Category: Regulation

Ofcom has published its first update of 2005, revealing the UK has over six million broadband connections.

The Advertising Standards Authority (www.asa.org.uk) is the organisation responsible for dealing with complaints regarding certain types of advertising such as press advertisements. It was asked by BT and members of the public to look into an advertisement from Telewest Broadband (blueyonder) which made several comparisons about its 256 Kbps service to BT Broadband's 512 Kbps service.

Ben Verwaayen has been talking to The Sunday Times about what he feels may transpire in the current UK broadband market place.

In what almost seems a news item from a dream, MPs are set to review the big 12 month long Ofcom review of UK Telecoms.

The United Kingdom Internet Forum (certainly a better name than UK Internet Federation) has announced that Dr. Willie Black who just stepped down as Executive Chairman of Nominet UK has become its first chairman. The unofficial group sprung up as smaller ISPs started to voice their concerns at BT's price increases on the IPstream Office range of products and it is now taking its position as a campaigning organisation.

Ofcom has announced the connection and on-going rental charges for wholesale Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) services that have arisen from the consultation that took place earlier this year. These prices are due to come into effect on 1 January 2005. The connection charges are being reduced both for fully unbundled lines where the copper pair is given by BT to another operator as a whole and partially unbundled 'shared access' lines where BT provides telephone services but provides unbundling of broadband service to another operator.

Ofcoms second part of its great broadband market review is on the way, but the fall-out from the the MST is still continuing.

Sir George Young increases the pressure on Ofcom by pushing for urgent answers to ISPs questions.

UKIF (UK Internet Federation), a group of service providers convened as a result of the recent BT Wholesale price rises of up to 32.6% taking effect from September has spoken out against Ofcom's lack of respect for business models of smaller providers This morning, Ofcom published its Direction statement setting out a Margin Squeeze test to compare BT Wholesale's IPStream and DataStream services which 'hand over' the user sessions in different parts of the network. Ofcom's role as regulator is to ensure BT does not abuse its dominant market position for example by supporting its own IPStream services over similar services provided by DataStream operators who take the session from BT at an earlier level in the network.

A significant number of small-to-medium sized ISPs have expressed their dissatisfaction at Ofcom's consultation process with respect to the proposed margin squeeze test that is has been using to calculate margins which BT claims left them with no option but to increase prices of the higher end IPStream Office services and among others. A group of ISPs met with Ofcom last Friday to bring their urgent concerns to the table but left feeling their comments would not make a difference.