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As the newly released OFCOM UK interactive research map shows, there is still a massive disparagey between the Broadband Speed have’s and have not’s in the UK.

Ofcom hopes that the map will help the UK government see where investment is needed to being the UK up to speed of other countries and hopefully put the UK out in front of many others.

The map in fully interactive and provides a wide variety of information based on the various regions in the UK. It’s worth a look and a play with to see what the speeds & Broadband take up is in your own area.

From my own point of view, I continue to receive good broadband speeds through my BT Infinity line, although I can see a slight tail off in the download speed, but at an average of 30MB, I cannot complain at all. It may just be that that more users are being added to my fibre spur and the bandwidth is being taken up with TV/Movie viewing, gaming etc.

In the end, is this not what high-speed broadband is about and the fact that I can still receive these types of speed over a twisted copper pair of wires is amazing!

The Daily Telegraph published this story yesterday, again stirring up the controversy about FM Radio frequencies being turned off in favour of DAB Radio.

I’ve posted a number of times about this and I am still convinced that this would be a serious backwards step in the delivery of quality of broadcast radio in the UK.

It shows again how a supposed industry regulator (OFCOM) is completely out of touch with the ordinary public and seems to be indulging in an over enthusiastic pandering exercise with big business.

If this change is goes ahead, every radio in the UK will have to be replaced, including car radios, at the same time opening the floodgates to massive imports of non-UK produced DAB radios!

Why does officialdom want to interfere with our lives some much? OFCOM has yet to officially divulge a date for the switch off, which may be a late as 2020.

However, unless there is a concerted protest effort by the public it looks like we will end up with a rubbish quality radio broadcast system at sometime in the near future. Write to your MP about it here.

Read a great article in the Thursday Telegraph by Peter Oborne about the fallibility of David Cameron and his obviously bad judgements in hiring Andy Coulson & his cosying up too close the Murdoch ‘clan’!

Oborne also points out that these issues have also happened to past political leaders, which makes Cameron’s errors of judgment even more surprising; clearly he did not major in political history during his education!

If he is not careful, the effects of the NOTW debacle will engulf him (and probably Clegg) and we’ll end up with see yet another hamstrung UK government, just when the country needs more decisive actions to rectify the current economic situation.

It appears that Beko fridge-freezer fires began four years ago!

As I mentioned in my previous post on this issue, it seems incredible to me that we are only now learning about this issue.

What happened to Consumer Protection? What happened to Trading Standards? What happened to the government looking after it’s population?

It seems to me that so many organisations appear to be completely disconnected from the real world that we have live in. Somewhere, someone knew about this & I expect that they either could not be bothered to tell the public or perhaps they were prevented from doing so by business rules!

After publishing the previous post I decided to create another listing all of the MySociety websites in a clearer format.

• Write To Them – Enter a postcode and it’ll tell you who all your local representatives are, and a bit about who you should contact for which reasons.

• They Work For You – tells you everything you could want to know about what your Member of Parliament gets up to in Westminster. Uncover their voting record, read or watch their speeches on video, subscribe to email alerts when they speak.

• What Do They Know –  This definitive Freedom of Information site will help you make Freedom of Information requests and read all about what other people have been asking, and what replies they’ve been getting.

• Fix My Street – Enter your postcode, stick a pin in the map, type in your problem and zoom!… off it goes to the council. It’s so simple that over 100,000 problems have been reported through it so far.

• Petition Your Council – helps you find out whether your local council has an online petitions site.

There are plenty more useful website to visit, check out there Project Pages and have a good look around. You’ll find it very informative.

I’ve been displaying one of their website access ‘widgets’ on this blog for some time which allows you to find out  who are and write to your local MP/Councillors.

MySociety.org, the creator of this ‘widget’ has produced some more websites that allow people to find out if there are any ‘Local Petitions’ being run by their local council or to create one.

MySociety.org have also made some updates to ‘Fix My Street’ and a created new site for ‘Fix My Transport’ – soon to launched.

These are really useful tools if you are interested in making your points of view known, I have used some of them a number of times and they really do work.

You can see all of the work that MySociety.org does at their main web site here.

