O2 Broadband has just announced yet another sizzling summer deal. All those who sign up for any of the O2 Home Broadband packages throughout July will get the first two months of their broadband service free. This provides a saving of up to £44 over the first year of service, should you sign up for the O2 Broadband Pro package and you are not an O2 Mobile customer.

This offer is also available to customers outside the O2 network, who can sign up for O2 Access Broadband, which provides the same speed and usage cap as O2 Standard Broadband (up to 8Mbps, Unlimited) for a slightly increased monthly cost.

It’s been a busy few weeks for O2, who on Monday announced a Wi-Fi tie-in with BT Broadband which sees O2 Mobile Broadband customers able to make use of 3,000 BT Openzone Wi-Fi points. In the week previous, O2 halved the cost of Mobile Broadband dongles on Pay As You Go.

O2 has announced a new partnership with BT Broadband which sees O2 Mobile Broadband customers able to hook up to an additional 3,000 BT Wi-Fi Hotspots. As well as this, O2 Mobile Broadband punters will be able to keep an eye on the amount of data they’re using thanks to new software.

This new software will notify you when 75%, 90% and 100% of your data allowance has been reached, so you don’t stray over your limit and end up saddled with extra charges.

Last week saw O2 slashing the cost of its Mobile Broadband dongles on Pay As You Go. With O2 Mobile Broadband Pay As You Go, you can chose to sign up for daily, weekly and monthly packages, all of which include unlimited Wi-Fi.

Back in April, BT installed Wi-Fi in over 600 branches of Starbucks throughout the UK and the Republic of Ireland. It was announced shortly after that iPhone owners would be able to make use of BT’s Wi-Fi points in Starbucks for free as well, with O2 Mobile Broadband customers to follow in the summer.

International IT law specialists Pinsent Masons, AKA the people who run the OUT-LAW blog, published an article last Friday which has kicked up a bit of a stir on there shores.

“There is no legal barrier in the UK to internet service providers (ISPs) blocking content from website operators who do not pay them,” reads the first line of the piece. This news comes after the widely publicised beef between BT and the BBC.

The UK’s leading provider of broadband services pointed to the costs linked to subscribers watching content online. It was suggested, prior to publication of the Digital Britain report last week, that owners of popular content streaming sites and applications would have to pay ISPs for costs incurred.

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News has just reached us that BT Broadband will be offering free upgrades to faster speeds when it’s 21st Century ADSL2+ network comes online this summer. 10 million UK homes are due to receive the free speed boost, which will provide ‘up to’ speeds of 20Mbps, more than double the top speed currently available on any of BT’s packages.

Further rollout of the service will continue into the new year. 10 million homes accounts for roughly 40 per cent of BT’s network, and it is expected that a further 55 per cent will be covered by March 2010.

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TalkTalk have just launched their new Home Mover service, which will see those moving home into a non-cable able to bypass the usual route of having to sign up with BT first before switching providers. As TalkTalk are now taking on the cost of providing a service at the new property, the consumer will be able to avoid shelling out for the process, which usually costs around £120.

Instead, existing TalkTalk customers would be able to pay £29.99 to have their service moved to a new address - the same amount as the normal connection fee for TalkTalk broadband. New customers would have to stump up £59.99 for the process and sign up for TalkTalk broadband for 18 months.

Moving house is a pretty stressful affair already. Wendy Becker, MD of TalkTalk pointed out: “Customers have more than enough to worry about when moving home, so we’re pleased to be able to take the hassle - and a lot of the cost - out of the process of getting your home phone and broadband up and running.”

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Orange have pulled out of plans to buy up the catch-up TV service that went by the working titled of Project Kangaroo. France Telecom, Orange’s parent company had this to say in the following statement:

“We can confirm that we are not pursuing our interest in the catch-up TV service Kangaroo. After in-depth due diligence, we concluded that it was unlikely that an outcome which benefited France Telecom’s Orange operations would be met.”

The ill-fated Project Kangaroo is a collaboration between the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 and was conceived as a kind of merger of the BBC iPlayer, ITV Player and 4oD video on demand platforms. First of all it was blocked from going ahead by the Competition Commission, which ruled that it would be too much of a threat to competition in the IPTV market, currently only occupied by BT Vision and Tiscali TV.

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After both BT and Virgin Media have been busy making their next-gen plans public over the last few weeks, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), an independent Government body, has announced that it is spending £1 million on developing new broadband technology.

The research projects could yield technology capable of delivering speeds from 1 and 10 Gbps, or Gigabits per second, and will hopefully ensure that the UK won’t lag behind other countries in the future when it comes to broadband.

“The challenge is to identify ways to address the technical issues facing the introduction of Ultra-Fast Broadband within the next decade and to build European collaborations to exploit the technology,” said Mike Biddle, a spokesman for the TSB.

There are 13 projects currently being undertaken, all of which are concerned with different aspects of how the future of Broadband Britain might take shape. One will look at the possible technology used for Ultra Fast Broadband, and another at how best to connect homes to fibre networks.

It is thought that the final result of these projects will be an extensive roadmap which will lay out the best way for the Government to prepare for the future of broadband in the UK.

Virgin Media is planning to add a further half a million UK homes to its existing network, with some 50,000 homes and businesses to be added this year alone. The Virgin Media network currently covers some 12.5 million premises, which accounts for roughly 50 per cent of the UK.

Virgin Media will be initially focussing on places where ducting and infrastructure has already been set up in order to minimize costs and delays, close to or within areas already fully or partially covered by the cable network.

A Virgin Media spokesperson, quoted in DigitalSpy earlier this week, said that the move will “improve our consumer offer and lay the foundation for future growth.”

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It looks as though BT is set to double the pace of its next-gen fibre optic broadband rollout, bringing up to 100Mbps broadband within reach of more than a million premises as early as next year.

In a statement following publication of the broadband market leader’s financial report for the last three months of 2008, CEO Ian Livingstone said:

“We will examine doubling the pace of the rollout of super fast broadband next year within existing capital expenditure plans, bringing fibre based services within the reach of more than a million homes and businesses and securing the jobs of a thousand BT people.”

Perhaps BT were spurred to act fast after it was announced that Virgin Media has begun trialling a 200Mbps service, and has mentioned plans to roll out a 150Mbps service to customers in 2010.

“If BT were to meet the time frame they have suggested - of finishing by 2012 - I would see us as having much, much faster upstream speed, running at a minimum of 100Mbps downstream and possibly more,” said Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett in March.

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Despite broadband news this week being largely dominated by the Carphone Warehouse takeover of Tiscali, BT Broadband has just announced figures that reveal that it is still top dog in the UK broadband stakes.

The broadband provider BT claims that its customer base has increased to 4.8 million, keeping it head and shoulders above the competition. The Tiscali buyout saw Carphone Warehouse leapfrog Virgin Media into second place, with its customer base swelling to 4.25 million - impressive, but still not enough to pip the British Broadband crown from BT.

Today also saw the publication of Tiscali’s results for the last quarter, which saw the troubled company steadily losing subscribers right up until the deal with Carphone was done.

The figures released show that BT Vision now has 423,000 customers, up from 398,000 on the last quarter. Use of BT’s Openzone Wi-Fi minutes, amounts of which are bundled free with BT Broadband packages, has also increased by 80 per cent over the last 12 months.