How bad is superfast broadband uptake?

Friday, November 11th, 2011

We’ve been waiting for years for true “superfast” fibre-optic broadband, but now it’s here it seems few people actually want it. At least, that’s the impression given by Ofcom chief Ed Richards’ comments earlier this week, when he said superfast (24Mbits/sec+) broadband uptake was “still low” and largely confined to families with teenage children.

How low is “low”? We asked BT for its latest fibre figures. More than six million premises now have access to BT’s fibre lines, but only 300,000 customers have actually signed up for the service. That’s a less than impressive sounding conversion rate of 5%.

It’s even less impressive when you consider that BT Infinity fibre costs no more than the company’s most expensive ADSL package, and that the company admits to “really going for it” in terms of marketing fibre to customers. People are being offered an effectively free speed upgrade and many seemingly don’t want it.

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Who are the real broadband conmen: the ISPs or the ASA?

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

When you’ve dug yourself a hole, stop digging. Or if you’re the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), keep going until you hit the molten core of the Earth itself.

Regular PC Pro readers will know how the ASA has allowed ISPs to over-egg the speed of their broadband connections by permitting them to advertise fantasy “up to” speeds, which Ofcom’s research has proven time and again are pure fiction. Even Ofcom itself called for this insidious practice to stop over a year ago, since when the ASA has dithered with a year-long consultation on the use of “up to” speeds, but still hasn’t arrived at a conclusion.

Consequently, one ISP took matters into its own hands. Last year, Virgin Media launched its Stop The Broadband Con website, calling on ISPs to advertise typical rather than maximum speeds – very similar recommendations to those made by Ofcom itself.

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Net neutrality: what the BBC says and what the BBC does

Friday, April 1st, 2011

The BBC has been one of the most vociferous defenders of net neutrality – the concept that all internet traffic is treated equally.  However, a couple of deals struck with BT suggest the BBC isn’t as wedded to net neutrality as it likes to claim.

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Why we can’t afford to wait for fibre

Friday, November 26th, 2010

For the past couple of days I’ve been with BT in Northern Ireland, visiting homes and businesses that have been among the first in the UK to be hooked up to BT’s fibre broadband network.

If you’re one of those people who can’t understand why Britain needs a decent high-speed network, or think that rural campaigners are greedy for demanding proper broadband in their area, you should listen to the stories from the people we visited in Northern Ireland.

People such as Paul Sherry, Hugh Morgan and Joseph Ireland – three ambitious young men who set up their own company while midway through their degrees, because they could see that there would be no jobs in the flagging construction industry waiting for them when they finished their studies.

They run Energy Assessments NI, a company that certifies the energy efficiency of new buildings as required by EU law. Much of their work involves sending and receiving large architectural drawings over email, or delivering certificates electronically to their customers – tasks that are painfully slow or just aren’t possible without a decent broadband connection.

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The real reasons we have to wait for BT’s fibre-to-the-premises broadband

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

“Fibre-to-the-Premises rolling out next year!” scream the headlines. It sounds so easy. But wait: most people will have to be patient, with fibre not arriving until 2012 for many, and 2015 for many more.

Why, you might well think, do I have to wait that long? I was despatched to one of BT’s FTTP trials in Milton Keynes to find out how much work goes on behind the scenes, and this blog post will reveal everything you need to know — probably more than you ever wanted to know — about the labour put in by engineers to get a tiny little cable to your home.

Two things to keep in mind: first, Milton Keynes, being a newish sort of place, has a well-planned duct system, making the trial a bit more straightforward than it could be in other locales. FTTP in older cities won’t be so easy or even possible, while others will get fibre access over telegraph poles instead.

The other thing to remember is this: fibre is really, really thin. Surprisingly so.

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Britain’s sleepwalking into a net neutrality nightmare

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

Imagine that you get home tonight, flick on the TV and BBC1 isn’t there. Not absent because of a strike or a temporary technical fault, but because ITV had paid Sky not to carry BBC1 on its satellite network so that it could gobble up a greater share of the viewing figures.

I suspect it would cause a bit of a stir. The Daily Mail would be apoplectic.  #burnrupertmurdoch would be a trending topic on Twitter in less time than it takes to strike a match.

Yet, Britain’s biggest ISPs and Ofcom are driving us towards exactly this kind of scenario on the internet. At a Westminster eForum last week, TalkTalk’s director of strategy unashamedly admitted that he could foresee a situation where Google paid his company to give YouTube priority bandwidth over the BBC iPlayer. His counterpart from BT said likewise. Both described it as a “legitimate business practice”.

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Fibre broadband: when is it coming to your area?

Monday, October 4th, 2010

BT is now asking broadband customers to register their interest in high-speed fibre lines, to help inform its decision on where to roll out its next-gen network. But how do you know if you’re already on the list of towns BT plans to cover?

There are two ways to get hold of this information:

Sam Knows Broadband has an excellent Exchange Checker that tells you if and when BT plans to lay fibre in your neck of the woods, as well as providing detailed information on the availability of ADSL, cable and LLU providers in your area. To see if fibre’s coming to your area, enter your postcode, scroll down to the BT Wholesale section, and check the date alongside “FTTC status”. (FTTC stands for fibre-to-the-cabinet, BT’s up to 40Mbits/sec fibre service.)

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How many emails does it take to order a line from BT?

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

I hate it when people tease out a punchline, so I’ll tell you: it’s 122.

One hundred and twenty two emails, to get an order progressed with our national telecoms carrier. It almost beggars belief – but, for those of us who view telecoms connectivity as part of the very first stages of our WAN rollouts, it’s rapidly becoming the longest, most painful and least controllable part of any project. The reason, in this case, is because the order was placed with a BT Local Business (BTLB) unit.

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The question Ofcom won’t answer: is it safe to run an open Wi-Fi hotspot?

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

You may remember a few weeks ago, we reported on how Ofcom’s proposed code of conduct for dealing with illegal file-sharing contained a veiled warning to the providers of free or open Wi-Fi connections.

In a nutshell, anyone who provides an open Wi-Fi connection – be that a company with a free hotspot in their reception or a home user who decides to leave their router unprotected – will be held responsible if someone downloads copyrighted material on their connection. (Unless, bizarrely, they are a coffee shop or other business that offers Wi-Fi access in conjunction with other goods or services, in which cased they’re treated as an ISP).

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Is fibre broadband as expensive as BT makes out?

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

For many years now, BT has been claiming it simply cannot afford to deliver fibre broadband to large parts of the country. In 2008, the Broadband Stakeholder Group claimed it would cost £5.1 billion to deliver nationwide Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) – a figure that BT itself has repeated in public.

However, a press release issued by none other than BT today provides a fascinating insight into the economics of fibre broadband – and casts some doubt over the accuracy of those lofty figures.

In what BT describes as a “fibre triumph”, a local council in Kent has contributed to the cost of deploying fibre in the village of Iwade. According to BT, the council stumped up £13,000, which “unlocked” £62,000 of investment from the telco, meaning it cost a total of £75,000 to bring fibre to each of the village’s 1,350 premises.

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