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
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
Local government is going to be the lynchpin to rolling out future generation broadband networks, according to BT. It believes that local authorities are the key to unlocking pent-up demand for faster connections to hospitals, libraries, government offices and schools which will, in turn, make investing billions in fibre more attractive.
Following on from this month’s
Providing a nationwide network of next generation broadband could cost as much as £29bn, according to the influential telecommunications industry body, the Broadband Stakeholder’s Group (BSG). If that leaves ISPs and broadband users wondering where the investment is coming from, the long awaited ‘Caio report’ (PDF download) suggests that it’s unlikely to be coming from
Remarks by the Chair of Ofcom’s Consumer Panel that ‘next generation’ broadband should skip a generation to prioritise those without broadband today have been met with a muted response from the two companies that could potentially build the required nationwide network.
Neither BT nor Virgin Media was able to answer positively SamKnows’ question of how people
OFCOM have published the results of research into how fast data can be transmitted over a copper local loop.
This is a very theoretical study that asks what might be possible some day, while noting that the standards to achieve that level of performance have not been defined and equipment is certainly not available.
It also looks
Yesterday’s news about FTTH created a stir, but what might a fibre service cost ?
Part of the answer is already in the public domain, from BT Openreach and BT Wholesale announcements relating to the Ebbsfleet pilot.
The fibre connection charge will be £130 and the monthly rental for a 10Mbits/s downstream (bursting to 30M) service will
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
Sky (Easynet) are reportedly trialling a Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) system in East London, which according to ZDnet doesn’t involve any customers but is more of a “proof of concept” trial of sub-loop unbundling (SLU).
SLU involves Openreach making available tie pairs at the street cabinet level, allowing 3rd party operators to connect ADSL or
The Victorians probably did not realise that the sewers they built would one day provide a potential means for rolling out fibre across the country. However, that is the business plan of infrastructure builder H2O which, as the name suggests, lays fibre through sewers to minimise disruption on the surface.
The company begins work on a
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
The government’s leading advisory group has warned that before ‘next generation’ services are launched the business model behind broadband will need to change.
The Broadband Stakeholders Group released findings earlier this week that suggested the £16bn required to build fibre connections to 80% of UK homes would lead to a positive social and economic gain for
BT Wholsale’s launch of FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) at the new Ebbsfleet valley housing development kicks off this Autumn. Whilst a rough product line-up has been in the public domain for some time, this is the first time we’ve seen any pricing information from them.
The following table summarises both the products and prices on
Given BT Wholesale’s fast approaching planned rollout announcement (due June 30th by the way!), and the very successful Milton Keynes extended reach trial, it is all too easy to forget about those with TPON lines. TPON (Telephony over Passive Optical Networks) users are unable to receive ADSL broadband because ADSL will only operate over copper