ISPs failing to deliver

A report on ISP performance by monitoring firm Iowatch shows 82 per cent of UK ISPs ran up enough downtime in January to breach yearly Service Level Agreements (SLA) of 99.99 per cent. Companies using the Iowatch service, have their connections monitored 24 hours, and are e-mailed e-mailed whenever Internet connection is lost. ...more

iTunes set to overtake Real Player

Apple's iTunes software will overtake Real Player later this year to become the second most widely used media software after Windows Media Player (WMP). Nielsen//NetRatings reports that based on current trends iTunes will have just under 30 million unique users by the middle of 2006, compared to the 80 million who use the Microsoft player. Currently iTunes has just 18. ...more

UPDATED: Microsoft denied patent for FAT filing system

Microsoft has lost the first round in the battle to patent the FAT filing system used in DOS and which formed the basis of the disk management system of early versions of Windows. The US Patent and Trademark Office decided in a review of the patent granted to Microsoft in 1996 that it did not differ sufficiently from the work of other programmers to merit legal protection. The challenge to the 1996 patent was mounted in April of this year by the Public Patent Foundation (Pubpat) after Microsoft began to start collecting royalties on the patent. ...more

Google pilots Click to Call service

In another of the seemingly endless flow of new initiatives, Google is quietly launching its click-to-call service. Imaginatively called 'Google Click to Call', it may go some way to explaining why the search engine was so keen to buy up bandwidth earlier this year. Click to Call is a service that allows advertisers - usually small local businesses to advertise online without actually having a web site to click through to. ...more

The PC Pro ISP Survey results

Thousands of PC Pro readers answered our recent ISP survey and here are the headline results. Criteria The results reflect readers' experiences of getting (and staying) online. Categories such as the "quality of connections" provided, the level of "services supplied" and the overall "quality of support" are considered. ...more