2009: A Year in Broadband

A lot has happened in the UK broadband market in 2009. Here’s a quick round up of the some of the big changes in broadband that have taken place over the last 12 months.

Tiscali gets bought by TalkTalk

Poor old Tiscali spent 2008 looking for a buyer without success and its woes continued into 2009. Despite many ISPs sniffing around hoping to steal a quick march on BT, nobody was willing to dig deep in their wallets. With deals collapsing at the last minute and its parent company losing millions of Euros on the continent times looked bleak for Tiscali’s UK arm. Then TalkTalk came to the rescue at the eleventh hour and swept Tiscali of it’s feet.

Speeding Up

2009 has seen a lot of speeding. BT, Orange and PlusNet all revved up their top download speeds to 20Mbps and 24Mbps in the case of Eclipse Internet. BT also released the Broadband Accelerator speed booster pack allowing customers to benefit from a more reliable broadband experience.

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Ofcom: Broadband Britain not a rip off

We might be seriously lagging behind other countries in terms of speed but us Great Brits are pretty fond of our gigabits if this Ofcom survey is anything to go by. Compared with the USA, France, Germany, Spain and Italy the UK can boast the lowest prices for single line (i.e. not bundled with voice calls) and mobile broadband services. Prices for fixed-line voice calls are also the second lowest, after Italy.

Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, said: “The report shows that UK consumers have benefited from competition in the form of lower prices. Innovation means that the UK is well placed in the take up and availability of digital services.”

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TalkTalk: Free connection offer extended indefinitely

When TalkTalk replaced its offer of M&S vouchers with free connection to its broadband services (normally charged at £29.99) it was understood that the offer would expire on the 15th of December.

We’ve just heard from TalkTalk that the offer is to be extended for an indefinite period – no date has been given but we’re told that this is a “limited time offer” so if you want to cash in, we’d suggest you get your skates on.

Free connection is currently available to customers ordering the Essentials or Pro packages. TalkTalk Essentials provides download speeds of up to 8Mbps a 40GB monthly download limit and evening and weekend calls for £6.99 a month.

TalkTalk Pro comes with top speeds of 24Mbps, unlimited downloads and anytime calls for £14.99 a month. Line rental is charged at £11.49 per month and is payable to TalkTalk instead of BT.

O2 trials 150Mbps LTE mobile broadband

Come next-gen broadband and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for dial-up now. As well as Jimmy Carr, the Wernham Hogg Paper Company and that John Betjeman poem, Slough can now count high speed mobile broadband among Things It’s Famous For.

O2, whose UK headquarters are  in the Berkshire town, has distributed next-gen LTE dongles to test out their new high speed mobile network. LTE, short for Long Term Evolution technology, is looking set to replace 3G as the next high speed mobile broadband technology.

A piece in today’s Telegraph states that the LTE dongles given out in the O2 trial are theoretically capable of providing top speeds of 150Mbps.

This could mean that super-fast speeds could be rolled out without the need for the expensive and time consuming installation of a nationwide fibre network.

Part of the Digital Britain report mentioned that future solutions for Broadband Britain (2Mbps speeds in every home by 2012) would involve a mixture of traditional physical connections (phone lines and cable) and wireless solutions.

LTE ought to allow for all sorts of mobile broadband goodness such as seamless streaming of HD videos, downloads of huge playlists, online mobile gaming… everything that a fast fixed-line connection ought to allow for.

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Sky TV Voucher Code £60 M&S vouchers – 60VOUCHER

Ho Ho Hows this for a Christmas deal? Sky has just announced that the £50 worth of M&S Vouchers currently available with online orders of Sky TV package can be racked up to £60. Entering the voucher code ’60VOUCHER’ (all caps, no spaces) sees you bumping up the vouchers by a tenner.

Note that this offer applies to any combination of Sky services and not just Sky TV bundles. So you can take out Sky Broadband with Sky Talk voice calls with your Sky TV and still qualify for the £60 of vouchers.

So that’s even more money to be saved on tasty food for the Yuletide spread, or for keeping hold of for the January sales.

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Broadband Tax Confirmed: Next-gen connections by 2017

Finally, some positive UK Government/broadband news. Sort of. Chancellor Alistair Darling has confirmed that a ‘Landline Duty’ would be set up next year which would work out at 50p per month, or £6 a year on all phone lines. This would raise an estimated £175 million in funding which would be invested in bird houses and moats a nationwide next-gen broadband infrastructure.

The funding will be used to “encourage private sector investment in digital infrastructure.” This could mean that ISPs such as BT and Virgin Media, who have already heavily invested in improving the availability and performance of their respective networks, could benefit from an injection of public coin.

However this will only come to pass if Labour remain in government after the next election. Both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats have said that they would scrap the proposals if either party came to power.

Last month, TalkTalk chief executive Charles Dunstone said in the Guardian that the tax would be counter productive, as “over 100,000 mostly low income homes will be forced to give up their broadband lines.”

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