ISP News Archives for February 11, 2016

More than 2,000 homes on the Northern side of the Isle of Skye in Scotland, which will not be reached by BT’s roll-out, could soon benefit from superfast broadband (30Mbps+) services after a local community project secured the necessary public investment from the Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE).

The annual uSwitch Mobile Awards 2016, which took place this week at The Barbican venue in London, have crowned giffgaff as the “Best Network of the Year” after it won several categories. A number of other operators also picked up awards, although it wasn’t such a good night for the big boys.

The Superfast Staffordshire project in the West Midlands (England), which includes Stoke-on-Trent, has today announced that 90% of premises in the county should be able to order a superfast broadband (24Mbps+) service.

Last week we reported that Japanese scientists had managed to build a wireless network that could send data at a speed of 56Gbps (Gigabits per second) using the 72-100GHz (GigaHertz) radio frequency bands (here) and now another team claims it can hit 100Gbps by pushing into the TeraHertz (300GHz+).

The cross-party Joint Committee, which was setup to review the Government’s controversial Investigatory Powers Bill (IPB) that aims to force broadband ISPs into logging and monitoring a bigger slice of your Internet activity, has criticised the bill and said that “significant” work will be needed to fix it.

Nobody likes receiving unwanted marketing calls, unless they’re exceptionally lonely. In keeping with that BT has today launched a new blacklist service, which aims to redirect related calls to a junk voicemail box and thus prevent them from irritating their customers.

The £12.2 million Black Country Broadband Project (England’s West Midlands) has made good progress since it began deploying last year and has already expanded BT’s “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network to an additional 10,000 premises. Today the next batch of upgrades have been confirmed.

Satellite operators Eutelsat and ViaSat have announced that they’re teaming up via a Joint Venture. On top of that ViaSat has also announced plans to build three new ViaSat-3 spacecraft, which could deliver broadband speeds of 100Mbps+ to customers around Europe and possibly the UK.

Customers of TalkTalk’s Internet and phone services could be forgiven for feeling a little uneasy this morning after several of their websites appeared to wobble. Meanwhile a number of email problems have also hit the provider.