Google has announced that it is ready to begin installing its first fibre-optic broadband network after an extensive planning phase.

The Google Fiber service will be installed in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri. For those not familiar with the area, the two cities are right next to each other, separated by a river.

Making the announcement on the Google Fiber Blog, Google Access general manager Kevin Lo said, "We've measured utility poles; we've studied maps and surveyed neighborhoods; we've come up with a comprehensive set of detailed engineering plans; and we've eaten way too much barbecue. Now, starting today, we're ready to lay fiber."

Teeny tiny fibres

Those less interested in the diet of the Google engineers and more about Google Fiber might like to know that each cable will be chock full of glass fibres roughly the width of a human hair.

These cables will then form the "backbone" of a high speed data infrastructure that could carry speeds "more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have today."

The first stage of the rollout is installing that "backbone", then Google will start connecting up home across both Kansas Citys.

With all the talk of 300Mbps broadband and increased national average speeds, it would have been very easy to miss one of the most important points made in Ofcom's latest research into the UK's internet connections – that millions are settling for crappy connections for no good reason.

It's obviously a good thing that the average speed of broadband connections has increased, up from 6.8 to 7.6mbps in a year, but given that those willing to pay for the privilege (and in the right area) can now get 100Mbps it was inevitable that this would tug up the average.

For me, the fact that Ofcom felt the need to highlight its concerns that people were settling for much worse connections when they could upgrade for little or no extra money, was much more important.

"More than 4 in 10 broadband consumers remain on packages with speeds of 10Mbps or less even though many of them would be able to get a higher speed at little or no extra cost if they switched package or provider," said Ofcom's report.

Why choose below average?

So the question here is why? Why are people forking out for broadband and getting less than 10Mbps?

First up there's a huge and very disgruntled group that are geographically disadvantaged; with many rural areas still incapable of achieving anything like 10Mbps.

But Ofcom says that 'many' would be able to get more bang for their buck, which brings us back to our original question.

Presumably another big group can be excluded because they get bundled services – meaning that their broadband is part of a package of services for things like television.

Within that group you have those that just take broadband because it is there and don't really need fast connections at all and those that don't want the inconvenience of finding another provider – even if the service is better.

And then you have another group – quite possibly the largest within Ofcom's 'many' – those that simply do not upgrade for no good reason.

Confusion reigns

And that's where you hit a major issue; a huge swathe of those people won't even know that their poor internet connection is costing them the same as a better one.

A huge swathe of people that have been left confused and bewildered by the frankly ludicrous misdirection and half-truths in the way companies advertise their broadband speeds.

A huge swathe of people who feel that switching their broadband over is likely to be a confusing, difficult and lengthy process involving call centres, canned music and often obtuse service.

A huge swathe of people that should have been helped much more, and much earlier, by the watchdogs that have allowed the ISPs to ride roughshod over what is clearly right and what can be argued in a court of law.

Fair price, fair product

For most of the people who read TechRadar things like what a megabit and megabyte are, the differences between fibre to the cabinet and fibre to the home and what the star next to "unlimited" data really signifies allow us to make good decisions on our broadband.

But for millions of others they just want to pay a fair price for a fair product and not have to worry about the terminology, and that only works when there are safeguards in place.

They want to be told the truth without hyperbole or companies hiding behind semantics, they don't want to be told they could get up to a speed, they want to know speed that will be. They think that companies should be fair to them, not sticking small print in fair usage policies.

And now, ridiculously belatedly, there are: advertising must be clearer and more accurate, data must be more rigorous and companies will have to give more actual, you know, factual information to people who want to sign up.

But for many the damage has been done; broadband didn't need to be confusing or difficult but companies have made it so and many of the ISPs seem to be genuinely miffed that they are finally being brought to task.

So perhaps the real question is not why people are not getting fair broadband for a fair price, but how they were allowed to reach this state of affairs in the first place.

BT has deemed the super-ultra-fast broadband trials it was running in Cornwall a success, promising a commercial roll out in early 2013.

When we say super-ultra-fast broadband, we're talking about 300Mbps fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) which will see fibre laid all the way to your actual home, as opposed to fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) which is slower because the fibre runs only to those messy green boxes on the street that are forever being vandalised.

The trials in St Agnes, Cornwall, saw BT testing a solution that allows it to use the existing to-the-cabinet fibre then adding on the to-the-premise bit afterwards, something it calls 'FTTP on demand'.

But first, this

With the aim to start rolling out the 300Mbps FTTP broadband by Spring 2013, that leaves a good year to fill.

Luckily BT is planning to introduce a faster variety of FTTC in 2012 as well, set to double today's downstream sppeds from 40Mbps to 80Mbps, complemented by upstream speeds of 20Mbps.

Over 7 million UK households can now access fibre broadband over BT's network, with the company hoping to see this figure rise to ten million in 2012 and to two-thirds of the UK by the end of 2014.

