Category: Broadband

The NICC has agreed to approve ADSL2+ for use in the UK local loop, after much fiddling around means it can co-exist with VDSL.

ntl has the same day as Telewest announced its video-on-demand services.

Telewest has launched a movies-on-demand service, provided by FilmFlex, that will be accessible by its cable TV customers on the Digital network.

Businesses in the Oxford area are set to benefit from a 10Mbps symmetric service supplied by Community Internet.

A new wired network is to be created in Shoreditch, London costing £20,000,000 to create the largest broadband community in the UK.

TheRegister reports that T-Online, the largest ISP in Germany, has launched a low cost DSL service under its congster brand. The service costs €3.99 per month, some £2.83. The service includes 2GB of monthly usage on a three month minimum contract. After this limit, further traffic is charged at €0.0139 per megabyte which is about one pence, amounting to about £10 per gigabyte. It is worth noting these prices do not include the base DSL subscription so cannot be compared directly to UK services!

Another year has passed as we look back at how 2004 has changed broadband and what we're expecting from the next twelve months. We think most will agree that the last year has been a good year for broadband, although there is still a lot of work that needs doing to extend coverage, and the ever-increasing pressure for more bandwidth. In our review of 2003, we suggested BT would be launching a Home2000 service in Q4/2004 or early 2005 and we're pleased BT has started trialling this service in November and hope that it will move to a full service in the near future. This raises an interesting question as to what BT will do next in terms of speeds. The increasing pressure from cable companies, LLU operators such as Easynet, Bulldog and others entering the market is going to force BT into offering higher bandwidth services which we expect to be trialling in the second half of the year, possibly even launching before the end of 2005. Telewest has already been pushing the boundaries with broadband speed trying to catch up on the missed opportunity the cable companies had to dominate the market when BT was slow to start up on rolling out of ADSL just before the millennium.

Ofcoms Stephen Carter has been speaking about the comments made recently by Ben Verwaayen the BT CEO.

It is the run up to Christmas and its time to warn people, that if their ADSL connection becomes flaky, to turn off the Christmas lights to see if that helps.

The Register has picked up on some comments in the Financial Times by BT CEO Ben Verwaayen.