Everyday there’s a struggle going on in my head about what is really going on in the world, or more specifically in Sweden, as of late. We’ve always been early adopters of technology and often somewhat pioneering some fields. We have 7.2Mbit mobile broadband/3G network (a.k.a. 3.5G a.k.a. Turbo 3G), 24Mbit ADSL broadband for many, many homes via the standard phone jack, 100Mbit and hell, 1Gbit connections for the lucky few.

The struggle that is going on in my head is this: I can not get any what so ever 3G reception for any of my cell phones in my own house, which is by no means located out in the woods. Heck, more often than not I can’t get more than 40% of 2G reception! When I do have full 3G signal, being anywhere else, and do some speed tests, I’m lucky if I hit 1.5Mbit. And now, Telia is starting to test out their up and coming (if tests are successful) 100Mbit ADSL.

I have a 24Mbit internet connection to my house and I’m well below the maximum distance to the connection platform which delivers it, and yet, I can only get a maximum of 14-15Mbit download speed. I’m sticking to download speed in this article, although upload speed is lacking as much. My 14-15Mbit of download speed is commonly considered to be good and that I should be “thankful” for such a good connection, and yet I am paying for, as advertised, 24Mbit. Just like I am paying for the 7.2Mbit data plan on my cellphone.

I spoke with Telia today and the nice lady told me that they are preparing for the tests right now, and if they’re successful, they might start to roll out the upgrades early 2009. And here I am, with no 3G signal in my house. And paying full price for my 7.2Mbit data plan producing a weak 0.2Mbit at this particular moment (and any other giving moment in my house), a 24Mbit internet connection that gives me about 55% of what I’m paying 100% for… When will we stop accepting these outrageous facts? I fail to come up with any other product or service where one might accept a result of a bleak puny percentage of what you pay for and hope to get. Yes, you can always cancel within whatever number of days, but really… What options does it leave us with? Let’s just face it, being connected is becoming less and less a luxurious option in life and more a necessity. A fair comparison could be a phone line, any phone line, mobile or not. Would you pay 100% to get a line 10% of the times? I know so many people who’ve gotten replacement cellphones and discounts on their cellphone bills due to poor reception (that should not be, when comparisons have been made for the case).

A friend of mine had an 8Mbit internet connection producing a mear 3-4Mbit in his house, and after dawging Telia for 6 months he got 6+Mbit all of a sudden. So, shouldn’t we either pay for what we can get, or get what we pay for? Obviously, it can be done.

The nice Telia lady told me that for this 100Mbit upgrade to happen, they need to upgrade the connection platforms, which are located here and there all over our communities. Manual labor it is.

This takes me back a few years to when I called up Telia and asked for the opportunity to upgrade my connection upload speed, a request that was denied with the reason “it’s not possible, the hardware can not produce this”. And about a year or two later, with absolutely no hardware upgrades made anywhere, this was starting to roll out nationwide.

100Mbit ADSL… and not even good cellphone reception in my house… Oh, and I checked something else out. A house dead center in the city, was scheduled to get its connection platform upgraded to handle 24Mbit in late January 2009. It’s just funny I guess… 24Mbit been out for years. Oh, and did I mention the Swedish government used to own Telia?

Boxee, my new favorite media center application just announced that they landed a $4 million investment from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures at 50% each, and this brings me joy and sparkles in my eyes.

Since I last reviewed Boxee, and re-reviewed it, I have really fallen even more in love with this application. I can only assume this investment will bring more awesomeness to the application and the Boxee team. Maybe they can do the network browsing a bit faster, have settings stick (When I change “View” under say Movies, then go up or down a level and back, the View setting is reset). And I don’t know if caching is busted somehow, but thumbnail view is slow as snails. Actually, every time I enter Movies, the system has to think for way too long for me not to get testy. Another thing I’ve been wondering about is if the system respects folder names/structures, or if it uses the media file only for data.

Anyway, on with the good cash flow.

They say their goals for 2009 are:

• grow out of our comfortable closed-alpha cocoon and launch a kick-ass beta
• build even more functionality and content into boxee while making it easier to navigate
• listen to user requests, ideas and frustrations (and improve the product accordingly)
• work with team-xbmc, developers and partners to extend boxee beyond the confines of our limited resources
• finish the year with ~ 1,000,000 users

Not so many concrete goals I have to say. But yeah, we’d like to see improvements… They hit 100′000 sign-ups last week, that’s a good start. Congratulations Boxee!

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

A rather bleak home page greets me when I go to www.mtvmusic.com to watch the miracle that is the MTV Music website, where we now can watch music videos, all for free, right there in the web browser. The home page has a rather pretty lead image, well, a number of images in fact, but below that, there’s just an unbalanced column of video thumbnails with the title “Vintage Videos”. But who cares?! I want my Run DMC!

You can even embed the videos! A very nice initiative by MTV Netwworks. But the website doesn’t seem all that… developed. Well, it is “Beta”. The FAQ page says “Coming soon… ” with the page title “Copyright”, and as you can see in the column to the left, the information about the video, comments and rating is rather confusing. There’s no call to action below the Rate This Video title for one. And the comment for this video is inaccessible. If you look under MTV Music API, there’s a note stating “For now, registration is only required for commenting in our forums.“, but that’s the forums. I figured maybe you have to be logged in to view the comment, but there’s no way to register! Nor to sign in!

I’m not all that impressed by the quality of the videos, but I’m not the one to complain. The audio sounds pretty good, I guess that’s more important. Maybe the video quality will improve in time like when YouTube rolled out “High Quality” videos, but I wouldn’t count on that being any time soon.

So after a few minutes of digging around, watching some dandy videos, I thought “What about censorship?”. So I tried searching for the word “F*ck” (spelled out properly of course, don’t ask me why this particular search term, I just wanted to search for something dirty), and I got this semi censored result:

Pretty funny ey? I also watched the notorious video “Lapdance” by N.E.R.D. and it was the clean version. This doesn’t necessarily mean they censor videos though. I can’t think of a song that includes a dirty word that might tell me if they do censor videos at the moment, but I’m sure you can find one if you start digging through the archives.

Yo, VIP! Let’s kick it! Alright, Stop!

Word to ya mother