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July 15, 2010

Broadband Summit taking place to sort out UK broadband

A “Broadband summit” is taking place today in London, to talk about ways to get fast broadband out to every part of the UK.

A pledge to make Britain the fastest broadband nation in Europe by 2015 has also been made and that a minimum broadband speed of 2Mb should be available to every home in Britain.

However, the Government are not likely to be offering the broadband industry big pots of money to help fund the roll out, there is still the £175 million left over from the digital switchover that is to be used and since the government scrapped Labours 50p per month “broadband tax” that was to be used to help fund next generation broadband and the fact that as a country we have a huge deficit with money the government can’t afford to start spending.

BT are investing £2.5bn of their own money to fund the roll out of fibre broadband to two thirds of the UK, however they say that around £2bn more will be needed to reach the remaining third of the country. These remaining areas being areas where it is not financially viable for BT to fund the roll out themselves.

The CEO of BT Openreach, Steve Robertson said:

“As a society we need to make our minds up about what is an essential element of our social fabric. Today not having broadband makes people feel deprived.“

The Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt said:

“There is currently nothing to stop telecoms or utility companies reaching commercial agreements to share their infrastructure, but very few agreements currently exist.

Before we embark on legislation or start committing scarce public resources, we need to explore these cost-effective ways of achieving our aims so I want to hear from companies about their proposals and willingness to work towards mutually beneficial commercial arrangements.”

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- Filed under: Fibre broadband
- Tags: 2Mb minimum broadband, Fibre broadband, Next Generation Broadband, UK broadband —
Author: Ruth @ 10:10 am

March 31, 2010

UK Broadband reaches 10 years anniversary

Broadband in the UK has reached it’s tenth birthday today as it marks the day 10 years ago the first broadband customer started to receive their broadband service.

On March 31st 2000, Mark Bush of Basildon, Essex first had his NTL (now Virgin Media) broadband connection set up.

The original launch of the cable broadband in the UK was delayed by 12 weeks for extra testing, but Mr Bush requested that it was installed anyway and for that extra testing period he was the only NTL broadband customer.

Mr Bush told the BBC:

“It was pretty impressive in the early days, with having the whole pipe to myself”

Back then dial up was the way people connected to the internet, usually via a 56Kb connection and many internet connections being charged by the minute which proved to be very expensive. In the 10 years since, standard broadband has gone from the standard 512Kb broadband connections which were 10 times faster than dial up to 50Mb connections which is around 960 times faster than a standard dial up connection.
As broadband speeds have increased massively the price of broadband has come down and it is now also considered an essential service that many people expect to receive.

To mark the milestone, Virgin Media have got United Visual Artists to develop a piece of art called “Speed of Light” that is a laser based installation that involves 148 lasers across five rooms that will be put on display at London’s South Bank gallery from April 9th.

Seeing how far broadband has developed in these ten years shows how important the future investment in next generation fibre broadband is in the UK, we need to make sure that the current roll out will be future proof enough to cope with demand in the future.
Virgin Media are already looking at rolling out 100Mb broadband which puts BT’s 40Mb FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) installations in the shade.

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- Filed under: Home Broadband,News
- Tags: 10 years of broadband, Broadband 10 years old, UK broadband —
Author: Mark @ 2:10 pm

September 10, 2009

UK broadband connections hit 17.6 million

UK broadband connections for residential and small businesses are at the 17.6 million mark after a 1.6% increase in the last quarter and up 8.4% on the previous year.

This 1.6% equates to around 281,000 new broadband connections with a large part of this growth down to the increased number of LLU connections.

BT broadband have a market share of 26.4% at the end of March 2009 and this equates to around 4.6 million BT broadband customers, 3.7 million broadband connections were from Virgin Media who are a cable provider offering fibre broadband.

Other broadband providers (excluding LLU) have around 3.4 million customers and LLU operators who operate their own broadband have around 5.7 million customers.

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- Filed under: Home Broadband
- Tags: UK broadband, UK broadband lines —
Author: Mark @ 11:08 am

June 10, 2009

Free broadband isn’t enough to get everyone online

A  survey done for Ofcom, the Communications regulator, has found that 30% of homes in the UK don’t have broadband and of those there was 42% said they had no interest in getting it.

Their research resulted in finding that there were 3 different groups that those without the Internet fell into, these were:

  • Those intending to get the Internet in the next 6 months
  • The self-excluded
  • The financially excluded

There were 2 out of 10 who currently don’t have the Internet who were planning on getting it within the next 6 months, these on the whole were younger users who regularly use the Internet already away from the home who are working and also have children.

A huge 42% of those without Internet said that they don’t need or have no interest in getting on the Internet, with the majority being older people with 61% of these having never used a computer before. This group tend not to see any reasons why they would need the Internet.

The financially excluded group was made up of 30% of those without the Internet and of this group 3 out of 10 said the reason was because the cost of a computer was the main reason while 37% said the cost of the Internet was too much.

42% of those without the Internet said that they would be willing to pay something to have it, with 13% saying they would get it if they could get free Internet connection and a computer. There was 43% however who said that even if they were given free broadband they would still not be interested with these mainly being those who were 65 or over or those who were retired or those on low household incomes with no children living at home.

As the government wants to have everyone using the Internet it will be interesting to see what ways they will have to do to get all these without Internet and who have no desire to have the Internet to actually start using it. With more and more public services being put online the government will have to think ways and means through for these people.

The full “Accessing the Internet at home” report can be read at www.ofcom.org.uk

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- Filed under: Home Broadband
- Tags: Digital Britain, Those without broadband, UK broadband —
Author: Mark @ 2:40 pm

June 5, 2009

Broadband is Essential in the UK

People in the UK think that broadband is now “essential”!

The study was done by the Communications Consumer Panel and the results found that currently 73% of those who were questioned felt that broadband is essential or important and when asked about the importance of broadband in the future this figure rose to 84% who felt broadband would be essential.

2,000 people were questioned in the survey and made up 16 different target groups to get a fair and balanced view of users thoughts about broadband, groups  such as older people and those living in rural areas were a couple of the target groups.

With broadband now an everyday service that many people now see as more important to the likes of television, landline and mobile telephone services. With this in mind the figure of 81% of people believing that everyone should have the right to access broadband at home backs this up and those without it are believed to be at a disadvantage if they are not able to receive it.

This report goes further to back up the need for the whole of the UK to have access to broadband. We have alreday had the Digital Britain report saying that by 2012 that everyone in the UK should have access to broadband at a speed of at least 2Mb, while the 2Mb broadband speed may still not be hugely fast especially in a few years time it does show that broadband is considered very important as the government wants to make sure the whole of the UK is able to receive it, even those living out in very rural areas.

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- Filed under: News
- Tags: UK broadband —
Author: Mark @ 10:17 am


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