Popular Internet access provider Be Broadband ( O2 ) has for the first time hinted that it might build its own fibre optic broadband network. The move comes as a direct response to yesterdays report, which confirmed that BT was seeking to open up its fibre ducts for use by rival providers (here).


BE's support will add further weight to the debate about access to BT's fibre ducts, which would save ISPs having to dig up roads for their own fibre optic cables and could make investment in next generation broadband services significantly cheaper.

Both Sky Broadband and TalkTalk are also known to be interested, although BT is only likely to agree such a policy if everybody else agreed to open their ducts too. That could be very difficult to achieve. The Conservative Party is also pushing for BT to open up its duct, adding further weight to the debate.

BT has reached its goal of building a million-strong Wi-Fi Hotspot network, making it the largest network of its kind in the UK and Ireland. BT Wi-Fi users are also on track to spend more than a billion minutes online this year, thanks in no small part to the growth of iPhone users.

The estate includes:
• Circa 860,000 BT FON hotspots: These are public Wi-Fi hotspots broadcast [shared] by [fixed line broadband customers with] BT Home Hubs.

• Circa 137,000 BT Business Hubs broadcasting a BT Openzone public Wi-Fi signal.

• Circa 3,800 BT Openzone hotspots in popular UK and Ireland locations including hotels, coffee shops, major city centres, airport lounges and terminals and marinas.

Five million BT consumer and business broadband – plus BT Mobile Broadband - customers have inclusive Wi-Fi minutes in their contracts to surf, work or make cheaper VoIP calls. Casual users can buy access from as little as 1/2p per minute.

BT Openzone customers can access a further 65,000 hotspots in the UK and overseas through international roaming partners. BT FON members have access to another 225,000 FON (hot) spots in the UK and worldwide.

Hull based ISP Karoo (KCOM, Kingston Communications), which predominantly covers the region of East Yorkshire, has announced a big revamp of its existing broadband packages and the introduction of several new ones from Monday 22nd February. Customers can expect to receive a significant boost to their usage allowances without any price hikes.

Karoo Lite - from £8.49
Increased from 2GB to 5GB per month

Karoo Mid 1 - from £12.99
Increased from 10GB to 20GB per month

NEW Karoo Mid 2 - £19.99
30GB per month

NEW Karoo Mid 3 - £24.99
50GB per month

Karoo Pro 1 - £29.99
Increased from 75GB to 100GB per month including unlimited overnight usage

NEW Karoo Pro 2 - £34.99
150GB per month including unlimited overnight usage

All of Karoo's packages offer ADSL2+ download speeds of 'up to' 24Mbps and uploads of 'up to' 1Mbps. Minimum term contract periods are usually either 18 or 12 months in length, depending on the package. Karoo has also put in place a 'downgrade fee amnesty' for those wishing to swap onto a cheaper package for free. Some packages also come with a free router.

The Digital Dale project, a partnership of local businesses, residents and government agencies, has selected Networks by Wireless to build a superfast 20Mbps WiMAX wireless broadband network for Teesdale by late 2011. Currently only 12.3% of people in the district have broadband; the lowest take-up rate in the whole country.


Barnard Castle Vision is currently busy securing funding for the building, maintenance and operation of the network. Networks by Wireless could start work as soon as March, provided the cash can be confirmed.

Prices for the service are expected to start at £20 per month for a slower basic package (+£50 one-off connection fee). The network will cover some 12,000 homes and 1,000 commercial premises.

Comparison site Broadband Genie has revealed the results of its latest survey into UK Mobile Broadband speeds. It used data from 6,000 speedtests carried out during 2009 to conclude that the average speed is just over 1Mbps. Real performance increased by a meagre +0.2Mbps during last year, despite many advertised USB Modem (Dongle) speeds being ramped 'up to' 7.2Mbps.

The results mirror data from other independent tests conducted towards the end of last year, which found that the average Mobile Broadband speed per operator tended to fluctuate between 0.9Mbps and 1.3Mbps. This remains well below the speeds that most operators stick on their dongles and is thus deeply misleading for consumers.

The situation is not unlike that of fixed line broadband providers, where real world performance is often far slower than any advertised rates. Fixed ISPs got around that problem by offering "estimated" speeds for specific customer lines, which must be accepted before a user can complete their registration. This would not work with a roaming technology like Mobile Broadband.

Future Long Term Evolution ( LTE ) technology will make better use of local node capacity and improved performance, although LTE might initially also claim to offer speeds of up to and beyond 150Mbps. The potential for marketing to get out of control is huge, especially while the underlying problem of limited and expensive capacity versus low data revenues continues to persist.

Ironically Mobile Broadband is a perfectly acceptable service when it’s marketed correctly, such as for basic Internet usage. Presently the technology remains little more than a compliment to fixed line services rather than a true replacement.

It's reported that BT and Ofcom are in discussions that could result in rival ISPs being given access to the UK operator’s fibre optic broadband ducts (underground tubes where fibre optic cable can be run). This would allow BT's competitors to deploy their own fibre optic cable infrastructure without having to dig up any roads, assuming that the costs and regulations were fair.