More than 40 per cent of UK consumers could be getting significantly better broadband speeds for no extra cost according to watchdog Ofcom – although the UK's average speed has gone up significantly in the last year.

The jump in average speed from 6.8Mbps to 7.6mbps is welcomed by Ofcom in its latest broadband research, with more Brits plumping for fast broadband packages.

However, Ofcom's findings also suggest that a huge percentage are settling for sub-10mbps broadband when better packages are available for little or no extra.

Little or no extra cost

"More than 4 in 10 broadband consumers remain on packages with speeds of 10Mbps or less even though many of them would be able to get a higher speed at little or no extra cost if they switched package or provider," said Ofcom's report.

On the positive side, 58 per cent of UK broadband now has a headline speed of more than 10Mbps.

Of course, when the average is significantly less than 10 that shows the vast gulf in what is advertised and what is actually received by the public, something that Ofcom is hoping to rectify.

"CAP and BCAP published guidance in September 2011 on the use of speed claims in broadband advertising, which will come into force in April 2012," said Ofcom.

"Among other things, it requires that speed claims should be achievable by at least 10 per cent of the relevant internet service provider's (ISP) customer base, and where a significant proportion of customers are unlikely to receive a speed sufficiently close to that advertised, further qualifying information, such as the speed range obtainable by those customers, should be included in the advertisement.

"In addition, any claim should be based on robust and reasonably representative data."

With the next research being conducted in July, it will be interesting to see if the continued roll-out of fibre and ADSL2+ will give UK average speeds another much needed hoik.

And even more fascinating to see the advertising of the services finally move beyond the half truths that are served up by so many ISPs currently.

UK mobile network Three is offering 'broadband in a box' which does away with line rental charges and offers easy set up.

Currently most people pay a fixed line-rental charge which allows broadband to be delivered down their telephone line. Exceptions such as Virgin Media pumping the web via fibre optics into your crib, bypassing the ugly line-rental issue.

Three has chosen Glasgow, Edinburgh and Leeds to pilot their alternative broadband option the "Web Cube" – which uses a HSPA+ enabled mobile broadband SIM card to bring the internet into homes, thus bypassing any fixed lines and related charges.

The Internet³

The "Web Cube" is targeted at renters who frequently move house, students and people with a second home – although it will appeal to anyone who doesn't want the hassle or commitment of a fixed-line contract.

The cube acts as a standard wireless router with a 30 meter range and allows users to connect up to 5 devices at a time. Three claim it will be able to deliver typical download speeds of 2-5Mbps and has the potential to offer speeds of up to 10Mbps. Not amazing speeds but enough to get by.

What will attract consumers are the simple 'plug and play' interface and the offer of a rolling one-month contract at £15 per month. This includes 10GB of data a month and is ideal for users unwilling to commit to a long term contract, especially if they will be moving shortly. Bear in mind though you'll have to fork out £59.99 for the cube too.

There is a 24-month contract on offer which includes a free 'Web Cube' and 15GB of data for those who need a bit more each month and are staying put in the short term at least.

If the trial period goes well and Three rolls it out nationwide it could be a great option for people in rural locations unable to get traditional broadband, but with adequate mobile phone signal.

802.11ac: next-gen Wi-Fi

If you thought Wi-Fi couldn't get much faster than 802.11n, think again.

802.11ac, dubbed 5G Wi-Fi, promises ridiculously fast wireless connections, better range, improved reliability, improved power consumption and a free horse. (OK, we're lying about the horse.)

802.11ac is the latest evolution of Wi-Fi, and it should be particularly good for gaming and HD video streaming.

So how does it work, does it live up to the hype, and how long will you have to wait before you can get your hands on it? Let's find out.

Your 802.11ac speed could break the gigabit barrier

The fastest current 802.11n Wi-Fi connections max out at around 150Mbps with one antenna, 300Mbps with two and 450Mbps with three antennas. 802.11ac connections will be roughly three times faster - so that's 450Mbps, 900Mbps and 1.3Gbps respectively. Netgear, brilliantly, illustrates this with two pictures of motorways: the first picture, showing "Today's Wi-Fi", is normal, but the one labelled "3x speed with 802.11ac" is really blurry.

Your 802.11ac speed won't break the gigabit barrier

As with previous Wi-Fi standards, the speeds quoted on the box and in the promotional materials are theoretical maximums, not the speeds you'll actually get: so far devices with potential top speeds of 1.3Gbps have topped out at around 800Mbps. That's still blisteringly fast, of course, but there's still a gap between advertised speeds and real world ones. 802.11ac connection speeds will be reduced by numerous factors: network overhead, which is the chatter your hardware needs to keep the connection going; interference, congestion and physical obstacles; distance; the number of simultaneous connections; and whether the router is running in compatibility mode so that older wireless kit can still connect.

