Britain leads the way in affordable broadband

Broadband? Afford-band, more like. People in Britain are embracing digital technology faster than any other nation, according to a new report by communications regulator Ofcom.

Of the twelve industrialised nations studied for the report, Britain offers the cheapest broadband, mobile and pay-TV rates, and is also ahead of most when it comes to broadband take-up at 60%.

Social networking is also on the up, with half the UK using websites such as Facebook, Bebo and Myspace, and 43% of the population regularly uploading photos of friends and family to the internet. The keenest social networkers were Canadians, at 55% of the population. In the USA, the birthplace of Facebook, 40% of internet users were signed up to social networking site, whilst in France the figure was as low as 27%.

Eight percent of total music sales in Britain are now made online, the highest figure of any European country with the exception of Spain. Given the healthy state of the music industry in this country, this ought to come as no surprise, although Britain lags behind the US, where almost a quarter of music sales are made digitally. Nearly a fifth of advertising revenue in Britain is generated online.
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Orange Home Starter now free to Pay Monthly punters

Orange have just announced some new price changes to their domestic broadband products which now sees Orange Pay Monthly mobile customers able to qualify for a discount of up to £10 off of the cost of any of the Orange broadband products, which means that their basic entry-level Home Starter package (up to 8Mbps speed, 10GB monthly download limit), usually worth £10, could be taken as a FREE addition to a any Orange mobile contract, provided that its at least 18 months long.

Obviously, this rules out the rolling monthly SIM-only plans, but customers on such a plan can easily upgrade to a Pay Monthly contract in order to take advantage of free or discounted broadband, and is only available to customers inside Orange’s LLU network; use our postcode checker to see if you can sign up.

In other news, the cost of BT line rental is now included in the price of the top tier Orange Broadband Home Max product (up to 8Mbps speed, unlimited downloads) which, with the Orange Pay Monthly mobile discount is now available for just £15 a month for 18 months.

The news comes right after word of yet another potential Tiscali buyout, which would see Orange become the fifth largest ISP in the UK by default.

Punk singer leads battle against illegal downloads

The former lead singer of the Undertones, Feargal Sharkey, has today been unveiled as the chief executive of UK music, an umbrella organisation that represents composers and musicians, as well as record labels, managers, publishers, advertisers and producers across the British music industry.

Sharkey’s chief role will be to help eradicate illegal music downloads in the UK, which cost the industry £1 billion each year, by spearheading tough talks with government officials and broadband operators. Illegal downloads are of increasing concern to those in the industry, with the first warning letters from broadband operators due to be sent in a matter of weeks to those thought to be downloading large volumes of music for free.

“I think people do realise once you explain it to them that music isn’t for free. There is a harmful impact and, ironically, the people it most harms are the ones people are most engaged with and have most respect for – the songwriters, composers and musicians. For some reason people don’t make that connection,” said Sharkey last week.

As part of the plan he will also put forward a number of proposals to ensure that talented youngsters continue to contribute to one of Britain’s largest export industries. In one of the initiatives, secondary school pupils throughout the UK will be invited to write and record their own tracks, produce and market a CD and come up with their own record label. Another plan involves channelling funds from unused, dormant bank accounts into building practice rooms and recording studios for youngsters.

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School children to receive free computer and internet access

20,000 families are to be given government grants for computers and broadband access, in the first wave of a government scheme to ensure that every seven to 18-year-old has computer access at home for their school work.

The £300million scheme, announced at the Labour Party Conference earlier this month, will be trialled among pupils from low-income families in Suffolk and Oldham from February. Grants will cover a computer, software, one year’s broadband internet access and three years’ technical support.

Some 150,000 youngsters in Surrey and Oldham will also be offered special cut-price packages from broadband and computer suppliers and high-profile marketing campaigns will show parents the benefits of using computers and the internet.
The scheme was first put forward in January 2007, and a government taskforce set up to look into it.

Schools Minister Jim Knight said that as well as offering funding for poorer families, the scheme will also sell the extensive educational benefits of computer access to parents of all income groups who were not yet convinced. Currently about a million children do not have broadband access at home. Whilst some parents cannot afford it, others have the means but choose not to buy it for their children, he said.

