ASA bites T-Mobile over home broadband ad

The Advertising Standards Agency has ruled that a T-Mobile advert which implies that mobile broadband offers the same quality as fixed-line services could mislead consumers.

A member of the public registered a complaint with the advertising watchdog after having received a flyer from T-Mobile that claimed its mobile broadband service offered “All the benefits of home broadband, on the move. No wires, no waiting, no worries.”

The ASA said the flyer may mislead consumers into thinking that mobile broadband would offer the same speed and reliability as a fixed-line connection, and that consumers would therefore view it as a suitable alternative. Whilst mobile broadband technology has come on leaps and bounds over recent months, it is still neither as reliable nor as fast as a typical home broadband connection.

T-Mobile argued that the leaflets referred to the capacities of mobile broadband, not its speed, and “maintained that they did not make any claim that implied a direct technical comparison to fixed-line broadband.”

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BT gives away mobile broadband on business tariffs

BT is to offer “free” mobile broadband connections to its business internet customers.

The telelcoms giant is giving away a mobile dongle and connection to customers who renew or sign up to new contracts on selected BT Business Total Broadband tariffs.

The service makes use of Vodafone’s 3G network, which has performed well on mobile broadband speed tests with the fastest upload speeds of the five big players. The service has a relatively meagre download limit of 1GB, but does include 2,000 free minutes a month on BT’s Openzone network of Wi-Fi hotspots.

Business packages starting at £27 a month include an ADSL broadband connection, mobile broadband and Wi-Fi. “We’re adding value to our broadband offer at a time when businesses are up against it on costs,” David Hughes, BT’s director of wireless broadband told PC Pro. “It allows them to stay connected all the time.”

The deal is currently available only to businesses which renew or take out new deals on BT Business Total Broadband option 2 or 3. There is currently no upgrade package for the millions of business customers that BT has already signed up, although the company has said it is considering such an option.

BT has said that it will trial the deal with business customers before taking it to consumers. “We’ve started with business – we’ll look at whether it’s suitable for consumers after that,” said Neil Laidler, director of Mobility BT Business.

BT halves Wi-Fi rates

BT has announced that it will be slashing its Wi-Fi rates by up to 50 per cent as it launches a simpler and more economical price structure. The telecoms giant will also be adding thousands of new hotspots to its existing European network.

BT plans to create more than 2,500 extra European hotspots after operators including Vex, iBahn and Wayport agreed to new roaming deals, bringing the total number of Wi-Fi hotspots to over 100,000 in the UK and Ireland and more than 50,000 overseas.

BT has introduced four new tariffs offering wireless broadband from as little as 0.5p per minute from thousands of locations across the UK.

BT Original provides 500 minutes’ access to BT Openzone, BT FON and BT Business Total Broadband hotspots for just £5 per month. Openzone Together offers unlimited BT Openzone, BT FON and BT Business Total Broadband hotspot access plus 500 UK roaming minutes for £12.50 a month – half the price of BT’s previous pay monthly deal. Openzone Global, designed for frequent travellers, provides unlimited BT Openzone, BT FON, BT Business Total Broadband hotspot minutes, 500 UK and 500 international roaming minutes for £28 a month. Meanwhile the flexible BT Openzone tariff has been reduced by 25 per cent to 15p per minute.

In addition, hundreds of new hotspots have been introduced in high-demand locations through roaming partners Swisscom Hospitality Services and Comfone, including airports, railway stations, leading hotel chains, motorway service stations, coffee shops and marinas.

Chris Bruce, general manager at BT Openzone, said: “Over the last six months we have seen double the use compared with the same period last year, with huge demand at hotels, major travel hubs, high street locations and residential and business areas. We’ve listened to our customers and not only have we simplified our tariffs but we’ve added more value and places to connect.”

UK firm helps secure rural broadband access

A UK organisation is to be involved in bringing broadband to rural areas as part of a major European project.

The UK company NYnet, which successfully oversaw the introduction of high-speed broadband access to North Yorksire, has now been invited to participate in a large-scale European project to improve broadband internet access across the region. The project, named B3 – Regions for Better Broadband Connection, aims to help the 30% of rural homes and businesses that do not currently have access to broadband.

NYnet was set up by North Yorkshire County Council with the aim of providing high-speed broadband access to local businesses to ensure they had adequate resources to compete with their urban counterparts. The network offers local businesses high-speed broadband of between 1Mbps and 1Gbps. The company is also working with local communities to see if the technology could be extended to homes in the region.

