I was delighted to read that the EU states set to agree to cap cost of texting from abroad. Under this proposed legislation the maximum cost of sending a text message while roaming within the EU will be capped at 11c! That is significantly lower than my current rate!
The proposed legislation also includes a cap of 1€ per MB of data while roaming within the EU. I think that this would benefit a lot of business travellers. However, it would not be of any use to me, because I am always able to use WiFi when I am abroad.
In general I feel that the telcos have not yet embraced the concept of the single European market, and they are still charging their customers extremely heavily for intra-EU services. It is unfortunate that it requires legislation to force the telcos to reduce their charges, but if that is what is required then it must be done!
Tags: SMS, WiFi
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The EU launched a new digital library called Europeana last Thursday. The purpose of this digital library is to contain documents that are of cultural significance to the citizens of the EU. Initially, the digital library contains over 2 million items, but this is expected to grow rapidly.
The website was designed to handle initial traffic of 5 million visitors per hour. However, after its launch the website was receiving over 10 million visitors per hour! This naturally had serious consequences on the performance of the website, and several hours later the number of visitors had not subsided. Therefore, the website has gone offline until it can cope with this larger number of visitors.
I am sure that the website creators are delighted with the level of interest in their website, but I wonder how they got their estimates so wrong. Perhaps there is no way to reliably estimate how many visitors a new website will receive. I also wonder what steps they could have taken to dynamically cope with such large numbers of visitors.
More details about this story can be read in New EU online library crashes under weight of interest.
Tags: Digital Library, Europeana