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Sky’s the limit, claim Virgin Media

Here we go again. Virgin Media have called BS on bitter rivals BSkyB over their recent claims with regard to being the first UK ISP to offer punters truly unlimited broadband.

Sky recently removed their fair usage policy from their premier up to 16Mbps Broadband Max service, which means that punters can actually download however much they want, without fear of running into some sort of phantom usage limit and being forced to pay infinity billion pounds in charges; “We believe that we are now the only major broadband provider to offer truly ‘unlimited’ broadband,” crowed the Sky spokesperson at the time.

It was presumably this statement that got Virgin Media’s hackles up. “Virgin Media has always believed that customers should be able to enjoy their broadband as much as they want,” sulked the Virgin official.

“We were the first ISP to provide unlimited broadband packages to our entire customer base, including both cable and ADSL, and have never imposed any form of ‘fair use’ policy.”

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ISPs to send warning letters in illegal download crackdown

The six biggest ISPs in the UK have struck a deal with the government and the BPI to clamp down on illegal filesharing. The ‘Memorandum of Understanding’, or MoU, comes ahead of an announcement to be issued by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform later today, threatening ISPs with prosecution if they fail to tackle unlawful downloading of music and videos.

“We have looked to ISPs to acknowledge their responsibility to help deal with illegal file-sharing, engage in communicating the issue to their customers, and put in place procedures necessary to effectively tackle repeated unlawful file-sharing,” said a spokesperson for the BPI, the body that represents the British recorded music business.

Unsurprisingly, the list includes both BT and Virgin Media who have both already threatened to get medieval on errant customers. The four other signatories include Orange, Tiscali and Sky and the Carphone Warehouse – we were surprised to see that Charles Dunstone’s group had signed up, given that they had in the past told the BPI where to shove it with regard to adopting a three-strikes rule.

The new agreement sees ISPs adopting universal measures to deal with repeat offenders as well as a plan to commit to the development of more legal music download sites. The deal will involve providers sending warning letters to thousands of illegal downloaders telling them that their activities are being monitored and that they could face prosecution if they continue to flout the law. The crackdown is being hailed by the government as the “world’s first solution” agreed by the industry to tackle illegal file-sharing; it is estimated that last year alone around 6.5 million people in Britain downloaded files illegally.

Parents who receive the letters will be in for a shock, since many are unaware that their children have been downloading music, films and TV programmes illegally. They could be blacklisted and have their internet use curbed under the new plans. Households that ignore the warning letters could have their download speeds massively reduced, making it harder and more time-consuming to download large files, or even be blocked from using the internet altogether.

Concerns raised by this ruling include the prospect of subscribers having their wireless connections hacked and used by someone else for illegal downloads – under current proposals, this could see customers who are victims of pharming being held accountable for the illegal actions of others.

O2/Be Mobile + Broadband on ice ’til the end of summer

A combined O2 /Be Broadband mobile and internet looks set to be launched sometime around September, when it is estimated that the radius of the Be network will have expanded to cover over 50% of the UK, although, again there has been no definite word from O2 on any plans.

This means that if O2 do indeed launch in September, then they could only feasibly advertise their services in selected areas in the country, or have to negotiate a deal with a wholesale provider, mostly likely BT, if they intend to supply the services across the whole of the UK. If O2 do choose to clamber into bed with BT it would make for an odd turn of events, seeing as the telco used to own the mobile network back in the BT Cellnet days.

O2 are typically reluctant to give any specific date, preferring to wait until the time is right to launch their service; Peter Erskine, Chairman of Telefonia O2 Europe’s mobile phones division has said that: “The one thing I will not do is launch something that isn’t ready, on the customer.”

O2 bought then-small UK ISP Be Broadband for a cool £50million over a year ago and had originally planned to have a multi-platform service up and running by the start of this year. However, technology problems have led to targets not being met, resulting in entire advertising campaigns being scrapped.

Given that 2006 was ‘the year of Broadband’, and the fortunes of many internet service providers has in those twelve months been turbulent, a fashionably late entry into the converged communications market may be a wise move. We’ll just have to wait until the end of the summer to find out…

Orange leaves ISPA seeing red

Customer suspicion of Broadband with free phone calls/mobile contracts/digital TV/Faberge egg has been high since last year’s TalkTalk/Carphone Warehouse farce – now Orange, one of the more popular providers currently holding fort between tier-1 and tier-2 territory (having plateaued at around 300 unbundled lines) are breaking with the code of practice set out by ISP trade association and consumer group ISPA.

