It looks like Australia is going to get a non-cable TV video on demand download service thanks to QuickFlix, according to the SMH. This would be a real service to those with fast unlimited internet connections, but I have some doubts over the commercial success of this technology without some further work. I think that for this to work they would need to have partnering agreements with the major ISP’s… Such as iinet, internode, Telstra, Optus and Westnet such that users on those ISP’s did not have this traffic counted on their downloads.

I can just see a person on a 300 MByte/month plan downloading a 1-2 GByte movie (after compression) and then getting a $200 bill for excess bandwidth use. Try to tell me that will not happen. It will. Even if it is not intentional, it will be with some teenager who uses his parents credit card or account. Whilst I do not like such a service being restricted to an ISP, I think it would need to be set up so that you got tons of warnings if you were not with an ISP which they were peering against.

In Rome comes news that a Teacher is sueing because the trains in Italy are so unpredictable and are causing him stress. There are two things that Musolini did in Italy. He preserved a lot of the Roman architecture that was being destroyed by development. And he made the trains run on time!

Fibre Optics
http://www.webcastgroup.com/client/start.asp?wid=0671209052011