802.11ac video and gaming

Because 802.11ac has bandwidth to spare, it should be great for HD video streaming and for gaming. According to Netgear [PDF], you can say bye-bye to buffering: "802.11ac will significantly enhance the user experience by improving the playback quality to any point throughout the house. With 802.11ac, for the first time wireless will provide similar performance as wired Gigabit connections."

802.11ac routers use more antennas

To improve range and reliability, 802.11ac routers can use more antennas than existing 802.11n kit: your next router may have as many as eight antennas inside it.

802.11ac routers will use "beamforming" technology

Wi-Fi is omnidirectional, but 802.11ac routers will be able to use directional transmission and reception technology dubbed "beamforming". The router will be able to identify the rough location of the device it's talking to and strengthen the appropriate antenna(s) accordingly. The idea is to reduce interference.

802.11ac Wi-Fi uses the 5GHz frequency band

Older wireless kit uses the 2.4GHz frequency band, which is fairly crowded: your kit is potentially sharing radio frequency with next door's baby monitor, your cordless phone and even your microwave. Like high performance 802.11n kit, 802.11ac routers will use the less cluttered 5GHz band where there's considerably more room for data transmission. 802.11ac hardware will use two kinds of channels in that range: 80GHz ones and 160GHz ones.

802.11ac routers will be backwards compatible

You won't need to throw out all your old wireless-capable kit as 802.11ac routers will be backwards compatible with your existing Wi-Fi kit. For example, at this year's CES Buffalo demonstrated an 802.11ac router that operated on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands and that promised to play nice with 802.11a, b, g and n hardware.

The 802.11ac release date is now, sort of

As with 802.11n, hardware is coming out before the 802.11ac standard is actually finalised. That's going to happen later this year, but manufacturers are readying their products now and they'll be everywhere by the summer, with minor software updates addressing any changes that might happen to the standard before it's finalised. We'd expect 802.11ac prices to be steep initially, as they were with the first 802.11n kit, but those prices should start to fall almost immediately.

Apple's putting 802.11ac into everything

Apple's a key early adopter of wireless technology - it helped popularise Wi-Fi in the first place and was quick off the mark with 802.11n support. According to AppleInsider it's going to be quick off the mark with 802.11ac too, sticking the technology into "new AirPort base stations, Time Capsule, Apple TV, notebooks and potentially its mobile devices."

802.11ac hasn't skipped lots of letters

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the body in charge of the 802.11 standard, isn't skipping lots of letters: while major WiFi standards have jumped from 802.11n to 802.11ac, the IEEE didn't just skip 802.11o, p, q and so on. Successive versions of the 802.11 standard can also denote amendments to existing standards, so for example 802.11i introduced improved security and 802.11j introduced extensions for Japanese networks.

Sky is adding new channels including Sky Sports F1 to its mobile TV service, Sky Go. It will also be available to Android users for the first time.

The mobile TV service, which launched in July last year, is free to Sky subscribers over a 3G or Wi-Fi connection.

Previously only available on iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and computer, the Sky Go Android app is launching next month in time for the introduction of the new Sky Sports F1 channel.

The F1 season kicks off 16 March with the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne.

Take Note, F1 fans

Samsung Galaxy and HTC users will be the first to get the service – so we could see F1 fans flocking to buy a Galaxy Note for that little big screen experience.

Sky Entertainment channels will also be available on Sky Go, including Sky Atlantic from today, with Sky 1, Sky Living and Sky Arts 1 arriving in the next month.

The new features add to the recent on-demand offering of the iOS app which allows Sky Movies subscribers to access over 600 movies on demand.

To help users get the most out of the service, Sky is handing out free public Wi-Fi to its Broadband Unlimited customers. The service is provided by The Cloud and will give users access to over 10,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in places including Pizza Express and Caffe Nero.

Elsewhere in the Sky stable, its Anytime+ users will finally be able to get BBC iPlayer and ITV Player services.

Sky has announced that it will be extending its broadband offering, hoping to reach 88 per cent of UK homes by June 2013, as well as rolling out WiFi hotspots for its internet subscribers and a fibre broadband offering.

Although many take advantage of Sky's bundled broadband its coverage remains limited, leaving big swathes of the UK unable to plump for the offering.

However, in its financial results Sky has announced that it will be extending its network footprint by around a million extra homes.

Unlimited fibre

Also significant is the company's decision to offer Sky Broadband Unlimited Fibre - charging £20 for a service that will offer up to 40Mbps download speeds with "no usage caps".

Last, but not least, Sky is rolling out WiFi hotspots for its subscribers - allowing customers of its broadband unlimited access to hotspots from The Cloud, the company it bought last year.

"I'm delighted that our existing home communication products are making such an impact with customers. It's clear that customers are responding to the higher levels of value, quality and service we offer, said Stephen van Rooyen, Managing Director of Sky's Sales and Marketing Group.

