Broadband News
Just wait for that nice Brussels man to agree
Updated BT will be forced to cut the prices of the access charges it applies to the company's broadband and telephone lines when leasing them out to other providers, Ofcom said today.…
6 Feb 2012 | 2:18 pm
Virgin Media has announced that its fibre network now reaches 10 million households in the UK. The roll out of its cable, which allows for up to 100Mbps broadband speeds (soon to be upped to a maximum of 120Mbps), has …
Continue reading → 6 Feb 2012 | 10:21 am
'Fibre-to-the-premise on demand' in 2013
BT is talking up plans to bring its ultra-fast fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) broadband network to more of its customers in early 2013.…
3 Feb 2012 | 2:18 pm
Cuts also counter revenue dip in Q3
BT reported this morning that its sales had fallen 5 per cent for the three months ended 31 December, however earnings and cash generation remained steady, the company added.…
3 Feb 2012 | 1:02 pm
The super-fast broadband race continues, as BT and Virgin Media attempt to outdo each other hooking the nation – or at least the major population centres – up to very speedy pipes. Virgin Media struck the latest blow, with the …
Continue reading → 3 Feb 2012 | 7:52 am
More of a shunt than a glide
Average broadband speeds in Blighty are on the up, communications watchdog Ofcom concluded in a report published this morning.…
2 Feb 2012 | 10:44 am
Ofcom has released its latest piece of research into the average speed of the UK’s broadband connections. And the organisation reckons that in November 2011, speeds are up 22% on the previous year. The average connection was 6.2Mbps in November …
Continue reading → 2 Feb 2012 | 9:25 am
Sky has made a number of announcements regarding its broadband coverage in the latest set of the company’s financial results. First off, the firm intends to increase its copper-based broadband network to cover 88% of the UK by the end …
Continue reading → 1 Feb 2012 | 10:10 am
Didn’t touch the sides
iiNet has announced that its acquisition of Internode has been completed a month ahead of schedule.…
31 Jan 2012 | 11:00 pm
Dash to fibre as people abandon twisted copper
ADSL connections to US homes are on the slide as companies and consumers turn to cable and fibre for faster connectivity.…
27 Jan 2012 | 5:27 pm
We really wanna blow you some cable, dears
BT is on the lookout for around 1,000 residential buildings to sign up to a pilot to allow the national telco to test superfast broadband speeds in apartment blocks.…
27 Jan 2012 | 11:29 am
Replacement boxes rolled out due to faulty chip
National telco BT has been sending letters out to its Infinity broadband customers saying that it will swap their modems for a better version for free, but failing to mention that the real reason for the generous offer is because they could be faulty.…
27 Jan 2012 | 11:14 am
Huawei set to build ASSC-1
Telstra has signed on as a foundation customer on a nascent Perth to Singapore submarine cable system which is being built by ASSC-1 Communications Group.…
23 Jan 2012 | 3:26 am
Not soap - something that could undermine the fundamental interconnectedness of the internet...
(silicon.com - Networks)
20 Jan 2012 | 3:43 pm
Mining boom helps drive satellite demand
Australian listed satellite company NewSat has secured a raft of new contracts across oil, gas, mining, construction, aviation and government sectors, totalling $AU7.5 million.…
19 Jan 2012 | 9:41 pm
Huawei jumps on board Optikor
The ditch between Australia and New Zealand is getting a lot more hectic with moves for another trans-Tasman cable link underway.…
18 Jan 2012 | 4:51 am
High capacity for oceanic links
NEC has demonstrated a single fibre link – with no repeaters – running at 1.5 terabits per second over 10,000 km. The company says this is the first time that a single laser source has sent a terabit channel over such a distance.…
17 Jan 2012 | 10:00 pm
Virgin Media has been in a generous mood of late, and on top of its program of speed upgrades, an extra boost has now been announced for those on 50Mbps lines. If you missed it, last week Virgin said it …
Continue reading → 17 Jan 2012 | 7:32 am
Viewers discovering new ways of watching the box...
(silicon.com - Networks)
16 Jan 2012 | 4:40 pm
Apologises for 'gremlins', promises doubles all round
Updated An email that arrived in the inboxes of an unspecified number of Virgin Media customers on Friday that promised "faster broadband, for less" was embarrassingly pulled by the telco just hours later.…
16 Jan 2012 | 12:32 pm
Government consults on how to plug mobile notspots with £150m pot
(silicon.com - Networks)
12 Jan 2012 | 3:03 pm
Free Mobile's price plan: 60 minutes a month for nothing at all
Disruptive French broadband provider Free Mobile has announced pricing for its new mobile venture, and it's cheap, really cheap, thanks to lots of Wi-Fi and femtocell offloading.…
12 Jan 2012 | 8:31 am
Virgin Media has announced plans to considerably beef up the performance of its broadband network with a £110 million investment. The company intends to boosts its top speed package to reach 120Mbps, faster than rival BT, and to double up …
Continue reading → 12 Jan 2012 | 7:48 am
Together with a new 120Mbps headline broadband speed...
