Facebook already offers its Lite site for low bandwidth users

The world's biggest social network has revealed details of a stripped-down, text-only version of its mobile site called Facebook Zero.

The low-bandwidth site is aimed at people viewing Facebook on their mobile and will launch "in the coming weeks".

The social network recently said that more than 100 million people now access Facebook from their phone.

Analysts at CCS Insight said that the new site could help operators free-up critical bandwidth on their networks.

Data from industry body the GSM Association recently revealed that Facebook accounts for nearly half of all the time people in the UK spend going online using their phones.

The data showed that people in the UK spent around 2.2bn minutes browsing the social network during December alone.

Facebook said the new site "omits data intensive applications like photos".

"We are discussing it... as an option to make Facebook on the mobile web available to everyone, anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile internet usage," said a spokesperson for the firm.

Facebook already offers a slimmed down version of the version of its site - called Facebook Lite - for people with slow or poor internet connections. It is aimed at users in the developing world.

The site was announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which runs from 15-18 February.

by Steven Sande on Jan 2nd 2010 at 4:30PM

Everyone knows about the struggles US mobile phone company AT&T has had with keeping its network up to speed given the huge bandwidth requirements of the popular iPhone. Well, they're not the only mobile carrier having issues.

In the UK, O2 has been having problems with the huge amount of data being schlepped around the network by iPhones. O2 CEO Ronan Dunne told the Financial Times that performance of the O2 network had been disappointing since this summer and that the company was trying to cope with the increasing number of mobile apps running on devices such as the iPhone. TUAW reported a multi-day data outage that affected O2 users just a few weeks ago.

Most of the issues have been confined to London, so the company is installing 200 additional base stations to support the increased levels of traffic. Dunne also noted that the company is working with Apple, RIM, and other handset manufacturers to learn more about which applications are causing the heavy demands on the O2 network. O2 has been working with Nokia Siemens Networks to modify the network infrastructure to better handle the combination of voice and data traffic.

While trying to iron out these issues, it appears that O2's parent company, Telefonica, is making moves that could place further demands on the network. Telefonica purchased mobile VoIP company Jajah to add to O2's portfolio of services, and VoIP services are notorious devourers of bandwidth.

In the United States, Verizon can smirk about AT&T's network issues, but O2's problems point out that no mobile operator is immune from the bandwidth-eating apps that are popular on the iPhone platform.

• SMS was meant to provide internal messaging for engineers

• Messaging has led to creation of text speak (txtspk)

• Olivia Martin
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 January 2010
• Article history

For a technology that has become so all-pervasive that texting has been included in the Oxford English Dictionary, SMS (short message service) was not designed as a mass market consumer communications service at all.

"It was designed to use some spectrum and provide an internal messaging service for engineers and maybe become the beginnings of a Teletext-type service," explains Mike Short, chief technology officer for Telefónica O2 Europe. "In the early 1990s we had Teletext and Ceefax on the TV, and in some countries people said 'maybe we could do this on a mobile phone one day'. But in the early 1990s the screens were so tiny that people could not envisage it, we had no connectivity to the internet so people experimented a little bit."

The 160 character limit led to the creation of text speak (txtspk) and the frequent use of mobile phones has produced a trend in texting slang, especially in school assignments.

Text messaging is said to be highly addictive; studies at the University of Queensland, Australia, reveal that it is comparable to that of cigarette smoking, with users feeling they must "remain connected". And a lot of people do have that craving: about 4.1tn text messages were sent worldwide in 2008.

Text messaging may only be a decade old but in that time, in the eyes of some critics, has undone more than a century of grammatically perfect writing.

Or to put it another way: A mob is nt just a sender of IMs, but a means 2 the internet @ ne time; frm facebook 2 bus times. I can email in class nd txt on the train, just about nething is possible with this handheld mini pc.

Mobile Evolution by Kyle Bean

http://www.kylebean.co.uk

Orange's 'unlimited' iPhone

Rory Cellan-Jones | 09:13 UK time, Tuesday, 3 November 2009

Remember the price war that was supposed to break out once O2 lost its exclusive contract to sell the iPhone in Britain?

Well, the price plans that Orange has published for the phone show little sign of an eagerness for hand-to-hand combat.

Apart from an entry-level £30 tariff which promises twice as many minutes as O2's deal, the two firms' offers look virtually identical.

Look at what's likely to be among the most popular tariffs, a 24-month contract for a 16GB iPhone 3GS at £34.26 a month, where you pay £87 for the device.

That's identical in every respect to the O2 deal, except for the cost of the device - which is £87.11.

As we suspected, the high price that Apple extracts from operators leaves them little margin to undercut their rivals - about 11p in fact.

But what does stand out when you examine Orange's price card more closely is what it says about the unlimited data that has been an essential part of the iPhone's appeal.

An asterisk next to the "unlimited" leads to a note saying "Fair Usage policy of 750MB/ month applies." Cue plenty of grumbling from potential customers, particularly on Twitter.

The cap appeared to apply to data downloaded via wi-fi as well as via the 3g network, so some concluded that Orange was planning to curb their customers' use of their own home networks.

