This June, Virgin Media will slash the premium rate charges for calls to its technical support desk. The charges were introduced last summer to discourage irrelevant calls (’What’s a URL?’) to their staff, infuriating customers who had problem getting a connection, accessing emails or getting a decent speed at non-peak times.

Calls to Virgin technical support currently cost 25p per minute line; prices will fall to the standard rate for a national call around the same time that the rollout of the new 10Mbps speed upgrade for the Size: L package is due to be in full swing.

Broadband customers signing up for PlusNet’s Home Phone Evening and Weekends service will pay just £4.99 for line rental for the first three months of a 12 month contract, and then £9.99 per month thereafter. The package includes all evening and weekend calls to UK landlines as well as free calls to other PlusNet Home Phone customers at any time.

PlusNet’s Anytime+ package has also been cut to £10 per month for the first six months (£15 per month thereafter). The package includes all calls to UK landlines, free calls to other Home Phone customers and 300 call minutes to the top 20 international destinations.

The PlusNet phone packages are available to anyone who signs up for any of the PlusNet packages, from Option 1 to the new Broadband Your Way Pro.

Earlier this week, Downing Street responded to an e-petition which called for the Government to take a leaf out of the Japanese book by financially backing the big telcos in order to roll out a nationwide fibre network. The petition said that “the UK will lag behind in broadband speed if no fibre network isn’t put in place,” attracted just under 1,000 signatures and elicited this response from Number Ten:

“Thank you for the e-petition asking the Government to give BT Government incentive to provide fibre to every UK home. On the 22 February the Government announced a review targeted at areas within the scope of the Government’s influence, and responsibility with the aim of assisting the creation of market conditions that would lead to the a more attractive investment environment for the private sector. This review is due to report in the Autumn.

To date BT’s and other’s investment in broadband technology has meant that over 99% of all businesses and households have access to broadband - the highest ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) availability of all the G8 countries. As a result we have a very competitive market, which has benefited the consumer through increased choice and some of the lowest prices in Europe. This has been achieved by opening up the previous monopoly to introduce more competition. BT alone can no longer provide broadband to the exclusion of other providers.

Based on the last Broadband wholesale review carried out in 2003/2004, BT and Kingston Communications in the Hull area are currently obliged to provide wholesale broadband access products to other ISPs (Internet Service Provider), which in turn allows them to offer competing retail services. These obligations were necessary to ensure competition for consumers by ensuring that ISPs can access wholesale broadband services to allow them to develop their own competitive retail offerings. Both BT and Kingston meet the requirement and offer a range of wholesale broadband products to meet the needs of ISPs. The market is open to any ISP who wants to take the commercial decision to offer broadband via the incumbents’ network.”

Whilst the response contained a number of home truths, the UK does have the highest availability of ADSL broadband throughout the G8 (although that’s largely due to the fact that the UK is significantly smaller than say, the US or Russia) and some of the lowest prices in Europe, the response neatly avoided giving any concrete response to the question, other than that we should all wait until the Autumn to find out if any kind of government assistance will be given.

We’ve received a number of emails from readers who say they’d happily pay out more in taxes if the government could guarantee FttH to UK homes by a set date, say 2012. Gordon, are you listening?

According to BT, the black hubs have been flying off the shelves like the proverbial hot cakes, and so, flush with Easter spirit, they have decided to extend the deal til the 31st of March.

This is great news for people who wanted one of the black beauties but were waiting to come out of a previous contract before switching but missed the previous boat (yesterday). The offer of the BT Home Hub to come bundled with the Option 1 broadband package is also still standing, meaning that free wireless home networking is still available on all BT Broadband products.

The black hubs are pretty fetching, and we’d like to see BT make the choice of colour, sorry, shade, available to customers during the sign-up process.

Last week AOL, the Time-Warner affiliated company, not the UK arm owned by Carphone Warehouse, bought Bebo, the third biggest social networking site on the interweb, with around 40 million monthly users over the world. Randy Falco, chairman and chief executive of AOL, said: “Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media.”

The deal marks a push by AOL revive itself as a brand, and to grow its social media business, which consists of AIM, a cross between messaging and social networking, and personal communications network ICQ, in a similar vein to the Myspace IM platform, which should have, but never really took off.

Myspace was, of course, snapped up by Sky owners News International, in the days before Facebook became the new kid on the social networking block.

At last weeks ISPA awards ceremony, Eclipse Internet, the overall winners of the 2007 awards, scooped the titles of Best Business ISP and Best Business Email at the 2008 Internet Service Provider Awards (ISPAs) in London on Friday 14 March.

