Next Gen Broadband

It’s been a while since the launch of Virgin Media - just over 3 years in fact.

You’d be surprised to learn then that it’s taken this long for the business arm of NTL:Telewest to be rebranded as Virgin Media Business.

Richard Branson presided over the re-brand aiming to “shake up the UK business telecoms market” and build on the success of Virgin Media in the domestic market by consolidating the brand under “one common offering”.

The company is said to be ploughing money into its networks, provisioning functions and ad campaigns based around the rebrand.

However the option of paying for access to BT’s high speed tunnels has not yet been dismissed by the company.

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BT Infinity, BT’s next-gen cable broadband packages, are available to order now. As we revealed last week, there are two BT Innfinity packages, Option 1 and Option 2.

BT Infinity Option 1 provides top download speeds of 40Mbps, comes with a 20GB usage cap and costs £19.99 a month plus a one-off activation fee of £50.

Option 2 costs just £24.99 a month, provides the same 40Mbps maximum speed but comes with unlimited downloads.

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BT’s broadband offerings are set to get infinity times better from next Monday onwards. From the 25th of January, customers will be able to sign up for download speeds of up to 40Mbps from £19.99 per month.

BT Infinity Option 1 gives you top speeds of 40Mbps and 2Mbps downstream and upstream, 20GB of usage a month and costs £19.99 with a one-off £50 activation fee.

The higher-grade BT Infinity Option 2 offers the same top download speed of 40Mbps but offers a faster upload speed of 10Mbps and comes with unlimited downloads.

Option 2 costs £24.99 a month but there aren’t any additional charges.

Whilst BT Infinity doesn’t offer speeds as fast as Virgin Media’s 50Mbps XXL service, the Option 2 package provides a greater upload speed, which BT claim is over 6 times faster than that offered by XXL.

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BT has unveiled plans for the next stage of its fibre rollout. The rollout will cover some 63 exchanges, many of which are located in the south east of England.

Some exchanges will see old connections fully replaced with fibre-to-the-home lines, with others benefiting from fibre-to-the-cabinet upgrades. The “last mile” on the fibre-to-the-cabinet connections will be made up by existing copper and aluminium wire connections.

The full fibre-to-the-home lines are theoretically possible of delivering 100Mbps download speeds, whilst the fibre-to-the-cabinet connections will provide top speeds of 40Mbps, although The Register reports that average speeds on the latter type of connection will be around 10-20Mbps.

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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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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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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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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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Be Broadband is the latest ISP to publicly distance itself from the Digital Economy Bill and the anti-piracy measures suggested within. Be Broadband is concerned that the proposals are “open to errors,” and that there is a “risk that innocent customers could be penalised.”

Be Broadband lists a number of potential scenarios which highlight the problems posed by the bill.

Internet cafes, pubs and coffee shops which offer Wi-Fi (such as Starbucks) “would find the time or cost burden unworkable.” An entire household of people living in shared accommodation - students for example - could see themselves disconnected over the actions of just one housemate.

A wireless connection could be hijacked if the router was hacked into or left unsecured, allowing a third party to illegally download thousands of files for which the owner would take the rap.

Like many critics of the bill, Be Broadband is worried about the apparent “lack of technical understanding” and points to a more creative approach to combat illegal downloading.

Earlier this year it was suggested that the rise in popularity of sites and applications such as Spotify, YouTube and Last.fm had helped cut illegal downloading over the last two years.

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TalkTalk’s Don’t Disconnect Us campaign appears to have taken a blow from the benches, as Lord Mandelson seems set on forging onwards with his ‘ill-conceived’ plans to allow content providers to force ISPs to disconnect customers suspected of illegally sharing files.

Yesterday the business secretary said that “It must become clear that the days of consequence-free widespread online infringement are over,” and confirmed plans to disconnect persistent offenders. The government will decide in spring 2011 whether to introduce a three strikes policy, with disconnection being used as a “very last resort” for “persistent rule breakers”.

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