Datacentre provider Sungard AS entered administration, earlier this week.
Sky News claims the AWS and Dell partner has called in Teneo Restructuring to try and secure its future in the face of rising energy costs, a stand-off with landlords over rent prices and bad fallout from COVID-19.
Sungard customers include the NHS, Home Office and Npower and it runs datacentres and workplace recovery centres across the UK and employs nearly 300 people, with its EMEA headquarters based at Heathrow.
Millions in the UK could be using insecure routers according to an investigation carried out by Which?
A survey of more than 6,000 adults conducted in December 2020 found that millions of households could be using devices which are more than five years old and are no longer being supported with firmware updates.
Among the security flaws discovered were weak default passwords which are easy to guess by hackers, as well as local network vulnerabilities which would allow hackers to direct users to malicious websites.
Which? claims it sent some of the most used older devices to security specialists Red Maple Technologies, who discovered problems with more than half of them which included ISPs such as Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk, EE and Vodafone.
Sky has entered the UK mobile market with a SIM-only deal that allows data allowances to roll over each month, and offers free calls to the 11 million British households that buy its telly services.
The broadcaster said that it was “time to shake up” the mobile market, particularly in data, where many customers paid for more than they used because they were worried about exceeding their allowance, the pay TV group said .
Sky is the last of Britain’s big four broadband providers to offer mobile to its customers, giving it the full “quad play” offer, which also includes TV and fixed-line telecoms.
Stephen van Rooyen, Sky’s UK and Ireland chief executive, said the company had asked more than 30,000 potential customers what they wanted from a mobile service, and more flexibility on data was top of the list.
“We’ve designed it based on what people told us they want – it’s easy, flexible and transparent and it puts the customer in control,” he said
Sky is also piggybacking on the O2 network, although it will issue its own SIM cards and handle all parts of the customer relationship.
Mobile customers will not receive a combined bill for all Sky services, however, as the company said customers preferred to keep an individual relationship with their mobile provider.
Sky is offering three packages of 1GB, 3GB and 5GB of data a month priced at 10 pounds, 15 pounds and 20 pounds, respectively, with free calls and texts for its TV customers.
One of the sales problems for 4K TVs has been a lack of content, but it appears that Sky is getting ready to fix that.
Dubbed SkyQ, the gear will be in the shops soon. Coincidentally it appears soon after BT’s Ultra HD box began selling online.
Like EE TV, Sky’s new box will enable you to share broadcasts across smartphones and tablets as families move towards viewing TV on multiple devices.
It will also let you watch or record at least four programmes at once although that will require you to learn how to programme the damn thing.
Apparently SkyQ’s killer feature is 4K football which means that it will be only useful for people who want to watch grossly overpaid, tax dodging morons running up and down a field kicking a ball.
For the rest of the world who wants entertainment that investment in a 4K telly is still a waste of money until Sky and its ilk start upgrading their lower res content.
Sky will launch its box within a month or two so we will know then. The company has not released much in the way of content pricing either. If it is like 3D it will probably be a bit expensive.
Broadband supplied by Sky will automatically stop customers from seeing pornography unless people actively opt out.
Advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a TV, website and several press adverts for Virgin Media’s cable broadband service saying that they were misleading punters.
Rivals BT and Sky Broadband (BSkyB), moaned that the Virgin promotions “misled” consumers by claiming the service offered Internet download speeds that were “5x faster than Sky and BT’s regular broadband”.
Virgin Media’s TV promotion claimed that customers would be able to “download five times faster than BT’s regular broadband. It invited viewers to visit virginmedia.com/ourspeeds “for verification“.
BT said that the webpage in question did not provide sufficient information for viewers to verify the comparison that had been made.
Both BT and Sky Broadband complained against several almost identical claims made in other ads. Both ISPs described the “5x faster than Sky and BT’s regular broadband” claim as “misleading”.
They said that not all Virgin Media customers would always be able to “download 5x faster” than Sky’s and BT’s broadband customers.
Virgin Media and its advertising partner, Clearcast, felt that the webpage listed above did provide “all of the necessary information to allow viewers to verify the comparisons” and that the “5x faster” statement would understood by viewers not to be “absolute”.
The ASA disagreed and concluded the information provided was not sufficient to ensure the details of the comparison could be verified.
In its ruling it said that while consumers were likely to be aware that the speed of broadband services would vary according to factors such as the time of day, claims that consumers would be able to “download 5x faster than Sky and BT’s regular broadband” were not in conditional language.
It was considered they were likely to be understood to mean that Virgin’s superfast service was always five times faster than Sky’s and BT’s regular services, even when normal variations such as the time of day were taken into account, the ASA said.
As a result, Virgin Media has unfortunately seen a bunch of its adverts banned in their current form and the provider has once more been told to “ensure they provided sufficient information about comparisons to allow them to be verified” and warned to stop making absolute claims if they could not be proved.
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