Something smells funny about this story. For a political Party that bangs on about not wanting to be controlled by European rules and regulations, it seems funny that the current Conservative led coalition are now saying that we must be controlled by them when we are awarding major UK investment contracts to non-UK companies!

The head of the Train division in Derby made an interesting comment this morning stating that since the DTI (Department of Trade & Industry) has taken over responsibility for procurement of these types of contracts, Bombardier have not won any of the last three contracts, with one being cancelled and the other two going overseas.

Is there someone in the DTI sabotaging the process in favour of non-UK firms?

Although Siemens, the German based company that won the contract says that some 2,000 peripheral jobs will be created in the UK, the actual building of the trains will happen in Germany.

What does this say about UK successive governments and their inabilities to protect and retain manufacturing jobs here in the UK. It appears that they cannot be bothered to ensure that such major contracts stay in this country. Surely at this time of recession, every job is important to the UK.

I cannot imagine for one moment that Germany or France would let similar internal contracts go outside of their own countries.

This is a terrible mistake.

After a report on the BBC Breakfast Show today about a series of domestic house fires in London, links have now been made to faulty defrost controls in a number of Beko Fridge-Freezer products.

What amazes me is that that the London Fire Brigade bosses alerted Beko to the danger in June 2010 and the company apparently had issued a recall notices to all of its customers. As a Beko customer I have not had one. Have you?

The BBC Breakfast Programme issued a telephone number (0800 009 4837) this morning, which of course has been inundated with calls. They also directed readers of the news story on the BBC website to the Beko website, which crashed almost immediately.

Perhaps as part of the BBC’s commitment to UK Public Services Broadcasting they could also have pointed concerned users to this page of the Trading Standards Institute website where full details have been for sometime about the Beko Product Recall.

Maybe the BBC Watch Dog website might like to have this link on their page, after all are they not supposed to be champions of the consumer?

Whilst looking on the Wokingham Borough Councils website today to see if the Public Sector strikes were going to affect rubbish collection in my area, I came across some information about changes to local rubbish collections/ recycling that will be introduced from April 2012. I don’t remember seeing any leaflets about this or reports in local newspapers, but there are some interesting changes.

Basically these will be:-

• Items for recycling (using existing black boxes) will now be collected on a weekly basis.

• Other household rubbish will continue to be collected weekly, but each householder will now be issued with 80 free rubbish bags/sacks. These will be specifically marked; use any other bags/containers and they will not be collected. Wheelie bin are not to introduced.

• Free collection of Green Waste (Green Bags) will now end as of the end of March 2012. However, if you still want a home collection of Green Waste, you will now have to to pay for this service. You will then be given a brown wheelie bin at an annual charge of £60 per annum or you can buy a number of 75 litre compostable sacks for a price commensurate with the annual charge. Both the wheelie bin/ compostable sacks will be collected every fortnight. However, we are all being encouraged to now take our own Green Waste to local recycling  sites.

It’s good to see that Wokingham is not going the way of other councils and cutting back on frequency of collections, but I suspect that the cutting of free Green Waste will cause some issues for many residents plus some might feel that the extra charge is on top of what we already pay in local council taxes.

More information about the changes and a list of questions & answers (FAQ’s) is available from the Wokingham Borough Council website.

Happy recycling.

With the furore about the terrible treatment of the Dowler family during the recent trial of Levi Bellfield still in the headlines. I wonder why the UK still seems to be having such an problem in delivering fair justice to victims, the ‘system’ seems to be on its head at the moment and favours the criminals.

Leaving alone the Dowler case alone, here are two more recent examples of justice favouring the criminal…

Don’t Film the Yobs, you’ll be breaching ‘their’ privacy! – Yes that is what a community campaigner was told when she wanted to film yobs who were causing issues on her estate. However, it appears that the yobs have higher rights than the ordinary citizen! More back ground here.

Shopkeeper takes teenage thief home to parent and now faces prosecution for ‘false imprisonment’! – It seems that a good intention of taking a thief home to face their parents after stealing some grapes turned into  a nightmare for the shopkeeper who was later arrested by the police for holding the thief against their will. Perhaps the shopkeeper should have called the police, but then the thief (a 15 year old) might not have got off so lightly.

More background here.

I am sure that there are many more cases like this, I’ll have to keep an eye out and post some more.