Broadband
Wed, 23/06/2010 - 08:09 | David
Chancellor George Osborne ditched the 50p broadband tax, calling it "archaic".
Proposed by Labour last year, the tax would have charged everyone with a landline an extra 50p a month to help fund the roll out of broadband across the UK.
In keeping with previously made promises to scrap the tax, Osborne said the "landline duty is an archaic way of doing this".
Mon, 07/06/2010 - 17:20 | David
Another four Welsh communities will have broadband access by the end of the summer, as BT continues to upgrade networks in rural parts of the country.
The project, which is co-funded by the Welsh Assembly, will see Beulah and Ystrad Meurig in Ceredigion, and Cil-y-Cwm and Llanfynydd in Carmarthenshire, connected by the end of the summer.
Mon, 29/03/2010 - 12:47 | David
Ofcom, the toothless UK government quango, has admitted that ISPs are routinely flouting its Voluntary Code of Practice on Broadband Speeds.
Under the terms of the code - which came into effect in December 2008 - ISPs are meant to provide customers with an estimate of their maximum line speed at the point of purchase.
However, a mystery shopping exercise conducted by the regulator shows that ISPs are often failing to volunteer the information. Eighty five per cent of Ofcom's mystery shoppers were provided with an estimate of their line speed, but the shoppers had to prompt the salesperson in 42% of those cases, which means less than half of broadband providers are volunteering the required information.
Sat, 06/03/2010 - 09:41 | David
A dozen rural community groups have banded together to get the Government to roll out broadband to the countryside.
The Final Third First group highlights the fact that a substantial number of the population living in rural areas only have access to 28.8 or 56Kbits/sec dial-up connections.
Fri, 08/01/2010 - 12:54 | David
The Government has launched a twelve week public consultation on the best way of spending the £1 billion broadband fund that will be generated through its forthcoming broadband tax.
The next-generation broadband fund will be raised by levying 50p per month on all fixed telephone lines, and is intended to bring 2Mbits/sec broadband to 90% of the country by 2012.
Tue, 15/12/2009 - 14:58 | David
A Government consultation paper on the so-called Broadband Tax admits that consumers and small businesses are likely to pay more than huge corporations.
The 50p per month charge will be applied to each landline that runs into a residential or business property, meaning that homes and offices with multiple lines will be taxed at least twice.
Tue, 01/12/2009 - 18:01 | David
BT’s competitors may have to make up the company’s shortfall for its pension scheme as a result of an Ofcom consultation.
The regulator will decide whether Openreach, the division of BT set up to lease its lines to other providers, should be allowed to increase its prices to make up for BT's pension deficit. If agreed, it could see costs rising by up to 4%.
Fri, 13/11/2009 - 11:30 | David
Britain's next generation broadband access provision is likely to lag well behind demand, according to research from broadband monitor Point Topic.
The company's Broadband Geography tool has tracked the likely demand across the UK and compared it with the planned next generation access (NGA) rollout as outlined by BT. The results are not pretty.
Wed, 28/10/2009 - 18:28 | David
Mobile data traffic is set to grow 25-fold by 2012, stretching the mobile networks to their very limits.
Mobile industry analysts Informa claim that mobile broadband networks are already beginning to sag under the strain in major cities. "The networks in developed markets in the UK and the US are starting to saturate," Informa analyst Dimitris Mavrakis has announced. "We see a lot of bottlenecks in data-centric areas such as London and New York."
Tue, 20/10/2009 - 06:26 | David
If elected, the Conservatives would cut plans to tax phone lines 50 pence a month to pay for a superfast broadband rollout.
Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt told the Financial Times that the tax, proposed as part of the government’s Digital Britain plans, would be scrapped “as soon as possible.”
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