“There are around 30 communities in North Yorkshire that can’t get DSL at all because they are too far away from BT’s exchanges,” said Clive Downing, business development manager for NYnet.

According to the European Union’s broadband performance index around 70% of rural areas can access broadband. B3 aims to provide the remaining 30% with the same service. The scheme consists of 17 projects across rural areas of Europe, including Italy, Spain and Poland.

Mr Downing added: “We were selected to take part because we actually have a business up and running. We have found a business model that works whereas some public sector schemes work only until the grant runs out.”

Currently 36% of all EU households have access to broadband. Under European law the EU is required to make broadband access available to all Europeans when this figure reaches 50%.

Virgin Media criticises broadband speed tests

Leading UK broadband internet provider Virgin Media has questioned the validity of some broadband speed tests saying they rely on “dirty data”.

The company has been assessing the tests used to gauge speeds on UK broadband services, concluding that tests are often inaccurate, and is concerned that speed tests for new 50Mbps services will be even more erroneous. Virgin Media said that many of the tests rely on “dirty data” and use data samples that are too small. Online speed tests generally operate by sending a file from one computer to another and timing how long it takes. However, Virgin Media reckons that these files (the so-called ‘payload’) are often too small to render an accurate result, and the problem is exacerbated at higher speeds.

An increasing number of broadband customers are using speed tests to assess whether their service provider is delivering speeds close to what it promises. Currently most broadband customers subscribe to deals offering speeds of up to 8Mbps, but the actual speed they receive can vary massively from one connection to another depending on factors such as geographical location, the number of people online at any given time and the processing power of individual computers. Data travelling from one part of the internet to another is also subject to bottlenecks and delays.

Virgin Media has recommended tests developed by the website SamKnows which uses hardware directly attached to customers’ modems. The SamKnows model is already used by Ofcom in its own speed tests.

In spite of its concerns, Virgin Media has actually scored very well in recent broadband speed tests, coming out on top for delivering on its speed promises. Virgin itself plans to launch high-speed broadband connections which rely on fibre-optic cables as opposed to the significantly slower copper wire that we are used to.

Carphone Warehouse to launch 100 Best Buy stores across Europe

Carphone Warehouse is to open four or five electronic megastores in the UK as part of a joint venture with the US consumer electronics giant Best Buy. The group said that the current economic downturn was “the best time” to launch.
However, Best Buy sounded a note of caution, saying that the group would “temper” the rollout in line with the slowdown in consumer spending. “It’s not a race” said Bob Willett, Best Buy’s international chief executive. Around 100 stores are planned for launch throughout Europe in the next five years, with the group hoping to grab 10 per cent of the European retail electronics market ‘over time’.

Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy said in a trading update that they would jointly spend £20 million on the launches in the current financial year to March, with another £30 million earmarked for the following year alongside £40 million in capital spending. The joint retail arm, branded Best Buy Europe, predicts revenues of around £6.2 billion and underlying earnings of £3.5 million by March 2013.

Best Buy bought half of Carphone Warehouse’s retail business, encompassing 2,430 stores in Europe and the US, for £1.1 billion in May. Plans had originally been set to launch the new stores in spring 2009 or the end of 2008. They have now been pushed back 6 months to summer 2009.

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BT to trial FTTC 40Mb broadband in 2009

BT is to trial next generation high-speed broadband in 15,000 UK homes it was revealed today.

Exchanges in Muswell Hill in London and Whitchurch in South Glamorgan will be the location of the trials. Once the exchanges have been upgraded with fibre-optic broadband, residents in these areas should be able to go online at speeds of up to 40 megabits per second – more than 12 times faster than the current UK average. This means a DVD quality film could be downloaded in 11 minutes as opposed to the two and a quarter hours it takes on average using current copper wire broadband technology.

The trials in Muswell Hill and Whitchurch will run fibre-optic cable to existing street cabinets that connect homes and businesses to telephone exchanges. A BT spokesperson said that the two locations were chosen because of their demographic and the mix of available providers, as well as their communications network and balance between rural and urban locations. However, the scheme is likely to be piloted in other regions towards the end of next year: “Areas which were shortlisted but not selected will be considered alongside many more areas for next stage pilots expected later in 2009,” he said.

The service is set to be rolled out commercially in 2010, with an estimated 10 million homes receiving next generation broadband in 2012.

