..Being a big fanboy of Exetel, this is my first post on Techgeek in a long time:)

Well over the past 2 weeks, Exetel have been doing some changes to their ADSL1 & 2+ offerings that go via Telstra & Optus wholesale networks and being delivered to the Exetel subscriber. Their latest plan table has seen vast upgrades in quota on the ‘onpeak’ period of 15% to 300% on some plans. Offpeak is still staying the same generous 48GB offer on all ADSL1 & ADSL2+ plans.

Currently Exetel are on their way to becoming a big leading ISP, their sales have been increasting and now they have a peak of 75,000 customers connected to their network on ADSL1, ADSL2+, HSPA & business services.

Really whats expanding at Exetel are their bandwidth links internationally, listed on Steve Waddigton’s (Network Engineer At Exetel’s) blog, he said that “Connected customers has increased by 20% since 1 Jan 2008″ straight after that in his press, he said “Bandwidth use has increased by 34% since 1 Jan 2008. Looking even further back, in our first year of operation we needed to provision bandwidth at 23-24kbps per user to meet peak demand (and I recall some carrier suppliers at the time commenting on how high that was, since they were provisioning at 10kbps). Now, 4 3/4 years later, we need 46kbps per user.”

Even the MRTG graphs show that:

Looks like Exetel have been through a successful year so far, with the new additional services, they are deffently doing a great job.

When Microsoft launched Windows Server Home, the new moved silently in the market. Dedicated servers “family”, the system does not in fact a specific request as we can see ships, but could create its own audience by concentrating the digital life of an entire family.

A few months after its launch, a problem boring appeared in one of the major features of the system. Windows Server Home makes it possible to aggregate more than one hard drive and bring up the total as a single entity, removing the requirement to switch to appoint disks with letters. Technology Drive Extender is responsible for managing and guiding the disk access in the future.

This technology uses a driver that actually causes the problem. In some cases, data corruptions have been reported, and Microsoft had announced work on the problem. Now that the cause has been found, the publisher announced that an update will be available in June to correct this concern embarrassing.

Although still wait three months to be rid of the problem, Microsoft is currently testing a beta version of the patch. It modifies the operation of the system at a low level, which explains the time necessary.

TPG and SP Telemedia (SOUL) and have announced a merger in a deal worth $250 million.

“The combined group will have one of the largest DSLAM networks in Australia and will be one of Australia’s most profitable telecommunications companies in terms of profit margin”, said the announcement.

“In addition to the benefits from combining the SP Telemedia and TPG networks, there will be opportunities to increase network traffic, bundle and cross-sell both companies’ products, rationalise rented premises, and reduce personnel and administrative costs. Access to TPG’s DSLAMs will also reduce SP Telemedia’s capital expenditure as its customer base expands.”

Today Swedish public prosecutor Hakan Roswall formally charged four people responsible for operating The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker site, for accessory and conspiracy to break that country’s copyright law, which could lead to fines or up to 2 years in prison.

Hans Fredrik Neij, Per Svartholm Warg, Peter Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundström, are accused of “promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws.”

Charges include some 33 cases of alleged copyright infringement: 20 albums, 9 movies, and 4 computer games. Considering the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of different selections of each of these made available vis a vis torrent trackers on the site over the years I’d give anything to see what specific content the Swedish prosecutor decided to single out in the case.

Roswall is seeking damages of 1.2 million kronor ($185,000 USD ) and wants the confiscation of the 4 the suspects’ computers.

Evidence gathered by the prosecutor includes information provided by the suspects as well as interviews with staff at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Agency (APB), a non-governmental organization representing the entertainment industry.

One of the arguments in the case against them seems to be the fact that they sell advertising on the site.

“The company’s claimed business model is based on selling advertising to brands that wanted to reach its 10 million users in more than 30 countries, while paying nothing for the content that it uses to attract those users,” reads a statement by the IFPI.

John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of IFPI, which represents the recording industry worldwide, says: “The operators of The Pirate Bay have always been interested in making money, not music. The Pirate Bay has managed to make Sweden, normally the most law abiding of EU countries, look like a piracy haven with intellectual property laws on a par with Russia.

“We welcome the filing of these charges in Sweden. The evidence presented by the prosecutor shows that The Pirate Bay, which claims to be motivated by idealism, is really motivated by making money.”

Ludvig Werner, chairman of IFPI Sweden, says: “The Pirate Bay operation has caused massive financial damage to rightsholders. The profiteers behind The Pirate Bay have no interest in free speech, and they are not running The Pirate Bay because they love music and films. They are totally mercenary and are driven by the desire for personal wealth.”

But, as several people have pointed out, no matter the outcome of the case The Pirate Bay site will continue to exist.

“The Pirate Bay is not going to be down for a single minute. The Pirate Bay is now established in a number of countries, so there’s no one place in which to push the off button,” said Magnus Eriksson, a spokesman for pro-file sharing lobby group Piratbyrån.

As for them actually being convicted, he said that “It’s not very likely.”

“In the course of the investigation there have been attempts to bring up various things that The Pirate Bay has supposedly been guilty of. Before it was financial crime, and now this accessory thing seems to be the last straw for the prosecutor,” Eriksson pointed out.

To those that think piracy hurts music artists and filmmakers he says to them that “Artists have a lot of ways to earn money, and in that respect they are actually helped by file-sharing.”

“These charges will not help artists. Instead they are part of a wider campaign from the anti-piracy side to stop people downloading,” said Eriksson.

