Broadband News

We're all used to UK ISPs rounding on upcoming legislation designed to lay the foundations of a Digital Britain - but now some even bigger web businesses are getting in on the act.

Broadband writer Bill Thompson’s excitement over where Digital Britain is headed has swung from anxiety to mild optimism back to anxiety, all within a year.

BT, TalkTalk and Orange have taken the unprecedented step of joining forces with consumer groups to urge the government to ditch Lord Mandelson’s plans to cut off suspected illegal downloaders.

The Ashes approaching and then reaching a dramatic climax at the same time as the Premier League season got underway has given Sky a record number of new customers for its Sky Sports and News mobile television package as well as its 24-7 football goals and highlights service.

Chris Stening believes success in the business ISP market is different from the consumer sector, relying far more on quality and service than price alone.

Any company that allows online users to publish comments and interact with one another via their brand will be keeping a close eye on Economist.

TalkTalk is to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority tomorrow that BT’s latest ‘up to 20Mb’ advert is ‘misleading’ and based on poor research.

The Digital Britain team has rejected any suggestion that the 50p copper phone line is to be dropped.

The recent well-publicised hacking of corporate documents at Twitter was not an isolated incident.

Lonely Planet may well have cracked a problem which is vexing all media companies – how to make money online without cannibalising offline sales.

Privacy campaigners are often concerned about the amount of knowledge Google has on web users and so plans for its beta behavioural targeting platform, Interest Advertising Based, to go live before the end of the year will soon be big news.

Behavioural targeting may have been given a rough ride by criticisms levelled at the ill-fated Phorm platform but the technology actually already accounts for around 10% to 15% of the country’s £637m online display market.

Plans to use ‘digital dividend’ spectrum, freed up by switching off analogue tv, to bring mobile broadband to not spots have two fatal flaws, according to the former Chief Strategy Officer at the GSM Association, Ameet Shah.

BT today revealed it is not going to roll out Phorm, prompting the interest based advertising company to counter the assumption that this spells the end of its involvement in the UK market.

Something very unusual has started to happen in the UK over the past couple of years and it is has been happening in Scandinavia too.

Within two years BT Business will be making more from selling software services than monthly broadband connection fees.

The Digital Britain report is out at last and there was a proverbial rabbit in the hat for Lord Carter to pull out; a 50p per month tax on telephone line connections to raise roughly £150m a year to push back the geographic barriers of faster web access.

If you've not got time to read the full 245 pages of Digital Britain, Samknows.

It may sound like a leaf out of the Book of Obama, but Gordon Brown says broadband is as important to Britain's future as railways have been to its past.

Not everyone without broadband will take it up - even if it's offered to them for free.

The man in charge of the UK’s biggest ISP says that, when it comes to preventing illegal file-sharing, too much attention is being paid to peer-to-peer networking and the role ISPs can play to stop it.

At around the same time as Sir Alan tells one would-be Apprentice ‘you’re fired’ tonight, Phorm will be launching what it claims has always been the ‘missing piece’ in its ‘rounded offering’.

Spotify has been pressured for months to seal its legitimacy and sign up for a PRS for Music licence and SamKnows can now reveal that the hugely successful music streaming service has agreed terms with the UK body which represents music writers and publishers.

A man who downloaded over three thousand copyrighted movies on the Internet has been let off the hook in the Spanish courts.

Following Rupert Murdoch's announcement that his company's looking for ways to make readers of The Sun and The Times pay to access their websites, the debate on how newspapers can save themselves in the digital age has been reignited.

Vodafone and O2 can breathe a sigh of relief. A Government spectrum farming report has decided that neither company should be forced to give up any of its most valuable mobile broadband spectrum.

"We have identified around half a million homes whose proximity to our existing access network makes it a commercially attractive opportunity to extend our network to reach them over the next few years.

Google's unveiled the technologies it hopes will make sure it stays everyone's favourite search engine at what it's calling its first "state of the union" address.

Sky has launched a scathing attack on the BBC and the BBC Trust over the proposed Project Canvas which would see BBC, ITV and BT collaboration on a set top box which would bring online video content to the living room - essentially a Freeview box but with iPlayer-style functionality.

A future Conservative government would build Digital Britain with an injection of more common sense and new powers at local government level as well as encouraging community groups to petition local authorities for fibre.

The world's most popular BitTorrent site is blocking off content that infringes copyright ahead of its forthcoming court appearance.

AOL is relaunching its home page as the only place where UK surfers can check their mail and log on to multiple social networks automatically from one location.

The deal is done. Carphone Warehouse has bought Tiscali’s UK assets for £235m which it claims makes TalkTalk the largest residential broadband provider in the UK with a combined subscriber base of 4.

First they were, then they weren’t, then everyone thought they might be again but they weren’t but now, finally, Carphone Warehouse is being reported to have made an informal offer of £275m for Tiscali’s UK assets.

Virgin Media has started trialling 200Mb broadband in Ashford, Kent.

