October 27, 2011
Virgin cable broadband service is continuing to grow in popularity according to their latest set of results with most new customers taking broadband with a speed of 30Mb or above.
 Virgin have just released their Q3 2011 results and it shows that they have increased their number of cable broadband customers by 24,300 to their fibre optic cable broadband service but have lost 5,200 customers on their standard DSL service. The customers on Virgins DSL service are those who are not in areas covered by Virgin Medias cable network and so will connect via standard copper broadband connections on BT’s network.
They are also seeing far more new customers taking out super fast broadband options, with 54% of new subscribers taking out broadband with speeds of 30Mb or above, this is compared to a year ago where just 28% were taking 20Mb or higher.
Of Virgin Media’s 4,072,900 cable broadband customers, over 26% are now taking 20Mb or higher broadband form them, this equates to over 1 million customers.
We anticipate allot of Virgin broadband customers who have existing deals may only move to faster broadband packages when they are offered free upgrades to do so. Virgin Media already offer a 50Mb broadband and are rolling out a 100Mb broadband service that is due to be completed during 2012 that will be available to 8 million homes.
Virgin will no doubt eventually change their packages and will not offer their 10Mb broadband service but it is likely to be increased, many customers may only then move to a faster broadband connection when they will not have to pay more for it.
Neil Berkett, the Chief Executive of Virgin Media, said:
“Over a quarter of our entire base now subscribe to speeds of 20Mb or higher and a record number of
customers joined us on superfast broadband speeds during the period with. In TV, we have quadrupled the
number of households using our game-changing TiVo service and customer advocacy for this product is
very strong.
We are increasing the value and mix of our customer base as people add or move to higher tier services
and as new joiners increasingly take up higher value products. This, along with subscriber growth, has
increased revenue and we have had further substantial increases in free cash flow and OCF. Our strong
and sustained financial performance allows us to continue to invest in giving our customers more value and
further differentiating our range of market leading products.“
----------------------------------
October 25, 2011
The latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai found the UK lagged back in 25th spot based on countries broadband speeds around the world.
This latest report is for the second quarter of 2011 and actually saw European countries placed well in the top 10 of average broadband speeds, as usual though it is South Korea (13.8Mb), Hong Kong (10.3Mb) and Japan (8.9Mb) who top the list.
However, coming in in 4th spot was the Netherlands (8.5Mb), then the Czech Republic (7.4Mb) followed by Switzerland (7.3Mb).
The UK averaged just over 5Mb putting it back down in 25th spot.
However, where the UK does climb the rankings is for general broadband connectivity where we rank 11th, this is due to the fact that over 91% of users connected to the internet have broadband speeds of 2Mb or greater. The leader in this category, maybe rather surprisingly, was Bulgaria with 97% followed by the Czech Republic with 95%.
Top fastest 100 cities for broadband didn’t contain 1 UK city, with the highest ranked European city being Brno in the Czech Republic which was at number 55 averaging 8.3Mb. The top 100 cities included 59 form Japan and 10 from South Korea as has tended to be the case every time these reports are released.
All is not doom and gloom for the UK though, we currently have BT rolling out their fibre broadband network across the UK which is due to reach two thirds of the country by 2015 at a cost of around £2.5bn. Virgin Media are also looking at and working on ways to increase their broadband speeds offered to customers via their cable network. So going forward we would expect the UK to start climbing the rankings and hopefully by 2015 when the uptake of fibre broadband across the country has increased the average broadband speed test results will make for far more pleasant reading.
----------------------------------
October 20, 2011
The first city in the UK & Ireland to be fully upgraded to Fibre broadband is Derry in Northern Ireland.
 Every BT street cabinet in Derry has now been upgraded to FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) and now means that around 40,000 homes and businesses will be able to use the new fibre broadband service. It is probably little co-incidence that Londonderry was high up on BT’s list of places to get fibre broadband fully installed to as BT are one of the main sponsors of Derry for 2013 when they become the UK City of Culture.
FTTC will offer users in Derry up to 40Mb broadband speeds with this likely to increase to up to 80Mb next year when BT increases the available broadband speeds across its fibre network.
Colm O’Neil, the BT Chief Executive in Northern Ireland, told this to the BBC:
“There is different pricing and we have done it on an open access basis.
It is a more expensive product than your standard broadband product but for that, you would potentially get 10-50 times increase in speed.
This city on the north west coast of Ireland, right on the edge of Europe, now has access to speeds and connectivity better than people in Hong Kong, Tokyo, London or New York.
