The government has divvied up £50m of its £530m rural broadband cash to councils in Wiltshire, Norfolk and Devon and Somerset, in its final wave of pilots. 

Sky is expected to finalise a deal for a management buyout of its networking business Easynet by the end of this week. 

The government is discussing opening up public sector internet infrastructure to bring down the cost of introducing faster broadband nationwide. 

The government has dumped a commitment to deliver universal access to 2Mbit/s broadband by 2012. 

Workshop Mobile broadband has enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame since it became widely available, with many mobile operators reporting triple digit growth year-on-year, and data usage surpassing mobile voice. Access to multimedia content and social networking sites from smartphones, and traffic to and from mobile broadband-based PCs, has contributed to this growth. 

The great and the good of the internet world turned out in force last night at the London Marriott, DJed and evening gowned, to learn who had won prizes at the ISPA annual awards dinner. What a difference a year makes: last year the talk was all around safety, particularly for children. Last night the focus had shifted, with digital economy and the right way to fund creativity on the net very much to the fore. 

Australia's minister for broadband, and censorship, Stephen Conroy has delayed the switch-on of its Chinese-style national firewall until after the election. 

BT is encouraging local authorities in rural areas to consider subsidising faster broadband installations, after a village Parish Council in Kent agreed to stump up part of the cost of fibre-to-the-cabinet. 

BT's broadband boxes have run into planning opposition again, this time from a group of conservation societies on the south coast. 

The number of workers in the UK who admitted they "hijack" the wireless connection of others has gone up from six per cent to 11 per cent over the last 12 months. Globally the figure is 12 per cent*, with big increases all over the world. That's among the findings of the second annual survey of remote working commissioned by networking giant Cisco Systems, which paints a picture of general (and increasing) slackness about IT security threats. The poll of 2,000 remote workers and IT pros from ten countries, including the UK, found that many remote workers were happy to risk opening suspicious emails and attachments. Nearly half (48 per cent) admitted to opening dodgy emails in the UK, something of a black spot for the issue. The US scored better (by comparison, at least) with 27 per cent of those surveyed admitting that they exposed themselves to this risk.