Several ISPs, including TalkTalk and Sky Broadband UK, have expressed frustration at the lack of flexibility found in BT Wholesale's new 'up to' 40Mbps FTTC broadband products. That frustration is understandable because most unbundled ( LLU ) providers relish their ability to offer diverse packages that do not rely upon BT.

Sadly unbundled flexibility is easily lost within the confines of a standard wholesale product, which is presently the only way to get FTTC. One solution could be for the major broadband operators to invest in deploying their own fibre optic infrastructure. However, without access to BT's ducts, this could easily become very expensive in parts of the country where the only alternative would be to dig up roads.

The move might even save BT Wholesale having to make its products more competitive and thus less profitable. It could also be viewed as favourable by an incoming Conservative government. Suffice to say that BT is keep one foot on both sides of the fence, while still also offering support for Labour's 50p +vat per month fixed phone line next gen broadband tax.

UPDATE 12:20pm

BT has kindly sent us a full copy of Ian Livingston's statement, which the FT did not publish.


The additional paragraph is quite interesting, especially since a number of operators are already rolling out FTTH fibre optic broadband networks even without access to BT's ducts. i3 Group in particular is busy in the cities of Bournemouth and Dundee.

It's also worth looking at this from another angle, one that could see BT being given access to any ducts owned by its rivals. That is surely a crucial point and one that could be difficult for smaller suppliers to manage. On the other hand, as per our earlier remark, it all comes down to money and regulation.

BT Wholesale has confirmed that its 21st Century Network (21CN) based Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) product, which can deliver download speeds of up to 24Mbps via ADSL2+ technology, is now available from over 730 exchanges around the UK. 24Mbps products are thus available to half of the country's homes and businesses.

The WBC service crossed BT's "iconic 50% threshold" in mid-January 2010, ahead of schedule, albeit still several years behind key unbundled rivals, such as Be Broadband , TalkTalk and Sky Broadband . Be Broadband in particular was the first to start offering ADSL2+ based 24Mbps services way back in 2005 and can today reach 70% of UK homes.


WBC ADSL2+ is by no means a "next generation broadband service" as BT states, in fact such a claim is almost comical given how far behind they are on its introduction and deployment. However WBC is not purely an ADSL2+ platform and indeed the operators new up to 40Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet ( FTTC ) broadband service is also designed to use it.

Looking ahead, BT are now on track to deliver copper-based WBC services to around 14 million end-users by the end of March 2010 – and – "subject to market demand" – its intention is to increase this to 20 million by Spring 2011.

BT Openreach, which is responsible for ensuring that all rival operators have equality of access to BT's local network, has apologised after one of its engineers mistakenly refused to install a new 'up to' 40Mbps FTTC fibre optic broadband connection because the customer wasn't a BT Retail or TalkTalk user and didn't have a HomeHub router.

Presently we only know of two UK ISPs - BT Retail + Andrews and Arnold Ltd. ( AAISP ) - that actively sell BT Wholesale's commercial Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) product, which launched at the end of last month. Most other providers are not expected to follow suit until later this year when coverage has improved.

Suffice to say, FTTC is a new technology and it's probably no surprise that BT' engineers might suffer a few teething problems. This appears to have been what happened when one of AAISP's subscribers ordered FTTC only for the engineer to turn up and refuse because of some very bizarre reasons.

"Only BT Retail and Carphone Warehouse were capable of doing FTTC," insisted BT Openreach's engineer to AAISP's obviously bemused subscriber (note: Carphone/TalkTalk doesn’t even have a commercial FTTC package yet), before incorrectly insisting that he also had to have one of BT Retails' HomeHub broadband routers too.


As if not suffering enough, BT's engineer promptly left the customer with a malfunctioning ADSL broadband connection and returned to base. Mercifully he came back the following day and did finally complete the installation, despite still insisting that a HomeHub was required.


As we said earlier, teething problems would not be unexpected given that the bulk of initial installations are likely to be for BT Retail. The vast majority of UK ISPs have yet to even launch FTTC products.

Online security firm Websense has revealed the findings from its latest bi-annual research report, which looked at the state of Internet security for the last half of 2009. It found that 71% of websites with malicious code are legitimate sites that have been compromised and 85.8% of all emails were spam (junk).

Websense used its ThreatSeeker™ Network to discover, classify and monitor global Internet threats and trends. Every hour, it scans more than 40 million websites and 10 million emails for malicious code and unwanted content (spam). We've summarised the major findings below.

