Carphone Customer Crash?

Carphone Warehouse has reported a minor slump in figures for broadband take-up, but says that it’s not concerned. The mobile retail outlet which owns and operates TalkTalk and AOL UK, added 89,000 customers during Q2 three months to the end of September, down from the 126,000 seen in the last quarter, but the company said it was pleased with progress at its fixed-line business.

However, CW said it expects to add an extra 200,000 broadband customers throughout the rest of the business year. It has been suggested by competitors that due to the very public teething problems that the TalkTalk brand suffered during its first few months, many of those original customers who signed up for 18 month with CW will leave once their contracts have expired – Charles Dunstone said he had seen “no particular uptick” in TalkTalk customers leaving as their contracts ended.

AOL have just relaunched their services, providing free wireless routers to all customers and signing a deal with Dell which sees customers who sign up for two years netting a free laptop – CW have been reluctant to heavily promote this straight away and have instead been focussing on LLU and migrating customers from connections accessed via BT Wholesale – which nets CW a monthly loss of £5 per customer – onto their own network.

Carphone Warehouse are expected to net a fair amount of coin this winter through a deal inked with Be Broadband burgermeisters O2 – who are set to launch their own broadband service very soon – and Apple which sees CW retail outlets getting first dibs on the ubiquitous iPhone.

Cardiff gets a wireless facelift courtesy of BT

Cardiff, which is the epicentre of BT‘s 21st Century Network rollout, is set to get a boost to its wireless broadband coverage courtesy of the aforementioned telco.

The service is already available at Cardiff International Airport, parts of Cardiff Bay and Millennium Stadium; BT is working with the local council to see which areas where the network could be extended to improve business and residential services.

Steve Andrews, BT Group chief of mobility, said: “Cardiff’s decision to work with BT to extend its Wireless City network will open up a raft of new opportunities for businesses, citizens and visitors to benefit from access to all the high-speed broadband services normally available at home or in the office.”

The 21st Century Network (21CN) from BT is a systematic upgrading of all existing phonelines, allowing for greater access to ADSL2+ speeds across the UK. The plan has been criticised due to the fact that ADSL2+ technology is already old hat, and will be ever older come 2010, when the rollout is slated to be finished.

We’re hoping that the 21CN project will eventually be revised to incorporate a mass fibre optic network, but as they say in Cymru, ‘Rhaid yw cropian cyn cerdded.‘

Pipex and Intel resurrect WiMax 4 businesses

Pipex may have sold off their broadband and phone services to Tiscali, but their days as an ISP aren’t over yet.

Pipex, in conjunction with Intel are preparing to roll out a sexy new wireless SDSL broadband service to businesses under the new name of Freedom4.

There will be separate packages for home workers (JustData, 1Mbps download and upload speeds) and business users (DataMax, 4Mbps download and upload speeds). There is also a Wi-Fi service for executive types who require mobile net access.

The main advantage of the WiMax platform is that the connection is totally wireless; meaning no additional fees for line rental, potentially saving businesses plenty of coin. However, there’s no mention if voice calls can be transmitted over the same network and we’re pretty sure businesses will want phone lines for this purpose, so this could well be a moot point if it turns out that firms cannot completely avoid paying the dreaded line rental.

Currently, the WiMax network covers businesses in and around Manchester, Milton Keynes and Warwick, with planned rollout set to go ahead – trials suggested that there was “significant demand” for business WiMax

O2 aim for 1 million broadband customers by 2010

O2 are set to launch their residential broadband service on the 15th of October, offering customers speeds of up to 20Mbps.

O2 mobile customers on Pay Monthly contracts stand to get the best deals, benefitting from a standard 8Mbps service for as little as £7.50 a month, £10 a month for 16Mbps and just £15 for the top tier 20Mbps service.

These same speeds will be available to non O2 Pay Monthly customers for an additional £10 a month; line rental and voice calls will not be included in the packages, so residents will have to pay another provider for this. There are no set-up costs, and the 24-hour tech support is free. Usage for all packages will be unlimited, but subject to an FUP.

Presuming that a customer has an O2 Pay Monthly contract phone and signs up for the 20Mbps deal, and wanted the cheapest line rental with evening and weekend calls, they would therefore have to pay something along the lines of £28.95 (BT line rental at £10.50 plus £3.45 for BT Option 2 Evenings and Weekends) plus whatever they were paying for their phone.

Be Broadband (which also runs sans a phone package and line rental), despite being owned by O2, will continue to run as a stand-alone entity, thereby providing better value services to non O2-phone customers. O2 aim to be servicing 1 million customers by 2010, indicating a willingness to roll out to other areas of the UK at a later date.

Government rules ITV stake against public interest; Sky have a Picnic

Sky have released more information about their Picnic service. Initially thought to be just a standalone broadband package with none of the other Sky services attached, Sky are now saying that Picnic will offer customers a choice of three services; broadband, telephone and a form of digital terrestrial TV (DTT) which will eventually make use of the new(ish) MPEG-4 technology.