"This year sees a number of enhancements that will ensure we create even more choice.

"Whether it's the launch of free public WiFi, extending our network into more parts of the UK, or adding fibre to our product mix, we are focused on meeting the demands of customers and on being their number one choice for home communications."

There's no official news on the UK launch date of Sky Broadband Unlimited Fibre - although we're expecting it soon - and the WiFi offering will arrive "shortly", according to Sky.

Ofcom has announced its plans for the forthcoming 4G spectrum auction in the UK following another consultation.

It has pledged to make sure that at least four operators are able to offer decent 4G services to ensure competition, while also looking at ways to provide mobile data to areas currently not serviced due to geographical constraints.

4G networks will offer much-enhanced data speeds and bandwidth once deployed and, thanks to the current switching off of analogue TV signals, there's now a whole heap of spectrum at the 800MHz band that Ofcom is planning to auction off to mobile operators at the end of 2012.

With the Government pledging £150m to improve data coverage in the UK to offer broadband speeds to remote villages, Ofcom believes it can use this to entice at least one mobile operator to cover at least 98% of the population, with the auction carrying a condition that each bidder must offer at least 95% UK coverage too.

But you still can't use your mobile from your bed

Ofcom also mentioned the 2.6GHz band of spectrum that can be used for 4G - this higher frequency has a higher bandwidth but much shorter reach, so Ofcom believes that this will be ideal for creating local area hotspots, such as for hospitals or student campuses.

Ofcom Chief Executive, Ed Richards, said: "This is a crucial step in preparing for the most significant spectrum release in the UK for many years. The proposals published today will influence the provision of services to consumers for the next decade and beyond.

"The UK benefits from being one of the most competitive mobile phone markets in Europe. This means that consumers pay less for mobile communications services and have the choice to shop around for packages that suit them best.

"As the UK enters a new generation of mobile communications, Ofcom's objective is to promote effective competition and to stimulate both investment and innovation.

"In addition we are proposing a significant enhancement of mobile broadband, extending 4G coverage beyond levels of existing 2G coverage – helping to serve many areas of the UK that have traditionally been underserved by network coverage."

Do we have a right to fast broadband?

Should fast, low latency broadband internet be a basic human right?

Speaking for ourselves, we'd certainly struggle to get through so as much as the first 10 minutes of the morning without it. Strictly speaking, we don't really do mornings.

But we digress. What we want to communicate is a recent epiphany we had involving the internet.

Nope, that's not a euphemism for something in anyway salacious or unsavoury. We're talking about the sheer, giddy value for money derived from a decent broadband connection. Our particular pipe at home costs a paltry £16.99 per month.

We won't name names, for fear of appearing to curry favour. Suffice to say, our local phone exchange is LLU, which provides us with plenty of choice. We wouldn't touch a FUP'ed up BT connection with a 10-foot Ethernet cable.

In return, we get an always-on, almost-never-goes-down connection measuring a solid 16Mbps in width. Day or night, hour after hour, we can download at a rate of around 1.7MB/s. Much of the time our actual usage is a trickle, but over the past two years, it has never failed to deliver when we have turned on the taps.

Now, none of this is exactly news. While there are quite a few pretty shonky ISPs out there, the good ones aren't hard to find. But in this age of austerity, it's hard to think of any goods or services that come close to the preposterously good value offered by broadband.

Take motoring, for example. If you even think about getting into your car, it will cost a tenner. Actually drive any distance and you'll be lucky to get change out of £20 - unless you park in a built-up area for 30 minutes at the other end, in which case make that £30. Double that if you forget to put money in the meter. The same goes for rail travel, frankly.

If planes, trains and automobiles seem a little tangential, what about mobile phone usage? We get fleeced £45 every month for a line rental that on paper has all our calls covered, but somehow always manages to find a reason to charge a fortune for all the long ones. Indulge in even a whiff of phone roaming abroad and you're in deep trouble, too. A 10-day jaunt to Italy this summer socked us for £90 in data charges. It's completely and utterly scandalous.

We could keep at this all day. We managed to fit £60 worth of supermarket shopping into a small basket the other day, without buying a drop of booze. As for other utility bills, we would come clean but opening the post usually makes us cry.

By almost any metric you choose, broadband internet looks astonishingly cheap. For that reason, we can only assume it won't last. Either service quality will fall off a cliff, the spectre of a tiered internet will become a reality or prices will explode. No doubt it will end up being all three. So, take our advice. Enjoy it while it lasts. The end is surely nigh.

And another thing...

Speaking of good things coming to an end, we're more than a little concerned by the direction the PC processor market has taken in the past few months.

AMD has finally released its long-awaited Bulldozer FX chips upon the world, and it turns out they're pretty rubbish. It seemed likely that the long-term impact would be Intel dragging its feet.

