Less Radiation

Here’s a screen-grab showing people who search our site by country. See which non-English speaking nations are most interested in RF issues (UK is awful at best).

I just moved house and had rung BT to move my two lines over to the new address. BT’s website said I could expect 8MB broadband from them at my new address. O2’s website said I could get 20MB broadband, although i’d have to wait until my BT line was actually installed before I could apply – and then i’d have to wait at least another 10 days for my broadband to be operational.

I had already charged up the Sim in my ‘3’ mobile USB broadband dongle and knew i’d at least have slow internet access while things got setup. Then I remembered that broadband over glass fibre always beats copper for speed, so a quick search for cable broadband turned up Virgin Media. Imagine the big smile that crossed my face when their site said I could have a 50MB link at my new address – all for not much more that I was paying BT for line rental & packages, and Orange for 8MB broadband.

The installation all went more or less as planned. The engineers setup the Wireless Router for me , ran a few speed tests, and left.

This site is all about less radiation, so i’d already bought a DSL 4 port wired router from eBay for £13.99 (search for ‘virgin media wired cable router’ and you’ll see the TP-LINK model). I asked whether this model would get the most out of the 50MB account, and was told it would. The wired router was a doddle to setup and the wireless router’s now back in its original box – if the router didn’t remain Virgin’s property, i’d sell it. The TP-Link model seems to have all the functionality of my old ADSL DG834 Netgear, maybe more.

I tried to turn off the Wireless features of the Dlink DIR-615 they supplied, but all you could do was drop the signal strength to 12.5% of max power and the Beacon down to once every second – this isn’t enough for me, sorry guys.

My Powerline ethernet-over-mains adapters work fine, and my son now has the PS3 running Little Big Planet on the big TV downstairs. He can happily download new levels and characters from the Net. I can also use BBC’s iPlayer on it, to catch up when they occasionally put something worth watching on TV.

My Speedtest screengrab is below:

I managed to download the DVD of the latest OpenSuse Linux in about 15 minutes – about 4.6MB a second, where on my old 8MB link i’d top out at 700k.

The only bugbears about the service are with the phone line. For all their 50MB magicness, my local cabinet doesn’t support Caller ID on the phone line! You don’t realise how much you take caller ID for granted.

Invomo’s ‘customer support’ staff have given me a headache!

It’s a long story, has very little to do with electrosmog, but should at least land this cautionary tale near the front page of a well known search engine.

If you don’t know, Invomo supply 0844 & 0870 telephone numbers to businesses. The idea being that you can divert this number to another landline, and your customers only see a non-geographic. I used to work from two sites and used to use it to divert my calls from one landline to another. I’d not used it for a while and decided i’d remove the 0870 number from my websites & invoices and cancel next time the renewal came up.

My invoice from them arrived on the 19th of September and I called them the following week to tell them I may cancel the direct debit and stop using the number. At this stage nobody gave me an indication I couldn’t do that.

Their invoice gives you 7 days notice that they will take the direct debit from your account, so I simply cancelled the direct debit before they got chance to take it – remember, I’m paying for this service in advance – at this point they’re sending me a bill for something I won’t start using until the 26th of September, and which will last a year.

Call me old-fashioned if you will. I run my own web-hosting company, and if someone wants to leave my service for another provider they can at any time (no charge). If they pay a little late or want to cancel I don’t penalise them. If they want to cancel their relationship with me and forget to tell me straight away, I don’t hold them to ‘contractual ransom’ for 12 months. I like to think I’m a gentleman, and many customers tell me I am. The customer is always king.

So, with my over-developed sense of right & wrong you can imagine how I feel when Invomo tell me I have to pay another whole years charges because they didn’t get my cancellation email until the 28th. I initially believe that I missed the date by two days, both of which were the weekend days – so they probably wouldn’t have opened a cancellation letter until the Monday anyway.

Anyway, after a few more emails it becomes clear that they actually wanted me to cancel my agreement with them a month BEFORE the renewal. Let’s be honest, most businessmen are busy making money and decide to continue or cancel a service when they receive the bill. With Invomo you can’t work like this, you have to remember to cancel your agreement before the bill arrives, otherwise you’re in for another 12 months. And you know you’ll only forget next time too. They will of course keep your cancellation request on file for 12 months, if you request it – but by that time you’d have forgot and might have started re-using the number. If they cared about customer satisfaction they’d send a letter six weeks before the 12 months contract is up, stating that you have two weeks to cancel. I guess that’s not going to happen though…

My real bugbear is that I’ve had this number since 2002, and when I took the contract out they weren’t even called Invomo – they were PNC Telecom. My question to any lawyers reading this is how can you be held to such an agreement when the company has been sold and changed names? (I bet any staff they retained had to sign new employment contracts!) I never signed a new contract. They only thing they have my signature on is a piece of paper from 2002, for a one year contract with PNC Telecom.