The Picnic set-top box will give customers everything you get from Freeview plus three additional channels – no prizes for guessing which these will be – with a fourth channel slot dedicated to Sky News. Mobile phone and consumer electronics manufacturer Sagem has already stepped up to announce that it will be first in line to manufacture the receivers; unlike the current Sky+ boxes, Picnic hardware, like Freeview receivers, will be available from a number of manufacturers, rather than just Sky.

So far so good – the offer of Freeview plus a handful of some of the better Sky channels sounds pretty sweet to us, and looks set to give the nascent BT Vision and Tiscali TV platforms a run for their money.

So, when will Sky be opening their Picnic baskets? That’s the clincher. The service will be launched ‘pending regulatory investigation’ i.e. only if Ofcom says so. James Murdoch had this to say: “We are looking forward to the conclusion of the regulatory approval process so we can start delivering a great service and real savings to customers.”

To release details of a product so soon after the Competition Commission slated Sky’s swoop stake purchase in ITV as ‘anti-competitive’ suggests that they’re pretty confident that the regulators aren’t going to rap their knuckles over this one. Either that, or the press release is designed to give Virgin Media, BT and the rest a few sleepless nights. You have to hand it to Sky for the timing of the press release – the same day that Virgin 1 launched.

The decision of the Competition Commission

The purchase of the stake in ITV last November was seen by many as a thorn deliberately cast in Virgin’s path, not just Sir Richard Branson; the Commission was then called in to investigate the stake and how it might affect the plurality of news sources.

The Commission stated that with a controlling share, Sky “would therefore have both the ability and incentive to take advantage of opportunities to weaken ITV or prevent it from taking actions that would threaten [their] interests.”

The Commission has yet to comment on whether Sky will have to sell a portion of or all of their stake, or if a trade with rival shareholders, such as RTL who own part of Channel 5, is on the cards.

Ofcom was called upon to see if the then-unnamed Picnic TV could affect the market in a similar way, and to investigate the Great Cable Channel Farce.

AOL Bounces Back

AOL once enjoyed a reputation at the UK’s top dawg ISP way back in the good old pre-Freeserve days of dial-up internet – this public perception declined sharply, and was hasten following the emergence of broadband speeds in the UK market.

Following the Carphone Warehouse buyout of AOL’s UK services, the company looks set to win consumers back around again, by revamping their services for the new digital age.

AOL have scrapped their old Silver, Gold and Platinum packages, and have replaced them with two brand new wireless services, namely AOL Broadband Wireless, and AOL Broadband Wireless Plus, both of which provide the same connection speeds of up to 8Mbps, and come with free wireless routers, allowing up to 6 devices to share the same connection.

The standard Wireless package comes with a 10GB limit, enough for light browsing and the occasional download, whilst Wireless Plus comes with 40GB, more suitable for busy households.

The Talk Evening and Weekends packages, providing free calls to 01 and 02 UK landlines is included as standard, and the option to upgrade this to the Talk Anytime plan is also available.

We hope that AOL can, in the immortal words of Alan Partridge, successfully ‘bounce back’.

Virgin 1 is Go

Today, as in right now, Virgin 1 is live. The new digital TV channel available, on Virgin Media TV, Sky and Freeview launched earlier today, replacing the Ftn channel on the Freeview EPG and replacing the slot vacated by Sky One on the Virgin TV guide.

The new channel is the latest attempt by Virgin to break the Sky ‘Death Star’ deadlock. The channel provides top drama in the form of The Riches, starring Eddie Izzard as an Irish con artiste, and sci-fi in the form of Terminator spin-off The Sarah Connor Chronicles, plus the entire Star Trek franchise, to compete with the lure of Battlestar Galactica on Sky, the fourth season of which is due to launch early next year.

At a press conference staged at Richard Branson’s Oxfordshire address, the figurehead of the Virgin brand took the opportunity to stick the knife in; “Sky One is not exactly shining. It’s not something millions of people are watching. Its figures are a third or half of what it expected to get,” and to re-emphasise his position on the carriage fees debacle; “The Competition Commission is trying to decide whether it was anti-competitive. We believe [their] approach was tantamount to blackmail, so we decided not to give in.”

As the channel is available to pretty much every broadband customer with a Freeview box and not just Virgin TV, the new channel is hardly an effective means of retaining customers. However, Virgin have secured key sponsors for advertising, including, ironically enough, British Airways. And, if Sky One’s viewing figures are on the down and Virgin 1 performs as expected, it could hit the Death Star where it hurts, in terms of lost advertising revenue.

Having said that, the previously mentioned Battlestar will launch its fourth season early next year, and will be screened entirely in HD – something worth checking out even if you have already ripped every single episode in a low res file format.