The pilot scheme is being run by BT Openreach which is responsible for the ‘first mile’ of the communications network that links homes and office buildings to BT’s core network. Participants will be encouraged to put pressure on their broadband connection by, for example, downloading high density films and simultaneously participating in online gaming to test how the system will cope with such demands.

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BT rapped for Best Broadband Provider claim

The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has upheld a complaint by Virgin Media that BT’s claim to offer the best performing broadband was untrue and misleading. In an advert for BT Total Broadband shown regionally and nationally, the telecoms company claimed to be the “Best Performing Broadband” provider  in the UK, citing a an independent survey by Epitiro as evidence for its claim.

However, BT failed to mention in its advertising that Epitiro’s surveys, conducted between January 2006 and January 2008, were conducted only with ASDL providers and did not include cable  operators such as Virgin Media. Defending its actions, BT said that it did not refer to ASDL in its marketing information because most consumers would not understand the term. The ASA disagreed.

In a statement the advertising watchdog said: “Although we accepted that some readers would not be familiar with the term, we considered that most would understand ADSL to be a mode of broadband delivery. We welcomed BTs assurance that they would amend future advertising so that claims were always immediately qualified by the term ‘ADSL’ if the claim was specific to ADSL.

“Nevertheless, we considered that the headline claim ‘We’ve been named Best Performing Broadband, again’ did not make clear that the claim was specific to ADSL broadband.”

Virgin Media also claimed that the BT advert did not make clear that a BT landline would be required to access the internet using their services. However, the complaint was rejected by the ASA on the grounds that most customers would be able to understand that a landline would be required without prompting through advertising.

Virgin Media revealed as Broadband Speed King

Broadband speeds tests have revealed that Virgin Media now offers the fastest broadband speeds, snatching the crown from rival internet service provider O2 for the first time.

An industry official involved in the testing stated: “Virgin Broadband have finally overtaken O2 broadband as the UK’s fastest average download speed supplier. Data shows that the average download speed for a Virgin user is now 6.13Mbps as compared to 5.32Mbps for O2.”

The report indicates that Virgin Media also came ahead of other high-speed broadband providers, including Be Broadband and Sky Broadband.

Both O2 and Virgin offer high-speed packages of 20Mbps, helping ensure they fared well in speed tests against other providers who do not offer such a service. Virgin Media is likely to perform even better in future speed tests as it carries out plans to roll out its 50Mbps broadband service to a wider area.

Other broadband providers did not fare so well in the speed tests, with AOL and Eclipse Internet yielding the poorest results. AOL also scored worst on the upload speed tests along with TalkTalk, another Carphone Warehouse owned provider. For the month of September, the average download speed for Virgin Media was 6.128Mbps compared to an average speed of 5.321Mbps from Be Broadband and 5.32Mbps from O2.

T-Mobile and 3 join BT for 3G network support

Mobile operators T-Mobile and 3 have signed a five-year agreement with BT to connect 7,500 of their base stations to BT‘s high speed next-generation broadband network.

The deal was struck between BT Wholesale and Mobile Broadband Network Ltd (MBNL), a joint venture between 3 and T-Mobile. Mobile Broadband Network was established to provide 98% of the UK with access to high-speed HSDPA mobile broadband by 2010, thus making it the largest network in the country.

Mobile phone providers are being urged to increase their data transmission speeds as more and more users make wider use of mobile broadband. This need for speed has been highlighted as part of the five-year plan. Rival mobile operator Vodafone already signed a similar deal in April, with O2 following suit last May. Orange is now the only major mobile operator in the UK without such a deal.

As part of the agreement, BT will lighten the load of the network operators by carrying data from their mobile broadband services over the newly planned fibre optic network. This is known as backhaul. The deal will be worth several hundred million pounds – a large and welcome boost to BT’s business arm, which has suffered from a recent drop of revenues as companies such as Carphone Warehouse have stopped using its products.

The technology director at T-Mobile UK, Emin Gurdenli said: “This agreement with BT will make sure backhaul is not a constraint now or in the future at a time when T-Mobile is experiencing strong growth in mobile broadband and other mobile data services.”

The release of the Apple 3G iPhone, Google’s G1 and other smartphones such as the N96 are fuelling the current popularity of mobile broadband. As demand further increases, mobile providers will need to make sure that the networks they control can handle the increased volume of data traffic.

The managing director from BT Wholesale Markets, Brian Fitzpatrick said: “BT now supports the base station connectivity requirements of four of the five mobile players in the UK market, bringing our economies of scale to a hugely important element of the communications marketplace.”