Contrast this treatment with what an average non-business consumer could expect. You have distance selling regulations, 7 day cooling off periods. Does any of that apply to me? It seems not. How about decent honest behaviour, do you think that’s what I’ve received from Invomo? I’m struggling to see how they’ve ‘put the customer first’.

The Invomo2go.com website’s FAQ section states that ‘all contracts are for a minimum of 12 months, after this we require a months notice to cancel a number’. Note their use of the term ‘after this’ and not ‘before this’. I had an email yesterday (30/09/09) from them signed ‘On behalf of Nick Wiley, CEO’ telling me they still want £184.69 for 4 days service that I don’t want or need. That email started ‘Without Prejudice’, but surely charging me more for less is prejudice!

Everything above is fact. I’m very disappointed!

(sorry this piece had nothing to do with electrosmog)

Update: In the end Invomo agreed that I only owed them one months cancellation fee, which amounted to about £15. It seems that they – in my case at least – try to make it seem like it’s as costly to cancel as it is to continue your contract. If they did this to every customer wishing to cancel it might make a big difference to their bottom-line. I thought about taking this page down now the issue got resolved. But stuff them! The Internet is forever: not like an article in a newspaper, which is just tomorrow’s chip-paper… If they’d treated me (a customer) better this rant wouldn’t be here.

Update 02-05-2012 : Ignore this, Rowtex seem to have stopped selling the Orchid, leaving the field clear for the Low Radiation Siemens Gigaset phones. They now sell airtube earsets for mobile phones, and we wholeheartedly agree that you should buy one!
—————————————————————————————————————

Orchid Low Radiation Digital Cordless Phone from Rowtex Ltd.

The site you’ll find at http://www.lowradiation.co.uk/ states that the Orchid phone is the UK’s only Low Radiation Cordless Phone. Misleading.

In 2008 this may have been true. However, as we mention elsewhere on this site, you can now buy a Dect cordless phone for your home from Siemens that includes Low Radiation features for half the price.

You can buy a Siemens Gigaset C385 right now at Argos.co.uk for £33.95, order code 552/5683 – then just set it in Eco+ mode when it arrives. Then you’ll only be filling your home with electrosmog when you talk on the phone, not while you sleep. (In ECO+ mode the Siemens C385 handset & base stop emitting radiation within 35 seconds of you ending a call, regardless of whether you place the handset back in the base or not. Fact.)

Or you can pay £79.99 plus P&P for an Orchid – which absolutely ISN’T the UK’s only low radiation cordless phone. Fact.

If you really care about eliminating electrosmog from your home, then you really shouldn’t buy either of these products. You should use a regular wired phone instead.

More

So Sony have now launched an update to version 3 of their PS3 operating system.

The ‘killer-application’ for me is a simple link to BBC’s iPlayer application. You’ll need to register a free account with Sony HQ and then the magic TV option appears in the main menus. Following the link takes you directly to a chunky web-appliance version of iPlayer. Now you can catch up on all those missed programmes directly on your flat screen HDMI attached telly. Wonderful.

Of course this site is lessradiation.co.uk, so we feel duty bound to point out all the extra electrosmog you’ll be exposing yourself to if your PS3 is attached to the network via WiFi and you’re watching hours of telly over it. Much better, more secure & faster to use the Homeplugs instead – a pair of devices that send Ethernet over you household mains supply cabling.

With the PS3 Slim also being launched now, Sony really has the opportunity to become the essential home media hub, even for non-gamers. My PS3 even has Ubuntu loaded on it, but I believe the new slim version doesn’t allow you to load a 2nd operating system (I’m sure a hack for that will appear soon).

So, if you want your PS3 experience to be electrosmog-free, you’ll need to use Homeplugs instead of WiFi, and use USB cables to attach the controllers to the PS3 (which stops them using Bluetooth).

A report at TheRegister.co.uk on 25th August suggests that basic GSM handset encryption will shortly be thwarted.

For several years now, interested people have been doing ever more with GNU Radio and the USRP ‘software radio’ hardware from Ettus Research. The USRP is a USB hardware device that can be made to act like any radio, using the GNU Radio software to alter its behaviour. Thus, the $1000 USRP can be made to act like a GSM phone, a WiFi Router, a regular FM radio or indeed a Tetra radio.

The OpenBTS project first showcased what was possible: a DIY GSM mast that allowed you to use a regular mobile phone to make calls without using the regular legitimate GSM carriers – using just a laptop & USRP peripheral. Calls were routed through an Asterisk VOIP gateway. This project was actually tested for real at The Burning Man festival & also the 2009 Hackers At Random conference .

Once the open-source GPL’d OpenBTS was out there regular coders could look and see how everything fitted together. Of course it was only a matter of time before other GSM applications followed.

