Brits are spending more time than ever online, according to a new report by the communications regulator Ofcom.
The watchdog’s fifth annual communications marketing report showed that time spent on the internet increased fourfold from 6 minutes to 24 minutes a day between 2002 and 2007, while time spent texting and talking on mobile phones crept up from 5 minutes a day in 2002 to 10 minutes a day in 2007.
Total consumption of media services in the UK is at a record high, with Britons spending on average 7 hours and 9 minutes a day surfing the net, using mobile and landline telephones, watching TV and listening to the radio.
Broadband penetration also increased last year as many customers switched from dial-up, with 58% of British households signed up to broadband by the year’s end, up from 52%. Likewise, speeds have improved. According to Ofcom, the average blended headline speed across the UK was 5.9Mbps at the end of the first quarter of 2008, up from 3.6Mbps in December 2006.
This year’s biggest success though is mobile broadband. Brits are becoming obsessed with it, with sales of dongles almost doubling from 69,000 to 133,000 per month between February and June 2008. 511,000 new mobile broadband connections were established during this period in Britain.
In 2007 there were 4.7 million more 3G connections in the UK, bringing the total to 1.5 million subscribers.
Landline phones on the other hand are languishing. 7 out of 10 people who have both a mobile phone connection and landline still phone from their mobiles even when at home. Traditional landline broadband is still the connection of choice for over 65′s. Ofcom reported a 99% take-up from this age-group in the first quarter of 2008.
Orange are understood to be ready to launch their long-awaited IPTV (TV via broadband) service, after having taken its trials for its digital TV service to the whole country. Launch was supposed to be something in ‘late 2007′, which obviously didn’t happen, and the launch was moved back to an indeterminate time – trials are apparently still ongoing, but it is understood that the service will be ready to launch very soon.
At the time, Orange said that: “The first phase – our trial to existing paying broadband customers – started in November. Around 300 customers in Leeds and London are currently providing us with essential feedback. Once we’ve reviewed and assessed this feedback, we’ll then continue to roll out to other major towns and cities in the New Year.”
Orange has managed to secure a deal with MGM which will allow them to supply movies on demand to France, Spain and Poland as well as the UK. Orange will also be rolling with Rewind TV, a catch up service which allows you to watch the last months’ worth of programmes on demand – check out the clip uploaded to YouTube.
This could really help Orange’s IPTV offering stand out from the crowd, as the Virgin Media and BT Vision catch up services by contrast allow you to watch the last week’s worth of programmes. By effectively quadrupling the amount of TV you can watch, Orange have already increased the added value of their digital TV service four fold. We said last December that 2008 was set to be the year of IPTV. This could be interesting…
Eclipse Internet has proudly published results showing that the KCOM-owned ISP successfully blocked some 98.2 per cent of spam emails from reaching customers’ inboxes during the month of July – equivalent to over 503 million emails.
Whilst the majority of spam emails which offer you Viagra, cialis and access to offshore African bank accounts left to you in the will of some relative you’ve never heard of are pretty easy to detect, flag and delete, some spam emails are cleverly constructed hoaxes of emails sent from legitimate organisations which would plausibly try to get in contact with you via email – eBay, for example.
All Eclipse Internet packages come with their own branded VIRUSsheild and SPAMsheild security solutions, allowing customers to get set up and surf safely out of the box. As well as identifying and blocking a large proportion of spam before it reaches customers’ mailboxes, the anti-virus/anti-spam solution allows customers to check and delete suspect mail before it can do any damage.
The entry on spam at the website of security experts Symantec says that “messages that do not include your email address in the TO: or CC: fields are common [hallmarks] of Spam,” and therefore should be deleted before opening any attachments which come included.
Clodagh Murphy, Director of Broadband Operations at Eclipse says that “Spam email is a real nuisance and can pose a security threat to customers. Unsolicited email unfortunately is becoming more prolific as internet usage continues to increase. At Eclipse, we try to ease the pain for our customers with our very effective anti-virus/anti-spam solution.”
Today’s date is 08/08/08, and in their wisdom Be Broadband decided to launch their new 888 promotion, which sees its Be Value package, usually billed at £14 a month, dramatically coming down in price; the 888 package gives new and existing Be Value subscribers up to 8Mbps broadband for just £8 per month for the rest of 2008.
The price cut takes effect as of today, and will appear in the next statement for current customers – new customers who sign up online can benefit from the near 50% drop in price, after paying a one-off connection charge.
The Be Value package, offering unlimited downloads, a free 24-hour tech support and a free Be Box wireless modem, normally costs £14 a month – it will return to this price in January 2009. This price drop sees customers saving £30 off of the total annual cost of their Be Value subscription; customers who joined Be Broadband this year will now be paying out just £40 for the remaining five months of 2008.
