ISP News Archives for January 28, 2014

BT and property development firm SEGRO have teamed up to help 450 companies on the Slough Trading Estate in Berkshire (England) gain access to their up to 80Mbps capable “fibre broadband” FTTC network through private funding.

The state aid supported £21.96m Superfast West Yorkshire project in England has today named the first 14 telephone exchange areas that will benefit from an upgrade to BT’s “high-speed fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network, which aims to cover 97% of local premises by the end of Autumn 2015.

The Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme, which hopes to make superfast fixed line broadband speeds of 25Mbps+ available to 95% of the population by 2017, claims to have successfully passed 273,731 premises on 31st Dec 2013 with BT’s FTTC/P network (estimated to now be sitting at 300,000).

In a surprise move BTOpenreach has advised us that its FTTP on Demand (FoD) product, which makes their “ultra-fast” 330Mbps (30Mbps uploads) fibre optic broadband ISP technology available to premises on FTTC capable lines, is now going to become even more expensive due to higher than expected deployment costs.

The communications regulator has today published its annual Consumer Experience Report (2013), which among other things reveals that consumer satisfaction with broadband service reliability has fallen from 88% in 2012 to 83% in 2013 and this is highest for those who live in rural areas where poor connectivity is more common.

Akamai has today published its latest quarterly State of the Internet Q3 – 2013 report, which reveals that the world’s average Internet download speed is now 3.6Mbps (up 10% from 3.3Mbps in Q2-2013). Meanwhile the United Kingdom scored 9.1Mbps (up 8.9% from 8.4Mbps) but still fell from 10th to be ranked 14th fastest.

Fibre optic broadband ISP Gigaclear (Rutland Telecom) has scrapped its tentative plan to build a 1000Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network in the Dun Valley or Tytherleys (Wiltshire, England) after the local state aid funded Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) and BT project confirmed that it would also be doing them using slower FTTC.

The latest Public Accounts Committee event, which saw BT’s Group Strategy Director (Sean Williams) receive another grilling by Margaret Hodge MP, has revealed that the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office is once again writing to councils in the hope to securing a greater publication of viable broadband coverage data.