Year in Review: 2012

These past twelve months have yet again been interesting for broadband users
as more and more of us are able to access super-fast fibre optic broadband from
smaller projects such as
Gigaclear in Oxfordshire to large fibre rollouts by BT. We have seen
announcements of more support funding for a number of regional projects.
According to Ofcom, by mid-2012,
63% of households had access to super-fast broadband.

At the beginning of the year we reported that Andrew Crossley of ACS Law
Solicitors
had been suspended for two years by the Solicitors Regulation Authority
following a ‘speculative invoicing’ fiasco. Despite this a new company, Golden
Eye, has only recently
been granted a court order to force broadband provider O2 to supply details
of a thousand customers. Unlike ACS Law, Golden Eye is not a firm of solicitors
regulated by the SRA.

In February, Openreach announced its intention to offer fibre-on-demand in
2013 with
indicative pricing announced only a few weeks ago. Ofcom also announced
some changes in how telephone and broadband service
migrations would work, although we await to see the effects.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer announced in the March budget that the
cities of Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle would
join Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London in the super-connected cities
project, receiving millions in funding for delivering ultrafast broadband
coverage to 1.7 million households and 200,000 businesses by 2015.

A number of larger broadband providers were ordered by Ms Justice Arnold to

block access, to the Pirate Bay, a website implicated in the distribution
of copyrighted content. Access remains possible through technical workarounds,
but the Pirate Party operated proxy server has just recently been shut
down.

We launched our new broadband
factsheet in June which has received much positive feedback. It is
our aim to continue to update the factsheet on a quarterly basis

In July,
Sky launched its IPTV service requiring no satellite subscription and
Openreach
launched its fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) service, although availability is
still quite limited. Sky
unbundled its 2000th telephone exchange rivalling BT Wholesale in terms of
network size; TalkTalk reaching over 90% of UK households on its unbundled
network.

Fluidata established its
wholesale broadband aggregation platform to bundle the vast array of
smaller regional super-fast fibre projects as well as larger ones such as
Digital Region in Yorkshire and enable a number of broadband providers to
provide services to end-users.

Soon after stepping into her role as Secretary of State for the Department
for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Maria Miller announced that the government
was
planning changes which should make it easier for broadband infrastructure
providers to roll out super-fast broadband by simplifying the planning process
or in some cases removing the need for planning permission for some types of
broadband infrastructure. The changes are unlikely to come into law until
sometime in the coming year.

Everything Everywhere (or EE as we are supposed to call them now)
reached an agreement with Ofcom in November to permit them to launch the
UK’s first commercial 4G LTE service, despite complaints from rival operators
about spectrum. The service has been welcomed but cautiously as speeds vary
dramatically depending on the area.

Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK), the organisation responsible for distributing
funds to support broadband rollout received
EU State Aid Approval in November following concerns about the delays to
the process. In December,
Ainderby Steeple being the first area to benefit.

The Olympics was the highlight for many across the UK in 2012 and we saw
providers upgrading their capacity to cope with demand, mostly successfully as
we had very few reports of major problems.

We have many plans for 2013 we’d love to talk about, but those will have to
wait 😉

In the meantime, we’d like to thank everyone involved in making this all
possible, in particular our staff and volunteers without whom we couldn’t run
this site. Thank you to our loyal visitors—it’s really rewarding when we get
e-mails from many of you telling us how we’ve helped you make a good decision
or solve a problem.

Happy New Year!

Sebastien & John
co-founders, thinkbroadband.com