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
It has been advertised for a couple of weeks now and common knowledge for even longer, but today it’s official - Wanadoo are to rebrand to Orange as of tomorrow.
In conjunction with this announcement, they have also launched their ‘free’ broadband service as well. As expected, this requires you to have a £30+ per month
After undergoing months of trials and forming the basis of endless speculation, Bulldog have finally launched their ADSL2+ services. Touted at running at 16Mbps downstream, with 1Mbps upsteam, the service is available at all of Bulldog’s unbundled exchanges (according to Bulldog’s FAQ).
It’s still unclear as to whether Bulldog are capping the product at 16Mbps or
It’s easy to see that ADSL Max has got everyone rather excited at the moment. Forum posts on the subject are seemingly endless in number and the bt.com/broadband website seemed to slow a crawl at midnight as the nations most eager broadband users simultaneously clicked “Go” on the availability checker.
However, a note of caution. ADSL
PlusNet today announced that, following successful trials, it has reached agreement with Tiscali UK for Tiscali to supply wholesale broadband network services to PlusNet utilising its Local Loop Unbundled (LLU) infrastructure.
Speeds up to 8Mb will be available within Tiscali’s LLU service areas using ADSL and speeds of up to 24Mb will be possible in areas
The Register is carrying a story on the latest Ofcom views on making high speed net access a part of service providers universal service obligation (USO). Ofcoms view is that for the moment high speed net access should not be part of a USO.
Ofcom was quoted as saying, “By imposing a USO and in choosing
Andrew Davies, Minister for Economic Development and Transport, has today announced that BT have been awarded the contract to supply broadband to the remaining 35 unviable exchanges in Wales. Work will commence immediately, with the first RFS date due at the end of June. 32 RFS dates were released in total, which can be found
BT have today announced that they have signed the remaining four contracts for suppliers for the 21st Century Network rollout. Rather unsurprisingly, Alcatel, Cisco, Ericsson and Fujitsu are the four additional prefered suppliers that now join the existing list of Ciena, Huawei, Lucent and Siemens.
BT’s 21CN plans involve moving the entire telecommunications network to an
BT today confirmed the launch date for ADSL Max products.
This will allow people to obtain line rates of up to 8Mbit/s, enabling them to get more out of their broadband connection. The ADSL broadband speed that can be supported on an individual line is governed by a wide range of physical factors.
BT estimates that
Homechoice customers can now benefit from a speed upgrade for free.
1Mb becomes 2Mb and the 2Mb service becomes 4Mb.
On the Homechoice website they are now offering connections at upto 8Mb.
There coverage is fairly limited to within the M25 and Stevenage at the moment this may change in the coming months.
List of exchanges can be found
Fusion Media Networks have today announced their line of products built upon the IPStream Max product from BT Wholesale. On exchanges where ADSL Max is available, home users will be able to purchase 8Mbps broadband (with 448Kbps upstream) for £29.99 +VAT per month. Business users will be offered 8Mbps broadband with 832Kbps upstream for £54.99
Be, today launched ‘Be home 24 meg’ - the UK’s fastest broadband service.
For just £24 per month, Be offers it’s members speeds up to 24 megs and limitless
24 hour per day access to the Internet, using the free, wireless Be Box modem.
Be’s 24 meg service represents an exponential leap for Internet users. Just one of
their
Be, the UK’s newest broadband provider, broke the speed record yesterday when their first customer, Stefan, connected to the Internet in Clerkenwell with a download speed of 18.5 meg.
“I didn’t think it would make that much difference, but it’s actually really excellent. After 20 minutes, I was utterly sold” said Stefan.
Be is one of the
UkOnline have been conducting trials with parent company Easynet since March this year.
In reaction to Be Unlimited offering consumer trials of the 24Meg service in the London area, UkOnline are looking at beginning consumer trials immediately.
“UK Online’s groundbreaking broadband service offering speeds of up to 24Mb
will be available in October, for under £30 a month.”
Consumers
Be Unlimited are offering 24Meg download and 1Meg upload, unlimited internet access.
On 24 exchanges in the London area, we are in the process of enquiring into where those 24 exchanges are to a better level of detail.
The home service is priced at £20 per month for lift once the trial is completed. We would expect
From the 1st September 2005, BT Wholesale will be reducing the charges made for new ADSL provisions. Quite a few ISPs do not charge this, as they spread the cost over a 12-month period.
For ‘home’ (50:1 contention) and ‘office’ (20:1 contention) these have been reduced from £50 to £40. SDSL has been reduced from £260
Not content with just announcing an additional 500 SDSL exchanges this week, BT Wholesale have today announced a sweeping range of new developments.
First and foremost, BT have announced early plans to trial ADSL2+ at speeds of up to 18Mbps in the UK. There are sadly no further details of this trial yet, but further details
Following a successful three month trial, BT Wholesale have announced that the trial for IP Stream 2000 has completed and the product will be launched on the 10/02/2005.
Whilst many ISP’s have been offering 2Mbps connections for a reasonable price for some time now, these have been based upon Office 20:1 connections. This new product extends
UKOnline, a subsidary of EasyNet, have announced their plans to launch 8Mbps broadband for £39.99 from April next year. The service is unsurprisingly based upon EasyNet’s LLU deployment, meaning that it should be available at 236 exchanges nationwide by the time of release.
Distance restrictions will mean that around 50% of people on an exchange will
Users of Telewest’s Blueyonder service must be having a great year so far - first a free speed boost back in August, and now another penciled in for Christmas. All products with the exception of the 256Kbps product will have their speeds increased. The 3Mbps product will be taken to 4Mbps (rivaling Bulldogs 4Mbps services,