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
Broadband is continuing to be the lead growth area for Virgin Media according to its second quarter figures which were released this morning with a reminder that the brand is gearing up to launch 50mb broadband later in the year.
The company added 54,600 net new broadband customers in the quarter, up from 45,800 for the
I am pleased to announce that our first Performance Monitoring report is ready (finally!).
The report is available in PDF format using the link below. Apologies for the relatively large file size - many of the images are at a higher resolution, so you can zoom in for a better look. A one page “executive summary”
The BBC News site recently discussed the concept of communities left out of plans for “superfast broadband” to take the initiative and set up their own infrastructure.
A potential scheme in Cumbria will build on the wireless Cybermoor project and is looking to install a fibre based system with help from the Community Broadband Network -
BT have today announced plans to roll out a £1.5bn investment in fibre based high speed broadband offering a range of services with top speeds of up to 100Mbps. Headline speeds of “more than 1,000Mb/s in the future” are also mentioned in the BT announcement.
The full press release sets out the financial details and explains
Entanet launches their “2Plus” range of broadband services on Tuesday 15th July. These are variable rate ADSL2+ products that will connect to the telephone exchange at speeds as high as 24 Mbits/s or as low as 288 kbits/s depending on line length, interference, extension wiring and the usual constraints of physics. In other words an
Yesterday the Guardian had a pull-out “Optical Fibre” supplement whilst Ofcom’s Chief Executive was talking to a conference in London about “super-fast broadband”.
The back page of the Guardian supplement was occupied by an advert from Virgin media, who have faced some controversy following advertising their services as “fibre optic” when the final stretch of cable
Entanet’s retailers have become popular ISPs with broadband enthusiasts in part due to their well defined monthly download allowances and lack of complex traffic profiling systems. They have tended to poke fun at the “unlimited” providers from this position of clarity and openness which includes publishing the loads on their BT Central infrastructure.
This position may
The BBC News website reports criticism by analyst Ian Fogg that BT Openreach’s forthcoming fibre trial at Ebbsfleet will be “too slow”. He opines that a trial should use the fastest technology available.
BT are of course trialling the product they plan to launch as opposed to running trials on the fibre technology itself. Their FTTH
BT’s Home IT support service has added a new service to improve broadband speeds - the Broadband Accelerator.
The service, available here, is available only to those who take both a phone line and broadband from BT Retail (i.e. have BT Total Broadband).
For £90 an engineer will visit and spend up to one hour working to
This summer is going to see a lot of records smashed and not just on the Olympic race track. Like most sports in the digital age, the Beijing games will be simulcast on television and broadband, leading most experts to predict audience figures will shoot through the proverbial roof and test broadband networks to the
The BBC news website is offering a broadband speed test and an interactive mapping facility at bbc.co.uk.
Unfortunately their instant speedtest appears to give very low results, for example around 2Mbps when Thinkbroadband reports 7Mbps on the same connection, and there will be some potential bias in respondents being self selected rather than a representative cross
Over the weekend we have incorporated coverage data for a further three wireless broadband ISPs.
Kijoma offer wireless broadband services at up to 10Mbps down by 2Mbps up in parts of Wiltshire, Sussex, Devon and Wales. Their focus is on areas where traditional fixed-line broadband services perform poorly (typically due to line length or quality).
Back in
It seems that at the beginning of each year someone somewhere heralds the coming year as being the “year of broadband”. 2007 was no different, with many predicting that LLU would truly take off. In many ways this has held true - there are now in excess of 3 million unbundled lines in the UK,
Mobile operator O2 yesterday caught up with the rest of the mobile crowd and launched their broadband offerings. Built on the back of Be’s network of 818 ADSL2+ enabled exchanges, covering nearly 14m premises, O2 hope to differentiate themselves from the crowd by not going down the “free broadband” route and instead competing on features.
O2
The Scottish Executive has identified 18 exchanges that are suffering capacity issues and will be upgrading these between now and February 2008. All of these exchanges received ADSL as a part of BT’s Exchange Activate scheme, which has brought ADSL to around 150 exchanges (nearly all of which are in Scotland).
Unfortunately, Exchange Activate limits those
The nice folks at NewNet have recently provided me with the roll-out data for their new 24Mbps ADSL2+ LLU products. Portsmouth central is the first exchange to get the new service, which is expected to go live early in August. Portsmouth North and Fareham are targeted for October.
NewNet’s CEO’s postings on the ThinkBroadband.com message boards
Virgin Media have unveiled their traffic shaping policy (read: usage limits) for their cable broadband services after trials in the North West. Whilst the limits are generous (only being applied during the evening, and only throttling your speed for a few hours), they are sure to be unpopular in certain quarters. The Virgin Media forum
The Telegraph is this morning reporting that mobile group O2, itself recently purchased by Telefonica, has bought LLU operator Be Un Limited for £50m. The fact that O2 has been looking to acquire an LLU operator has been common knowledge for some time, as they have been tied to potential deals with both Bulldog and
The rumour mill has been working overtime for the last 12 hours since ZDNet published an article claiming that Bulldog were leaving the retail market and were instead going to resume offering wholesale products again. This morning Cable & Wireless, Bulldog’s parent company, has confirmed the story in their announcement.
In summary, from 1st July 2006