The report at The Register states that the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) of Germany will be releasing tools in the next couple of months that will allow anyone with a laptop & antenna (and presumably a USRP) to listen in on encrypted GSM calls. They plan to build a huge A5/1 Rainbow Table of pre-computed encryption hashes (which is basically a lookup table of every possible answer for an encryption key) of some 2 terabytes in size. Presumably you’ll be able to post your key online and get a result from the rainbow table, in the same way you can with Windows Login passwords right now. Of course posting such a request to the table via the internet would probably get you a black mark down at Spooks HQ – and i’m quite sure they’ll be listening!

It’s amazing to think that this year will have seen both Dect and GSM hacked to bits. All this is possible because of the USRP hardware & ever faster PCs. 3G phones however will be safe for some time to come, as it will be only the original implementations of GSM that can eventually be eavesdropped upon.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/28/mobile_phone_snooping_plan/

Also, an article from the German Financial Times, translated to English.

I just needed to know whether my 3G USB dongle was going to work when I move house shortly.

It got me thinking about whether the information that the mobile phone network providers supply is more up to date than Ofcom’s. Guess what? It is!

So if you need to know what kind of signal coverage you can expect at a particular location, just enter a postcode or town name using the links below. If they show no 3G coverage you can still use a Vodafone Access Gateway connected to your internet router, which acts like a mini phone mast (assuming you can get broadband). If you’re with another network, try searching for ‘femtocell’ ‘picocell’ & ‘orange’ ‘O2’ etc.

www.three.co.uk/_popup/Coverage_checker?maptypeForm=mbb&placename=knutsford&postcode=

maps.vodafone.co.uk/coverageviewer/web/default.aspx

www.webmap.o2.co.uk/map.asp

web.orange.co.uk/coverage/index.php

and of course finally, that stalwart of mast hunters everywhere:

http://www.sitefinder.ofcom.org.uk/

Vodafone have now launched a 3G Mini-Mast (Access Gateway – it plugs into your broadband router) for your home! This is the femtocell that the various mobile phone operators have been promising to unleash on the general public for so long. Other operators are expected to follow suit shortly.

The blurb makes much of the fact that it’s a mast in your lounge with one ten-thousandth the output of its regular big brother masts. The Sagem box costs £160 to buy outright, which can be added to your bill at £5 per month – or if you upgrade your phone/package you might get it included for free.

If you’ve always struggled to get decent mobile phone reception in your home, maybe now you have a solution. You’ll need to be with Vodafone, have a 3G mobile & a broadband router for it to work.

The Access Gateway plugs into the router, you register up to 4 mobile phone numbers and the units serial number online, and then about 18 hours later you can make calls through the unit. As it’s 3G you can also access data services – if you’re on one of the all-you-can-eat plans, of course.

It doesn’t turn your mobile into a BT home cordless phone or anything fancy like that, but for people living in cellars & under-builds it should prove a godsend – now you can call for rescue!

The Access Gateway will provide 3G coverage throughout your home for the four devices (phones) you pre-approve. As you’re now much nearer to the mast your mobile will transmit on much lower power than it would if you were depending on a mast 1000 metres away – which means slightly less RF soaking into your brain & slightly longer battery life!

Range is apparently less than you would expect from a WiFi hub, and with some using Skype over WiFi cordless phones, this won’t appeal to everybody.

I do think it makes a good alternative to just sticking up ever more masts with no regard for whether people actually want them in their streets.

The Leichtenstein parliament has confirmed its intention to enforce the law adopted in May 2008 to restrict exposure (in sensitive areas: homes, workplaces, schools, hospitals and other public buildings) to 0.6 V/m from mobile telecommunication base stations.

This was met with dismay by the telecommunications industry, who have stated that this will make it unfeasible to run a financially viable mobile phone service under these restrictions. The goal is meant to be met by 2013, but the industries are expected to provide an annual progress report towards the goal as well. The 4 main mobile phone companies based in Leichtenstein have threatened to pull out of the country if this restriction is not lifted, to which the government has responded by exploring the possibility of running a state owned mobile telecommunication network if they were to do so! (courtesy of powerwatch.org.uk).

The Interphone study into adverse mobile phone effects has so far produced very little.

Bickering amongst the scientists involved, as to how any data should be presented has pretty much ensured that nothing useful has emerged.

Now it seems that the Dect-effect will be left out of the exposure figures too. This is completely stupid, given that most people will spend more time in the field generated by their constantly-emitting home Dect phone than anything else.

Ten minutes on your mobile a day or five hours sat next to your Dect cordless docking station while you watch TV in the evening? It’s a complete no-brainer for an amateur to figure out, so why’s it so hard for scientists in the pay of the mobile phone industry?

Go figure…