Mark Thomas, Head of Sales and Marketing at Eclipse had this to say: “Over the last 18 months we have complemented the business-grade broadband access we offer with a range of new services that help businesses to operate more efficiently, including online data back-up, hosting services, hosted applications and e-commerce solutions. We are delighted that our growing reputation as the ISP of choice for businesses has been recognised by the industry through the achievement of not one but two business ISPA awards.”

All of the Eclipse business broadband packages come with no download limits, and provide top download speeds of 8Mbps, with varying levels of IP addresses and webspace; this way smaller businesses who do not require as much space for hosting are not priced out of higher speeds and can enjoy the same level of service as larger outfits.

Eclipse aren’t intending on resting on their laurels. According to Thomas, the plan is to “keep investing in the type of services and the level of customer and technical support that businesses want.” As the commercial broadband market is continually consolidating, the business broadband sector is set to become another hotbed of competition. Tiscali are to branch into the market via Pipex, and both O2 and Sky are offering ADSL2+ services to companies via Be Broadband Pro and UK Online, up against ISP stalwarts Demon
and NamesCo.

The tenth ISPA event, now in its tenth year, recognises innovation and good workplace practice (which is why HMRC were awarded the ISPA equivalent of the Golden Raspberry) in the ISP sector.

If you were thinking about signing up with BT to get a black Home Hub, then today is the day; the offer is slated to end tomorrow. The limited edition black run of BT Home Hubs is currently available free on all BT packages, due to the Option 1 Home Hub offer being extended due to the excessive demand for the shiny wireless routers. Whilst the run of black Hubs is expected to come to an end tomorrow, the offer of the Home Hub on Option 1 is to continue.

The Home Hub provides straightforward wireless home networking, VoIP calls with BT Broadband Talk and on-demand digital TV with BT Vision. Speeds of up to 8Mbps are available on all BT Broadband packages, with usage ranging from 5GB a month, to an unlimited amount.

A report by telecoms research body Point Topic says that Sky has retained its position as the fastest growing ISP in the UK, according to sales figures from the past five quarters. In the three months up to last December, the triple-play company netted a further 260,000 broadband customers, which equates to 42 per cent of new broadband customers during that period.

The success of Sky Broadband has largely been credited to the popular SeeSpeakSurf bundle, which sees broadband included free with Sky TV, their killer app, and fixed line phone calls. Sky was also the first ISP to offer free wireless routers to customers, allowing home networks to be set up quickly and easily. Rival providers Be, AOL, Tiscali and others quickly followed suit.

Sky entered the broadband market under its own name nearly two years ago, after buying Easynet for a cool £211 million. Sky wasted no time investing into the LLU scheme, unbundling at a furious rate. SeeSpeakSurf launched in 2006 and late last year, Sky announced that it had connected its millionth customer. Sky also purchased ADSL2+ ISP UK Online, who specialise in providing next-gen ADSL broadband to SME customers.

The results of the tenth ISPA Internet industry awards ceremony which took place last week are in. The coveted Best Consumer ISP award was picked up by PlusNet, who scooped the accolade because of their flexible monthly contracts and the clearly defined usage limits of their packages. An ISPA spokesperson had this to say about the winners:

“The judges agreed that PlusNet put their customers first with transparent usage allowances rather than vague Fair Usage Policies and their self-developed traffic management system. The judges also felt that PlusNet’s one month contracts were very beneficial to consumers.”

Runners up in the category were BT, Virgin Media and Tiscali. Previous winners Eclipse who won the best consumer broadband award in 2007, picked up two gongs this year, winning best business ISP and best business email. BT Yahoo! scooped the award for Best Portal - other nominees in this category were Virgin Media, Tiscali, and Orange.

The Internet Villain Award of 2008 went to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) for their spectacular EPIC FAIL late last year, which saw the confidential details of 25 million recipients of child benefits go missing due to unbelievably low-tech data protection measures.

PlusNet, with their customisable usage limits and unlimited free midnight browsing, are all set to big themselves up as the gamer’s broadband choice by way of a pretty sweet promotion with high street video game retailer Game.

Until March 31, 2008, new customers signing up to the Broadband Your Way Pro service will also be eligible for a free £40 voucher to spend at any GAME store in the UK. PlusNet’s Broadband Your Way Pro package has been specifically tailored for online gaming, with all gaming and VoIP traffic identified and prioritised allowing for low ping and latency and a reliable, and stable connection.

At the standard monthly rate of £19.99 you get 10GB of prioritised usage, which can be increased by an additional gigabyte for an extra 75p per gig, and l33t playerz intent on pwning n00bs all night long can rejoice with unrestricted bandwidth between midnight and 8:AM.