What we weren't expecting was for that effect to kick inquite so fast. Intel has gone live with its own new high-end desktop processor, known as Sandy Bridge E, as seen on the Intel Core i7 3960X.

It's been nearly two years since Intel did anything noteworthy at the top of its desktop product portfolio, so expectations were high. In the event, however, Sandy Bridge E has no more cores than the two-year-old Gulftown chip.

At least, that what it seemed like at first. Tucked away in Intel's marketing material was an image of Sandy E's processor die, and it was immediately obvious that this was in fact an eight-core chip with two of the cores fused off.

When we asked some Intel suits for an explanation, they rolled out some guff about balancing clockspeeds with cores and doing what was right for customers. Funny thing is, when AMD was more competitive, turning off cores didn't seem like the right thing to do.

Likewise, if we were customers who'd just paid £750 for a Sandy Bridge E processor, we'd be wondering how Intel was serving our interests by turning off cores. All of which means the scenario we've been worrying about most has arrived sooner than we'd feared. There's no more competition in the CPU market.

The growth of fibre optic networks has left watchdog Ofcom demanding that companies fit battery backups supplying one hour of phone service – because without the copper wire phone system people would not be able to make calls in the event of a power cut.

Although fibre brings myriad improvements, one drawback is that a lack of power cripples the system – a problem that did not hit the old copper cabling setup.

"A conventional telephone draws the necessary power for operation from the local exchange via the copper telephone wires, and as a result can continue to function even when there is a power cut at the premises," explained Ofcom.

Need more power captain

"However, optical fibres are unable to support this arrangement as they do not conduct electricity. The consequence of this limitation in fibre optic networks is that, if there is a power failure at the property, and absent any other measures being taken, the telephone will stop working. Hence calls, including calls to the emergency services, are not possible."

Ofcom's answer is to install a battery backup system – and it believes that one hour of battery backup is enough.

"In practice, a back-up supply of power to ensure that calls can be made over optical fibre networks during a power cut is normally supplied via a battery installed at the customer's premises," added Ofcom.

"The question that arises from solutions of this type is the length of time over which the battery back-up remains operational."

"Given the expected growth in fibre optic networks over the next few years and in light of recent survey evidence that suggests that communications providers are adopting a mix of power back-up solutions in their current deployments, we believe that this represents an appropriate time to address this issue."

If you travel abroad, you'll often come home thinking Britain is rubbish. Our airports are overcrowded, as are our trains, and the bits of road that aren't jammed solid have potholes deep enough to swallow school buses.

The very worst thing, though, is the mobile phone network. Where some other countries have super-speedy 4G connections, I sometimes struggle to get a data signal in major cities or on major transport routes.

People in the 1950s were famously promised jetpacks in the not too distant future; in the UK, 4G's beginning to look like a similarly empty promise. According to Ofcom, the auction for 4G networks might happen before the end of June. Maybe. If the weather's nice and nothing bad happens.

The auction was supposed to be in early 2012, but Ofcom has had to put it back, largely because the networks are arguing with one another.

Country feedback

Want to know why the US, much of Scandinavia, much of Europe and a whole bunch of Asian countries have 4G and we don't? Blame the networks.

As Ofcom's Ed Richards told The Guardian, the UK will be the last major European economy to hold a 4G auction - Germany started its rollout in 2010. The best case scenario is a rollout that runs from 2013 onwards, but even then that means much of the country will be on 3G in 2015.

As ever, the rollout will focus on the most densely populated areas first, which isn't much cop for the Scots, Irish and Welsh or anyone in a rural area.

"I think some major companies will have to reflect upon whether they have inadvertently jeopardised the benefits of objective, independent regulation in this area by virtue of their willingness to game the system," Richards says, making it clear that the networks' bickering is the main problem here: they're "holding back innovation and hampering growth" with litigation that is "essentially strategic rather than based on objective grounds."

4G isn't just about speed: it's also about providing connectivity to the bits of the country where wired broadband isn't economic.

As the Federation of Small Businesses puts it, "businesses in rural areas need broadband now." Meanwhile the National Farmers Union's chief economist Phil Bicknell told the BBC: "We're seeing that widening gap between those people in rural areas, in terms of the speed of their connection with broadband, and those superfast connections that are increasingly emerging in urban areas."

According to policy organisation Open Digital, the lack of 4G is costing UK businesses £732 million per year in lost productivity and limiting businesses' use of cloud computing.

It's not surprising that the networks are putting their own narrow commercial interests ahead of the national interest - but it's surprising that they're getting away with it. However, the networks should be careful: if Ofcom can't persuade them to play nice, the Government may decide to regulate the sector directly.

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BT has declared that the last quarter brought a market-leading 63 per cent share of broadband net additions, and that despite a slight drop in revenue its financial power allows it to invest in the UK's infrastructure 'when others are merely talking about it.'

