ISPreview - Entanet Interview
Entanet Interview
By: Mark Jackson - Nov 5th 2007 : Page 1 -of- 2
"The LLU providers that have fully unbundled a line have a unique position as it effectively locks a customer into a contract that is expensive to get away from"
Established in 1996, Entanet has grown to become one of the UK’s leading communication providers for business grade voice and data connectivity services. Since then the group has continued to expand and is the key supplier behind some of the country’s best known and performing residential and business focused ISP’s (Aquiss, UKFSN and TitanADSL to name but a few of many).

Entanet is owned by the Tsai family and has retained a strong Taiwanese heritage, just one look at the design of their Shropshire office should be evidence enough of that:

The group was recently chosen as the only non-BT company to participate in the operators initial trials of faster up to 24Mbps ADSL2+ broadband technology, which is due for rollout during 2008. Naturally we wanted to interview them:

1. Who are you and what do you do?

James Blessing, COO, Entanet International.

For those that don't know Entanet is a wholesale ISP that doesn't sell to end users but does it via a channel of resellers. We do carry out billing for those partners that want us to.

I'm also on the Council of the Internet Service Providers Association and chair of the Broadband Subgroup.

2. Ofcom’s new broadband migration rules (GC22), which make it easier for consumers to switch ISP’s, were introduced earlier in the year; though they still fall short when it comes to unbundled (LLU) line support. Has their introduction impacted your ISP and in what areas could it still be improved?

Entanet was one of ISP's pushing for the insertion of GC22 as ISP we holding onto ISPs in unfair ways. The downside is that people now think they have the right to move without fulfilling their contractual obligations.

The LLU providers that have fully unbundled a line have a unique position as it effectively locks a customer into a contract that is expensive to get away from. The impact of this is yet to be fully seen.

3a. Several major ISP’s have expressed concern about the BBC’s new free Video-on-Demand (VoD) iPlayer Internet TV (IPTV) service, primarily pointing towards its P2P based impact upon their networks.

The BBC's product is a fantastic step forward in terms of providing content to end users (if it wasn't purely available on Microsoft platforms I'd be happier) but the ability of the application to saturate networks is quite scary. If the BBC were able to give ISPs control of how and when the capacity was consumed (by imposing limits of the quantity data uploaded during peak hours) then ISP could manage their networks in a cost effective manner without impacting the service.

3b. Tiscali even went so far as to suggest that content providers should contribute to Internet providers, thus helping them to manage the impact. Others ISP’s fear that prices may have to rise, what are your thoughts on the subject?

It would be better to come up with some way of allowing ISP to control the times and speeds of uploads that the iPlayer uses would be more useful. Especially as that would allow the ISP to bill the end user more money to get a better level of service.

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