TalkTalk has just unveiled their new ‘brighter’ look, as part of a new ad campaign due to start next week. The makeover coincides with the recent acquisition of Tiscali and the subsequent leap from third to second place in the UK Broadband League for Carphone Warehouse, behind market leaders BT Broadband and above quad-play providers Virgin Media.

According to Marketing Week, TalkTalk will be rebranded as Britain’s ‘brighter phone and broadband company’. This rebranding process will see the TalkTalk logo and website getting a redesign.

The image above shows the familiar TalkTalk logo rendered in Bonfire Night-esque ‘light graffiti’ and set against the nocturnal cityscapes of London’s Whitehall and Primrose Hill, Brighton beach and Manchester’s Canal Street.

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O2 Broadband has just announced yet another sizzling summer deal. All those who sign up for any of the O2 Home Broadband packages throughout July will get the first two months of their broadband service free. This provides a saving of up to £44 over the first year of service, should you sign up for the O2 Broadband Pro package and you are not an O2 Mobile customer.

This offer is also available to customers outside the O2 network, who can sign up for O2 Access Broadband, which provides the same speed and usage cap as O2 Standard Broadband (up to 8Mbps, Unlimited) for a slightly increased monthly cost.

It’s been a busy few weeks for O2, who on Monday announced a Wi-Fi tie-in with BT Broadband which sees O2 Mobile Broadband customers able to make use of 3,000 BT Openzone Wi-Fi points. In the week previous, O2 halved the cost of Mobile Broadband dongles on Pay As You Go.

O2 has announced a new partnership with BT Broadband which sees O2 Mobile Broadband customers able to hook up to an additional 3,000 BT Wi-Fi Hotspots. As well as this, O2 Mobile Broadband punters will be able to keep an eye on the amount of data they’re using thanks to new software.

This new software will notify you when 75%, 90% and 100% of your data allowance has been reached, so you don’t stray over your limit and end up saddled with extra charges.

Last week saw O2 slashing the cost of its Mobile Broadband dongles on Pay As You Go. With O2 Mobile Broadband Pay As You Go, you can chose to sign up for daily, weekly and monthly packages, all of which include unlimited Wi-Fi.

Back in April, BT installed Wi-Fi in over 600 branches of Starbucks throughout the UK and the Republic of Ireland. It was announced shortly after that iPhone owners would be able to make use of BT’s Wi-Fi points in Starbucks for free as well, with O2 Mobile Broadband customers to follow in the summer.

Earlier this month we saw Be Broadband offering new customers who signed up to any of the Be Value, Be Unlimited or Be Pro packages for 12 months a free haul of Amazon gift vouchers worth £24.

Now we hear that the UK’s leading providers of ADSL2+ broadband have doubled their offer, handing out packs of Amazon vouchers worth a whopping £48 for new 12 month subscribers. That works out at £4 worth of free stuff from Amazon for a year.

Apparently, to qualify for the vouchers, all you have to do during the sign up process is enter the promotional code: ‘24OfferBTC1′. The Be Broadband website is currently still displaying the old offer on its main page, but according to a post over at Broadband Genie, where the story broke, the code is genuine and will benefit new subscribers to the tune of £48 worth of Amazon vouchers. Continue Reading »

O2 has just slashed the connection cost of its Pay As You Go Mobile Broadband service in half. The USB Modem E160 dongle, normally priced £29.34 is now available for £14.97 until Monday the 29th of June. The mobile broadband dongle works with both PCs and Macs, offers plug and play installation and top connection speeds of 3.6Mbps.

As well as this, O2 Mobile Broadband customers on this PAYG offering can take advantage of different daily, weekly and monthly tariffs. The daily tariff comes with a data allowance of 500MB, and unlimited Wi-Fi access at any of the 5,000 UK hotspots operated by The Cloud.

The weekly offering provides 1GB for £7.50, with the monthly offering providing 3GB for £15. Again, both of these offerings provide unlimited Cloud Wi-Fi access.

Ever had problems with mobile phone signal at home? Well now thanks to Vodafone and a little thing they call the Vodafone Access Gateway (pictured), you can set up a miniature mobile phone network in your own home using your broadband connection.

Much in the same was as you’d set up a wireless network in the home for multiple computers and laptops to connect to, Vodafone Access Gateway plugs directly into your broadband line and wirelessly routes all voice calls, texts and data requests across your connection.

