WiFi was the killer technology that made home networking easy. No more messing around with hubs and cables and drilling holes in walls, simply turn the devices on and hit connect. Over time the speed and range has increased, but those with larger houses or granny flats out back have …read more

Long-suffering customers of internet providers are most likely to leave if they find a better deal elsewhere, although crappy customer service is also a major push factor.

A survey by UK consumer charity Which? found that out of 8,000 customers surveyed, only around half had ever switched.

Of the 4,000-odd folk who did take the plunge, 25 per cent moved for a better deal, 18 per cent left due to poor customer service, 12 per cent shifted due to price hikes, 9 per cent cited slow broadband and 7 per cent complained of connectivity issues.

With contract prices typically going

A consortium of European organizations has launched ELIoT, an EU-funded project that hopes to develop commercial applications for visible light communications.

The project’s primary concern is Li-Fi – a method of short-distance data transfer that relies on the light spectrum and fancy LEDs rather than radio frequencies, proposed by Edinburgh University professor Harald Haas .

The idea is simple: make the light flicker faster than the eye can see, delivering a stream of 1s and 0s that can be picked up by a nearby photodetector.

Li-Fi is not a new development – if you need proof, see our WTF is...

If you want IPv4 addresses in Europe, there is now a literal waitlist to join.

In a new policy approved and posted on Tuesday, the regional internet registry (RIR) that serves Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, dubbed RIPE, has decided that the only way to deal with the ever-diminishing number of internet addresses is for everyone to form an orderly queue.

"On application for IPv4 resources, LIRs will receive IPv4 addresses according to the following," notes the new policy. And the first bulletpoint? "All allocation requests are placed on a first-come-first-served waiting list. No guarantees are given about

UK comms watchdog Ofcom fined Brit MVNO Giffgaff £1.4m today for overcharging around 2.6 million users to the tune of around £2.8m.

An error in the Telefónica UK-owned firm's billing system – as we reported at the time – led to the screwup which meant anyone who bought the budget firm's "goodybag" bundles of calls, messages and data (crucially, while using pre-paid credit) was billed twice every time they used their phone.

The whole thing went on for nearly eight years and when the MVNO first copped to the error, it suggested users should, er, turn it off and on