Ken’s Tech Tips Index: Tesco Mobile, Three on the up whilst the big four lose out

Our first study of switching intention finds that Tesco Mobile and 3 are doing well in the market whereas the big networks are falling behind.

What is the Ken’s Tech Tips Index?

The Ken’s Tech Tips Index is our first study looking into how well each mobile phone network is performing in terms of attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. Using data from the PAC Code Finder tool and people’s stated intention of how they’ll switch network, the Ken’s Tech Tips Index answers the question of how rapidly a network is gaining and losing new customers. More specifically the index score is “the number of customers who join a given network for every 100 customers who leave that network”.

If a network has a high score in the Ken’s Tech Tips Index, it means they are gaining customers a lot faster than they lose them. This is perhaps a good indication that the products they provide are better value for consumers (or alternatively, it could just mean they are doing a great job with publicity or sales).

A score above 100 in the index means that network is gaining customers faster than it is losing them. Meanwhile a score of below 100 is bad news: it means the network is losing customers faster than it can replace them.

There are two ways by which a network can improve their Ken’s Tech Tips Index score. They can either attract more new customers or they can better retain their existing customers. The ways by which a network can do this is to provide better value to consumers, better customer service and support and a better customer experience.

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Reviewed: Samsung Wave & the Bada Operating System

We review the first Samsung Wave, the first phone running Samsung’s new bada operating system.


It takes a lot of guts for a company to decide they still want to develop their own smartphone operating system when the market is already saturated with the likes of iOS (iPhone), Android, Windows Phone 7, Symbian, Palm webOS and Blackberry OS. With these mobile operating systems fighting hard for market share and the open-source Android being adopted by numerous phone manufacturers including HTC, Sony Ericsson and Samsung themselves, Samsung’s decision to develop its own operating system, bada, was a gutsy and risky move.

Samsung recently gave me a new Samsung Wave S8500 handset to play with (see the disclosure notice at the end of this article). Available free on Pay Monthly tariffs starting from £25/month, it’s the first phone on the market running on the bada operating system and I was hoping it would have given me a taste of what’s to come from bada. Unfortunately my experience was incredibly disappointing: bada lacked many of the features that you would expect from a modern smartphone, many of the bundled applications failed to work and there were some serious usability issues.

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How to see the invisible infrared world using your mobile phone camera

Using your mobile phone, you can see infrared radiation – a normally invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Ken’s Tech Tips looks at some of the physics of electromagnetic waves and explains how you can see this invisible world – and you don’t need anything more than the mobile phone in your pocket.

What is infrared radiation?

Infrared is a form of electromagnetic radiation. Other forms of electromagnetic  radiation (EM radiation) include visible light, x-rays, microwaves (the EM waves that wi-fi networks use and also the waves that cook your food in microwave ovens) and radio waves. The difference between all these different forms of radiation are the wavelength of the EM wave. We can illustrate this electromagnetic spectrum (CC-licensed image from Wikipedia):

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Contact

If you’d like to get in touch with me, you can send me an e-mail on ken at kenstechtips.com.

How Can I Help?

Looking to get in touch with a specific mobile or broadband provider?
(e.g. to change or cancel your plan)
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Found an error or an omission on the website?
Sometimes, I’ll get things wrong (or things can change quickly, given the industry we operate in). You can either leave a comment below the relevant article to let me know, or you can send me an email using the address above. Thanks again for taking the time to letting me know!
Got a question that you’d like answered?
Unfortunately, I’m not able to answer questions via e-mail due to the large volume of messages that I receive. However, you can leave a comment below the relevant article with your question. I’ll endeavour to reply to as many of those questions as I can, or other members of the community might chip in and answer them as well. If you like, our system can also send you a email notification whenever someone replies to your message.
Want to place a guest post on the website?
Unfortunately, we don’t accept guest posts on this website.
Want to get in touch with information about your product or service?
I’m happy to receive information about relevant products and services but unfortunately I won’t be able to reply to every email I receive.

 

Effect of Microwave Ovens on Wireless Internet

The New Cook
Creative Commons License photo: Joshua Davis (jdavis.info)

I noticed something quite odd lately – when the microwave oven in my house was being used, I would lose all connectivity on my wireless internet connection. That lead to the internet dropping out in the whole house – internet radio, game consoles, laptops, etc.

It turns out that the issue is that microwave ovens and wireless internet operate on the same frequencies. My microwave uses a frequency of 2450MHz (check the back of your microwave as yours may be different) and my wireless (802.11g) operated on channel 11 (around 2462MHz). As you can imagine, the microwave oven outputs with a lot more power than the wireless router so totally overwhelms your ability to use wi-fi.

The solution is to change the frequency that your wireless internet operates on.

Firstly, check the back of your microwave oven and find out what frequency it operates on.

Now you’ll want to change the frequency that your wireless internet operates on. As a rule of thumb, you’ll probably want it to be at least 20MHz different from your microwave. As my wireless was operating at 2462MHz, it was well within the frequency range which was susceptible to interference from the microwave.

Modulazione di frequenza
Creative Commons License photo: Un ragazzo chiamato Bi

Here are the wi-fi channels and corresponding frequencies:

Channel Frequency (MHz)
1 2412
2 2417
3 2422
4 2427
5 2432
6 2437
7 2442
8 2447
9 2452
10 2457
11 2462
12 2467
13 2472
14 2484

It’s important to note that these are center frequencies. In other words, your wireless internet will use a range of frequencies around that frequency (e.g. channel 11 is centred on 2462MHz but actually uses all frequencies between 2451MHz and 2473MHz). Hence you need to make sure there is a sufficient gap between the frequency of your wireless internet and the frequency of the microwave. Consult this graph on Wikipedia for more information.

Check local laws too about what frequencies and power levels you are allowed to use. You can use channels 1-13 in most of the world with the exception of channels 12 and 13 in North America.

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Bug inside LCD Screen

Argh, help! I’ve got a living bug crawling around inside my LCD computer monitor! It’s actually walking around which is quite annoying. I’ve no idea how it got in there but it’s small enough to have fit through the small holes at the back of the monitor.

On the bright side, there only seems to be one so they won’t be making babies in there any time soon. Has anyone ever had bugs inside their monitors and how did they get rid of them? The advice I’ve had so far is to wait for them to die and hope that they die off screen or somewhere where it won’t affect the picture too much.

Update (July 2010): Incredibly, this article has had 10,000 hits since it’s been published (most of them being in July each year which seems to be peak season). Please read the comments below for tips and discussion. In my case, I found that the bug disappeared after a few days providing that you don’t squish it or anything. You don’t need to do anything elaborate like taking your screen apart (and would not be advised to). Please do drop a comment below and let us know what’s working for you.  – Ken