(silicon.com - Networks)
11 Jan 2012 | 2:57 pm
Why the mobile-maker faces a gruelling battle
Analysis Humiliatingly, Nokia was forced to deny rumours last week that it was planning to break up and sell its crown jewels to Microsoft. Normally a company can remain impervious to Twitter-born gossip, particularly from a known antagonist.…
11 Jan 2012 | 11:24 am
Shopping centres, stadiums among orgs sniffing YOUR whereabouts
The public should be informed when a building or facility operator uses systems to track the location and movements of mobile phones, a data privacy expert has said.…
11 Jan 2012 | 9:29 am
Rogue telemarketers won't toe the line
The house of VHA is in trouble with authorities again, this time attracting the ire of the Australian Communications and Media Authority for breaching the ‘Do Not Call Register’ Act.…
10 Jan 2012 | 10:30 pm
Just friends with benefits...
Vodafone is increasingly adopting local partners, rather than buying up local operators, to push its brand and services into new markets around the world.…
10 Jan 2012 | 9:01 am
Biggest data-slurping mobiles named and shamed
3G networks are straining to support the demands of punters as their shiny new smartphones demand more and more information from the internet, says a report by British firm Arieso. iPhone 4S users use twice as much data as iPhone 4 users, and three times as much as iPhone 3G users.…
7 Jan 2012 | 10:43 am
Cops keep schtum on sniffing RIM data
Canadian police have apparently used BlackBerry communications to arrest murder suspect Raynald Desjardins in a move seen as an unprecedented use of intercepted data.…
6 Jan 2012 | 2:39 pm
Apple and Nokia jockey in Chinese mobe market
The Chinese will be able to buy an iPhone 4S from 13 January and should be able to speak to it too as Apple flings the shiny mobe into 90 countries.…
5 Jan 2012 | 1:17 pm
Service for Chinese speakers in Blighty to launch 2012
China Telecom is following through on its promise to launch a UK network in 2012, piggybacking on Everything Everywhere's network for the 400,000 Chinese speakers in the UK.…
4 Jan 2012 | 4:25 pm
Everything must go - for $299 each
RIM's frenzied attempts to offload bags of its unpopular PlayBook tablets continues, with prices on all models in the US slashed to $299.…
3 Jan 2012 | 12:37 pm
Ericsson looks into crystal ball
Mobile operators will be forced to up the ante on innovative business models if they are to survive, warns vendor Ericsson.…
29 Dec 2011 | 9:30 pm
Hackett readies to kick ass
The founder of Internode, Simon Hackett has promised not to go “riding off into the sunset” following the completion of iiNet’s acquisition of his company, but will instead be kicking “some serious ass” as he works directly with iiNet CEO Michael Malone.…
27 Dec 2011 | 9:30 pm
BT has announced another phase of faster broadband roll out is to begin across Scotland, but this isn’t part of the fibre program which is currently underway. In fact it’s a bolstering of its copper based network, with 47 exchanges …
Continue reading → 23 Dec 2011 | 7:57 am
Daily Telegraph pitching porkies? Surely not
It’s taken the best part of half a year, but Australia’s lame-duck press self-regulator, the Australian Press Council, has given News Limited outlet the Daily Telegraph a wet slap over aspects of its NBN coverage.…
22 Dec 2011 | 9:30 pm
The government has announced the latest initiative in its drive to improve the UK’s broadband infrastructure. George Osborne has made £100 million available to share between ten cities, which will become “super-connected” with a network of 80 to 100Mbps being …
Continue reading → 22 Dec 2011 | 10:46 am
Another one bites the dust
Popular Adelaide-headquartered national ISP Internode, a pioneer in Australia’s ADSL2 market and vocal critic of National Broadband Network price strategies, is to be acquired by number two broadband provider iiNet.…
22 Dec 2011 | 5:30 am
Celebrates completion of regional backhaul
With the last link of Australia’s Regional Backhaul Blackspots Program (RBBP) network – from Darwin in the Northern Territory to Toowoomba in Queensland – going live, NEC has announced an expansion of its regional wholesale broadband footprint.…
21 Dec 2011 | 10:00 pm
Regulator short of patience
Vodafone Australia is facing $AU250,000 fines from the ACMA if it does not continue to lift its game on network performance, customer care and privacy issues.…
21 Dec 2011 | 9:30 pm
Ofcom has published its latest batch of telecoms complaints data for the quarter leading up to September. And the bad news for TalkTalk is that, once again, the company is the most complained about ISP by UK consumers. It’s the …
Continue reading → 21 Dec 2011 | 8:34 am
Cash? Here's $3bn. Spectrum? Bunches. Roaming? Sure!
Details of AT&T's "we screwed the pooch" payout to Deutsche Telekom over the failed T-Mobile USA acquisition have emerged, and right ... about ... now ... AT&T chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson should be barricading himself in his corner office as pitchfork-brandishing shareholders demand his head on a platter.…
20 Dec 2011 | 11:02 pm
Carriers lift suspension on vendor activities
Malaysian operators Axiata Group and Telekom Malaysia have lifted a year-long operating suspension on Alcatel-Lucent.…
20 Dec 2011 | 9:54 pm
News in brief: Move follows outages caused by stolen cables...
