The GSM Association, trade body to the network operators, has joined forces with 16 companies to launch a new logo which can be plastered on to any kit offering 3G connectivity.

The service stamp is titled “Mobile Broadband”, and is to be promoted with a $1bn advertising budget put together by the 16 launch participants including Microsoft, Asus and Dell amongst others. The idea being that a kit containing HSPA or better mobile connectivity will have the logo, to ensure customers know the product will work without needing a hotspot.

Mobile phones are in everything these days, embedded in to laptops and even e-books. Qualcomm want to see this continue, as does other manufacturers, and they have been promoting its multiple 3G technology supporting chipset, and telling people, “the world is your hotspot” and ensuring everyone knows that 3G technologies are already offering speeds comparable with Wi-fi, while 4G should out-perform any unlicensed frequency-based technology.

This of course is only true under optimal conditions. In the real world Wi-fi is much faster, but connections to cellular networks are easier to configure, come with built in roaming, and aren’t nearly as expensive as they used to be.

The 16 companies involved at launch are: 3 Group, Asus, Dell, ECS, Ericsson, Gemalto, Lenovo, Microsoft, Orange, Qualcomm, Telefónica Europe, Telecom Italia, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, Toshiba and Vodafone, representing 760 million wireless connections in 91 countries, according to the GSMA.

The Wi-fi Alliance won’t take this lying down, and WiMax has a service mark of its own, but it’s difficult to believe that any technology is going to challenge GSM, even with plenty of new radio spectrum becoming available across Europe.

The European Commission is considering making broadband access available to everyone in the European Union. Current statistics suggest that around 36 percent of household in the EU have high-speed internet access.

When the majority of EU citizens are using a telecoms service, EC rules dictate that it becomes one every European should be able to enjoy.

Viviane Reding, EU Telecoms Commissioner said in a statement: “High-speed internet is the passport to the Information Society and an essential condition for economic growth,

“This is why it is this Commission’s policy to make broadband internet for all Europeans happen by 2010.”

The EC’s Universal Service Obligations (USO) is demanding that all citizens who want them should be able to get access to basic telephone services.

It covers the production of a phone directory, payphones, and specific measures for people with disabilities or those on low incomes and fixed phone access for local, national and international voice calls.

These obligations also include a clause demanding that the fixed line be of sufficient quality to “permit functional internet access”. In the UK, this has been interpreted to mean a line that can support a dial-up speed of 28.8 kilobits per second.

The USO is reviewed by the EC every three years and in the report it said that broadband was growing at a pace that means more Europeans were using it than not.

EC figures suggest that from 2003-2007 broadband use in member nations tripled to 36 percent of households and had an annual growth rate of 20 percent, however, the EC said there were “striking gaps” among member’s states and the coverage their citizens enjoyed.

Denmark, Luxembourg and Belgium allow 100 percent of its population access to broadband, but Romanians have around 60 percent availability. In Germany and Italy about 12% of the population is not covered by high-speed access.

The review aims to find out if the USO need to be re-written to force telecoms firms to extend broadband to those areas competition will leave bereft of it. The review will also find out whether dial-up access is sufficient to “permit functional internet access”.

At the best of times, air travel is not the best experience you can have, and it looks like its going to get worse as two airlines are set to allow passengers to use their mobile phones during flights in the coming weeks.

BMI is adapting a cautious approach, allowing text messaging only, but budget airline Ryanair will allow passengers to make and receive calls and send emails via their phones. Passengers should expect to hear loads of people calling from the air, “just because they can”, when it gets rolled out – if it receives approval from the airline regulator.

Ryanair will launch its service in around two week’s time, with BMI following shortly after. At present there will be no additional charge for mobile use on the flights – remarkable when you consider you have to pay for a plastic fork or a wet wipe.

“It won’t cost the passenger any more than their standard roaming charge. The pricing has been worked out by OnAir and we get a small percentage of that,” explained an airline spokesman.

“We feel that the real benefit will be through text messaging and that will be supported by calls,” he added.

The technology was developed by OnAir, a subsidiary of Airbus, and will be installing it on planes. Ryanair says the technology has already been installed on ten aircraft, with another 40 to be fitted by the end of this year.

When the service launches, just six passengers will be allowed to use their phones at any one time, but they hope to expand this to 14 users. There is no limit on texting.

Fears have been raised that loud, obnoxious passengers would upset other passengers but Ryanair believes that people will not object the service.

“We have considered that when rolling it out. We’ve been assured by On Air that six or 14 callers on an aircraft of up to 180 passengers shouldn’t be too disruptive. Because the cabin is pressurised, sound doesn’t tend to travel as much so it won’t be that intrusive. It’ll probably be less so than on a bus or a train,” said the spokesman.

