Problems to be solved

The main problem nowadays is avoiding paying to get around a difficulty. At the present time, I've got two ADSL connections simply because while the BT provided link has been very reliable for years, in the last few months this has started to become problematic. On a number of occasions the link has dropped out while using a VPN connection, or simply run so slow as to not be able to connect. A new problem is that the Sky connection is only set up for 2Mb which is a bit slow for many of the functions that it was purchased for.

In theory BTOpenzone could be used to provide a connection, but this is provided around here by the BT hubs of other households down the road, and I should also enable that on my own hub, but if I allow that activity then there is even less bandwidth for me. Despite what BT say about their latest home hub in the adverts, the increasing number of hubs in an area is restricting the available bandwidth. My smartphone displays the current spread of hubs using an application called WifiEye, and several are currently competing for the same channels and at night wireless to the laptops can become unusable for periods. So since the media system is room based, hard wired links will help reduce competition there.

Another problem with phones relates to poor mobile access, and this is yet another area that needs addressing.

A final problem currently is the lack of any standard for working between systems. While UPNP does provide a sort of method of streaming, the various manufacturers seem to design in their own restrictions so that you can only use this reliably between kit from the same source. Ideally we want to be able to work out a set of encoding selections that work reliably across many devices. I have a number of films that will not play on the PS3 and as yet I've not had time to work out why.