According to the BBC, the ISPA in the UK (Internet Service Providers Association) has awarded the UK’s EU Presidency the prestigious award of “Villian Of The Year” for its part in driving home the European data retention laws which are due to come into effect this year.

Under the ruling, ISPs and telecoms will have to store customers phone and internet data in order to help the fight against terrorism. Although the content of the data (calls, emails etc.) won’t be recorded, their records will be, which means a huge cost to service providers who have to store this type of data.

We’ve already seen all the hype surrounding the Bush administration in the US seeking search records from Google recently. Fair play to Google for taking a stand and refusing to hand over their records, but how long before people’s privacy online is blown wide open, especially with call and internet records now possibly being held for up to two years at a time?

When your business relies heavily on a decent broadband connection (by decent, I’m using Eircom’s 3mb business line, though the upstream isn’t huge), its a pure pain in the ass when you have to spend the first part of your morning (about 40 minutes) waiting on hold before speaking to someone.

Actually, I never got to speak to anyone, it just kept going on and on. All I needed to know was if there was a line fault in the area. You contact an ISP I used to work for on tech support and the IVR system kicks in telling you theres a fault in your area to save you waiting on hold and yesterday I was informed they even send you text messages and keep you updated during the day!

So the broadband went.

We waited.

And waited.

By lunchtime I had to go home to send off print orders for jobs, check the mail and return to the office. Nothing by the afternoon.

So I resorted to dialup (56k – we pulled out the dual ISDN back in the summer to make way for BB) – borrowed a laptop (as I now refuse to install modems into any machines I build), found a length of spare phone cable I had and dialed in. 15 minutes to check my email, download a 250kb PDF and return to my office. The killer was, there was an error in the PDF so I had to ring to arrange another one to be sent as waiting on mail was going to be a joke – and fair play, they sent another one immediately, so I waited a further ten minutes (seen as the pages were cached it was running a little quicker) and got my updated PDF – which I then faxed away…. who the hell sends a fax any more?

Bottom line is, I have no idea how any Irish business could rely on dialup for their internet access and not make the move over to broadband. That and I can’t fathom the fact that one of the country’s leading ISP has to take more than 40 minutes to answer a tech support call to tell me whether or not it can be fixed or when the service goes live. Especially when every 3 minutes they tell you how important your call is!

Damn John for kicking my ass in Call of Duty for the last hour of the day!

I was a bit skeptical at first in relation to Google integrating GoogleTalk into GMail – but I’m pretty happy with it. I don’t use it with the webmail front, I prefer the traditional IM interface, but its nice being able to finally chat to a few Mac heads nice and simple without worrying about what version of what software you’re using!

Bridging the gap – about bloody time Seen as they’re busy taking over the world with so many bigger projects… what took them so long?