TalkTalk are currently offering all new broadband customers a no strings, no obligation 30 Day Trial of their Talk3 with Free Broadband and Talk3 International packages. New customers are free to leave the service within 30 days of singing up without having to pay any disconnection fees.

Also, customers who sign up for the Talk3 International plan can do so at a discounted cost for the first three months.

Usually charged at £20.99 a month, the package, which gives you unlimited calls to local and national UK numbers and discounted calls to selected international numbers is charged at £19.99 for the first three months – the same cost as the Talk3 package which provides the same service, but without discounts on calls made to numbers outside the UK. Both packages come with an 8MB Broadband service, with a 40GB monthly download limit included as standard.

These special offers are only available until the 30th of June, so if you like the look of either of TalkTalk’s packages, don’t hesitate to sign up.

AOL have recently announced a price adjustment to their broadband packages, depending on the type of phoneline you have. The new pricing system ups the cost of the Silver and Platinum packages by an extra £10 a month for customers on a non-LLU line, so if you’re connected to AOL through, say, a BT line in an area where Opal Telecom – part of the Carphone Warehouse – haven’t installed their hardware at the local exchange, then you will end up having to fork out more for the same service, although AOL have said that customers living in an area marked down for future unbundling will not be affected by this recent change.

This pricing policy isn’t limited to AOL – TalkTalk have operated a similar cheaper service for customers on their lines in the past, although seeing as AOL UK’s parent company also owns and runs TalkTalk, you would expect that both ISPs would be able to make use of the same Opal equipment.

AOL once enjoyed a reputation as being one of the best ISPs in the pre-Broadband days, but have taken a nosedive over the last few years; this LLU postcode lottery policy will do little to endear them to new customers and restore their former reputation.

It might be fairly old news, but it’s still good news.

Salisbury City FC have assured their place in the Vauxhall Conference next season, a positioned secured by a 1-0 victory over Braintree at Steveange Borough’s turf on Sunday the 13th of May. Now the Mighty Whites face the awesome challenge of having to twice play Exeter City… We’ll be cheering them on here at Broadband Finder.

It looks at though the next couple of months are going to be a pretty bad for Virgin Media. In a surprise move, it has emerged that a deal with Sky could see Tiscali’s TV platform playing host to a number of Sky channels, including the channels, Sky One, Sky News, Sky Sports News etc, which were dropped from Virgin earlier this year.

It is believed that Tiscali are preparing to accept terms and rates above those which were offered to Virgin before the court negotiations took place, which will strengthen Sky’s courtside position, and makes Virgin look bad by comparison. The timing of this announcement is impeccable – just days before Alastair Darling is set to rule whether Sky should be hauled over the coals over allegations of anti-competitive behaviour.

Tiscali are crucially positioned behind Virgin in the Broadband stakes – acquisition of the contentious Sky channels, something which saw a large number of customers leaving Virgin over, could see Tiscali’s consumer base swell dramatically.

Tiscali are also rumoured to be up for buying Pipex, and if they go through with the purchase, then the size of the Tiscali customer base could well overtake that of Virgin Media by the end of the year, and would bring Tiscali into direct competition with UK Broadband leaders BT, who are also trying to push their IPTV package alongside internet and phone services.

This news couldn’t come at a worse time for Virgin Media. The recent announcement of bandwidth throttling, where Virgin reduce the connection speeds of users during peak times in order to provide a more balanced service, has disgruntled some customers, especially those who pay a premium for the faster service speeds.

Bandwidth shaping has had to take place due to the technological nature of a cable internet connection. Unlike ADSL, where the quality and speed of your connection depends on the distance of your house from the exchange, the performance of a cable connection largely depends on the browsing habits of other cable users in your area. As most people tend to use the internet at home at peak times – when they get back from school or work and at weekends – performance over a local cable network can slow down considerably.

Virgin’s recent ADSL deal with Cable & Wireless could sort this problem out in the long term, as customers may benefit from a standard phoneline connection if they live close to an exchange. Virgin intend to release new features for the digital TV set-top box, which they have been giving to customers singing up for their 8MB ADSL service, promising to offer “advanced TV services in all areas throughout 2008″ as take up increases.

