Despite the increasing number of service providers offering video-on-demand services via cable or broadband, managing director of Virgin Media's online operations predicts that we're still two to three years away from ubiquity.

Alex Green, speaking at the Online TV and Video Forum in London, said that his company was working towards creating a "seamless, intuitive experience" spanning TVs, computers and mobile devices, but admitted that "VoD is not yet a fully-fledged family proposition" despite "the consumer... becoming increasingly sophisticated".

"Our solution is to create a network in the home that delivers entertainment on demand to any screen in the house. This will take two to three years," said Green.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future. While you were in bed this morning, dreaming of Konnie Huq running in slow motion in the snow, LG was hard at work in Korea (where it's midday when it's 3am here) putting ridiculously futuristic technology on a mobile phone chip.

The tech is called LTE, which (doesn't really) stand for "the Long Term Evolution of 3GPP". It's basically the plans that the 3rd Generation Partnership Project has for the future of 3G and cellular broadband in general. Some people refer to it as 4G.

That image to the right, when uncensored, is the cover to German heavy metal band Scorpions' 1976 album "Virgin Killer". It was the centre of a storm yesterday after six British ISPs blocked their subscribers from accessing pages that featured it, including Wikipedia.

As well as the block of the offending page, another result was that Wikipedia editors and administrators in the UK became suddenly unable to edit pages when not logged in. This has prompted an uproar amongst users of the site - which relies on editing by volunteers for its content.

O2 has just joined 3 and T-Mobile in offering a pay-as-you-go mobile broadband package. It'll sell you a USB dongle for just £30, and then you can choose from £2 a day with a 500MB data allowance, £7.50 a week with a 1GB allowance or £15 a month with a 3GB allowance. You'll also get free Wi-Fi at hotspots operated by The Cloud.

This seems to currently be the cheapest on the market. It's closest rival is 3's ugly Huawei e220 modem, for £40. 3 charges £10 for 1GB, £15 for 3GB and £25 for 7GB, offering more data if you need it, at a slightly higher price.

This is a positive step for mobile broadband. For just £30, there's now a very low barrier to entry, and with prices as cheap as £2 for 500MB, I'm seriously considering picking on of these dongles up and keeping it in my bag for 'just in case' occasions, like the train, or an airport. I'll wait till I get to try the INQ1's dongle capabilities first, though.

Press Release (via O2 Press Centre Twitter)

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If you waited 15 seconds or so for this page to load, then you'll know this already, but your broadband is pretty slow. The Office of National Statistics says that despite Ofcom claiming last year that the average broadband speed in the country is 4.6Mb/sec, more than 42% of connections are less than half that speed - slower than 2Mb/sec.

It turns out that a handful of people using 24Mb/sec services are skewing the stats upward. Worst of all, these figures refer to the advertised 'headline' data transfer rates not actual speeds. Statistics for actual speeds would probably be closer to 1Mb/sec, or even lower.

But perhaps it doesn't even matter. 55% of you have no idea how fast your broadband is, anyway. That said, nearly a fifth of you aren't happy with it, says a separate report issued by OfCom.

(via PC Pro)

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IP Vision has announced a new hybrid set-top box which can be used to access the complete range of Freeview channels, acts as a digital video recorder (DVR), as well as being able to access a range of video on demand content over the Internet.

The company is keen to point out that this is a subscription-free, operator independent service, unlike those from the likes of BT, Virgin Media and Tiscali. It can be used with any broadband provider.

At launch, over 1,200 hours of content will be available in the VoD library including films and programmes from Paramount, ITV, Turner Broadcasting, Eagle Vision, Fremantle, Entertainment Rights and Aardman.

Virgin Media has been testing out 50Mbps broadband for some time now, and now a few residents of Warrington will get access to the same super-fast system for two months at the same price as their existing Virgin Media broadband package.

Though the Register reports these lucky 200 residents as the "first", a number of other Virgin Media customers in Ashford, Folkestone and Dover have already been using the souped-up system.

Ladies and gentlemen! Roll up! Roll up! The gadget freak show is in town! Here, behind a wall of steel for your safely, is the Silicon Mountain Allio - a 32" or 42" HDTV that also squeezes a Core 2 Duo PC and Blu-ray player into its case.

It even manages PVR-like recording features thanks to its PC bit's hard drive. Plus you can split the screen if your brain's capable of multitasking and you want to watch TV, browse the internet and play video games simultaneously because you're THAT CONNECTED. Here's a look at the beast...

Careful, she's hungry! The 42" model does the full 1080p spec, with the 32" version maxing out at 720p. The Allio is available in America right now, with the 32" one going for $1599 and the 42-incher costing from $1999. Bigger hard drives for the PC part and larger chunks of RAM up the price, which is a thrillingly novel fact to take into account when buying a telly.

(Via VisionMan)

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If you spend your lunch break positioning your monitor so no one else can see it and happily browsing through Raven Riley's charming online photography albums while you deep-throat a Gregg's sausage roll - YOUR TIME IS UP, SICKO.

Network safety specialist Paraben has revealed the latest development in its world of computerised forensics, a file-scanner that, no doubt thanks to everyone at Paraben spending ages analysing all kinds of porn themselves, can identify DIRTY photos on users' computers and instantly grass the offender up to the boss. If you're a fan of beach volleyball you'd better start being more careful...

The Federal Communications Commission has voted 5-0 in favour of opening up the "white space" of unused airwaves between broadcast TV channels to be used for enhanced wireless broadband and communications.