That is an important message for the business community to understand.“Derry first city to get full FTTC coverag
Customers in Derry won’t get an automatic switch0over to the fibre broadband, this is because prices are currently around 30% more expensive than standard broadband connections, but as Mr O’Neil pointed out there are much larger speed increases available for the extra you will be paying.
Despite BT being one of the partners for Derry’s 2013 UK City of Culture this does not mean that the fibre broadband is only available via BT Infinity. Other Broadband providers will be able to offer services through the new fibre network.
----------------------------------
October 14, 2011
An outage of Virgin Media broadband, TV and home phone services on Monday in parts of Scotland was caused by rats chewing through fibre optic cable according to Virgin Media.
Hundreds of customers in east Scotland were affected as the rats had chewed through the underground cables. Virgin Media engineers managed to fix the problem by Monday evening but the rats came back and chewed through them again on Tuesday afternoon meaning that services went down again.
The engineers once again came out and sorted the problem, with a spokesperson for the company saying:
“We’ve now put additional measures in place to prevent further damage to our cables to avoid further disruption for our customers.”
----------------------------------
October 3, 2011
 BT Broadband has had broadband outages across the UK today after one of the major exchanges in Birmingham had a power failure.
At around 1 pm today (Monday 3rd October) problems started to arise for BT Broadband customers and it was a nationwide problem affecting customers up and down the country.
A BT Spokesperson earlier on said:
“We can confirm that, as a result of a power issue at one of our major exchanges, some customers may currently be experiencing a loss of broadband service.”
It is believed that the main problem has now been fixed with most BT Broadband customers back online, there are however some remaining customers who are still experiencing problems with connecting to their internet.
*** Anyone still experiencing problems with their BT Broadband are advised to reboot their Home Hub modem/router to hopefully fix any remaining problems. ***
BT Broadband customers can also keep an eye on the BT Service status update page for updates and estimated resolve times to their BT Broadband.
----------------------------------
September 29, 2011
A study into broadband performance across Europe is to take place with the results used to hopefully boost broadband in the future.
The project which is to be done by SamKnows on which are the same company who Ofcom used when doing similar tests across the UK will require around 10,000 volunteers and is being done on behalf of the European Commission.
Each of the selected volunteers will receive a “Whitebox” device which will show reports to the consumers and also back to the researcher about their broadband performance and ISP.
Alex Salter, the CEO of SamKnows, said:
“We are working to provide ISPs, regulators and, most importantly, consumers with the information they need to push for improved broadband services.”
“The people who volunteer to take part will not only get access to our technology for free, but will be champions for better broadband across Europe as they help us to develop a picture of connectivity across Europe.”
The Whitebox works by running simulations and automated tests on the broadband line when it is not in use to gauge different aspects from it, such as speeds and performance.
Countries that are to be tested across Europe are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Malta, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.
For anyone wanting to sign up to apply for a free “Whitebox” and be a part of the study should do so at www.samknows.eu
----------------------------------
September 23, 2011
TalkTalk has once again topped the “most complained about landline and broadband” charts according to complaints to Ofcom.
The report is based on all complaints made by consumers to Ofcom between April and June 2011 and requires providers to have at leats a 4% market share and who generate at least 30 complaints in a month.
This means that the report cover 89% of the fixed telephone and fixed broadband and mobile markets to compare.
Although TalkTalk have once again topped the charts by quite a margin there does looks like this last quarter they have been working hard on improvements as the complaint figures are coming down compared to the previous 2 quarters before that.
On the landline side of things, TalkTalk received 0.8 complaints per 1,000 customers (down from 1.12 per 1,000 the previous quarter), compared to just 0.15 complaints per 1,000 customers for Virgin Media who were least complained about.
The same with the fixed broadband, TalkTalk topped the chart again with 0.58 complaints per 1,000 customers (down from 0.81 per 1,000 last quarter) with Virgin Media again receiving just 0.15 complaints per 1,000 customers for their fibre broadband services.
 A great deal of TalkTalk complaints stemmed from when they bought Tiscali and continued to bill 62,000 customers who had cancelled their service yet were still charged.
TalkTalk responded to the results by saying:
“It’s encouraging that Ofcom’s data demonstrates that, following the Tiscali integration, the service we offer our customers has significantly improved in the last quarter, with the number of complaints as a percentage of customers dropping by over 50%. We’re simplifying our business for the benefit of our customers and calls to our customer services teams are down 40% from this time last year.