However, with BT Vision very much alive and kicking, Freeview leading the way in the world of digital TV, and with the switchover due to start early next year, 2008 may be a bit too late. Virgin are going to have to seriously beef up their ADSL packages if they want to attract customers who might see themselves getting a better bundle deal with another provider.

Virgin Media have just inked a deal with Cable & Wireless – former owners of the Bulldog ISP, before it got snaffled by Pipex – which will allow the multimedia giant to roll out its quad play services to over 80% of UK homes via an unbundled ADSL network. This is a significant increase of the former percentage of homes covered by its non-cable broadband network, which hovered somewhere around the 50% mark.

Now, Virgin can market their digital TV set-top box, putting the group on a similar pegging to main TV competitor Sky in terms of the number of customers it can potentially supply with services, however Virgin now have the edge over Sky in terms of Broadband – whilst Sky’s satellite footprint covers nearly all of the UK, the same can’t be said of it’s Broadband network, for the time being at least. Sky have unbundled equipment in over 1,000 phone exchanges since March last year, and show no signs of slowing down.

Recently, Sky have published personal exchanges between boss James Murdoch and his opposite number at Virgin, Steve Burch, in an attempt to embarrass Virgin by claiming that they rejected Sky proposals to resolve the carriage fees dispute. Next week, trade secretary Alastair Darling is set to announce whether to submit Sky’s controversial swoop purchase of a stake ITV should be submitted to the Competition Commission, which could potentially leave ITV open for a Virgin bid.

Virgin Media have been accused of hypocrisy after it has been revealed that they shape broadband traffic during peak times, when they have routinely criticised other non-cable providers for falsely advertising their services as unlimited.

Download speeds on the cable network will be limited between 4PM and midnight for traffic which Virgin considers to be excessive, ideally to prevent heavy users of the cable network from adversely affecting the service for casual users.

Size: M customers who stray over a download limit of 350MB during the eight hour peak time period will have their 2Mbps halved to 1Mbps; Size: L punters will similarly see their 4Mbps service axed to 2Mbps should they stray over a 750MB limit and the 10Mbps connection speed available on the Size: XL package will shrink to 5Mbps once 3GB worth of data is accessed.

Despite this, Virgin still claim that they offer an ‘unlimited’ service, as the restrictions do not affect the amount you can download, just the speed at which you can access information.

Pipex seem to have done a massive about-face and sorted themselves out. Despite laying off staff, and offering themselves on a plate to the highest bidder, they are currently pitching themselves at customers via the offer of huge savings on their bundled Broadband and phone service.

Six months of free broadband is up for grabs for customers who sign up for the Broadband + Anytime calls package – seeing as you don’t pay for the Broadband part of the deal, this package, usually costing £19.00 a month, is available for the reduced monthly price of £12.50. This means all-inclusive calls at any time of the day, plus up to 8MB Broadband speeds – even when you include the BT line rental, it’s a good deal by anyone’s standards.

Whether this signifies that everything is now relatively peachy at Pipex HQ, or if it’s a last-ditch drive to increase revenue to make them a more attractive prospect to buyers is anyone’s guess. The official line on the recent promotion is:

“We’re delighted to be offering such a good deal on our main broadband and call package,” says Dominic Crolla, of Pipex’s residential division. “With over 15 years’ experience and a reputation for offering reliable, high performance broadband, it’s perfect for both new broadband users and those that are just looking to get better value from their phone and internet packages.”

Despite this, speculation on the possibility of a takeover has increased, with Tiscali confirming recent rumours that they were eyeing up Pipex. As reported in our news feed, Massimo Cristofori, chief financial officer at Tiscali, said in a statement that “Pipex has started the procedure of an eventual sale and it has sent us their dossier.”

Although this does not confirm that Tiscali are going to buy up, it also doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. Tiscali are now the 3rd largest providers or Broadband services in the UK, a position previously occupied by TalkTalk, who were also, until recently, interested in buying up Pipex.

A report in the Independent suggested that Pipex’s WiMax network, may be a deciding factor in other ISPs reluctance to buy up; the WiMax technology, ostensibly to be used to wirelessly route connections to households over the so called ‘last mile’ is largely untested and therefore hard to value – companies don’t want to gamble an investment on an unproven technology.