Oli White, head of marketing at Be Broadband, said: “Be value offers an up to 8Mbps service for a generation of users for whom broadband is an essential part of their lifestyle, complete with a level of customer service that has earned us a strong reputation among the broadband community. This “888″ promotion, along with the additional features that are included in the package, means that for customers who Be Broadband is their life-support system we will deliver the best Be Value possible.”
This is a pretty amazing package from the leading providers of ADSL2+ services in the UK – use our postcode checker to see if you can sign up for Be Broadband.
Keeping in line with yesterday’s post concerning the healthy state of the UK broadband market, in sharp contrast to that of the housing market, Virgin Media have announced some healthy profits, no doubt due to their marketing emphasis on their cable broadband services; some 54,000 broadband subscriptions were added in the last quarter, bringing the total Virgin Media broadband consumer base (including cable and ADSL) to a cool 3,836,100. Underlying profits for the quarter are reportedly something in the region of £333m.
This precipitates the unveiling of the hotly anticipated unveiling of 50Mbps speeds, apparently due sooner than people might think. Virgin Media’s Neil Berkett had this to say: “The second half of this year will mark a major milestone as we roll out our unrivalled 50Mb broadband service. We believe this superfast service, combined with our leading video-on-demand product, will prove extremely attractive to existing and new customers.”
Talks with Sky are apparently still happening, but nothing new is happening on that front, so don’t hold your breath.
The increase in tale up of broadband lines in the UK is growing ahead of expectations, according to Point Topic analysts; there were more than 16,735,000 active broadband lines at the end of June, up by nearly a quarter of a million (225,000) from their estimates.
“The number of dial-up homes ripe for migration to broadband is rapidly dwindling, there are barely a million of them left now and they are an increasingly resistant minority,” says Tim Johnson, chief analyst at Point Topic.
However, Point Topic said that there are some 9.6 million UK households that have no internet access at all, broadband or otherwise. This may be down to a lack of choice of service providers – in many areas, only BT Broadband is available – or financial constraints, although Tim Johnson seems to think that the credit crunch can’t be to blame for any lulls in take up.
“It is understandable that an ISP’s chief executive should blame his shrinking broadband numbers on the economy rather than lack of foresight or declining market share. But it gives a misleading impression of how well the broadband business is doing,” he says.
3 Mobile are following in the footsteps of both Orange, Vodafone and AOL by wading into the free laptop battle with all guns blazing. The new deals from 3 see customers able to pick and choose from three differently specced Hewlett-Packard lappies available on a number of the higher end £30 monthly Mobile Broadband contracts from 3.
The three offers (no pun intended) are as follows:
An HP 530 laptop with 1GB of memory, a 120GB hard drive and Vista Home Basic – available on an 18 month contract from £35 per month or a 24 month contract from £30 per month.
An HP 2133 laptop with 1GB of memory, a 120GB hard drive and Vista Home Basic – available on a 24 month contract from £35 per month.
An HP DV6910 Pavilion laptop with 3GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive and Vista Home Basic – available on a 24 month contract from £40 per month.
A 3 Mobile USB modem comes included with all of the laptop deals – customer can pick and choose between black and white versions of the Stick modems, which currently allow users to connect at speeds of up to 3.6Mbps. All in all, the cost of the contracts against the retail value of each of the machines at the time of writing sees you saving a couple of hundred pounds if you were to buy a similarly powered machine and sign up to the 3 Mobile Broadband plans, which are similar to the Plus 18 Month and Plus 24 Month plans, albeit with a faster potential download speed.
PlusNet have ever so slightly just beefed up the usage of their entry-level Option 1 broadband package. Option 1, which provides up to download speeds of 8Mbps and allows users to take advantage of unlimited downloads during the ‘graveyard shift’ of 12am Midnight to 8am in the morning, now comes with a 2GB monthly download limit for all other times, for no extra cost; that’s 1GB up from the previous daytime usage limit, which was 1GB.
Today also sees the launch of the new PlusNet Essential bundle deal, a bare bones broadband and phone deal for customers who already have a router or modem and aren’t interested in making use of an IP for VPN. With no extra cost for line rental or connection, PlusNet Essential really is bare necessities broadband.
PlusNet has also undergone a bit of a makeover, sporting a new fetching mauve outfit; their new design logo is here on the right, resplendent in all its JPEG glory.
EDIT: We have just been informed by PlusNet that the Essential bundle package also comes with unlimited email addresses and a healthy 250MB of webspace, therefore making the Essential package even better value for money!
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