April update from Telecommunications Adjudicator

Wednesday 07 May 2008 12:57:57 by Andrew Ferguson

The new migrations guide appears to have slipped into May 2008 and the OTA is expecting it to should be published over the next few weeks as the new 'Best Practice Guide'. This should give both providers and consumers information on the large matrix of migration and home mover options that exist in the broadband and voice market. The full Telecommunications Adjudicator report can be read at www.offta.org.uk.

A best practice guide alone will not be enough. Communications providers are meant to be fully adopting the simultaneous provide process which is currently patchy in its use, as well as other changes such as a move to flexi-cease which will allow for faster re-connections.

The increase of 187,000 unbundled connections in the last month reflects the appeal of the various LLU offerings and the continued roll-out. Wholesale Line Rental showed a small increase with an extra 8,000 customers and carrier pre-selection has remained static at 5.85 million telephone lines.

Users living further away from the local telephone exchange will be interested to hear that sub-loop unbundling (the process which allows LLU operators to unbundle a telephone line at a street cabinet level) is under way in London. This location may at first seem an odd choice for a technology that provides better speeds on long lines, but London is not immune to the problems of long lines resulting in slow ADSL/ADSL2+ speeds or even no service.