Virgin Media’s quarterly figures released today show it is just as susceptible as competitors to the general slowdown in new broadband connections.

Sky’s prediction it could persuade its television customer base to take up its triple play of satellite television, phone and broadband appear to be vindicated with strong growth figures released today for the nine months up to the end of March.

ISPs have reacted with guarded optimism to Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, pulling back on controversial plans to store all details of a subscriber’s web and email traffic on a single, unified database.

In last week's budget the Government committed to looking at the possibility of taxing intellectual property, which it sees as a means to the end of pulling the UK out of its economic hole.

"The Budget today announces that the Government will pursue Universal Service in broadband at 2 Megabits per second alongside further support to promote broadband take-up and basic digital skills.

While the talk of flat markets was hardly surprising, the biggest news to come out of Carphone Warehouse’s Q4 trading update, released this morning, was confirmation the group will split its retail and telecoms operations.

TalkTalk has today announced a £50 incentive scheme to attract Tiscali customers concerned over the ISP’s future.

ITV’s Chief Executive Michael Grade’s warning that the British regulatory system could give American rivals an unfair advantage may be starting to be realised as both Hulu and TV.

It had people scratching their heads back in 2005 as to where the reported ‘synergies’ were and so news that eBay is to dispose of internet telephony business Skype next year is not entirely surprising.

It may have been the first country to get a man on the moon but now America's playing catch-up in the national broadband stakes.

Facebook has blocked all links to The Pirate Bay, disconnecting users from the world's most popular social networking and file-sharing sites.

Virgin Media has launched its ‘V Stuff’ suite of broadband subscriber features with the announcement of a new, inclusive back up service which allows customers to set up online photo albums and order up to 100 prints per month for free.

An entertainment blogger has reportedly been sacked from his role at FoxNews.

New music services from Virgin Media look inevitable after the fibre broadband provider announced today it had appointed Richard Wheeler to the newly-created post of Head of Music.

Project Kangaroo, the failed broadband TV venture between the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, could be bouncing back, with Orange a potential buyer for the technology behind it.

New European Union legislation comes into effect today forcing Internet Service Providers to hold on to data for 12 months on how we use the internet.

The BBC and Sky are, perhaps unsurprisingly, at loggerheads as to how central the BBC should be in delivering the government’s vision for Digital Britain.

The ‘bill shock’ often associated with a trip abroad could be eased from this July as new European rules are due to be put in place that will limit roaming charges to 1 Euro per Mb.

Sky is urging the government to drop the suggestion the BBC could play an important role in the roll out of high speed broadband, as outlined in Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report.

The BPI has confirmed to SamKnows that although there has been no official statement, it has ditched its call on ISPs to warn, warn again and then disconnect illegal file shares – the so called ‘three strikes and out’ approach.

Felix Geyr is to begin sharpening Be Broadband's focus this spring on the core interests for which he believes people come to the LLU provider.

BT today launched a free Wi-Fi service in Westminster which will allow anybody in the area with a laptop or mobile (with Wi-Fi) to find local information as well as book restaurants and reserve tickets to events.

Stephen Carter’s interim Digital Britain report was published today as more of a conversation starter than a list of proposed policies some may have wished for.

TalkTalk is launching an 'Emergency Plan' today which gives existing customers six months internet connection and access to their TalkTalk home phone plan for free, leaving them to pay just the line rental each month.

Sky unveiled quarterly figures which it suggests makes it the country’s fastest growing broadband provider and warned rivals that it feels there is still much growth yet to come through converting more of its 9.

BA is due to launch what it claims will be the first transatlantic mobile internet service from a UK airline when it launches its new London City to JFK business class only route this Autumn.

There are many people eagerly anticipating Stephen Carter’s Digital Britain report this week but long-time ‘notspot’ campaigner and author, Lindsey Annison, is fearing the report’s recommendations will not go far enough in bringing broadband to rural communities and those on the wrong side of the existing digital divide.

Sylvain Thevenot can understand why many people believe his appointment last autumn as TalkTalk’s senior director of products and strategy means the ISP is aiming to launch a mobile broadband service.

The National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (Nesta) is calling on the Government to think more creatively about how it could encourage fibre to be rolled out by rewarding companies with digital radio spectrum for Wi-Max use.

Virgin Media is launching Setanta Replay today which gives its top tier customers free video on demand replays of sporting action for up to a week after it is first broadcast.

Be customers are being promised a multi million pound network improvement scheme which should start easing congestion within a month to six weeks.

Sky customers are the least likely to switch their ISP, independent research from Strategy Analytics reveals.

Privacy campaigners have ushered in the new year with warnings that new EU rules compelling ISPs to keep a record of email communications for a year are an infringement of civil liberties.

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• UK consumers on average receive a maximum speed of 4.3Mbit/s
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• Customers with an ‘up to 8Mbit/s’ package received, on average, a speed of 3.

The Vat reduction was passed on by most major ISPs at the end of last year with the notable exceptions of TalkTalk and Sky, and it looks likely to stay that way for the time being.