried to get the SIM working on my Vodafone 3G Broadband Data card, but it wouldn’t even show me the network list. After spending a long time on this, I called Vodafone customer services back in the UK and I was informed by a helpful chap that the card was network locked and couldn’t be unlocked. I then had to use Bluetooth to my Nokia 9300. I finally managed to get the instructions on how to configure GPRS Internet access on my laptop from a 1MB PDF file which I had to download on my 9300.. and then I was online.. for about an hour at which point my 10 euros of call credit ran out and the connection began disconnecitng intermittently.. When on GPRS – do not browse normal websites.. you’ll eat up funds double quick time.

Finally today I recharged the pre-pay SIM (conveniently done electronically at a shop just by handing them a credit card and the phone number) with 100 euros which should cover me for quite some time.. as long as I make sure to avoid browsing the web like I am used to doing on my 3G card in the UK.

Fortunately as of tomorrow I will have broadband or wireless of some sort (I hope) so I don’t have to count the bytes

Having just read some comments about the “reliability of VoIP” I am reminded of a problem that I see on a daily basis when users confuse the difference between technology and an implementation of a particular service. These are obviously interrelated but many people do not grasp the true difference leading otherwise good technology to be given a bad name because of a poor service.

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) has been marketed in many ways but the most common association I would expect an average Internet user to link it with is “cheap phone calls” as it cuts out the traditional telecommunications operator from part or all of the phone call, thus reducing the cost primarily to that of the Internet connection itself. VoIP technology is used by many companies that use calling cards, etc. and sometimes (I would not go as far as saying often as I am not sure how well it can be quantified) quality of the phone call can be quite poor as VoIP providers reduce the bandwidth available (or compress using an inferior codec) to the user in order to fit more calls within a pipe. This, bundled with other service problems often results in users blaming VoIP as a technology for not being ready or mature, rather than considering the implementation of the particular service.

The same label currently applies to “Virtual Private Servers” (VPSs) in many cases as they are considered ‘cheap alternatives to dedicated servers’ whereas a VPS based service can in fact be superior by allowing easier failover/migration options in the event of problems or scalability issues and better redundancy in many cases.
Fundementally it comes back to the same problem that affects today’s society–It’s all about price. This factor drives decision making so much that technologies are often associated to prices alone. There is a gross misunderstanding that the level of service provided by two companies with varying prices must be the same, and therefore the cheaper option must be better by definition. It is often not considered that differences in price are quite possibly related to service quality, redundancy, expansion capacity, etc.

Consumers – Wake up!

Consumers are often treated with kid gloves and there is a perception they need strong protection in terms of industry regulation to ensure no ‘cowboys’ can enter a market. This is a frequent suggestion by individuals who find themselves at the mercy of a company that has gone out of business, etc. These types of regulation are a huge burden on smaller businesses and may well prohibit new innovative entrants from engaging in the market as the cost of entry is higher.

It is important to accept consumers require extra protection than that afforded to businesses for the simple reason contract values are smaller and let’s face it, we can’t “negotiate” a contract with the bus company on common terms when we board one during rush hour. However, this needs common sense to be applied and consumers should share the responsibility by not choosing suppliers, no matter which industry it is in, by price alone and not labelling an entire technology based on experiences from one provider, usually a low cost one.