It's not T-Om it's Everything Everywhere

Orange UK and T-Mobile UK will be officially joined at the hip on July 1st when the networks are combined with UK roaming between networks. The new company name is Everything, Everywhere which CEO Tom Alexander said "is their name, vision and ambition". T-Om (T-Mobile - Orange Mobile sounds better though), both the ORange and T-Mobile brands are being retained.

The combined company will have over 700 retail stores and command 37% of the UK market which equates to over 30m users, O2 come second with 28%, Vodafone with 23%, with 3 having a small percentage.

The networks will be fully integrated, any overlaps combined etc. The reduced management overheads (for the two networks and management teams) is expected to bring savings of around £3.5bn, this on a turn-over of £7.7bn is where it all starts to make financial sense.

If they can combine the best assets of both companies (rather than the worst) they have the potential to keep their combined lead and offer innovative new services in both the mobile and fixed markets (Orange has a reasonably large consumer broadband offering).

Twitter borked again

A certain Mike Butcher published a post on Techcrunch about a twitter bug allowing anyone to type "accept @username" and then username would be listed in their followers.

Twitter seem to have noticed the error (maybe after reading the article) and have then tried to fix it. When users attempted to run the command, they got an "internal server error" message. It also seems everyone's followers and who they're following have been wiped (well the counts reset to zero and the lists not available, though tweets still come through.

There's probably a slight panic going on in Twitter HQ.

As an update, Twitter have recognised the "accept @username" bug, are rolling back all accounts who used the bug (which forced the username to follow you) to the state before using accept. Once that's complete the follow/ing/ers counts are being set back to what they should be.

iPad WiFi issues (techie)

The iPad seems to have a few issues with WiFi which have been documented by Princeton University.

Having observed the iPad it seems the problem is more like: -

* Select WiFi network
* iPad joins network and does a DHCP request
* iPad caches DHCP info

You then switch off or do something else, then turn on iPad again.

* iPad re-joins WiFi network
* iPad renews IP data from cached info (which may now be stale)
* Hitting renew (under DHCP) just reloads cached info

If the iPad detects a duplicate IP address (as it's been allocated to another system) it shuts WiFi interface down, unfortunately bringing it up again just reloads stale IP info.

If the network info is cleared, then the iPad should renew it's DHCP info, but all the WiFi parameters will need to be entered again.

Please Apple fix in a 3.3 release.