Tuesday 26 February 2002

Financial Times: BT prompts battle for fast internet customers. The battle for Britain's broadband consumers began in earnest when BT's announcement of sharp wholesale price cuts prompted its cable operator rivals to offer even faster internet access. The separate plans by BT, Telewest and NTL are designed to accelerate UK take-up of high-speed broadband services... [Tomalak's Realm] Interesting. Very. I'm presently involved in an ADSL test here in Ireland. This is offered by Eircom (our equivalent of BT). They were originally due to launch the service to the public back in October 2001 but were forced to postpone because of disagreements with our Regulator about the proposed charges. The Eircom site still quotes rates, but I do not know if these are as originally proposed or as amended.       They begin at 100 euro per month (after installation fee and equipment costs, and before VAT), which charge only applies to a single user on a single computer and only delivers connection speeds of 'up to' 512kbps downstream and 128kbps upstream. To obtain the fabled 1Mbps is shown as costing 165 euro per month (which covers up to 4 users). The Financial Times story refers to British IPs being able to offer broadband packages for 'less than £30 per month' (which works out at about half the Irish rate). 8:23:30 PM  Your view

Quark ships International QuarkXPress 5.0 [MacNN] Well, at last! Still, 529 euro for a 4-to-5 upgrade which still isn't compatible with OS X seems pretty crazy. So, a dilemma: do I follow my usual trend and go for the latest and greatest, leave things as they are, or maybe even check out the opposition? Being serious about it, though, I suppose my first logical step is to go back and check out just what's new in this long-awaited upgrade. 4:45:03 AM  Your view

		© Copyright 2002 Jim MacCormaic . Last update: 29/09/2002; 06:01:39 am .