SamKnows

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.
Other than that, the report was largely as

The countdown for Phorm could well and truly be starting, revealing by the end of the year if it really is on track to live up to its hype and serve £239m worth of adverts within two years.

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. Speaking ahead of the impending final Digital Britain report, Charles Dunstone said “we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.”

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 4.25m.
SamKnows queried TalkTalk’s maths, given that BT claims to have 4.6m subscribers. TalkTalk’s rationale, it explains, is that of these BT users 700,000

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.
This is believed to be way below the price Tiscali had been seeking – it turned down an offer for

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.
While the leading star of its financials was undoubtedly Sky+ HD boxes surpassing the 1m

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.
Analysts and investors have long called on the group to realise there was never much logic behind having a retailer and

TalkTalk has today announced a £50 incentive scheme to attract Tiscali customers concerned over the ISP’s future.
It would appear to be the final stage of a long battle for ownership of Tiscali’s customers which, earlier this month, saw TalkTalk linked once again with the ailing Italian ISP shortly after its shares had been delisted

Controversial targeted advertising company Phorm has announced a deal with Korean Internet service provider KT. This will see the company’s behavioural targeting advertising system replicated in Korea after successful trials in the UK. However, there are fears that the Phorm system infringes privacy laws and it has attracted a number of legal challenges.
In simple terms

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.
The company claims it has been considering for the past couple of months how it can help customers who are having

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 9.4m satellite television customers to its broadband offering.
The company has maintained fourth place in the UK market (behind BT, Virgin Media

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.
After all, he comes direct from Vodafone where he worked across Europe rolling out new messaging and voice products, most notably answer phone messages

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.
TalkTalk initially told SamKnows it had not immediately passed on the reduction because it was working on increasing its £4

No sooner had the ink dried on the multiple column inches devoted to Virgin Media’s 50Mbps service launch, then Be announced results of a 48Mbps trial near Paddington, London.
Although the full results of the trial are not to be released until the start of next year, a statement from Be pointed out that managing director,

BT’s trial of the controversial targeted advertising platform, Phorm, has ended with both parties reporting success and a commitment to ‘move towards deployment’.
The trial began two and a half months ago to establish if the technology could be used on real life which, Phorm claims, it has shown it can.
“The trial achieved its primary objective

Talk Talk have announced revisions to its broadband and phone bundles available from Tuesday November 18th.
Customers on exchanges with Talk Talk equipment will be able to “Boost” their speed above 8Mbits/s download by opting for an “up to 24M” option if their line is capable of a higher speed, for a monthly topup of £4/month

Carphone Warehouse is reported to still be in talks to buy Tiscali. The Italian-owned ISP had been hoping to set up an auction between Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse this summer but Vodafone pulled out of the process, believing Tiscali had valued itself too highly.
Tiscali is believed to still be talking to Sky about a possible

BBC engineers have used the lull after frenzied downloading and streaming of the Olympics to fix a bug with iPlayer that was causing BT Home Hubs and O2 and Be wireless routers to reset.
The annoying bug was believed to be a problem in the BBC’s encoding of the system that was affecting wireless routes using