Stories about: British Telecom

The telecommunications industry remains split over the need for structural separation in the National Broadband Network (NBN), after submissions to government from ISPs and consumer advocacy groups failed to agree on a suitable regulatory framework.

Telstra has submitted to the Federal government its proposal for what regulatory framework it believes is needed to meet Senator Conroy's vision of an open, competitive high speed national broadband network.

The T4 group has made available on its Web site presentations made by economic and telecommunications industry experts at the T4 national broadband network regulatory seminar, held in Canberra last week.

Fulfilling the demand for broadband to millions of users across the globe takes more than just ingenuity, it takes energy -- lots of it. Accounting for nearly 1 per cent of total power consumption in the UK alone, BT Group was faced with a dilemma: how to scale and roll out new services to take advantage of new market opportunities without overburdening its energy budget -- and the climate.

For a decade, IPv6 has been the classic chicken-and-egg conundrum: There has been little North American demand for IPv6, so US carriers haven't introduced IPv6 services; without commercial IPv6 services available from carriers, US government agencies and businesses can't migrate to the next-generation Internet technology.

Carbonite has updated its online PC backup product. For a uniform price Carbonite version 3.5 provides an "all you can eat" style online backup service aimed at consumers and SMEs.

At the Cebit trade show, DS2 and Devolo are showing faster power line networks, supporting speeds of up to 400M bps (bits per second) -- twice the maximum capacity that the technology provides today.

While Google has reportedly shown an interest in collaborating with Yahoo to ward off a potential takeover bid from Microsoft, and other companies have contacted Yahoo, it's unlikely that any of them could beat Microsoft's offer, analysts said Monday.

In an effort to slim down a crowded femtocell architecture field, the Femto Forum this week announced a program to unite different device models.

When we went through a redesign of ComputerWorld Canada last year we decided to call our feature section IT Business. This was in part because a Web site I launched some years ago, ITBusiness.ca, had never had its own print component, and in part because I thought IT Business was a good way to describe what the in-depth stories we write are really about.

You might not agree with him. You even might not believe what he says. But British Telecom does. Ian Pearson has been BT's futurologist since 1991. His job it to imagine where today's technologies will lead us. Artificial intelligence, genetic modification, intelligent viruses, imaginary civilizations and Second Life 10.0, as well as some pretty nasty scenarios involving robots like the Terminator are all real possibilities he included in his 2006 Technology Timeline. In this interview, Pearson talks about his profession, explains why he doesn't think we will understand intelligent machines when they finally arise, and warns to the big ethical dilemmas our technological civilization will have to face sooner or later.