..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.

Nintendo has announced that it will release an upgraded model of its popular handheld, the Nintendo DS. Featuring a camera, music playback and more modernized features, it will come to market in Japan this year at a price not far above the current model.

According to reports from Japanese-language newspapers, pictures taken with the camera will be usable in games released for the system. Meanwhile, it is predicted that CDs and other music will be able to be imported onto the DS for playback.

The Wi-Fi antenna currently in use for multiplayer gaming is set to get a power boost, as well. The new wireless technology under the hood will be used to “more easily access news” and other up-to-date information such as weather.

The upgraded DS will be released in Japan this year at a price of “under 20,000 yen” ($189). For reference, the current DS sells in Japan for 16,800 yen ($159).

Australian IT is reporting that social networking site Facebook is looking for at least four people, including a head of sales, to be based in Sydney to form an Australian-based advertising team for the site, joining Canada and Sweden as places that the social network wants to expand into.

Currently, advertising has been handled by ninemsn since last December as part of a global deal done by Microsoft, which saw Microsoft paying US$240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the company.

Its rivals, however, have set up offices to sell local advertising in Australia. MySpace has an an Australian team since 2006, while Bebo appointed Francisco Cordero as its general manager last year.

The House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress have unanimously passed a bill that has been seen by the web radio stations as life or death. The new bill, The Webcaster Settlement Act, would now allow internet radio stations to negotiate with the music industry for a lower royalty rate than what was mandated by Congress last year.

It was passed by the house by a voice vote on Saturday.

The National Association of Broadcasters, who have been opposing the bill, have now said that they will drop its opposition when it moves to the Senate to be voted on either Sunday or Monday.

OK, you have to admit that this product is funny; but at least it may be useful when you have multiple USB connections that you want to plug in to that Macbook Air (yes, I’m still not getting over that it has only one USB connector!). The Super Kid USB 4-Port Hub, though funny, brings a whole different approach to the design – including the flexibility so that you don’t have ports crowded up against each other. And plus, it only costs $14 – US dollars as usual.

Google has taken a public stand against a new proposition that would see gay marriages being illegal again, after the California Supreme Court recently overturned the ban a few months ago, and will also amend in its constitution that would see marriage between a man and a women valid in California.

Read More over at The Journal >

Six months after Wal*Mart jumped into the music download business, joining Amazon, Napster and Apple’s iTunes, back in August 2007, they have decided to make the switch to DRM-free music. That’s great, but what would happen to all of the music that was purchased before the announcement?

Well, the answer is that it won’t be playable, if you plan to move it to another computer. Why? Well, they are planning to switch off the server that allows you to authorise computers to play the music that you bought on October 9th. The good thing is that they will be able to play the music on the computer that was used to purchase the song.

To combat this problem, they are sending emails to those affected and telling you to burn them on CDs to back them up. So, that means you have to waste many CD-Rs just to get your collection away from the DRM. Another solution could be that they allow you to just download the same version of the song without DRM, since the music quality would be degraded if you burn it to a CD (Audio), but I guess they haven’t thought of that.

You can read the letter after the jump. [Via BoingBoing]

Read More >

Everyone loves the Chinese, since they produce most of our crap. And most of that crap are imitation of that crap that are actually made in China. Anyway, we just found a store that is showcasing this crap to make a quick buck – well, it’s obvious they are fake. But what gets me are the perplex features that they claim to offer…

First of, its the Shake to Control GSM Quad-band IP001; which says that it’s “especial function” is to “Shake to elect song, ditheringge elect motif picture”. I was like WTF? Anyway, it also supports MP3 and MPEG4 playback, and is quad band. It also features (according to its description):

iPhone style cellular phone, Quad-band PDA Cell phone, Bluetooth, A2DP, JAVA , Outlook, Email, MSN，shake control, we will give you 1GB Card for Free,3.5-inch TFT color screen Integrated 2.0mega-pixel CMOS camera.

As well, the team over at Gearlog came across this knockoff and found some other ones too, like this one – the M88+ Phone. This phone (see right) looks like the iPhone at the front, right? Well, it happens to be running on Windows Mobile 6.0. The features? Well they are:

• Quad-band（GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz）Supports: Work for all over world.
• Language：English，Spaish，Portugal，Chinese (complexity),Chinese (simpleness)
• Support mp3, midi, wav, wma, amr of ringtone formats
• Music:Support MP3 / WAV / WMA format and play MP3 at background, support forward and pause
• Video:3GP, MP4, AVI, ASF, WMV, support AVI (third party software) / MP4 / 3GP / ASF of films formats to play in full screen, forward and adjust saturation of color
• Connectivity:GPRS / WAP / WIFI
• Internal Memory:Support to extend
• Card slot:MicroSD
• Messaging:Unlimited SMS / MMS
• Data transfer:USB / Bluetooth, realize U disc and activsync synchronization with the third-party software
• Games:Built-in PPC games, can download thousands of PPC 3D games, and built-in the Java Midp 2.0 also can be downloaded thousands of entertaining games, which will bring you into the funny game\’s world
• Camera:2.0MP high-definition camera
• Image output size (max.): 1600*1200 pixels
• Support video unlimited record with sound, and 320*240 films fluent play

And no, we are not kidding with the spelling mistakes. They are actually what they spelt it on their features and descriptions. And yes, I was shocked over the fact that 2MP is the new “high-definition” camera.

First it was blogging, then it was YouTube – now Twitter is now involved in the US’s presidential coverage, after launching its election website using the recently acquired Summize to showcase all the tweets made by users, along with specific filters for all both the Republican and Democratic candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, while showing their own tweets in a special section.

It has also partnered up with Current TV to help in its election coverage, allowing the “tweets” to be displayed on-screen during the presidential debates.

uTorrent, after being acquired by BitTorrent (not the protocol) in 2006, has now seen its alpha version of the new Mac version surfaced on The Pirate Bay, and its parent company was not happy about that – oh what sweet irony.

The new version, developed in Cocoa, will now see the software supporting both Windows and Mac versions, after previously being a Windows-only software; and while the software is an Alpha release, it has gained positive feedback.

While BitTorrent hasn’t given any indication on when this will be released as an beta, or a full version, it could be a quite long time to develop. However, you can view the images from TorrentFreak.

Image: TorrentFreak