BMI however are taking a more cautious approach. It will trial the text messaging service, then analyse customer feedback. They say that if passengers don’t want the service then they will scrap the idea.

“This is a trial in the true sense of the word. If people don’t want it, we won’t do it,” said a spokesperson.

With reports of cybercrime flying around the place, most people associate it with China and Brazil, but a recent study shows that a huge proportion of attacks originate from good ‘ole US of A

SecureWorks, a security firm, has counted 20.6 million attacks against its customers that came from inside American borders so far this year. China ranked second in the world with just 7.7 million, with Brazil and South Korea lagging in third and fourth with 166,987 and 162,298 respectively – better luck next year huh guys…

The findings will have implications for companies trying to fend off denial-of-service attacks and other net-based assaults. Don Jackson, SecureWorks’s director of threat intelligence (awesome job title) said that in August, when Russia invaded Georgia, many Georgian IT staff members tried blocking off Russian IP addresses from their networks, but in the end they were hacked anyway by computers from Turkey and the US.

Whereas the majority of compromised machines in the US are under the control of people out with the country, that is not the case in China. There are reports of entire university networks that are under the control of hackers, with the help of insiders.

In related news, Chinese activists have started targeting the websites of several of the companies involved in the recent baby milk scandal. Targets reportedly include the Sanlu Milk Company and the Mongolian Milk Corporation. Posts on their website read as follows:

“When an infant with kidney stones lies weeping in a hospital bed, can the factory owners intuitively sense the condemnation?”

“In order to gain profit you have gone so far as to devastate these young lives!”

In response to an August order from the FCC, Comcast has unveiled a new “protocol-agnostic” method for managing heavy traffic on its cable-based network.

At present the ISP blocks uploads from BitTorrent and other Peer-2-Peer applications when they exceed certain thresholds. With the new method due to be rolled out by the end of the year, Comcast will target the traffic of individual users.

“The new approach will focus on managing the traffic of those individuals who are using the most bandwidth at times when network congestion threatens to subscribers’ broadband experience and who are contributing disproportionately to such congestion at those points in time,” reads a detailed filing with the FCC.

The company says that the new software will monitor traffic on each segment of Comcast’s network, and if a segment’s upstream or downstream usage exceeds certain thresholds, traffic from people using excessively large amounts of bandwidth will be “assigned a lower priority status”, meaning their bits will be temporarily delayed.

A subscriber’s traffic “returns to normal priority status once his or her bandwidth usage drops below a set threshold over a particular time interval.”

Comcast tested the method out in five US cities over the summer, and the company says they received no complaints whatsoever, they added that just one percent of customers are affected by the change.

“We manage our network for one reason: to deliver a superior, reliable, high-quality experience to every high-speed Internet customer, every time they use our service,” says a company spokeswoman. “This new technique will ensure that all customers get their fair share of bandwidth every hour of the day. As we roll out these new practices, we’ll make sure our customers are fully informed.”

Robb Topolski, the independent network researcher who sparked off the FCC investigation when he first discovered the ISP was blocking BitTorrent uploads, has commended Comcast for its honesty in describing its tactics.

But he is unsure why Comcast is doing it. “Their own test results show that so few people who be impacted by this and they say that those that are impacted are only slightly impacted,” he said. “I’ve got to wonder why do it at all?”

Comcast has also installed a 250GB a month bandwidth cap for each subscriber.

In the past, the ISP reserved the right to terminate users when they reached an unspecified monthly bandwidth threshold. Users who exceed the 250GB cap twice in six months may have their account terminated for a year.

The UK’s Transport Research Laboratory has determined that if you take your hands off of your car steering wheel to send a text message, you are in more danger of crashing than if you were drunk.

The results of simulated driving conditions were published in the UK’s Times newspaper. Reaction time for motorists dropped by 25 percent for those sending text messages, while drunk people were 12 percent slower, and those on drugs were 4 percent slower again.

But the study found that its not just reaction time that is diminished by texting; failing to hold on to the steering wheel with phone in hand had a major impact on a driver’s ability. Drug users lost the ability to drive in their lane by 35 percent, compared to a staggering 91 percent of those sending a text while driving.

Commons sense dictates that anything that causes you to split your attention while driving is not only dangerous to yourself but dangerous to others. With the advent of Bluetooth headsets, and other wireless technologies, it’s frustrating to hear that I’m still in danger on the road because of a texting fanatic. IMO, if you have to text it, then it’s not urgent.

Details of Research in Motions Blackberry Storm have been leaked all over the internet, apparently from internal documents and a video presentation that shows how RIM intends to take on the mighty Apple iPhone.

The handset, which was previously referred to as ‘Thunder’, will reportedly be exclusive to Verizon in the USA and features a touch screen with haptic feedback and an interface the offers easy access to more consumer-focused applications.

