ISP News Archives for February 11, 2014

The £25m Better Broadband for Oxfordshire project, which aims to extend BT’s superfast broadband access (25Mbps+) to 90% of Oxfordshire in England by the end of 2015, has revealed the next batch of locations to benefit from the upgrade.

BT has denied that its commercial investment of £2.5 billion, which is being used to make their superfast broadband (FTTC/P) network available to around 66% of the United Kingdom by Spring 2014 (19 million premises), will complete with significant underspend worth hundreds of millions.

The £24m Digital Durham project, which is working with BT to make superfast broadband speeds (FTTC/P) available to “around” 94% of local premises by the end of 2016, has finally begun the first phase of its deployment.

Who needs YouView (IPTV) anyway? The BBC, Channel 4, ITV and Digital UK appear to be considering a third bash at the Internet based catch-up TV game (aka – Freeview Connect) after their last attempt, YouView, ended up becoming more of a commercial customer retention tool for the big broadband ISPs (e.g. TalkTalk and BT).

It’s already possible to make 2G based voice calls on-board flights (note: not all allow it though) and Ofcom has now launched a new consultation that aims to extend this by enabling the use of 3G (UMTS at 2100MHz) and 4G (LTE at 1800MHz) based Smartphones and related devices on a licence-exempt basis while flying.