For its part a blog post on The Pirate Bay comments on the charges and repeats the same message about how no matter what the trial’s outcome The Pirate Bay will live on.

“In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site,” it reads. “The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We’ve been here for years and we will be here many more.”

After having scattered their servers throughout several countries following the raid back in 2006, my bet is it will indeed continue to operate no matter the verdict in the case.

This weekend, my 13 year-old daughter and I set out to replace her first-generation MacBook. She instead picked a pink Sony VAIO running Windows Vista Home Premium. I bought her the MacBook on launch day, May 16, 2006, at one of Apple’s two Bethesda, Md., retail stores. The computer came configured with a 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 512MB of RAM (which I upgraded to 1GB), 64MB dedicated integrated graphics memory, 60GB hard drive, DVD burner, 802.11b/g wireless and Bluetooth. She does lots of video editing, which was getting increasingly difficult because of the puny hard disk, system RAM and graphics memory.

My daughter also had some interest in Windows Vista, because of certain applications not available for Mac OS X. We went to Fashion Valley Mall in San Diego looking at a new MacBook or a pink VAIO VGN-CR290EAP. The VAIO would mean a switch from the Mac. The mall has Apple and Sony Style stores.

View: The full story @ MS-Watch

Security breaches that are allowing the financial details of tens of thousands of Britons to be sold on the internet are to be investigated by the country’s information watchdog.

Without paying a single penny, The Times downloaded banking information belonging to 32 people, including a High Court deputy judge and a managing director. The private account numbers, PINs and security codes were offered as tasters by illegal hacking sites in the hope that purchases would follow.

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, will begin an investigation into the security breach today and Scotland Yard is also investigating. Experts said that the findings suggested that more personal data than ever before was going astray. The Times found: More than 100 websites trafficking British bank details A fraudster offering to sell 30,000 British credit card numbers for less than £1 each A British “e-passport” for sale, although the Government insists that they are unhackable.

15 Years ago, the first SMS was sent via the Vodafone network. Papworth sent the text on 3 December using a PC terminal and traditional keyboard, while the recipient, Vodafone’s Richard Jarvis, received the message using an Orbitel 901 handset.  Well these days, Australia alone sends 2.61 Billion SMS a year via the Telstra network, so these are taken for granted.

“I can remember the event, being there, typing [the message] in and getting confirmation that it had got through. But I wasn’t the chosen one or anything like that. Eventually the time came when we had to take the system down to Vodafone to plug it in and get it working on the live network. Because I’d been working on the interface stuff it made sense for me to go down and do it,” Papworth said.

Well recently Optus Fusion was unveiled in Australia, and the only good thing about it was the home phone, you could basically make unlimited calls only paying $99 a month and that included 20GB of Internet Quota, but we go behind the sciences to show you how the performance of the service really is. Let alone counting uploads, the speeds weren’t as at advertised. 24mbps, advertising looks so good, but when it is fake, the $99 isn’t really worth it, well have a look below:

Test 1:

Test Results from Oz Broadband Speed Test
———————————-­
Test run on 01/11/2007 @ 11:48 PM

Mirror: OptusNet
Data: 3 MB
Test Time: 5.2 secs

Your line speed is 4.71 Mbps (4708 kbps).
Your download speed is 589 KB/s (0.57 MB/s).

Test 2:

Test Results from Oz Broadband Speed Test
———————————-­
Test run on 02/11/2007 @ 05:41 PM

Mirror: OptusNet
Data: 3 MB
Test Time: 102.2 secs

Your line speed is 240 kbps (0.24 Mbps).
Your download speed is 30 KB/s (0.03 MB/s).

Test 3:

Test Results from Oz Broadband Speed Test
———————————-­
Test run on 04/11/2007 @ 09:39 PM

Mirror: OptusNet
Data: 3 MB
Test Time: 13.19 secs

Your line speed is 1.86 Mbps (1857 kbps).
Your download speed is 232 KB/s (0.23 MB/s).

As you can see, the speeds are all over the place & they don’t even reach a MBPS. I got a friend on Internode ADSL1 to do a test and his results were outstanding:

Test run on 01/10/2007 @ 03:54 PM

Mirror: Internode
Data: 15 MB
Test Time: 23.67 secs

Your line speed is 5.29 Mbps (5294 kbps).
Your download speed is 662 KB/s (0.65 MB/s).

Internode ADSL1 has just beaten Optus ADSL2+. Optus really do hear us, they hear we want super fast broadband!

Is the PS3 pushing Blu-ray or is Blu-ray pushing the PS3? Right now, I would say that Sony’s PlayStation 3 is pushing Blu-ray. Back in March, in response to a question on whether putting Blu-ray in the PS3 was a sound decision, Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios President Phil Harrison was quoted as saying: “No regrets whatsoever. And it’s those kinds of decisions, painful though they were to live through in the last quarter of 2006, those are the decisions that are going to propel PlayStation 3 to be a platform that lasts for ten years, like we’ve seen with PS1 and PS2. And it will be, I believe, reflected on as the smartest decision we ever made.”

Apple Inc. no longer accepts cash for iPhone purchases and now limits sales of the cell phone to two per person in a move to stop people from reselling them.

The new policy started Thursday, said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris. Before then, there was no cash restriction and the purchase limit was five per person.

“Customer response to the iPhone has been off the charts, and limiting iPhone sales to two per customer helps us ensure that there are enough iPhones for people who are shopping for themselves or buying a gift,” Kerris said. “We’re requiring a credit or debit card for payment to discourage unauthorized resellers.”

View: Full story at Yahoo!