We’re also connecting new customers much more quickly and efficiently. Last year it took an average of 23 days, today a customer will be connected in 14 days” (which is the minimum allowed due to the cooling-off period).“
----------------------------------
September 16, 2011
Fibre optic broadband and mobile broadband networks is taking too long according to the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt.
Mr Hunt believes that the UK is in danger of falling behind the rest of Europe by taking too long to get things sorted. He liked the problems to how we dealth with our railways by saying:
“We need to ensure we do not make the same mistake in broadband that we made in railways – building our high-speed network 45 years after the French and 62 years after the Japanese.
PIA (physical infrastructure access) has to be sorted out – and quickly – in a way that allows fair competition with different providers able to invest in our broadband infrastructure.”
The price that BT wants to charge rivals for access to their underground ducts and telephone poles so that they can install or lay their own fibre network are due this month, but it is likely to be a case that the prices will be disputed by BT’s rivals as too high which will then again delay the process of more fibre being laid in the UK. This could then delay the process by up to a year before Ofcom comes in with making a decision.
Currently we have Fujitsu looking to create a £2bn fibre network across the UK but they are after £500m of funds from the government that have been put aside to help roll-out next generation broadband to rural areas.
Along with his thoughts on fixed line fibre broadband Mr Hunt also said how he wanted the mobile phone operators to work together and put aside any competitive differences with the forthcoming 4G spectrum auction so as to not have that delayed any further.
Mobile data is increasing at an astonishing rate and so the 4G network capacity is in great need, it is predicted that by 2015 the volume of mobile data is set to increase 26-fold!
Currently Vodafone and O2 have space spectrum while Three and Everything Everywhere (Orange & T-Mobile are jointly owned) are in desperate need for extra capacity.
Mr Hunt said:
“Sweden completed their auction in 2009, Germany last year, Italy is doing theirs this week and France will finish theirs this year.
Mobile phone operators must put aside competitive differences and work together in their common and our national interest to make this happen.”
----------------------------------
August 22, 2011
The UK’s slowest broadband towns have been listed after broadband speed tests across the country were done by uSwitch.com
The Kent town of Cranbrook managed to set an average broadband download speed of just 1.32Mb which is around 5 times slower than the national average which is 7.5Mb.
Out of the top 20 (or should than be bottom 20) for slowest broadband speeds the counties of Kent & Sussex were home to 6 of the slowest broadband towns in the survey, with all of them having broadband speeds below 2Mb.
The results were gathered from people running broadband speeds tests and as such pr0bably mean there are other places with slower broadband, but from the 400,000 speed tests that were performed between May & July this year these were the findings.
The second slowest was Tregaron in Wales followed by Lavant which is near to Chichester.
These slow broadband speeds are on the UK governments agenda to get sorted, in Western Europe the UK has one of the slowest internet connections, way behind the average in France of 18Mb and Finland with 22Mb. The UK government want to have the fastest European broadband network by 2015, along with the £2.5bn investment in their fibre network being done by BT, the government have announced a £530m pot to help fund broadband out to rural areas and a further £300m in the future.
We can only look longingly at the average broadband speeds that South Korea and Japan offer which are 46Mb and 61Mb respectivly.
----------------------------------
August 19, 2011
The Scottish government are not happy with the amount of funding that the UK government has allocated them to help fund their broadband roll-out.
Scotland were allocated £68.8m from the £530m pot that was allocated to help fund the roll-out of broadband across the UK with the aim that we have the fastest broadband network in Europe by 2015.
However, Alex Neil, Scotland’s cabinet secretary for infrastructure said:
“I am disappointed with the allocation from the UK government towards the Scottish government’s ambition for roll-out of next generation broadband across the whole of Scotland.
…this announcement from the UK government has fallen short of the expectations of the Scottish economy to the overall costs of broadband roll-out in the remote and rural parts of Scotland.
For instance the cost to deliver next generation broadband across the Highlands and Islands alone has been estimated at up to £300m, therefore we do not regard the UK government’s allocation as a realistic contribution to meet Scotland’s broadband requirements.”
The rest of the £530m pot that was available through left over money from the digital switchover has also been allocated with England receiving £294.8m, Northern Ireland £4.4m and Wales £56.9m. There is a universal broadband target of 2Mb broadband speeds as a minimum out lined by the government.
----------------------------------
« Newer Posts — Older Posts »
|
