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Ofcom’s latest quarterly Telecoms Market Data Tables Q2 2012 report has revealed that the UK is now home to a total of 21.067 million fixed line home and small business broadband ISP connections (up from 20.91m in Q1-2012), which includes 601,000 superfast fibre optic based services (e.g. FTTC/P).
The debate over whether or not Scotland should become independent from the United Kingdom is generally marred by political division, which often overlooks some of the more technical and economic questions; such as what happens to the cost and speed of broadband in Scotland, England, N.Ireland and Wales if the former separates?
A team of scientists working out of Bangor University in Wales has developed a commercially affordable method of using Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OOFDM) over fibre optic lines, which could deliver broadband ISP speeds that are 2,000 times faster than current services.
The European Parliament’s Industry, Research and Energy Committee (ITRE) has supported calls for a “radical” boost to Europe’s Digital Agenda strategy, which could see “ultrafast” broadband ISP speeds of 100Mbps (Megabits per second) being made available to 100% of UK and EU households by 2020; with 50% able to get speeds of 1000Mbps (1Gbps).
A new Government commissioned report from Analysys Mason has revealed that the total radio spectrum (e.g. wifi, digital tv, 3G etc.) market was worth £52 billion a year to the UK economy in 2011 (up 25% in real terms since 2006) and rising. But Mobile Broadband is going to get cheaper.
Software and Internet giants Microsoft and Google are understood to have expressed “extreme interest” in the UK development of a potentially national wifi style wireless broadband network using the unused White Space (IEEE 802.22) radio spectrum that exists between Digital TV (DTV) channels.