Having a pop at other companies is hardly a rarity when BT makes an announcement, and as well as rightly talking up the impressive news that UK broadband roll-out has been accelerated, BT chief executive Ian Livingstone was pugnacious about his company's power.

"We have increased cash flow, profits and underlying revenue in the quarter," said Livingstone.

Growth

"We achieved a market leading 63 per cent share of broadband net additions and another quarter of growth in fixed lines," he added.

"We expect to continue to offset the economic headwinds through improved customer service and processes, better efficiency, and investment in the future of the business.

"This strategy and our financial results allow us to invest when others are merely talking about it.

"We are accelerating our fibre roll-out programme to cover two-thirds of the UK by the end of 2014 – one year earlier than planned and creating 520 new jobs.

"With the already announced government support, we believe there is the potential for fibre-based services to reach more than 90% of the UK within a few years thereafter."

Expansion

Livingstone also used the opportunity to talk about BT's expansion plans outside of the UK.

"We are also investing across the world and have announced a programme to double our business in key Latin American countries in addition to our expansion in the Asia Pacific region announced last year," he said.

"Our performance in the quarter reinforces but does not change our outlook for the year."

Virgin Media has finally outlined the first wave of its Spotify-flavoured offers, including six- and three-month premium subscriptions with its broadband and Virgin Mobile deals respectively.

What's more, the company is promising no extra data charges when you use Spotify from a Virgin Mobile.

Although the deals are only open to new Virgin Media customers (or those renewing their contracts), the offer can be amalgamated with your existing Spotify account – so even if you're already paying for Spotify, you'll get your free months.

Like a Virgin

And that's not all for the Virgin Media/Spotify love-in; there'll be more offers coming to other Virgin Media bundles soon.

App fans will be pleased to hear that Virgin Media also plans to release a Tivo app for Spotify too, which it reckons will "bring Spotify to the living room" by allowing you to play music from a premium account through you home cinema system .

No official release date for the app yet, but it should reach your TiVo account in the next few weeks.

Starbucks has rolled out a new, free Wi-Fi offering to all 650 of its UK coffee houses.

The new two-click system, which mirrors the US store service, makes it easier to get online for Starbucks card holders and non-card holders alike.

Previously, you've needed to be a member of the Starbucks reward scheme in order to access free Wi-Fi in the UK. Everyone else had to pay through the BT Openzone connection.

BT Openzone will continue to supply the high-speed Wi-Fi access, only now users will be greeted with a pop-up that offers instant access by accepting Ts and Cs.

Quick and easy

Starbucks says it has made the change after demand for its customers for a simpler system.

Brian Waring, VP Marketing & Category for Starbucks UK & Ireland said: "Our customers told us that they liked our free Wi-Fi, but they wanted it to be easier and faster to access. Starbucks is a place to take time out, but it's also a social and digital hub and customers now expect to be able to connect with family and friends, find entertainment or even run their businesses from our stores.

"This summer the UK will have millions of visitors from around the world for London 2012 and they'll be able to stay in touch with a single click in Starbucks. This is one of many ways we're getting ready to welcome them."

Disclosure: As living proof, this news story was written in Starbucks using free Wi-Fi. It works rather well. Unfortunately we still had to sell a kidney to afford a double espresso frappuccino light.

Via: Engadget

YouTube has finally brought its film streaming service to the UK, with over a thousand films available to rent on the Google owned video site.

The service, which was previously available in the US and Canada, includes classics such as Reservoir Dogs, Casablanca and Mongolian Death Worm. It also lets you stream more recent titles like Hanna, Red Riding Hood and Mega Piranha.

The films cost between £2.49 and £3.29 to rent, with some older titles - such as Nosferatu and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil - available for free.

30 Days of Knight

Once you've paid for the film, you receive a 48 hour pass, which gives you 30 days to begin watching, and 48 hours to finish the film - although we're not sure if this applies if you buy Eddie Murphy vehicle Another 48 Hrs.

Free films are available to watch indefinitely, but they are supported by (unskippable) ads. The titles we looked at don't come in HD formats, either, with most being DVD-equivalent 480p.

However, the films are compatible with Android devices such as phones and Google TV.

In addition to the films, viewers can also access extras like behind-the-scenes videos, interviews, parodies, clips and remixes - though most of this content is on YouTube anyway.

YouTube's biggest rival in the UK is likely to be LoveFilm, which has a similarly-sized catalogue of pay-per-view films at around the same prices, but offers almost five thousand titles to its monthly package customers.

BT has stepped up its super-fast internet arms race with Virgin Media by promising speeds of up to 300Mbps for some customers by the spring of next year.

The company will be using new fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology, which involved installing fibre-optic cable directly into the home, to offer the new speeds in 2012.

BT will use the same technology to begin offering 110Mbps FTTP broadband by early October this year in six towns around the UK.

