Kangaroo, the television catch-up and video on demand service being jointly developed by the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 has been referred to the Competition Commission by the Office of Fair Trading.
The Competition Commission (CC) now has a 24 week period to look in to the online television service which will now not debut this [...]

YouTube is synonymous with amateur shaky footage of high school pranks and skateboarding dogs but that might be about to change, at least partially; and that could cause a headache for ISPs.
The famous video site has recently given its content partners, the companies which launch a channel on YouTube, the green light to exceed its [...]

The Scottish Government has awarded a £3.3m contract to Avanti to bring broadband to some 3,800 properties who registered and were validated as not being able to access existing services.
The notspots, or should that be naespots, will receive either an individual satellite broadband solution or a wireless service with the wireless network being connected via [...]

Despite hopes being raised at the recent London Calling event where ISPs met representatives from the music industry, the two sides would seem as diametrically opposed as ever on how to deal with unauthorised file sharing, particularly on who should pay to combat the problem.
Although former pop star Feargal Sharkey, now head of the BMR [...]

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 [...]

Yes that’s right, in order to support our ever increasing developments we’re hiring a new full-time programmer.
There’d be opportunities to work on all aspects of Samknows, including the website, the availability checker API and the rapidly growing performance monitoring network.
The ideal candidate would:

Have excellent PHP, shell scripting and SQL skills (particularly MySQL)
Be very proficient in [...]

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 [...]

Google’s Senior Policy Director, Richard Whitt, has revealed that the web giant is working on tools that will reveal to broadband users whether their service is being ‘throttled’ to allow some online services to be prioritised over others.
Speaking at Santa Clara University at a conference on net neutrality – the issue of whether ISPs should [...]

OFCOM have tweaked the process for handling the situation where a customer finds they cannot order broadband due to a “tag on the line”. This usually arises when a service is already present on a phone line that prevents an ISP ordering ADSL from BT Wholesale, or prevents a LLU operator gaining access to the [...]

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 [...]

Carphone Warehouse believes a slowdown in broadband connections is down to the housing slump rather than an indication we have moved to a predominantly ’switcher’ market.
Shares in the group fell 10% yesterday as its Chief Executive Charles Dunstone admitted that so far this year new, net broadband customers were down on expectations. An assertion that [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

OFCOM have today launched a new public consultation, seeking views on whether BT should be allowed to give discounted connections and voice line rental to up to 300 properties connected by Fibre to the Home (FTTH) in the Ebbsfleet development.
At first glance one might wonder why a consultation is required for this, but the Universal [...]

Ofcom made the positive step on Thursday of getting 37 ISPs, which represent more than 90% of the UK market, to agree to a new code which mandates they must give a realistic forecast of the speed a subscriber will get. Whilst the code does not cover marketing slogans, so we are still likely to [...]

OFCOM have today published a voluntary code of practice for the advertising and selling of broadband products, designed to reduce consumer confusion especially about speed of services. Some 37 ISPs have signed up at the time of writing, representing about 90% of the market. Signatories are expected to fully implement the letter and spirit of [...]

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 [...]

OFCOM have opened a consultation looking at the future pricing structure for BT’s Openreach division.
Openreach owns and runs the BT “local loop” copper network and charges other divisions of BT and other operators for use of the lines. As the local loop is an effective monopoly the pricing is regulated by OFCOM.
Currently the prices charged [...]