ISP News Archives for December 16, 2014

The Superfast Northamptonshire project in England, which is currently aiming to make BT’s superfast broadband (FTTC/P) services available to about 90% of premises by September 2015, has finally signed a new contract with BT under the Broadband Delivery UK based Superfast Extension Programme (SEP). An extra 20,465 premises will now benefit from the on-going roll-out.

BTOpenreach has updated the “fibre availability checker” on their Superfast Openreach website with some new options, which helps to identify whether the area where you live has been upgraded to support the operators latest ‘up to’ 80Mbps capable NGA Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) or 330Mbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) service.

As previously reported new customers who take TalkTalk’s triple-play Plus TV bundle of unlimited broadband, phone and YouView television services will, effective from today, also receive a Free Mobile SIM that includes 100 minutes, 250 texts and 200MB of data per month.

The Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) project in England has successfully raised an extra £700,000 to help roll-out “superfast fibre broadband” (although curiously the speeds are stated as sub-superfast “up to 24Mbps“) across hard to reach communities in the Dartmoor and Exmoor National Parks.

Budget ISP Fuel Broadband (formerly Primus Saver) has moved to make their existing offer, which is promoting 12 months of free unlimited broadband (up to 16Mbps) with included UK weekend and evening calls (normally £4 per month), even more attractive by throwing Google’s Chromecast video streaming device into the mix.

Customers of BT’s broadband powered YouView TV (IPTV) service can, following the operators successful application for interim relief at the Competition Appeal Tribunal, now get access to the Sky Sports 1 and Sky Sports 2 channels alongside their existing BTSport, ESPN and Eurosport content. The move also means no more BTVision+ boxes.

The United Kingdom’s telecoms and media regulator, Ofcom, has today announced that Sharon White will in late March 2015 take over the position of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) from Ed Richards, who steps down at the end of this month. The regulators Strategy and Technology Director, Steve Unger, will cover the intervening period as acting CEO.

The European Commission has published its annual report into the coverage of superfast broadband (Next Generation Access) services around the EU, which again shows that the United Kingdom is making good progress on 30Mbps+ capable Next Gen (NGA) service delivery but still lags miles behind most other EU28 countries in terms of pure fibre optic connectivity (FTTH/P/B).

The Government’s Connection Voucher scheme, which offers grants worth up to £3,000 to help SME businesses install a superfast broadband (30Mbps+) service in any of 22 cities across the United Kingdom (note: many more cities will soon be added), has received another small but notable tweak in an effort to make it more attractive.