ISP News Archives for October 2, 2012

The government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has allegedly sacked the author of an internal discussion paper that questioned some of the costs of BT’s financial model for delivering superfast broadband (FTTC) services into the “final third” of mostly rural parts of the UK.

Market saturation, delays in the availability of 4G based Mobile Broadband services and the greater propensity of consumers to use WiFi for mobile internet use will give Western Europe (UK, France etc.) the lowest annual growth rate in mobile data (29%) between 2012 to 2017. One solution could be to attract more fixed line ISP users to go mobile.

Mobile operators O2 (Telefonica) and Vodafone have been given the green light to merge their UK based 2G, 3G and future 4G (LTE) platforms through a new network sharing agreement that will also lay the foundations for 98% population coverage by the end of 2015 (two years ahead of Ofcom’s 2017 deadline).

BTOpenreach, which manages access to BT’s national UK telecoms network, has announced that ISPs offering its up to 80Mbps capable superfast broadband (FTTC) service will from next year be able to discount the connection fee to £30 +vat (normally £80) for a period of 6 months.

The latest summary of anecdotal consumer broadband ISP speed testing data from Broadband.co.uk, which covers the previous month of September 2012, reveals that the average internet download speed has increased slightly from 16.720Mbps (Megabits per second) in August to top 17Mbps now.