Ashford, Bradwell Abbey, Highams Park, Chester South, St Austell and York will be the first to be able to sign up for the package. That's only a potential base of 60,000 people.

Spearheading the revolution

The 110Mbps speeds gives BT Broadband an edge in its battle with Virgin Media to spearhead the super-fast revolution in the United Kingdom.

Virgin currently offers 100Mbps as its top speed, while BT just doubled its best offering from 40Mbps to 80Mbps for existing customers.

Currently BT uses 'fibre to the cabinet' technology for its super-fast connections, which involves having fibre-optic cable at street level, with copper wires carrying the connection to the house.

With the new FTTP connections, those all important fibre-optics will make it all the way to your telephone socket.

Superfast by 2015

BT says it will have the tech in 18m homes by 2015, meeting the governments targets.

"These are significant announcements and good news for the UK," said Communications Minister Ed Vaizey said in a statement.

"High-speed broadband is essential for economic growth, which is why we want the UK to have the best superfast broadband in Europe by 2015.

The company is convinced that the FTTP tech can eventually reach download speeds of up to 1Gbps, at which point we'll all do a very excited dance.

TalkTalk has been fined £3 million by Ofcom after mistakenly billing thousands of customers even after they had closed their accounts.

Over 62,000 customers were wrongly billed by TalkTalk and its subsidiary Tiscali between January and November 2010, leaving the company with the lowest consumer satisfaction of all the UK's broadband and landline providers.

Ofcom ordered TalkTalk and Tiscali to sort out their billing issues by December 2010 but, despite taking some steps to stem the problems, the companies continued to incorrectly charge almost 3,000 customers up until March 2011.

Harsh but fair

The £3 million penalty, Ofcom says, is to "reflect the seriousness of their breach of the rules and to act as a deterrent to them and other telecoms companies who must comply with the rules" and could have been higher had TalkTalk not taken steps to rectify the issues.

The company has also paid out over £2.5 million in refunds and compensation to more than 65,000 affected customers.

TalkTalk's chief executive Dido Harding said in a statement to TechRadar: "Last year I recognised that we needed to invest in our systems, processes and customer services ­ and we are making significant progress.

"We are of course disappointed at the scale of the fine and feel it is a disproportionate penalty; however we are striving to continually improve and invest in customer experience and are pleased at the clear progress we are starting to make."

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has announced how a £363 million cash injection will upgrade the broadband infrastructure in England and Scotland, following investments already made in Northern Ireland and Wales.

The government has plans to provide everyone in the UK with broadband speeds of at least 2Mbps in the short term, with superfast broadband to be rolled out to the entire country by 2015.

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said, "Some areas of the UK are missing out, with many rural and hard-to-reach communities suffering painfully slow internet connections or no coverage at all. We are not prepared to let some parts of our country get left behind in the digital age."

Out in the sticks

Strongly rural counties are getting the biggest investment, with Somerset and Devon nabbing £31 million, while North Yorkshire and Cumbria will get £17 million each.

Scotland will receive £69 million in total, with the Scottish government set to distribute the funds as it sees fit.

Ian Livingston, CEO of BT, said in a statement: "It is important that these funds are used wisely and so we would encourage the government to work with private sector partners who are in this for the long run, who are willing to invest significant funds and who can guarantee open and equal access to their networks.

"Open and equal access is essential if competition is to flourish and end users are to benefit from low prices. Local monopolies would benefit no one."

BT Infinity, Virgin, Plusnet and more

When ADSL broadband first appeared, more than ten years ago, its performance seemed amazing.

Times change, though, and displaying simple text and graphics is no longer enough. We want to watch TV online, upload large files, stream video, and on multiple devices - a PC, laptop, iPod touch maybe, all using the same internet connection.

Basic "up to 8Mbps" ADSL broadband is no longer good enough, then. And while you may be able to sign up for an "up to 20/ 24Mbps" ADSL package, if it's available in your area, don't expect that to make much of a difference.

According to Ofcom's recent report, most of these deliver less than half the headline speed, typically averaging 8 to 9 Mbps.

Why? The problem is the transmission medium, our copper phone wires. The signal is prone to interference, and it degrades significantly over time, meaning the further away you are from the exchange, the slower and more unreliable your connection becomes.

We may not have to put up with this unhappy situation much longer, though, because a new technology which minimises these issues, and so greatly improves performance, is increasingly becoming available all across the UK: fibre broadband.

What is fibre broadband?

Fibre broadband sees the old twisted-pair copper wires replaced by fibre optic strands, each the width of a human hair. Data is transmitted through these using pulses of infra-red laser light, rather than electricity, and overall the scheme has many advantages.

There's no need to worry about interference from any electrical equipment nearby, for instance - it won't affect the connection.

The signal doesn't degrade over distance, either. It doesn't matter how long the cable is, performance won't be reduced.

