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Right now I'm sick as a dog, perhaps a legacy of spending the early part of last week couped up in an underground TV studio with dozens of other people and breathing constantly recirculated air.

Although I dragged myself out of bed at a little after 7am, I've been coughing, spluttering and feeling so sorry for myself that it's taken me until 11:30am just to hunt out the headlines for today's edition.

Certainly if I was working in a job which required me to spend an hour commuting too and from the office I'd have phoned in sick and you'd all be staring at Friday's column right now -- but hey, this is the 21st century and now even illness is no reason not to turn in a few hours a day.

Now have your say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums While you're here, why not visit the Aardvark Hall of Shame and perhaps make your own nomination.

Of course my next challenge is to figure out a topic for today, a difficult task when you're on your fourth paracetamol of the day already.

The obvious one has to be the situation over at Orcon, where some users seem to be far than best-pleased with the levels of service on offer.

some of the most vocal have already started a thread in the Aardvark Forums on the matter and it would appear that there may be tears before bedtime if things aren't resolved soon.

It seems to be that whole issue of uncapped broadband access rearing its ugly head again and I'm surprised so many people didn't realise that there's just no way to avoid problems when you offer an "all you can eat" connection in these days of movie and music downloads.

Maybe one day, when the recording and movie industries decide that the only way to reduce piracy levels is to offer their own official downloads at reasonable prices, true flat-rate broadband will become viable. Until then however, anyone offering such a service will have to either charge the earth or be careful not to offer optimistic service levels that get blitzed by the P2P users and heavy downloaders.

Once the recording/movie industry agrees to allow ISPs to locally host such content that can then be purchased by their users at *reasonable* prices and without too much draconian DRM, then I suspect the levels of illegal traffic on P2P networks will fall somewhat and free up a little of that bandwidth.

Well that's it from me for today -- I'm going back to bed.

Aardvark Forums
The forums are back up at: www.aardvarkforums.co.nz/forums, have your say on today's column

Unfortunately you'll have to re-register because we're starting the new year with a complete reinstall.

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