ISPreview Site Status – Ultrafast Broadband Category Added to ISP Listings

As part of our most recent update sweep of the UK ISP Listings database, which has just completed, we’ve decided to add a new fixed line category for “ultrafast broadband” (100Mbps+) providers. This is in preparation for G.fast and FTTP/H services becoming more common.

At present the new category mostly consists of alternative network (altnet) providers because many of the mainstream ISPs, except a few national ones like Virgin Media and BT, have yet to launch any “ultrafast” services for the domestic market (the packages listed for TalkTalk and Sky Broadband are really just limited trials). Due to this we’ve also chosen to display the rough regions of network availability under each entry.

Otherwise we’ve also completed our usual update sweep, which is performed every few months to ensure that all our prices and information remain up-to-date. The main listings are constantly being updated but sadly many smaller ISPs don’t notify us of their changes and so every now and then we have to do a manual sweep of around 200 ISPs.

In keeping with that there have also been a few other changes on the site. Firstly, we’ve long had a policy of rejecting ISPs unless their price / package details are displayed in public (no details = nothing to compare), although so far this has only been enforced for fixed line providers (mostly impacts business ISPs). We’re now extending this policy to all categories but it won’t have a big effect because the vast majority are compliant.

Elsewhere we’ve spent the best part of the past four months on upgrades to our web server software and recoding old systems in order to ensure that they work with the latest PHP7 programming language. After a big investment of time and money I’m pleased to report that this work is now complete. The final changes were implemented last week and hence why ISPreview.co.uk is now running noticeably faster.

Finally, some of you may have noticed that since Easter we’ve been testing a mobile (Smartphone) friendly version of our website. At present this only shows for Smartphone users who view individual news articles, although in the near future we will slowly begin to extend it out across the rest of the site. Otherwise we’re going to take a break from R&D and re-focus on content again. Thanks to Keith and Michael for all the recent help with coding.