That performance is just about as future-proof as you're likely to see, with speeds perhaps reaching as much as 40 GBit/s at some point in the future (though don't get excited just yet: that's far away, speeds right now are much lower, and each fibre optic strand must share its bandwidth between many homes).

And there are many less obvious benefits, too. It's far more difficult to snoop on a fibre optic connection than a conventional copper line, for example. And the cables won't conduct power surges from nearby lightning strikes, either, so there's less chance of your equipment being damaged in a storm.

Down sides? You'll need a new modem, and probably a router, but that's no surprise when moving to a new technology. And most fibre broadband accounts will include suitable bundled hardware, anyway, so this won't be a hassle for most people.

It's easy to see why BT used fibre as the basis for their new broadband service, BT Infinity, then. But to understand what to expect then we'll need to take a closer look at how the technology works.

DIFFERENT KIT: Fibre broadband accounts like BT Infinity usually come with a new modem and router

What are the types of fibre broadband?

There are two major types of fibre broadband. The first connects directly to your home, and is known as FFTH (Fibre To The Home) or FTTP (Fibre To The Premises). This delivers the best performance as it's optical from one end to the other.

FTTH is also the most expensive, though, which is probably why BT opted for a more basic alternative, FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet), for most of the Infinity network.

Indeed, there are two mass market implementations of FTTC networks in the UK – Virgin Media's HFC (Hybrid Fibre Coaxial) based cable service and BT's VDSL2 based BT Infinity fibre broadband. Virgin uses FTTC in most places, but has some FTTP trials as well as some bespoke business installations, according to the company.

BT Infinity sees fibre connections running to a cabinet on, or very close to the street where you live. And the final stage then uses a VDSL (Very high bitrate DSL) connection running across your existing copper phone lines.

FTTC is a hybrid solution and has a drawback or two. Lightning strikes may still create dangerous power surges after all, for instance. And more seriously, switching back to copper cuts the performance you'll get, and means this may vary according to your location (if not as much as before, because the FTTC cabinet will be closer than your existing exchange).

Instead of using copper for the "last mile" connection between the cabinet and your home, Virgin uses it's existing high-grade coaxial cable network.

BT Infinity is able to offer "up to 40 Mbps" download speed, while uploading at up to 10Mbps. And while you probably no longer trust these advertised speeds, Infinity comes far closer to achieving these than regular ADSL. Virgin offers speeds of up to 100Mbps in some areas.

BRIGHT LIGHTS: BT Infinity has been featured in major ad campaigns

Plusnet reports that "74 per cent of customers who previously experienced speeds of 2-12Mbp/s say they now experience speeds of 30Mbp/s or more" on the new Fibre service, while Ofcom's latest figures suggest the average BT "up to 40Mbps" speeds, even at peak times, are somewhere around 33Mbps - that's some ten times the speed of a typical "up to 8Mbps" connection.

And this is just the start. VDSL can theoretically support more than twice that speed, so there's room for improvement in future, and when BT finally extend cable to individual homes then performance will leap again. Which is great, although it's perhaps best not to get ahead of ourselves - you'll need regular BT Infinity to be available in your area, first.

How to get fibre broadband

If Virgin Media has cable services available in your area, you can also get Virgin Media fibre optic broadband - enter your postcode to find out.

BT has been upgrading exchanges with its FTTC technology since 2009, and the company recently reported that Infinity was now available at more than five million premises (around 20% of the market). The rollout is ongoing, and BT Openreach is currently predicting 66% coverage by 2015.

Sounds good, but it may not help you much if you're in a rural area. Which is unfortunate, as of course you're in the most need of an upgrade. Openreach say the cost of upgrading the network in areas with only a relatively small number of people will generally be too high, though, warning villagers "the reality is that it could well take a government subsidy to bring super-fast broadband to you".

There are no fixed rules here, though. Openreach has upgraded their network in a few rural locations; and living in cities is no guarantee of success, as most people still don't have access to the latest fibre technology. So the best way to discover what's available is to use one of the many Broadband Availability checkers on the web.

NEW HUB: BT's Infinity Hub allows you to share the benefits of your connection by Wi-Fi or Ethernet

SamKnows is probably the best all-round checker - just enter your phone number or postcode and it'll display details on Infinity (or BT FTTC as it's called here), and any other services available in your area. You can even compare them in a click or two.

We have spotted the occasional error with SamKnows, though, so once you've got a general idea it's best to confirm you can get a particular service at the provider's side. With BT, for instance, you'd use the Infinity Availability Checker.

CAN YOU GET IT?: Just choose your region on the map and BT will tell you more about the local availability of Infinity

Access to BT's fibre network is also resold through other ISPs, with their own accounts and conditions. Plusnet, for instance, offers a basic fibre account priced at just £16.49, or gives you McAfee online protection for free if you purchase their enhanced Fibre Extra account.

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