The Technology of wide bandwidth digital is hitting the UK Market. Checkout the two main contenders at this stage.

BT has announced its new wide bandwidth service to be started this summer - They are advertising a starting price of £39.99 a month and free installation if booked by June 2000. A multi-user service to companies will be £99.99 per month. The prices are for 1 computer and up to 4 respectively although there is no reason why more than 1 computer cannot be connected by cables, giving the ability to serve as many computers as you wish. This will of course slow the 10 times faster action of a digital connection.

Telewest has introduced their digital service, BlueYonder, and claim that some areas will have it now. Their price starts at £50 a month, £10 more than BT but if it is
available now, then there will be no shortage of takers.

The hightech of DVD is soon to be challenged by, of all people, the Chinese. They are about to give the Americans and Japanese a bloody nose. On Sky Technofile they announced the coming of a £400 Recordable Video CD Machine. Bob Tomalski gave
Technofile a world exclusive: a prototype Video CD machine that can record over an hour of high quality video and audio onto a normal CD-R disc. When the machine is released, later this year, it'll mean you'll be able to play DVD discs, and time-shift programmes off the TV in the same machine... could this mean Recordable DVD machines are dead in the water? The machine will be made by 'Mico', a Chinese firm. It's not available in the UK.

Playing Cd's from different parts of the world has been a problem. Buying a cheaper disk from the states would not do anyone in the EC any good, cos it wouldn't play. Now here is a machine that plays em all. This is also from the Chinese, the Mico DVD-A980 plays discs from any region, and features a built-in Dolby Digital decoder. The machine can also play MP3 discs, and is CD-R compatible.

Tom Houy, from IBM has shown a prototype of IBM's first palm-top computer that you can talk to... Yep it recognises voice comands, there are only four in the world at the moment - but be prepared to see them on the High Street soon!

Olympus show off their latest solid state voice recorder. It's designed to replace the dictaphone, and 8 Megabytes of on-board memory can record 90 minutes of audio, in an ergonomic palm-sized machine.

If you have any news of new technology and feel it worth a mention in the next article then email your findings and any associated website to vegiman.

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