The information appears in a “Talking Points” document, which was apparently distributed to employees prior to an official launch and an internal video that was supposed to remain a secret but is now readily available online.

Making the device exclusive to Verizon has surprised many, especially as the leaked document talks about being connected in “over 195 destinations world wide” which would indicate that the handset supports both CDMA and GSM technologies, however it looks like 3G is only supported on CDMA networks (EV-DO).

For a short time, the Verizon website was offering to take peoples email addresses and let them know when the Storm becomes available, however the page has been removed.

The video, ‘A Minute with Mike’, is hosted on vztvonline.com, a domain that’s registered to the same address as Verizon’s office. A YouTube version was on for a short while, but it was taken off quickly.

This could all be part of publicity stunt, it hard to tell, but the Blackberry Storm looks like it could be a pretty nifty piece of kit that could challenge for the iPhone’s crown.

Sky has dropped the gigabyte download restrictions on its “Max” package in order to offer unlimited broadband without any “fair use policy” repercussions.

The terms and conditions of the £10 per month LLU ADSL2+ package were altered in August, with limits on downloads for new and existing customers disappearing, hurrah!

They’re not the first ISP to remove download limits, but it is one of the cheapest options - Virgin Media doesn’t halt the flow of downloads either, and BT’s is extortionate at 24.99 per month.

This could be a signal for the rest of the industry to catch up on, so expect lots of ISPs to make packages a little more transparent. Ofcom’s ‘broadband code of practice’ begins in January, with new rules that mean ISPs will be required to warn customers when they breach fair use limits, and let them know what the consequences of their downloads could mean.

At present the vast majority of ISPs don’t tell their customers how many gigabytes are considered fair, because putting a number on it would mean “unlimited” marketing campaigns would breach advertising regulations.

A poll out today showed that customers of Sky are very happy with the service, with O2 coming in just behind.

The director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has told an audience at the launch of his new foundation that he had been discussing how the web can “help us filter good information from bad”.

In an interview with the BBC, Berners-Lee explained that he is increasingly worried about the proliferation of bogus information facilitated by his creation (that’s the internet for those who don’t know).

He said: “On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable…A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging.”

He said that the panic generated by the internet over the Hadron Collider’s likelihood of bringing the world to an end was an example of unscientific online panic.

Berners-Lee proposed solution to this apparent “problem” is to have some kind of centralised accreditation scheme for websites, and readers who are incapable of independent thought.

He argued, “I’m not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways,” he said. “So I’d be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways.”

If this idea sounds familiar, it is certainly reminiscent of Tim Reilly’s ditched ‘blogging code of practice’, which was thought-up to attempt to control the more heated web bloggers. Luckily for Digg, Technorati and the like, the angry blog is alive and well.

Berners-Lee di offer some less controversial announcements, such as his new World Wide Web Foundation receiving a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation to advance a web that is free and open, and “to expand the web’s capability and robustness, and to extend the web’s benefits to all people on the planet”.

What Berners-Lee’s foundation does exactly is not totally clear, but we do know that it plans to pursue its goals via technological innovation, web science and projects targeting underserved communities.

Berners-Lee said dramatically: “if the Foundation achieves all the things I can imagine now, we will have failed”.

Telecommunications regulator Ofcom has said that providers of internet telephony must now allow emergency 999 calls over their networks and release caller location information where technically feasible, or face the risk of enforcement action.

The new rule for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) providers came in to effect today. The change will affect businesses such as BT, Vonage and Skype that offer services that connect VoIP calls to the public telephone network.

Operators have been ordered to provide the ability to make calls to 999, the emergency number in the UK and 112, the number that most of Europe uses for assistance. Ofcom previously told operators to put stickers on any equipment that allows emergency calls where possible over a service.

The rule, known as General Condition 4 of the General Conditions of Entitlement, also provides that the network must provide Caller Location Information for calls “to the extent that is technically feasible”.

Ofcom stated that the term ‘technically feasible’ means that location-based information must be provided where the VoIP service is being used at a predominantly fixed location.

In May, a child from Calgary, Canada, died when an ambulance was dispatched to the wrong address in Ontario, 2,500 miles away, after his parents called using their VoIP system.

The requirements currently apply to fixed line and mobile communications providers but the VoIP industry had resisted their extension. In December last year, the Voice on the Net (VON) Coalition of Europe was set up as a lobby group, which includes Google, Microsoft and Skype among its founding members to influence the regulation of internet telephony.

The group warned against the “premature application of emergency call rules to VoIP services that are not a replacement for traditional home or business phone services”.

The VON Coalition added that this move “could actually harm public safety, stifle innovations critical to people with disabilities, stall competition, and limit access to innovative and evolving communication options where there is no expectation of placing a 112 call”.