Category: Broadband

Tonight, a special pub quiz will be taking place in two pubs in rural Northamptonshire. The New Inn in Middleton Cheney and The Cross Tree Inn in Byfield will be hosting this rather special event being enabled by broadband. What is claimed as Britain's first Rural Broadband Quiz, the locals in the two pubs will be competing with each other with the aid of streaming video and multimedia interactive questions streaming over the Internet. The winning pub will get free broadband.

One of the key problems in the adoption of broadband by many of the users who were not early adopters has been the lack of broadband content. As part of a wider "Home of Possibilities" broadband strategy, it launched a product bundle in conjunction with Philips that allows users to download music and listen to it in any part of their home. Although this is not an entirely new concept from Philips, previous models have not included 802.11b wireless connectivity.

Oftel has completed its reassessment of the Freeserve complaint over BT Openworld's consumer broadband pricing policies being anti-competitive confirming its earlier decision in May last year. Freeserve had asked the Competition Commission Appeals Tribunal to investigate the decision made by Oftel.

The Community Broadband Network and other broadband campaign groups are welcoming BT's recent announcement following the review of all exchanges which did not have a trigger level set and their decision to provide trigger levels for 2,300 exchanges.

BT has replied to the news story in the Financial Times that Scottish and Southern are to complain to Ofcom over BT enabling the Stonehaven exchange in July 2003.

BT has released details of evidence it submitted to the Trade and Industry Select Committee. The data lays out the current UK position in terms of broadband, and claims an almost unheard of amount of competition compared to the rest of Europe.

The Access to Broadband Campaign (ABC) has announced the date for its next conference. The two day conference to held on 27th and 28th January 2004 is entitled ‘Revolution at the Edge: Broadband Networks and Innovation’.

In an unusual move it appears SSE is going to complain to OFCOM about BT rolling out ADSL to one its PLC broadband trial areas.

TeliaSonera, one of the largest telecommunications operators in Europe is introducing a policy to block all traffic to/from computers hosted on its network that send unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) in a crackdown against viruses and trojans.

The Register is reporting that Oftels latest review of broadband pricing in the UK is unlikely to call for price cuts from BT Wholesale.