C&W Enable Exchanges

Cable and Wireless are going to enable an additional 256 exchanges for their ADSL2+ Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) service which will provide an up to 24Mbps service to individuals and businesses, which will include exchanges that are within the Pathfinder area and will be enabled from May 2010. The exchanges in the Pathfinder area included [...]

£3m Upgrade for Exchanges

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 [...]

New Africa Broadband ‘Ready’

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 [...]

Pilot Takes Broadband Further

Openreach today announced a pilot of its Broadband Enabling Technology (BET), a new fixed-line solution for delivering broadband over much longer distances. The technology could play a major role in delivering broadband to current “not spots” – i.e. homes that are currently too far away from their local exchange to receive a broadband service – [...]

UK Broadband 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 [...]

Rural Areas Need Fast Broadband

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 [...]

Tax To Pay For Fast Net Access

Every Briton with a fixed-line phone will pay a “small levy” of 50p per month to pay for faster net access. The national fund created by the levy will be used to ensure most Britons get access to future net technologies. The proposal is part of the Digital Britain report outlined by Culture Secretary Ben [...]

Tale Of Two Broadband Villages

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 [...]

Fight On For Better Broadband

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 [...]

Light My Fibre

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 [...]

In A Broadband Not-Spot?

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 [...]

Satellite Gets Funding Boost

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, [...]

C&W Upbeat

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 [...]

Boost For Future Broadband Speeds

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 [...]

CLA Confirms Rural Fears

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 [...]

Digital Region Launched

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 [...]

Government Backs 2Mbps

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 [...]

Green Light For Faster Broadband

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 [...]

Digital Britain Feedback Site

BERR has announced the launch of a new internet discussion site to encourage debate on the Digital Britain Report. Minister for Technology, Communications and Broadband, Stephen Carter said: “We understand that there’s huge interest in the Digital Britain report and have already seen a flood of comments posted on various websites and blogs. So today [...]

10 Years of Broadband

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 [...]

UK Fibre Rollout Behind

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 [...]

Broadband Boost for Business

Businesses around Scotland are now benefiting from a £3.3 million Scottish Government project to extend broadband services. Later today (6th Feb 09)  Finance Secretary John Swinney will visit one of the 4,000 businesses and households able to access broadband after Ministers launched an initiative to connect properties previously not connected. Ardgualich Farm near Pitlochry is [...]

Interim Digital Britain Report

The Government has today published a plan to secure Britain’s place at the forefront of the global digital economy. The interim report contains more than 20 recommendations, including specific proposals on: next generation networks universal access to broadband the creation of a second public service provider of scale the modernisation of wireless radio spectrum holdings [...]

Broadband Hits 17 Million lines

UK broadband lines increased by 322,000 during the third quarter of 2008, reaching almost 17 million lines, new data has shown The new additions put the total number of UK broadband connections at 16.9 million by the end of September 2008, according to regulator Ofcom’s statistics. And with the help of local loop unbundled (LLU) [...]

Community Broadband On Rise

A fast-growing network of community-led broadband schemes has been springing up across the country as remote rural areas refuse to wait for fast connections A report into broadband Britain by the Communications Consumer Panel found a “surprisingly extensive” network of community-led fast broadband networks across the UK from Ashford in Kent and King’s Lynn in [...]

Mobile Solution For Authority

Whether in an urban setting or in rural communities, such as those that comprise Dumfries and Galloway, organisations are seeking to equip their employees with a range of mobile communication devices and 3G connectivity to increase their efficiency and effectiveness.  It was with this aim in mind that the Scottish local authority turned to THUS, [...]