News
UK Government to Debate Broadband Not-spots on Wednesday
The UK Government’s Minister for the Digital Economy, Ed Vaizey MP, will on Wednesday hold a “not-spot summit“, which will bring broadband ISPs, mobile operators, politicians, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and Countryside Alliance (CA) together in order to debate how best to close the remaining gaps in fast broadband coverage. At present the Government’s Broadband Delivery UKprogramme is already working to push superfast broadband (24Mbps+) capable connectivity out to 95% of the United Kingdom by 2017/18 and BT expects [...]
UPD Science and Tech Committee Warns of UK Internet Snooping Bill Costs
The cross-party Science and Technology Select Committee (House of Commons) has today warned that the Government’s controversial new Investigatory Powers Bill (IPB) could cost significantly more than claimed and needs to be clearer about what it expects ISPs to actually do. The bill marks the third attempt by a Government to expand the United Kingdom’s existing telecoms snooping laws by forcing broadband ISPs into logging a bigger slice of everybody’s online activity and then keeping that log for up to [...]
Council of Europe Sets Out Net Neutrality Guidelines for Broadband ISPs
The Council of Europe has today issued a set of “network neutrality guidelines” that call for mobile and broadband providers to treat Internet traffic equally, without discrimination or restriction, and for member states (e.g. UK) to support this via the “development of national legal frameworks“. The new guidelines follow last year’s agreement to introduce a new Net Neutrality law, although this time around the language appears to be somewhat stricter. Never the less there are still some caveats, such as to allow [...]
Rural Broadband ISP Gigaclear Gets 25m Euro Loan to Expand Network
Ultrafast fibre optic ISP Gigaclear, which is rolling out a 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to rural communities across the United Kingdom, has bagged some additional investment in the form of a €25m loan. So far Gigaclear’s network has already become available to roughly 15,000 homes and businesses in rural parts of Oxfordshire, Essex, Kent, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, Berkshire, Hertfordshire, Rutland and Gloucestershire in England. On top of that the ISP, which currently owns and operates 56 rural fibre networks (plus [...]
BT Openreach Adds More Cabinet Data to “Fibre Broadband” Checker
BTOpenreach has recently updated their Superfast Openreach website, specifically its ‘Where and When‘ broadband availability checker map tool, to provide users with an easier to understand tester and a smidgen of additional street cabinet level data. The new beta checker, which until fairly recently was not officially available to the public (it’s been in testing for the past few months), provides users with a simplified and more logical overview to show the status of your local street cabinet based “fibre broadband” availability. The [...]
BT Picks Tech Boss to Become CEO of UK Telecoms Division Openreach
The Chief Executive of BT’s Technology, Service and Operations, Clive Selley (54), has today been confirmed as the replacement for outgoing Joe Garner in the role of CEO at the operator’s Openreach division, which is responsible for the national UK broadband and phone network. Readers might recall that Joe Garner, who had only been in the role for around a year, suddenly announced his intention to step down last November 2015. Garner said he was leaving in order to pursue the [...]
Good Broadband Helps Find the Top 69 UK Cities for Starting a Business
A recent study from Quality Formations has ranked 69 of the United Kingdom’s cities by how attractive they are for starting a new company. Overall Derby came top and unsurprisingly the quality of local broadband plays an important part, both in terms of the best and worst cities. The company formation agent produced the table by marking each UK city on eight criteria: commercial property (rent costs, availability etc.), energy, virtual office services, public transport, broadband service (average download speed), workforce demographics, access to [...]
No Flood Delays as Cityfibre Resumes York UK FTTH Broadband Rollout
Construction of Cityfibre’s joint roll-out of a new ultrafast 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) network with Sky Broadband and TalkTalk in the UK city of York (England) has officially resumed today after work was paused due to the Christmas break. Happily the recent flood had no impact. BTOpenreach’s own local phone and broadband infrastructure was badly hit when the River Ouse, which enters the city from the west before meandering down to the south, broke its banks last week and left many premises underwater. BT’s York telephone Exchange [...]
BT Openreach Confirm UK LLU and Line Rental Price Changes for 2016
BTOpenreach, which maintains and manages access to BT’s national UK telecoms network, has announced a series of line rental, local loop unbundling (LLU), electricity and engineering related price changes that will be introduced from 1st April 2016. Thankfully most of the adjustments are reductions. The tweaks will impact Internet and phone providers that buy their services directly from Openreach, which predominantly reflects the charge controls / regulation (Fixed Access Market Review) introduced by Ofcom. The prices are +vat based and don’t include [...]