Web Security
• 13.7% of searches for trending news/buzz words (as defined by Yahoo Buzz & Google Trends) led to malware.
• While the first half of 2009 saw a sharp rise in the number of malicious Web sites, the second half of the year revealed a 3.3% decline in growth. Websense Security Labs believes this is due to the increased focus on Web 2.0 properties with higher traffic and multiple pages. Websense Security Labs has identified:
• • Gumblar, Beladen, Nine Ball and other mass injection campaigns led to a higher number of attacks in April & June over other months.
• • Overall, comparing the second half of 2009 with the same period in 2008, we have seen an average of 225% growth in malicious Web sites.
• 71% of Web sites with malicious code are legitimate sites that have been compromised.
• 95% of user-generated posts on Web sites are spam or malicious.
• Consistent with previous years, the majority of malware still connects to host Web sites registered in the US (51.4%). China (17.2%) remains the second most popular hosting country. In the last six months Spain, which has never appeared in the top 5 listing, has leapt to third place with 15.7% (a 14.5% rise from the first half of the year).

Email Security
• 81% of emails during the second half of the year contained a malicious link.
• Websense Security Labs identified that 85.8% of all emails were spam.
• • Statistics for the second half of 2009 show spam emails broke down as 72% (HTML), 11.2% (image), 14.4% (plain text with URL) and 2.4% (plain text with no URL).
• • Spammers are sending an increased number of blended attacks.
• Tens of thousands of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo email accounts were hacked and passwords stolen and posted online which resulted in a marked increase in the number of spam emails.
• Phishing lures have doubled since the first half of the year representing approximately 4% of spam email.
• Websense saw a rising number of shortened URLs in spam messages, a decrease in the use of image spam, and a consistently high number of emails that contained links to URLs.

Data Security
• 35% of malicious Web-based attacks included data-stealing code.
• 58% of all data-stealing attacks are conducted over the Web.
• US, Russia, China and Brazil are consistently in the top 5 countries hosting crimeware and receiving stolen data. Canada

The emerging trends and predictions by Websense researchers point towards increasingly blended security threats attempting to rope computers into bot networks and steal valuable confidential information. Specifically, hackers will look to compromise new platforms such as smartphones, take advantage of the popularity of Windows 7, compromise the integrity of search engine results and use legitimate advertisements to spread their malicious content; much like any other year.

There will apparently also be even more spam and attacks on the social web and real-time search engines such as Topsy.com, Google and Bing.com. The trend, set to continue this year, began in 2009 with increased malicious use of social networks and collaboration tools such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Google Wave to spread attackers’ wares. These attacks have been successful because of the trust users place in the platforms and the other users.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), which is appointed by the House of Lords and the House of Commons to consider matters relating to human rights in the United Kingdom, has expressed serious concern over the governments Digital Economy Bill and its proposal to disconnect broadband ISP customers from the Internet.


The JCHR has called on the Government to provide a fuller justification for its proposals. In particular it requests more details about the technical measures (when they would be imposed (minimum criteria), for how long and whether users could still seek an alternative ISP) and believes that the amended Clause 17 (allowing copyright powers to be adjusted with only minimum oversight) is still "overly broad".

Read the full Report:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt200910/jtselect/jtrights/44/44.pdf

The British Hospitality Association (BHA), which has been representing the hotel, restaurant and catering industry for 100 years, warns that the Digital Economy Bill "will have serious consequences" for UK hotels offering broadband Internet access to their customers.

The controversial bill seeks to warn and ultimately punish people who are "suspected" of unlawfully downloading copyright files over their Internet Service Provider's (ISP) connection. Unfortunately the methods it will employ cannot accurately identify a specific individual and thus any owner of a shared home/business network or public service, such as Hotels or Libraries, could be unfairly penalised.


The BHA is actually incorrect about one point, perhaps due to a lack of technical knowledge, because it is not the ISPs "liability" or responsibility to identify specific "rooms" where an infringement has taken place; that is quite literally impossible.

The ISP can only identify the owner of a connection (i.e. the hotel itself) and not individual users on a shared local network, hence the situation is in fact far more serious than the BHA may realise. But it's not just Hotels and consumers with concerns. Some 40 representatives from universities, libraries and schools have now written a letter to Lord Puttnam expressing identical fears.


In addition the government’s minister for Creative Industries, Sion Simon, has just announced that he will step down during the February recess. That's kind of a problem for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport because Simon is responsible for pushing the legislation through parliament; queue a big rush to find his replacement.

As it stands the Digital Economy Bill appears to be deeply flawed, largely due to a complete and utter lack of basic technical understanding as repeatedly shown by most politicians, rights holders and a few big name music “stars” (hi Bono). IP addresses are not and never have been a reliable means of accurately identifying specific individuals.

Matt Roburgh, a Security Expert working for broadband ISP TalkTalk UK, has exposed the dangers of weak wireless (Wi-Fi) network security to Channel 4 News (TV). As you'd expect from TalkTalk the interview is focused on how Wi-Fi hacking can lead to network owners being unfairly "suspected" of illegal file sharing (P2P) downloads.

Last year the ISP estimated that 7 Million homes and businesses were vulnerable to Wi-Fi hijacking and, under new anti-piracy proposals, at risk of being wrongly disconnected from the Internet (here). TalkTalk's survey found that 5% of Wi-Fi networks were completely open (no security), 36% used WEP (easily hackable), 56% used WPA which is currently fairly secure but not perfect and only 3% used the best WPA2.