Any ISP who wishes to become a member of ISPA has to ensure that their business practices fall in line with the codes and conventions of the association, codes which are set up to ensure that disputes are resolved fairly and customers can’t be shafted.

Orange’s line is that Broadband internet should be considered by their customers to be a free addition to a mobile contract, and not the other way around. Ergo, as Orange are primarily providers of a mobile phone service and not an internet service, their codes of practice should not be regulated by an internet trade panel.

Orange have said that customers can refer any complaints to CISAS – the Communications & Internet Services Adjudication Scheme – a body which acts as an arbitrator in consumer/corporation quarrels, if an issue cannot be resolved after three months. By contrast, a disgruntled customer is free to contact the ISPA if their ISP cannot sort the problem out after 10 days.

Customers have become increasingly less enamoured by the offer of free Broadband services from providers who aren’t chiefly ISP’s. With the ability to register complaints now obscured and lengthened by this move, Orange have made the offer of their services to new customers less attractive than before.

Police clamp down on drive-by Broadband leechers

The security of residential wireless networks in the house has been thrown into question after police have arrested two people who were caught stealing people’s bandwidth in the streets.

The two arrests, made in the same area of Worcestershire, but apparently unconnected, were made after residents spotted people sitting in parked cars using wireless-enabled laptops, to ‘piggyback’ someone else’s Broadband connection for free.

There has been much debate about this practice, also called ‘leeching’ and ‘mooching’ which has been spotted in Canada and the US. As well as stealing effectively what is someone else’s property, the implications of piggybacking are more severe than just petty bandwidth theft – a piggybacker could use a wireless network to steal bank details, or download illegal material such as music files or pornography, for which the owner of the connection could be prosecuted and fined for something they haven’t done.

Typically, piggybackers will access the wireless signal from a roadside, as glass does not impede the radiowaves in the same way that masonry and brickwork does – it is not yet known if lead-lined panes in stately homes can block the signal.

This is a problem for customers, households with multiple users in particular, who want to sign up for the obvious advantages provided by a wireless connection.

Programs specifically designed to counter drive-by piggybacking include McAfee’s Wireless Home Network Security 2006 and Zone Labs’ ZoneAlarm Wireless Security; most of these programs are compatible with the wireless routers that come with the Sky, Be, Eclipse, etc.

BT‘s Home Hub and the Orange Livebox both come with their own pre-configured wireless security measures which automatically secure all connections within the radius of the signal with a login name and password set by the user – anyone trying to leech your signal from the outside will need to know these security details.

Police from the West Mercia Constabulary are reminding people to be vigilant when setting up wireless networks in their own home, and are encouraging people to purchase or set up security setting as soon as possible, lest they have their Broadband connection compromise and be used for illegal purposes for which they could see themselves getting charged for.

Good things come to those who wait?

It appears certain that mobile phone network operator O2, who wholly own Be Broadband, plan on releasing a converged mobile/broadband service later this year – we just don’t know exactly when.

The firm have been somewhat sketchy on the details, although Matthew Key, chief executive officer of O2 UK has in the past stated that they “don’t think of broadband as just something to throw in for free. Proper broadband takes continual innovation and focus.”

With consumers becoming increasingly wary of converged services offering ‘free’ broadband, O2′s strategy if holding its cards close to its chest seems wise, for now. Key said: “Customers are rebelling against free broadband. They associate free with substandard.”

As of February this year, Be Broadband – which currently offers the fastest connections speed in the market – unbundled equipment in its 500th exchange, increasing their coverage of the country to just over a third. Key said at the time that “We are working at unbundling 200 more exchanges by June and we are already testing new technologies that will enhance the network and our speed.”

Be Broadband said it is on target to unbundle in 833 exchanges by the end of the summer, which will then mean that their network footprint will cover over 50% of the population of the UK.

If O2 decide to unveil a converged service when this target is achieved, it will put them somewhat behind Virgin Media (whose cable network currently covers 80% of the UK) and Sky, who have now unbundled in close to 900 exchanges. But faster speeds and an emphasis on a better quality of service may mean that O2/Be may emerge as a prominent player on the market by the end of the summer.