This "Wi-Fi on steroids", as Google describes it, could offer a much larger range than current Wi-Fi technology, thus allowing greater broadband penetration in remote areas, and might also be used to set up local ad hoc networks directly between devices.

Vodafone has announced its new USB Stick Pro offering customers access to its HSDPA 7.2Mbps network, claiming that it has the most reliable and fastest mobile broadband network in the UK.

Having said that, the announcement is honest enough to warn users that average download speeds are anywhere between 1-5Mbps, with maximum upload speeds of 2Mbps but an average of 1Mbps.

Not only is Sky spending heavily on advertising at present, hoping to improve upon its recent increase in subscribers, but it could be about to bid a cool £450m for the broadband provider Tiscali.

If Sky's take-over of Tiscali, with around 1.2m broadband subscribers, is successful it would put its broadband business into third place, behind BT and Virgin Media.

Other interested parties had included the Carphone Warehouse, Vodafone and BT, but Sky is now believed to be in exclusive talks with Tiscali.

Sky

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Consumer surveys are all very good for finding out what people like and don't like, but so much the better when a commissioning company takes note of the results and changes its product accordingly.

So it is with O2, which carried out a survey of consumers to find out what they thought of mobile broadband.

Over one in ten responded by saying that they felt they'd been mis-sold a package, with a third saying that they were paying more than they believed the deal stated, while one-fifth cited poor coverage as a bugbear. Around one in six said that there was no returns guarantee if the service wasn't right for them, while half wanted free use of Wi-Fi hotspots as standard.

People of Suffolk and Oldham, prepare to be happy. The Government has announced that these will be the first places in the country to benefit from the "Broadband for all" scheme as of February next year.

Schools Minister Jim Knight will oversee the spending of £300m on this project that will initially provide 20,000 selected low income families with money for either a new computer, software or internet for a year.

New research from consumer group uSwitch.com has shown that 6.2 million broadband customers wrongly believe they have an unlimited broadband service. They don't understand, or simply haven't read, the fair usage policy that every provider except Sky applies to its "unlimited" packages.

A further 7.5 million do not know what their limit is. Adding that figure to the 6.2 million covers 80% of UK broadband customers. Only one in four consumers have actually read the terms and conditions of their broadband contract. Worst of all, one million users have exceeded or nearly exceeded their usage cap. It's clear that much more honest marketing is needed around broadband contracts.

uSwitch.com (via Easier.com)

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What is this with free broadband to businessmen, woman and cats? First BT gets Peter Jones to wave his dongle in our collective face and now Orange adds insult to injury by offering free broadband to small business customers who opt for the Orange Solo mobile phone packages.

Mercifully, Orange already offers some kind of free broadband to consumers of the same eight meg speed and actually I'm beginning to wonder if this latest announcement makes any difference or is simply there as a way of shouting against BT's offer of free mobile broadband to BT Business Broadband customers?

Mobile operator underdogs 3 has just launched an addition to its family of wireless dongles - a wireless router. It's quite a smart idea - it allows you to plug a 3 wireless dongle in, and it'll act like an access point, when there isn't one normally available. Given usual 3G speeds, however, how fast this would actually run when split between "up to 4" people is open to debate.

It'll work on the move, thanks to an included rechargable battery. 3 reckons it could even replace home broadband for some people. I'm a little skeptical of that, at least until 3G speeds improve, but I suppose if you're just surfing the net and not doing much downloading, then it might work.

Do you live in Muswell Hill, London or Whitchurch, Cardiff? If so, you'll be pleased as punch to hear that you're soon going to be offered 40MBit/s broadband from BT. Of course, by "soon", I actually mean "they're going to send the engineers in soon", so you won't get your hands on it till early 2010 at the earliest. In the meantime, there's always Virgin Media...

BT will be rolling out fibre-optic cable to roadside cabinets that cover 15,000 premises, starting next summer. The announcement follows BT's promise to invest loads o' dosh in their fibreoptic network. A national rollout of the tech would apparently cost £5.1 billion, but BT have pledged just £1.5 billion so far, until Ofcom gives them more control over pricing.

(via the Register)

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Of all the people in the world you'd like to have communicating with alien leaders in a potential "first contact" scenario, would Bebo users really be the #1 choice? Well, that's what's happening, as the social networking site's users' suggestions for images and text to send into space as part of its 'A Message From Earth' project have been... sent into space.

501 messages from Bebo users - including photos of Richard and Judy and pop band McFly's opinions on Cheryl Cole - were sent off from Ukraine's National Space Agency yesterday in a fantastic waste of everyone's time. Here's Bebo's sensational illustration of how sending messages into space works:

The messages will take a shade over 20 years to get to "Earth like" planet Gliese 581c, much to the bemusement of the local rocks.

(Via Bebo)

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Poor old Qamar Masood-Mirza was said to have been running an "unsophisticated" operation, in which he nicked equipment he was supposed to be installing in people's homes in order to sell it on eBay.

BT colleagues suspected him of selling the "internet connection equipment" and looked for it on eBay - they found it and tracked Qamar down from his eBay ID, which he'd rather amateurishly registered using his real details. The BT engineer made himself a £3k profit flogging stuff he'd nicked from his employers - money he's been ordered to repay in return for his nine-month prison sentence for theft being suspended.

He was ordered to pay £3,207.40 back to BT and £474 in court costs, and will be made to do 250 hours of community service - which we'd hope he'll be spending setting up routers for the elderly.

(Via The Slough Express)

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