(silicon.com - Networks)
20 Dec 2011 | 3:48 pm
Telcos are most complained about ever
It's official: TalkTalk and 3UK had more complaints than any other Blighty-based telcos since communications' regulator Ofcom started publishing its league table displaying the good, the bad and the downright ugly.…
20 Dec 2011 | 1:21 pm
A lot of fibre is mangled by metal pilferers, you know
BT is working with Scotland Yard in an effort to crack down on metal theft, which the Met said costs taxpayers £700m per year - not to mention the misery when power and telecoms cabling is nicked.…
20 Dec 2011 | 12:18 pm
Maybe fixed networks will work better…
Vodafone Australia has announced its first trial customer connections on Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN), hooking up households in Armidale.…
19 Dec 2011 | 11:00 pm
Telco mulled flogging assets to save deal
Talks to sell off some of AT&T's assets to make its merger with T-Mobile USA seem a little less anticompetitive have reportedly stalled.…
19 Dec 2011 | 1:49 pm
EPG in ginormous Hitchc**k-up!
Some Virgin Media telly customers attempting to tune in to various programmes over the weekend were greeted with ludicrous censoring of well-known names, such as Charles D**kens and Jarvis C**ker.…
19 Dec 2011 | 1:07 pm
Mmmm. Get your chops around juicy pork barrel goodness
It's been a week since the Countryside Alliance made a noise about the lack of activity around the rollout of a broadband network in rural areas. That came after a Freedom of Information request from the pro-fox hunting group revealed that councils were bumbling along with the fibre upgrade process.…
16 Dec 2011 | 9:29 am
While Primus is set to offer calls
Network service provider, Visionstream, has secured a $AU19 million contract to supply NBN Co’s first stage transit network.…
14 Dec 2011 | 3:59 am
The delay of 4G in coming to these shores has been something we’ve written about quite regularly. Bickering over the ins-and-outs of the rules and regulations for the spectrum auction has slowed the process considerably, and the delayed auction process …
Continue reading → 13 Dec 2011 | 10:15 am
178 exchanges earmarked
BT's Openreach wing plans to deploy its fibre technology to a further 178 exchanges, the national telco confirmed today.…
12 Dec 2011 | 3:21 pm
Head in the clouds with satellite network
Niklas Zennstrom's FreedomPop has signed a mind-boggling deal with LightSquared to provide free broadband to everyone in America.…
9 Dec 2011 | 5:34 pm
Rural superfast net rollout 'very underwhelming'
Analysis A picture is slowly emerging that suggests that the UK's incumbent telco - BT - has a perceived stranglehold on the rollout of a faster broadband network in hard to reach parts of the UK.…
9 Dec 2011 | 12:47 pm
Set to deploy GPON for Northpower
Ericsson will be rolling out one of the first commercially available GPON networks developed under the New Zealand government’s Ultra-Fast Broadband initiative.…
6 Dec 2011 | 10:30 pm
'Space situational awareness' cash for Allen Array
The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has announced that it is back in business checking out the new habitable exoplanets recently discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope to see if they might be home to alien civilisations. The cash needed to restart SETI's efforts has come in part from the US Air Force Space Command, who are interested in using the organisation's detection instruments for "space situational awareness".…
6 Dec 2011 | 1:14 pm
Try to find a hospital without a mobile tower
Why do the Australian Greens want to cut hospitals out of the country’s mobile phone networks?…
6 Dec 2011 | 12:03 am
Ethernet business services in the pipeline
TNZ-owned AAPT has announced that it will be deploying kit from Ciena to support an upgrade to its carrier Ethernet services.…
1 Dec 2011 | 12:16 am
300 diggers plug in to video technology
The National Broadband Network will be used in an $AU8 million telemonitoring healthcare trial for chronically ill war veterans.…
30 Nov 2011 | 10:30 pm
Damning report accuses firms of trying to mislead regulators
The US Federal Communications Commission has issued a damning staff report on the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile USA, despite the companies' protests.…
30 Nov 2011 | 3:16 pm
'Your call may be recorded for quality control purposes'
Australian cloud based phone call recording company, 1300 Record, has secured $AU1.5 million in first tranche funding from Innovation Capital, ahead of a marketing push. 1300 Record has developed a platform that allows businesses and individuals to record and store phone calls without the need for equipment or software.…
29 Nov 2011 | 12:02 am
Regulator plots out new numbering plan
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) says mobile numbers could be exhausted by 2017, according to a discussion paper canvassing revisions to this country’s numbering plan.…
28 Nov 2011 | 10:30 pm
Given red-headed stepchild cash 'for the last time'
Nokia's shares lifted today after strong sales in the US on Black Friday and the news that it won't be giving Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) any additional capital.…
28 Nov 2011 | 5:02 pm
