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The Somerset County Council in England has published an update on their joint £171 million Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) project, which reveals that around 11,300 premises in the county will remain unserved by “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) ISP networks when the project completes in 2020.
Broadband ISP BT has been hit with a £77,000 fine by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) after they unlawfully sent 4,930,141 emails (between December 2015 and November 2016) to customers in order to promote three charity initiatives (i.e. the BT ‘My Donate’ platform, Giving Tuesday and Stand up to Cancer).
The UK Minister of State for Digital, Margot James MP, yesterday reaffirmed the government’s commitment to a Gigabit “full fibre” (FTTP) future and also called on ISPs to “pass on [the] benefit” from Ofcom’s recent wholesale market reviews in order to improve the take-up of “superfast broadband.”
The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) and National Farmers Union (NFU) have today updated their existing wayleave framework for ISPs, which was first agreed in 2013 (here) and has now been revised to help “speed up rural broadband roll-out” and reflect recent changes in UK law.
The CEO of Ofcom, Sharon White, yesterday told the Connected Britain event in London that to provide good mobile network (4G etc.) coverage across virtually all of the UK landmass would cost up to around £6 billion and is likely to require some form of cross subsidy.
Mobile operator Vodafone has countered EE’s announcement of a 5G trial in London (here) by confirming that they too will be testing the future 1Gbps capable mobile technology between October and December 2018, albeit in 7 UK cities: Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, London and Manchester.
Low cost UK ISP Plusnet has gone against the industry trend by testing a new range of broadband and phone bundles for one week, which are not only cheaper than usual but also come with free evening, weekend and mobile calls as standard. Previously providers have preferred to scrap their calling plans to focus on broadband.
A new uSwitch.com survey of 2,005 UK adults (conducted during March 2018) has found that 38% have in the past noticed unexpected costs on their UK Mobile phone bill, with 17% of those attributing it to a “billing error“. On average, each billing error was estimated to be worth an average of £23 (£63.5m as a total UK cost).