Category: Regulation

The headline from Ofcom is that new rules could cut the cost of laying full fibre to the home from £500 per premises to £250, additionally new targets for Openreach on performance and firmer pricing for the 40/10 GEA-FTTC service.

Sharon White who heads up Ofcom does not hold back in an attack on Openreach, which makes it clear that she expects Openreach to do more and wants them to urgently do something for slow premises.

Citizens Advice has published a survey showing that 6 out of 10 cats (sorry broadband consumers) experienced slow service or their connection stopped working in the last year. This needs improving and they feel a new advocate to help consumers is needed.

The proposal from BT that in return for not making the USO a legal requirement it would roll-out a mixture of fixed line and other technologies to deliver a USO has been rejected and now the full weight of the law is set to apply to the USO.

The UK tried to break the stranglehold of BT when the original cable franchises were handed out and the next big step was the LLU explosion in 2006. The next step that is the full fibre dream is underway and to try and give competitors some breathing space Ofcom is proposing restrictions on how flexible FTTC and G.fast pricing can be.

After a long wait a final decision has been arrived at on how consumer broadband advertising needs to change in terms of what speeds are shown, and while the median speed is what most expected the inclusion of peak period will make the next few months interesting.

The days of having to plead for compensation to make up for long outages due to faults or missed appointments and delays to installs are set to end now that an automatic compensation has been agreed.

Openreach has been talking about the responses to its full fibre consultation and this raises wide ranging questions about the UK broadband market and what Government and regulators want to do or whether to stand back and let the battle commence.

Hyperoptic is the latest provider to fall foul of the ASA after one complaint about a leaflet has led to a ruling that an advert must not be used again in its current form.

The online world suffers from all the foibles of real life but the persistence of online content and circle of contacts that runs into the billions can have the unfortunate effect of amplifying negative content. Into this maelstrom the UK Government has announced an Internet Safety Green Paper to make the UK the safest place online.