Seeing as voice calls and texts aren’t hugely data intensive compared to say streaming music and video online, this shouldn’t have a huge impact on your monthly usage. This is great news for those who live in areas where mobile coverage is patchy at the best of times, and can’t always get through to friends and family on their mobiles.

The Vodafone Access Gateway will be available to order in store and online from the 1st of July. The Gateway will be available on Vodafone price plans from as little as £15 a month, or for a one off fee of £160. No news as of yet if the Gateway will be available at a discounted price when bought with Vodafone mobile broadband; we’d assume that some sort of deal along those lines would be available in the future.

International IT law specialists Pinsent Masons, AKA the people who run the OUT-LAW blog, published an article last Friday which has kicked up a bit of a stir on there shores.

“There is no legal barrier in the UK to internet service providers (ISPs) blocking content from website operators who do not pay them,” reads the first line of the piece. This news comes after the widely publicised beef between BT and the BBC.

The UK’s leading provider of broadband services pointed to the costs linked to subscribers watching content online. It was suggested, prior to publication of the Digital Britain report last week, that owners of popular content streaming sites and applications would have to pay ISPs for costs incurred.

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Sky Broadband has just announced speed increases for its Mid and Max broadband packages, which are now known as Sky Broadband Everyday and Sky Broadband Unlimited respectively.

Sky Broadband Everyday now rocks with a top speed of 10Mbps, up from the original 8Mbps that was available when it was called Sky Broadband Mid. Unfortunately, this shift in speed also sees the monthly usage cap drop from 40GB per month to 10GB.

Sky Broadband Unlimited comes with a top speed of 20Mbps, up from the top 16Mbps available before, and as it’s name suggests, retains the same Unlimited usage cap that Sky Broadband Max customers enjoyed.

Other changes to Sky Broadband packages include the increase of Sky Talk line rental on all packages up to £11 a month, although this is not due to take place until the 1st of September.

From today, Sky is reducing the free trial period of McAfee Internet Security from 12 months to 3 months on Sky Broadband Base and Everyday. Sky Broadband Unlimited subscribers and those who have already registered for McAfee trial will continue to benefit from their 12 months free McAfee Internet Security service.

The picture to the right is of part of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In a nutshell, the LHC shoots particles around a large underground circuit at mind-boggling speeds, and so the pic was chosen to reflect Sky Broadband’s recent upgrades.

Photo Credit: [CERN]

The Digital Britain report has just been published. We’ve yet to give huge 195-page PDF a proper going over, but we have made note of some of the key points with regard to the future of Broadband Britain.

First thing of note is that, as expected, universal broadband access at speeds of at least 2Mbps downstream will be made available to every UK household by 2012. This will be partially funded by a large £200 cash injection of public money, which will bring broadband access to the “estimated 2.75 million households which cannot currently receive 2Mb/s.”

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The final part of Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, which will outline a roadmap for the development of broadband infrastructure in the UK, is due to be published today. There has been much speculation about the contents of the document, after the interim report was published back in January.

Recent announcements by ISPs here in the UK and noises made by content providers such as the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) have given us some clues as to what the report may contain.

Here is a brief round-up of what is widely expected to be included in the report:

• Measures to provide speeds of at least 2Mbps to every UK home - this will almost certainly include a mixture of fixed-line and mobile connections. ISPs and mobile network operators could receive government incentives to invest in future broadband connections.

• A Rights Agency designed to prevent illegal file sharing. This may or may not involve a ‘three strikes’ system, whereby first offenders will be sent written warnings, persistent offenders will frisk having their connections slowed to a halt. Yesterday’s announcement by Virgin Media sees the ISP offering a carrot to go with the stick, in the form of unlimited downloads of DRM-free music with its broadband services. Such offers could become commonplace throughout the market.

• A change to the BBC licence fee which will see the public service broadcaster help cover the costs of bandwidth eaten up by use of its iPlayer on-demand platform. The BBC could also be asked to share proceeds earned from the licence fee with commercial rivals such as ITV and Channel 4, both of whom have their own ITV Player and 4oD on-demand offerings.

• Funding for investment in future networks may also be accrued from the licence fee. A speed of 2Mbps is the minimum required speed for viewing programmes on iPlayer online, so it makes sense for a fraction of the licence fee to be used for this purpose. Doing so should in theory allow everyone to watch footage of the London 2012 Olympics live on line. This will be beneficial to those living in parts of the UK such as Cornwall where digital terrestrial reception is patchy.

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