I called Orange to check this out - and found the company slightly confused about its own fair usage policy. More than four hours later, the press office finally returned with chapter and verse.

There was a 750MB cap for 3g mobile data, and a separate 750MB for data downloaded with their wi-fi partner BT Openzone - you are free to do what you want on your own network.

So how does this compare with O2? That company came back with its own statement, confirming that its "unlimited" data policy did in fact have its limits.

"We reserve the right... to contact customers about their usage if we believe it adversely affects the service of our other customers, eg if a customer uses their SIM in another device for which it is not intended."

So O2 looks to be a little less restrictive than Orange.

But will many really run up against Orange's limit? At first 750MB may seem an awful lot of data to use on a phone - I reckon I get through about 200MB in a heavy month.

But what we've seen so far is that once you offer people "unlimited" data, they rush to use it, and software developers provide them with new data-rich applications.

Streaming audio and video are increasingly popular on the iPhone, and they can chew up your data allowance at an alarming rate.

Last night someone pointed me towards this clause in Orange's Terms and Conditions:

"Not to be used for other activities (eg using your handset as a modem, non-Orange internet based streaming services, voice or video over the internet, instant messaging, peer to peer file sharing, non-Orange internet based video). Should such use be detected notice may be given and Network protection controls applied to all services which Orange does not believe constitutes mobile browsing."

It sounds as though services like Spotify, AudioBoo, Ustream and even Facebook messaging - increasingly popular with O2 iPhone customers - will be out of bounds for Orange users.

The operator is caught between a rock and a hard place. With little room for manoeuvre on prices, it will be hoping that better network coverage will be one factor winning over iPhone customers from O2.

But if too many power users start streaming TV and playing online games on their phones, the Orange network may buckle under the strain - hence the need for a fair usage limit.

Just hours after publishing its price list, Orange appeared to be having second thoughts about that 750MB cap, admitting that plenty of e-mails had been coming in and that it had noticed the rising tide of Twitter comments.

A spokesman told me the cap would be "reviewed" to make sure that it was at the right level.

The problem for the operators is that users no longer see the iPhone and similar devices as phones but as small computers. And who wants to be told 25 days into each month that they must now stop playing around with their computer and just use it to make calls?

Update, 17:20: Orange has been in touch to clarify their iPhone terms and conditions. Here's the company's statement:

"We do recognise that iPhone customers will use popular streaming services such as YouTube, Spotify etc. As a result we do not intend to apply network protection controls to anyone, as long as they are within their usage allowance. The T&Cs are in place to reserve the right to restrict access should they continue to exceed our Fair Usage policy, and our other Mobile data users suffer a reduced data experience as a result."

Vanessa George, the Plymouth nursery worker who abused children and took camera phone images to send to friends on Facebook, will be sentenced next month. However, another sentence is proposed for the tens of thousands of nursery workers across the country: a ban on camera phones at work.

A mother whose children attended George's nursery has set up a campaign, nocameraphones.org, calling for nursery staff to lock up their phones and only be allowed access during their breaks; apparently 23 nurseries have signed up to this policy so far. Camera phone regulations are being hastily written. Plymouth City council has promised to issue "a written policy for nurseries" covering "advice on the use of cameras" and the teachers' and nursery staff union Voice is calling for a "no-mobiles rule" in nurseries.

Already, some nurseries are confiscating mobiles from their staff as they enter the door, and another has moved the lockers away from the nursery area so that staff are unable to hear their phones ring.

This is a familiar pattern: one case of depravity and criminality leads, like clockwork, to a new set of regulations for everybody. One twisted woman's use of a camera phone to photograph her abuse means that all nursery workers are frisked for mobiles.

Yet surely, somebody devious enough to abuse a series of children during work hours, without others seeing, would be devious enough to conceal her camera phone from view, which requires only putting it in a pocket. Others have suggested putting CCTV cameras in nurseries – but CCTV cameras cannot cover every corner of the nursery. So how about metal detectors? Tagging staff? Rules that staff cannot be left alone with children? If we try to organise nurseries around the assumption that every nursery worker could be Vanessa George, we will end up with horrifying fortresses.

The vast majority of children have happy and fulfilling times at their nursery. They need staff to be relaxed with them, and they also need videos and photography so their parents know what they have been doing in the day. "The use of digital cameras and videos are an integral part of nursery practice", says Purnima Tanuku, chief executive of the National Day Nurseries Association, "It is vital that nurseries are not discouraged from using these."

These calls for general regulations also let the woman in the dock off the hook. They make her crime, somehow, the fault of lax "child safeguarding procedures", which were not sufficiently strict and did not specifically regulate the use of camera phones. It makes it less her fault, and more the fault of the rules.

Yet if anything, George's case shows the failure of tick-box child protection procedures. The Ofsted inspection gave her nursery "good" ratings in all areas, including "protecting children from harm or neglect". George herself was vetted and had passed all the tests. No doubt the nursery had the appropriate "safeguarding policies" in place; they may even have had a 'policy' on the use of cameras.

Vanessa George's actions were highly unusual, which is why they were so shocking and can be firmly punished. The sentence should be imposed on her, not on thousands of nursery workers and the children in their care.