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Boris Johnson made a surprise appearance at a press conference in London's Science Museum this morning. The press conference was for Everything Everywhere to announce the roll out of 4G across the UK as well as its rebranding to EE.

BoJo made a hilarious speech to declare London's networks "switched on". Not before rambling on about how well the mobile networks coped with the extra demand during the Olympics.

He didn't stop there.

He specifically went on to thank EE's competitor, Vodafone, along with further thanks to BT.

Awkward Boris, awkward. I don't think you should expect an invite to EE's Chirstmas party after that.

With Cisco due to be providing Wi-Fi access for the Olympic and Paralympics Games this summer, it's slightly concerning that the vendor struggled to provide Wi-Fi for the attendees of its very own Cisco Live Europe event this week.

During the games the supplier is contracted to provide Wi-Fi, along with several other services, to 6,000 staff and 70,000 volunteers at 100 venues around the country. There were 5,000 people at Cisco Live, taking place at the Excel Centre only a stone's throw from the Olympic Park - and itself an Olympic venue - yet there were plenty of angry attendees unable to Tweet or access their e-mails.

Recently Stuart Hill, BT's vice president and director of the Olympic Games 2012, revealed that he was in "sensitive discussions" with Cisco to provide Wi-Fi within the Olympic Park for the use of the general public too - Downtime isn't holding its breath just yet.

A BT survey of 2103 people has shown that 20% of adults are yet to send an email. Unfortunately the survey doesn't continue on to reveal how many of the electronic mail virgins actually knew how to or what an email was. 

The Telegraph website has revealed a true scoop on the state of UK broadband. Either that, or it has made a tantalisingly insightful typo.

In a story stating that property website Rightmove is to include broadband speeds in all its listed properties, the story describes BT Infinity - the telco's fibre-based superfast broadband product - as delivering "40 mega buts per second":

 

Downtime gets as frustrated as everyone else in the disparity between promised and actual broadband speeds, and thinks that Ofcom should adopt this new nomenclature to describe ISPs' customer complaint handling:

Customer: "You told me I would get 40 meg broadband."

ISP: "But that's only the highest speed possible... But you're too far from the exchange... But we can't offer fibre in your area... But it's not commercially viable in rural areas... But... But..."

Just think how bad it can get - 40 million "buts" every second!

  

According to the latest report on Royal spending from the Keeper of the Privy Purse, the Queen's IT budget was slashed by 50% last year, down from £400,000 in 2008 to £200,000 last year.

Apparently one of last year's IT priorities was the implementation of "a system to enable the real time back-up of all data to the Household's Business Continuity site".

Where does one keep one's backup site, Downtime wonders? In the east wing of the Palace? Perhaps the servant's quarters in remote Balmoral?

Other IT details contained in the Royal household's latest annual report reveal the connected nature of today's Royal family.

"Buckingham Palace is linked to other Royal palaces via private wires and fibre optic links and during the year additional links and software upgrades were implemented for resilience and a full disaster recovery test was carried out," says the report.

And not to be left out of the latest trends, QE2 has gone QE2.0:

"The Monarchy website and web presence has been continually developed since the relaunch of www.royal.gov.uk in February 2009 to keep up with new media trends and technological advances," says the report.

"The website attracts up to 300,000 visitors a week at peak times. Social Media is becoming an increasingly important medium for disseminating assets and information about the work of the Royal Family. In June 2009 a British Monarchy Twitter account was launched which now has over 40,000 followers."

And it looks like a busy year ahead for the Queen's IT team, whose priorities in 2010 will include "looking at various business processes within the Household with the aim of automating as much as possible and ensuring that these processes can cope with the increased workloads expected in association with the Diamond Jubilee in 2012."

Downtime is sure that one's IT manager is in for a busy, if budget-restricted, year ahead.

When Google announced it would connect the US city of Topeka with a 1gbps fibre network for free, the mayor promptly renamed the city "Google" for the month of March.

The internet firm has been trialling a 50,000-user 1gbps fibre optic network as part of its "Think Big With A Gig" project.

Now the company is looking for towns in which to deploy more networks, each for between 50,000 and 500,000 people, and the result is a manic competition between America's mayors.

One city, Duluth, made a mock proclamation that all males born in the town would be christened "Google Fibre".

Another town invented a flavour of ice-cream dubbed "Google Fibre".

Other mayors have gone in for stunts including swimming in a tankful of sharks, jumping out of planes and swimming in an iced-up lake - all to draw attention to their bid to win the Google offer.

Described by some commentators as great way to kick-start fibre deployment to the home, Downtime wonders whether Boris Johnson would be willing to jump off Tower Bridge if Google made the same offer in London.

As usual, the Microsoft presentation hit a glitch. But at IP08, it was not Microsoft's fault. You can blame BT.

The throngs were waiting for a speech from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to be piped in from Southbank to the IP08 viewing room in Earl's Court. But the ISDN link was not up. Not in the morning. Not at lunch.

So three questions for BT.

As this was an IP event, why ISDN? Second, why was the contingency plan to record Ballmer's speech and courier the tape across town? Third, what does this say about BT's confidence in its 21st Century Network? Answers on a postage stamp, please.

Does cloud computing confuse you? Not us. Because "the degree to which we can help our customers become more cloud-like internally will actually enable them to federate more easily with external clouds offered by suppliers selling computing resources," according to one suppler.

Whatever happened to blue-sky thinking?

The Wi-Fi watch and the topic of useless inventions also continued to garner interest from reader Michael Williams: "A couple of years ago our sales director came over with a great new idea form a client, and invited me to look at incorporating it into our next software release. The client wanted - in case he was absent from his desk when the telephone rang - an electronic message to be sent to his screen by his secretary with the caller details. I asked him to email me the details, but he still didn't get it. The same director called a developer in because of a fault with a web page. The director could highlight text on the page, but it wouldn't let him type over it. I was never short of work at that company."