The report in the Independent comes with a quote from Andrew Darley, analyst with KBC Peel Hunt said that Pipex’s WiMax licence was “the ace in [Pipex Chairman] Peter Dubens’ pack.”

A combined O2 /Be Broadband mobile and internet looks set to be launched sometime around September, when it is estimated that the radius of the Be network will have expanded to cover over 50% of the UK, although, again there has been no definite word from O2 on any plans.

This means that if O2 do indeed launch in September, then they could only feasibly advertise their services in selected areas in the country, or have to negotiate a deal with a wholesale provider, mostly likely BT, if they intend to supply the services across the whole of the UK. If O2 do choose to clamber into bed with BT it would make for an odd turn of events, seeing as the telco used to own the mobile network back in the BT Cellnet days.

O2 are typically reluctant to give any specific date, preferring to wait until the time is right to launch their service; Peter Erskine, Chairman of Telefonia O2 Europe’s mobile phones division has said that: “The one thing I will not do is launch something that isn’t ready, on the customer.”

O2 bought then-small UK ISP Be Broadband for a cool £50million over a year ago and had originally planned to have a multi-platform service up and running by the start of this year. However, technology problems have led to targets not being met, resulting in entire advertising campaigns being scrapped.

Given that 2006 was ‘the year of Broadband’, and the fortunes of many internet service providers has in those twelve months been turbulent, a fashionably late entry into the converged communications market may be a wise move. We’ll just have to wait until the end of the summer to find out…

… and add a couple of extra jewels to it in the process.

BT have netted a further 200,000 new Broadband customers this year, meaning that their position as the top provider of Broadband internet services in the UK has been regained, after the combined total of customers represented by Virgin Media briefly pipped the UK Broadband crown in the wake of the launch of the rebranded ntl and Telewest in March – BT now supply Broadband to over 3.6 million UK homeowners.

Virgin have experienced a fairly sizeable degree of customer migration which has partially been attributed to both the Sky carriage fees debacle, and the recent decision to impose stringent measures on bandwidth use (or abuse, depending on how you look at it) across its cable network.

BT have also recently launched a series of ads, trumpeting their IPTV service BT Vision, a combination of Freeview-esque digital TV with added pay as you go on-demand options. The BT Vision receiver broadcasts free-to-air digital channels which arrive through a standard TV aerial; the additional pay per view content is downloaded over a Broadband connection and then routed to the set-top box via the BT Home Hub, making this service an attractive offer to BT Broadband customers who might want a little more than the Freeview channels, but don’t want to have to pay for an expensive monthly subscription.

The service has been in existence for some time now, but the timing of this publicity campaign is perfect – the Sky/Virgin debate is still relatively fresh in people’s minds, and so migrating customers from these platforms may find BT’s offer an understandably attractive one.

As has been mentioned in our news feed, BT have also recently announced that they are tweaking their server settings to improve their commercial internet services, promising increases in connection speeds which will not translate into a price hike, and will mostly likely benefit Option 1 customers. BT have already reduced the prices of their internet packages from what they were at the beginning of 2007, meaning their Broadband throne is set to remain secure for the foreseeable future.

The already dubious future of beleaguered ISP Pipex has been thrown into further uncertainty following announcements of staff redundancies in various call centres, particularly the ones set up to deal with customer complaints.

Despite the company currently supplying Broadband and phone services to over 570,000 customers it has still been unable to find a buyer; by presenting prospective creditors with the opportunity to inherit a consumer base frustrated with a lack of any infrastructure to support it seems an odd way of making the offer sweeter.

It had been rumoured that everyone from BT to Virgin were interested in taking over Pipex, but as pretty much everyone in the market has had their share of highly-publicised customer service woes in the past - particularly TalkTalk - it seems unlkely that anyone will want to take up such a poisoned chalice.

Pipex itself had inherited a large amount of debt after it had acquired the services of niche ISPs Toucan and Bulldog, which it spent over £30 million on. Even though customer ranks swelled slightly, partially attributed to a cheesy but likable ad campaign starring ‘The Hoff’, Pipex took a bashing for failing to get its customer service and technical support together, and failing to refund customers who were overcharged for services.

This, coupled with news of call centre staff getting the chop does not indicate that Pipex will have the problem sorted anytime soon – they are expected to make an announcement on their future plans ‘in the summer’ which could be anything from the end of this month until September.