Category Archives: In the News

Tech news and opinions

giffgaff to launch new data-only goodybags on October 17th

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giffgaff has recently announced that it will, on October 10th 17th, be launching it’s latest service – data only goodybags.

These goodybags will be destined for iPad, tablet and mi-fi users who like to use their mobile connection to provide internet to other devices. Tethering will be permitted with these special goodybags.

Users may be required to order a seperate SIM for their tablet or mi-fi. Once activated, three packages will be available.

  • 500MB for 30 days: £5
  • 1GB for 30 days: £7.50
  • 3GB for 30 days: £12.50

These seem to be very competitive pay-as-you-go prices. The nearest competitor is 3, however they have a reputation of much better coverage and data speed than other networks.

giffgaff insist that the goodybags are sold at “cost price” – meaning giffgaff makes a loss if you use all of the data in your goodybag. A bold move – and one which could be extremely risky. giffgaff are betting on some people not using all of the data in their allowance, but I’m not confident this will be the case.

Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how popular the goodybags become.

To order a free SIM with giffgaff and get £5 free credit on activation, click here.

BT further increases landline charges – reminds us that we’re not in control

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BT has recently announced that as of December 2011, a number of charges (including line rental) will be increased. This is the second price increase from BT this year.

So, as of 3rd December, line rental will increase from £13.90 per month to £14.60 per month. On top of that, their unlimited anytime call plan is increasing by 20p per month to £4.90 per month – and considering this is BT’s most popular calling plan, this is bound to hit home. If you’re not on the unlimited call plan (or making a chargeable call), your call connection fee is going up to 13.1p per call. And to finish you off, your daytime and evening call rates are going up too. “Terrific!”, I hear you say.

Somewhat strange to remember, though, that BT announced in July that their quaterly profits were up 20% due to increased demand. Does that sound strange to you?

We have to bear in mind that a large majority of people living in out-of-city areas are on market one telephone exchanges. This basically means that you’re stuck with BT wholesale for your telephone and broadband services whether you like it or not, as no other operator can provide a service. What this really means is that there’s no competition – and so BT can charge whatever they like for your telephony services.

If you’re lucky enough to have the availability of cable in your area, perhaps you might want to consider the option of moving to cable broadband and scrapping your landline altogether. We all seem to be on these huge mobile contracts which offer endless minutes – so why do we need a landline? It’s worth a thought – as cable broadband will give you a much faster speed and generally a better service.

It is annoying though – BT are just taking advantage of the fact that they can do whatever they like to charges at the moment – they have control over most of the phone exchanges in the UK and no other operator can do much about it. The only group that can make a difference is Ofcom – but they often seem to cause more trouble than good. And to the average household suffering from money shortages (having already had the warning of increased energy charges), this can only be bad news.

Oh, and if you’ve just joined their supposedly amazing “summer deal” of free service for 4 months, then £16 a month – remember, it’s an 18 month contract.

Orange removes broadband Fair Use Policy

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Long time readers of GEEK! may know the Orange complaint I made in late 2009. In the past, I’ve also written to Ofcom and complained about the vague FUP that gave no details as to what they defined as “unlimited”.

Well, finally, Orange have removed their FUP and now supposedly no longer limits the amount of data people can download. Orange claim that they now offer totally unlimited downloads.

Previously, Orange would contact you if they believed you were using an excessive amount of data in a given month. If they believed that you were not taking action following their warnings, they would throttle your connection to almost unusable speeds during peak periods until they were satisfied that you had changed your ways.

I love what they’ve written though: “Some of the other broadband providers out there track and limit your speed if you reach a certain amount of data, we don’t.” Of course, they would know that – because they used to be one of the few providers that actually did it!

Apple launches new iTunes beta with iCloud

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Apple has today launched a beta of the new iTunes version 10.3 which, above all, includes the new iCloud functionality (or at least some of it).

You can grab your hands on the new version via this link. It’s available for Mac and Windows (32 and 64 bit). The download (at the time of writing) is running horribly slowly (currently getting about 30kb/s on the 77MB download) – but I’m guessing that’s down to demand and should return to normal sometime later this evening.

I’ll post up the good news when I’ve got it going!

Microsoft buys Skype–what happens next?

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As you may have been reading in the news, Microsoft has recently agreed to purchase the popular VoIP service Skype. After a couple of previous acquisitions in the past, Microsoft has made it’s biggest purchase – this time worth well over $8 billion.

Before I even start, I think it’s fair to say that this is either going to be a monumental win or a catastrophic fail – one or the other.

The question is, what will Microsoft do with Skype? Obviously, Skype certainly hasn’t been in the green lately – it’s debts have definitely been on the rise. So, Microsoft have evidently got to make a few considerable changes – otherwise the rather large purchase will become rather a large waste of money – even on Microsoft’s terms!

I can imagine Microsoft will probably implement increased charges for the paid services. However, I do hope that Microsoft will lower the charges for features in Skype that could potentially become very popular – such as group video calling. I happen to think that group video calling was a very well implemented feature into Skype – but unfortunately Skype started charging ridiculous amounts of money for it. If Microsoft lowered charges to £1-2 per month, I would probably consider purchasing it.

The other big question is whether they will continue to support all of the operating systems that Skype currently supports. Microsoft has never really supported Linux and people are starting to ask if Microsoft will drop support for it. Personally, it wouldn’t surprise me hugely if they did – but it would be a real shame.

The sale probably won’t finalise for another few months at least, so we’ll just have to wait and see what changes Microsoft will inevitably implement. In the mean time, enjoy Skype in it’s current form while you can!