ISP News Archives for December 14, 2016

Surrey is special because it’s one of the few counties in England to have already delivered over 96% coverage of “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) and as a result they were able to skip the Government’s second Broadband Delivery UK phase. But the council has this week agreed to go even further.

The consumer (retail) division of BT has confirmed that their subsidised BT Basic social tariff, which is a low-cost phone service for those on low-incomes or certain state benefits, has been improved with the addition of a £10 calls cap.

Akamai‘s latest Q3-2016 State of the Internet study finds that the average fixed line broadband download speed in the United Kingdom has fallen slightly from 15Mbps in Q2 to 14.9Mbps in Q3, which compares with a global speed of 6.3Mbps (up 2.3% from Q2). But the UK’s country ranking held at 20th.

Do you own a modern NETGEAR broadband router (i.e. R6200, R6400, R6700, R7000, R7100LG, R7300, R7900 and R8000)? If so then we’ve got bad news because a major security flaw, which was first identified and notified to the manufacturer in August 2016, still hasn’t been completely fixed.

At the end of last month Ofcom confirmed that they’d force Openreach into “legal separation” from the BT Group (here), which they view as necessary to improve competition / fairness in the UK telecoms and broadband market. But a Haitong Research study warns that Pensions remain a roadblock.

The Government’s National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has today warned that Mobile Broadband and Mobile Voice connectivity in the United Kingdom is “languishing in the digital slow lane” and that there are still “too many digital deserts and partial not spots” with 4G coverage.