BT have caused a bit of a stir this week by mailing a personalised letter to current or former Tiscali group broadband customers (these include Pipex, Freedom2Surf and Nildram). A photograph of one of the letters is available here, having been discussed in various forums earlier this week.
The letter points out the attempts by Tiscali
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
Entanet are to begin trialling their 21CN product set on a series of exchanges in the Birmingham area. Up to 250 users from the three participating ISPs (Entanet is the only non-BT ISP in the trial) will be connected to the network running off the back of the new WBC (Wholesale Broadband Connect) product.
The exchanges
The nice folks at NewNet have recently provided me with the roll-out data for their new 24Mbps ADSL2+ LLU products. Portsmouth central is the first exchange to get the new service, which is expected to go live early in August. Portsmouth North and Fareham are targeted for October.
NewNet’s CEO’s postings on the ThinkBroadband.com message boards
Virgin Media have unveiled their traffic shaping policy (read: usage limits) for their cable broadband services after trials in the North West. Whilst the limits are generous (only being applied during the evening, and only throttling your speed for a few hours), they are sure to be unpopular in certain quarters. The Virgin Media forum
It has been advertised for a couple of weeks now and common knowledge for even longer, but today it’s official - Wanadoo are to rebrand to Orange as of tomorrow.
In conjunction with this announcement, they have also launched their ‘free’ broadband service as well. As expected, this requires you to have a £30+ per month
UKOnline, a subsidary of EasyNet, have announced their plans to launch 8Mbps broadband for £39.99 from April next year. The service is unsurprisingly based upon EasyNet’s LLU deployment, meaning that it should be available at 236 exchanges nationwide by the time of release.
Distance restrictions will mean that around 50% of people on an exchange will
Mostly moved over to the BT checker now… down to 144 exchanges without numbers. I’m going to take another day or two to try and get that number as low as possible, then I’ll start on some features for the site. (Keep the suggestions coming in). Found a few more new exchanges too, bringing my