Small BT telephone exchanges serving remote and rural areas in Scotland are to get a £3m upgrade to increase access to broadband. The telecommunications giant is in talks with the Scottish government to select about 50 sites for improvement. Finance Secretary John Swinney said the plan recognised the frustration of some communities that faster internet [...]

A new high-speed undersea cable connecting East Africa with the rest of the world is poised to go live, Kenya’s top internet official has told the BBC. The launch of the government-backed East African Marine System (Teams) comes as providers face a backlash over slow connection speeds and high prices. Internet providers have increased speeds [...]

Parliament’s Business and Enterprise Committee has announced an inquiry into broadband speeds in the UK.  The committee will specifically look at : • Whether the target for universal access to broadband at a speed of 2Mb/s by 2012 is ambitious enough? • Is the Government right to propose a levy on copper lines to fund next [...]

Action needs to be taken to ensure that those living in rural areas of the UK are not left in the broadband slow lane, a report has warned. The report, from the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC), makes a series of recommendations to ensure that rural homes can keep pace with urban areas. It calls [...]

Cumbria is a microcosm of counties across the UK, many of which still have some “notspot” areas – defined as places that have no or below two megabits per second broadband. Lindsey Annison has been campaigning for faster online connections for her rural community in Cumbria for over 20 years. She is one of an [...]

While some have welcomed the government’s pledge to provide a minimum broadband speed of 2Mbps to every home in the UK by 2012 others think it will be an extremely challenging task, and insufficient to meet future needs. The government has defended itself saying that the 2Mbps speed is just a baseline and will form [...]

As the UK moves towards super-fast broadband the divide between the broadband haves and have-nots is likely to get wider. The government estimates that some 30% of the country will not be covered by BT and Virgin Media’s super-fast broadband plans – offering speeds of up to 100Mbps (megabits per second). It could see a [...]

There are still users in Britain who can’t get a fixed broadband connection because of where they live as their premises are too far from the telephone exchange, or in a few cases, their exchange doesn’t support broadband yet. No matter what the cause, this part of the population has to resort to expensive solutions [...]

The European Space Agency has awarded Avanti Communications €250,000 (£220,000) in funding for the design of a super-fast satellite broadband system called Hercules. The proposed satellite could deliver between 2Mb and 50Mb broadband access to 2.5 million UK rural households that are currently without access to broadband internet services, David Williams, chief executive of Avanti, [...]

Telecoms firm Cable & Wireless (C&W) saw full-year profits fall by 13% after it took a hit on the costs of a revamp and integrating a recent acquisition. It saw pre-tax profit of £233m in the year to the end of March, as it absorbed £189m of exceptional losses. Stripping out those one-off losses, earnings [...]

The UK government is spending £1m to develop technologies to boost future broadband speeds. The money is being spent on research that could boost browsing speeds to between 1 and 10 gigabits per second. The technologies being researched are all to do with broadband delivered by fibre-optic cables. Some of the 13 projects being funded [...]

The CLA says remarks made by Communications Minister Lord Carter confirm fears rural Britain is being left behind in the race for super-fast broadband. Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, President of rural economy experts the CLA, said: “This digital urban/rural divide is getting out of control. It is time for the hyperbole to stop and for Government to [...]

Following the Government’s 2009 budget statement to confirm approval for Digital Region, Digital Region Ltd today (22nd April 2009) announced the roll-out of ‘Super-fast Broadband’across South Yorkshire, putting the South Yorkshire region at the forefront of the digital communications agenda and marking a significant change in communications technology for Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield. The [...]

The UK government has signalled its commitment to ensuring everyone in the country has access to broadband speeds of two megabit per second by 2012. Earlier this year Lord Carter set out his interim recommendations for Digital Britain, in which he proposed a Universal Service for broadband. He recommended a minimum of 2Mbps, which the [...]

BT has received the green light to begin its rollout of super-fast broadband. Ofcom has delivered its long-awaited ruling which offers BT more flexibility in the way it delivers fibre networks. BT made clear it only wanted to make the move if regulator Ofcom allowed a fair return on that investment. The regulator said that [...]

Consumer broadband got started in the UK just 10 years ago, in the dying months of the last millennium, when BT and Virgin Media’s predecessors launched their first trial services. A few hundred lucky people were able to get 256 kilobits per second. Otherwise, everyone who was accessing the internet from home in 1999 was [...]

Notice something about the graph below? That’s right there is no UK!  And that situation is not about to improve, certainly not in the short-term. The Fibre to the Home Council Europe recently published its 6-monthly global ranking of countries with more than 1% of households connected to fibre optic broadband. In the latest update [...]