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 [...]

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

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

BT is to open its fibre ducts to allow third parties to roll out their own fibre networks.
In a move its Chief Executive described as ‘unlikely to be the silver bullet that will get fibre in to every home’, the broadband giant has arguable pre-empted future legislation that would have forced it to open its [...]

The Tories have been unveiling their digital ambitions.

Virgin Media has hit back at claims from BT that its newly-announced Infinity fibre service is better than the alternative from Virgin Media, particularly on price and upload speeds.
The cable telephone, television and broadband operator has taken the unusual step of going through BT’s claims one by one and also adding a few pointers on [...]

BT has Virgin Media firmly in its sites today as it launched its highly-antipicated fibre product, BT Infinity.
With scant details of availability, other than a promise to roll it out to 4 million homes and businesses by the end of the year and 10 million by the summer of 2012, the corporation was concentrating on [...]

The increasing need for bandwidth as companies of all sizes conduct more business through cloud computing lies behind Easynet Connect’s launch this week of a £15k per year uncontended 100Mbps fibre service, according to its Managing Director, Chris Stening.

 
The new service is limited to within the M25 area at the moment but the company is [...]

Residents and businesses in part of Manchester are a step closer to having a “true open access network which will revolutionise ways of working and using digital communications.” That’s according to the Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA), which has announced the appointment of a firm to deliver its next-generation fibre-optic broadband project.

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills has opened up a three month consultation period to gather views on how the Next Generation Fund could best be used to bring Next Generation Access to 90% of the population by 2017. Estimates suggest the fund could reach as much as a billion pounds within that period.
The [...]

The community initiative behind the biggest single Wi-Fi network in the UK is proposing extending its reach even further across South West England – and boosting broadband speeds to boot. But because that’ll put it in competition with BT, which has its own ideas for super-fast broadband in the area, the plans could spell trouble for local businesses.

The BT Group is waging a war on two fronts: versus the Government on one side, battling TalkTalk and Sky on the other.