Virgin Media’s Q4 2008 results show the net growth in cable broadband subscribers down nearly 50% on the same time last year. ADSL subscriber numbers also continued to fall but at a slower rate than the previous quarter. An operating loss of £50m for the quarter was reported, compared to a profit of £50m for [...]

Lord Carter has been speaking out in defence of his “Digital Britain” report, and in particular its Broadband USO proposal, in response to the general online and public debate. Speaking at a meeting organised by NESTA he said
“In our judgement two megabits is a base level that means people can access government services and have [...]

The Office of National Statistics has released its final Internet Connectivity Index showing that more than 19 out of 20 UK internet connections in December 2008 were by broadband.
A continuing decline in dialup use resulted in a small 0.3% reduction in the total number of internet connections, while connections with a “headline speed” over 8 [...]

The Fibre to the Home Council Europe recently published its 6-monthly global ranking of countries with more than 1% of households connected to fibre optic broadband. In the latest update there are twenty countries featured, up from fourteen last July. Only 7 of the 20 exceed 5% and the top four are Asian economies with [...]

There’s the usual flow of product launches and press releases at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, many of which relate to mobile data and broadband.
While LTE and WiMax jostle to capture the technology spotlight there is much talk of the need to release more spectrum for use by smarter mobile devices and for [...]

OFCOM are having another go at achieving consensus on liberalising the use of some mobile phone spectrum with a view to promoting competition and innovation. At the same time Lord Carter has appointed Kip Meek as a “Captain Scarlet” figure to head the challenge to the Mysterons of the mobile phone companies. Meek has been [...]

BT’s share price fell below £1 yesterday, a 25 year low, on the announcement of the 3rd Quarter financial results but there was some good news around in the broadband area. While the pension fund tanked from a £2bn surplus to a £2bn deficit and BT Global Services lost £0.5bn in a quarter, BT Retail’s broadband revenue [...]

Virgin Media have announced a localised trial in Blackpool, Preston and Wigan of a revised traffic management policy for their cable broadband customers. As with the current system this will target the heaviest 5% peak time users and reduce their connection throughput if a daily download or upload GByte threshold is exceeded.
The revised scheme, which [...]

O2 is to provide mobile broadband contracts with inclusive “free” laptops as part of a new Pay Monthly deal from the end of this month. Two Samsung models – the NC10 mini-laptop, shown below, and R510 laptop, will be available online and in O2 stores nationwide, from 27 February 2009.
Two different 24 month contracts will be [...]

The US Senate has passed President Obama’s $827bn “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” which includes several billion dollars in measures to map and increase broadband coverage.
Congress’s version of the bill, passed last month, includes $350 million for a broadband data collection effort to allow states to track – and, specifically, map – the availability of [...]

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.
In a bid to spread its service vertically, so it does not just provide access but is involved in content provision, he is planning to provide a gaming service and is [...]

OFCOM’s latest quarterly telecomms market report for Q3 2008 shows an increase in residential and small business broadband connections of 322,000 in the three months July-September 20008.
The annual increase over September 2007 was just under 2 million connections so we can see that growth is falling away in the classic S shaped curve of technology [...]

At a recent LTE summit Hank Kafka, vice president of network architecture for AT&T, said that ”an LTE network running at full capacity on a 5 x 5 MHz channel could deliver 1 megabyte of capacity to a user at the cost of 0.10 euros” in other words just under 10p per MByte or £100 per GByte. [...]

The Advertising Standards Authority have ruled against Virgin Media in response to complaints from Sky and a member of the public. Finally the regulator has addressed some aspects of the approach taken by VM to marketing its broadband as technically superior which to many looked like either dumbing down or intentional misleading of the public.
Virgin [...]

The UK Competition Commission has blocked the planned Channel 4 / BBC World / ITV joint venture video on demand project, on the grounds that it would result in a “Substantial lessening of competition.”
Full text of the report can be downloaded as a PDF file and the shorter press release is available as a PDF download [...]

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.
The BT MyPlace service (BTMyPlace.com) is being launched with Westminster City Council through a partnership with technology providers io global, Intel and [...]

Mobile broadband is often in the news, not least because the growth in the market is quite fast. At least part of the growth may be down to users signing up to 12 or 18 month contracts in order to get a “free” laptop, printer or other gadget.
Carter’s “Digital Britain” interim report also dangles mobile [...]