Adrian Kamellard is to be the Chief Executive of Broadband Delivery UK.

New Zealand plans to provide a minimum 5Mbits/s to 97% of rural households and 1 Mbits/s to the remaining 3%.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has unveiled its plans today to give 100m American households 100Mb by 2020. The National Broadband Plan would bring next generation access speeds to 90% of Americans and also give schools, hospitals and military facilities a 1Gb connection.
It is estimated to cost in the region of $350bn or £233bn but [...]

The government needs to ensure the new universal service commitment of 2Mb is met throughout rural communities before funding next generation access to urban areas, according to Charles Trotman, Head of Rural Business Development at the Coutry Land and Business Association (CLA) and leading voice behind a newly-formed pressure group, Final Third First.
He, and fellow [...]

Is the threat of being disconnected from the internet encouraging digital pirates to change their behaviour?

Several years after it started advertising “fibre-optic broadband”, Virgin Media is actually doing it for real.

Broadband should be marketed far more for its benefits, rather than an end in itself, and ISPs should be more creative at coming up with affordable packages which include computers.
That is the summary of Jill Pitt, researcher at Consumer Focus, a body part-funded by government which researches consumer issues. Presenting research at the House of [...]

On 2nd March the EC opened a consultation on the future of universal service in a digital era.

The fastest home and business boost speed has just been launched in Bournemouth where fibre customers are being offered a 100Mb connection with up to 10 one hour 1Gb ‘boosts’ per month.
Following fibre to the home (FTTH) work in Bournemouth last year by Fibrecity (known at the time as H2O because it lays much of its [...]

If fibre is to reach deeper penetration and small and medium businesses, providers are going to have to start getting better at showing boards how they can pay for faster internet connections through reduced call charges.
So argues Adam Beaumont, Managing Director of AQL which has extended the fibre network it runs to support its Voice [...]

Jose Socrates, Prime Minister of Portugal, has announced that he want to bring next-generation fibre networks to the whole country as quickly as possible.

SamKnows has been awarded a contract by Ofcom (the UK communications regulator) for the provision of research and data collection in relation to UK fixed-line broadband speeds delivered by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and is now looking for volunteers to join the project.
It’s been over six months since the Ofcom UK Broadband Speeds 2009 report [...]

Virgin Media announced this morning that it is to start rolling out a 100Mb commercial service before the end of the year. The ISP also claimed that it is extending a small trial of 200Mb connections.
Quoting figures from SamKnows’ Performance Monitoring service which, in partnership with Ofcom, measures access speeds across the country, Virgin claimed [...]

TalkTalk is calling on Ofcom to ban BT, and any other provider, from using ‘rolling contracts’ to hook customers in to long-term contracts.
BT came under heavy criticism yesterday in a Which? report for using contracts which tie consumers in to the service for 18 months and are then renewed at the end of the 18 [...]

The Government’s plan to introduce a 50p levy on all telephone land lines has run in to heavy criticism from an all-party group of MPs.
The Business Innovation and Skills Committee has labelled the tax as “ill-directed” because it takes money from everyone to deliver a gain that not all will see. As the committee concluded:
“We [...]

A laptop that ‘even your granny’ is supposed to be able to use and which comes with broadband and support for just under £35 per month became available today in a bid to get more silver surfers online.
Andrew Holmes, co-founder of The Broadband Computer Company claims its Alex laptop (named after Alexander Graham Bell, inventor [...]

European Commission seems happy but rival firms could yet put a spanner in the works.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has outlined one of the key goals of the National Broadband Plan – to deliver 100 Mbps connections to 100 million households.

Google has announced plans to offer 1 Gbps broadband at “competitive prices” to between 50,000 and 500,000 homes in the United States.

BT’s decision this week to open its fibre ducts to competitors has been given a cautious welcome by rivals.
However, the overriding concern is that there are no firm details from BT about how access will be given and under what terms. With the growing politicisation of fibre, for its ability to bring ‘next generation’ broadband [...]