The NextGen ‘08 conference held earlier this month in Manchester brought together a range of opinions and speakers on the subject of Next Generation Access (NGA). The presentations can be downloaded as pdf files from the web site and make interesting reading.
Francesco Caio presented the findings of his recent Next Generation Access Review which concluded
Over the course of this year ISPs have seen peak demands on their networks with the BBC iPlayer traffic surging at the time of the Olympics and the US Election.
Next week the potential bandwidth demand moves into a new phase with the launch of live BBC1 & 2 programming “for licence payers” as discussed in
A run of gloomy financial interim reports was brought to an end this week when Carphone Warehouse did not follow the trend in announcing job cuts but instead hinted at demerging its retail and teleco operations.
The move, which the City is known to favour, would see the two arms of the company parted because analysts
Sky, or to be precise British Sky Broadcasting Group plc, recently announced their first quarter results to September 30th. Sky broadband continues to grow with 1.792 million users but as this is only 20% of Sky homes there would appear to be a considerable opportunity for further growth.
One wonders why the figure is so low
In a recent interview BT’s CEO Ian Livingston suggests that the recession and shareholder pressure may jeopardise plans to spend £1.5bn bringing the next generation of super-fast broadband services to 10m British households within the next four years.
The credit crunch and BT’s recent results will have constrained the availability of capital, and there remains regulatory
Talk Talk have announced revisions to its broadband and phone bundles available from Tuesday November 18th.
Customers on exchanges with Talk Talk equipment will be able to “Boost” their speed above 8Mbits/s download by opting for an “up to 24M” option if their line is capable of a higher speed, for a monthly topup of £4/month
BT hit the headlines today with a planned 10,000 job losses, mainly from contract and agency staff. The announcement came along with the 2nd quarter results which showed a modest performance from the Global Services business countering gains in other divisions. The elephant in the room of the Group Pension scheme is also heading for
Research from Zen Internet shows that, despite the gloomy economic outlook, businesses are prioritising broadband service over cost.
In fact 85% of SME respondents stated that level of support for their broadband service was the most important criteria when choosing a supplier for their business. Similarly, whilst 72% of SMEs said they would change ISP if
Reports suggest that Virgin Media plan to cut their workforce by 15% by 2012 as part of a plan to increase cashflow.
The debt-laden company, which as NTL went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, also said the company has won a deal to delay its debt repayments - giving it until 2012 to refinance £4.3bn worth of
After defending the proposed Kangaroo multi-channel IPTV catch-up service to the Competition Commission, Ashleigh Highfield has resigned to join Microsoft.
The chief executive’s departure will come as a major blow to the proposed online television service for which the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are hoping to get clearance from the Competition Commission. Highfield, who had
BT have issued notification of Wholesale price changes that will take effect on Dec 1st and Jan 1st 2009.
There are many changes, both up and down, some examples are :-
A 5% increase in the annual rental of a fixed speed end user IPStream connection to £8.01 per month (ex VAT, Wholesale) from 1/12/08.
A 4.1% decrease
At the tail end of last week BT Wholesale published an update to it’s Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) rollout data. The update brings expected Ready For Service (RFS) dates for a further 1200 telephone exchanges nationwide.
WBC, as we discuss at length in our guide, is BT’s next generation wholesale product that is sold to ISPs.
Carphone Warehouse has confirmed to SamKnows it is no longer pursuing a purchase of Tiscali, leaving Sky as the sole suitor for the Anglo-Italian ISP that has been for sale throughout most of 2008.
Although Carphone Warehouse believes it will be ‘nip and tuck’ whether it will continue to occupy third place in the UK ISP
Although the customer tracking advertising platform Phorm received a blow this week when it was publicly snubbed by Orange, it can take solace that Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse have assures Sam Knows they are keen to carry on evaluating the technology.
The advertising platform is no stranger to controversy. BT began a trial at the
Mobile broadband is not just about the handset and the connection but also what people can do with that connection.
If proof were needed one need only look at the success of the iPhone App Store which Apple founder Steve Jobs claims achieved 100m downloads of games and applications within just two months of its July
Mobile broadband demand has rocketed sales of cut down laptops, called netbooks, which within a year of launch now account for 10% of the European PC market.
Figures from IDC and Gartners are predicting further massive growth for the small laptop devices which offer cut-price connectivity without the massive processing power and memory capabilities of top
Ofcom and SamKnows have joined forces to help give consumers the most accurate picture ever of broadband performance across the UK. The research project will enable broadband users to compare the performance of the largest ISPs across a number of measures as well as highlighting overall regional variations.
Most previous measures of broadband performance have relied
Be, the O2-owned ISP, has begun allowing its users to customised their broadband connections to prioritise the line towards their favoured activities.
There are four settings on offer. Standard, for everyday broadband use; speed, for watching videos and iPlayer; reliability, recommended for surfing the web for information and VoIP and gaming, which ensures the quickest possible
Virgin Media, the country’s second largest fixed line broadband operator, launched a mobile broadband service last week.
For £15 per month on an 18 month contract, subscribers get a free USB modem to plug in to their laptop and up to 3Gb of downloads per month – each extra Gb of data cost £15. The company
We’re currently deploying a large batch of Performance Monitoring units that will form the basis of our next report. Keen readers of the site will know that a few months back we sought volunteers for the project via a posting in the news here. Well, we took over 1000 registrations in a day, which was