UK rural broadband plans move on

27 May 2011 Last updated at 03:28 ET

Homes in Devon, Somerset, Norfolk and Wiltshire will get super-fast broadband, the government has said.

Making sure rural areas have fast net services is part of a wider drive to make the UK the best place for broadband by 2015.

Each county will receive a portion of the �530m fund the government has set aside to fund rural broadband.

The Department for Culture said that all the UK's local authorities will receive funding in the next few years.

"This is part of our plan for virtually every community in the UK to have access to super-fast broadband," said culture secretary Jeremy Hunt.

The government acknowledges that its �530m pot - which is money left over from an earlier digital switchover fund - will not be enough to give the entire country fast broadband.

Private investment will also be needed.

Fibre homes

The successful counties were among 18 which originally bid for the money.

Devon and Somerset will receive around �30m, Norfolk �15m and Wiltshire �4m and they will then choose a contractor and technology best suited for their needs.

The government anticipates that the technologies will be a mix of mobile, satellite and fibre connections.

Wiltshire Council has already pledged to spend �16m on broadband services across the county.

The government announced the first tranche of its rural broadband plan in October 2010, setting up three pilots in North Yorkshire, the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and Cumbria and Herefordshire.

It has been accused of being far too slow to get the trials up and running. So far none are live and only two have begun the process of finding a firm able to offer services.

Fujitsu has pledged to build a super-fast network across the whole of rural Britain. It has said it will offer fibre-to-the-home technology to around five million homes. That could provide homes with speeds of up to 100Mbps (megabits per second).

In order to do so it will rely on using BT's infrastructure - the ducts and poles that provide telephone and broadband services around the UK.

Ofcom has forced the telco to open up its network but some have argued that the prices it is planning to charge for access are too high.

Revised pricing is expected in June.

According to BT, Fujitsu has yet to join its ducts and poles trial.

Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin | Settlement Statement | WordPress Tutorials

WWII code-breaker will run again

27 May 2011 Last updated at 05:56 ET By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News <!-- Embedding the video player --> <!-- This is the embedded player component -->

<!-- embedding script -->

<!-- companion banner --> <!-- END - companion banner --><!-- caption -->

The working replica of the Tunny machine in action

<!-- END - caption -->

<!-- end of the embedded player component --> <!-- Player embedded -->

The National Museum of Computing has finished restoring a Tunny machine - a key part of Allied code-cracking during World War II.

Tunny machines helped to unscramble Allied interceptions of the encrypted orders Hitler sent to his generals.

The rebuild was completed even though almost no circuit diagrams or parts of the original machines survived.

Intelligence gathered via code-cracking at Bletchley underpinned the success of Allied operations to end WWII.

Time synch

Restoration work on Tunny at the museum in Bletchley was re-started in 2005 by a team led by computer conservationists John Pether and John Whetter.

Mr Pether said the lack of source material made the rebuild challenging.

"As far as I know there were no original circuit diagrams left," he said. "All we had was a few circuit elements drawn up from memory by engineers who worked on the original."

The trickiest part of the rebuild, he said, was getting the six timing circuits of the machine working in unison.

The Tunny machines, like the Colossus computers they worked alongside, were dismantled and recycled for spare parts after World War II.

The first Tunny machine was built in 1942 by mathematician Bill Tutte. He drew up plans for it after analysing the encrypted radio signals Hitler was sending to the Nazi high command and that the Allies had intercepted.

These orders were encrypted before being transmitted by a machine known as a Lorenz SZ42 enciphering machine.

Bill Tutte's work effectively reverse-engineered the workings of th SZ42 - even though he had never seen it.

Tunny worked alongside the early Colossus computer, which calculated the settings of an SZ42 used to scramble a particular message. These settings were reproduced on Tunny, the enciphered message was fed in, and the decrypted text was printed out.

By the end of WWII there were 12-15 Tunny machines in use and the information they revealed about Nazi battle plans aided the Russians during the battle of Kursk and helped to ensure the success of D-Day.

"We have a great deal of admiration for Bill Tuttle and those original engineers," said John Whetter.

"There were no standard drawings they could put together," he said. "It was all original thought and it was incredible what they achieved."

One reason the restoration project has succeeded, said Mr Whetter, was that the machines were built by the Post Office's research lab at Dollis Hill.

All the parts were typically used to build telephone exchanges, he said.

"Those parts were in use from the 1920s to the 1980s when they were replaced by computer-controlled exchanges," he said.

Former BT engineers and workers involved with The National Museum of Computing have managed to secure lots of these spare parts to help with restoration projects, said Mr Whetter.

The next restoration project being contemplated is that of the Heath Robinson machines, which were used to find SZ42 settings before the creation of Colossus.

That, said Mr Whetter, might be even more of a challenge.

"We have even less information about that than we had on Tunny," he said.

Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin | Settlement Statement | WordPress Tutorials