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Web minister Maria Miller: UK WILL hit 2015 broadband target
Culture Secretary Maria Miller insisted during parliamentary questioning that the government's £680m Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) project will hit its target of bringing download speeds of at least 2Mbit/s to almost every Brit by 2015.
Meanwhile, her department's rhetoric has changed to reflect the fact that many of the rural …
Turnbull 'flat out' seeking NBN killer blow
Australia's broadband debate is beginning to take on elements of farce.
For quite some time on Friday, April 19, Malcolm Turnbull, the opposition spokesman for communications, quizzed National Broadband Company (NBN Co) CEO Mike Quigley and CTO Greg McLaren about the feasibility of using VDSL for in-building distribution in …
How much will Google pay to bring fiber to Provo, Utah? Try $1
Choosing the small city of Provo, Utah as the next location to receive Google's high-speed fiber internet service must have been a no-brainer, as the online giant will reportedly pay just $1 to set up shop in the area.
That's in part because, unlike Kansas City and Austin, Texas before it, Google won't actually need to build out …
Coalition's NBN plan: where's the cost of the copper?
Australia's opposition parties this week released their plan for broadband infrastructure. Many people have taken to the document with an eye to the Coalition's alleged $AUD90 billion-plus figure for the cost of the current National Broadband Network, but few have asked about the accuracy of the coalition plan's assumptions.
At …
Australia's alternative NBN plan: some taxpayer-friendly questions
Last Tuesday, Australia's coalition announced its alternative national broadband network (NBN) plan, offering fibre to the node as the dominant mode of delivery.
The plan appears comprehensive, but like any such document, it doesn't answer every conceivable question.
With an election fewer than six months away, El Reg's Sydney …
Google: 'Austin is our next Fiber city.' AT&T: 'Us, too – maybe'
Google has officially announced what had already become an open secret: that Austin, Texas, will be its next "Google Fiber" city, where the online ad peddler will offer gigabit internet connections to homes and institutions. Soon after Google's announcement, AT&T chimed in with a copycat communiqué – albeit one with caveats. …
Australia's coalition launches new broadband policy
In Sydney's Fox Sports broadcast facility, a building supporting multi-gigabit connectivity, immediately following a demonstration of 3D television capabilities, and on the same day that the Australian Bureau of Statistics announced year-on-year Australian download growth of more than 63 percent, Australia's opposition announced …
Australia's coalition reveals bits of broadband plan
Australia's shadow communications Malcolm Turnbull releases an alternative plan for the nation's national broadband network (NBN) today, an important moment in the network's evolution given the coalition Turnbull represents is likely to win government in September.
IT media haven't been told where or when, in what seems to be …
BT boss barks at TalkTalk for being 'copper Luddites'
BT boss Ian Livingston has blasted TalkTalk for grumbling about the cost of fitting fibre-optic broadband - and accused the budget ISP of clinging to its copper network.
The chief exec took to the pages of the Daily Telegraph after TalkTalk complained the national telco was creating a monopoly due to the amount it charges to …
Is NBN Co about to pay for 80 years of power pole access?
According to the NSW State Government, NBN Co is being completely unreasonable in declining to fork over in the order of $400 million for access to electricity poles in that state. In response, NBN Co is, as it warned it would in October 2012, invoking the Telecommunications Act and using the poles without electricity authority …
Living in the middle of a big city? Your broadband may still be crap
Living in a city centre is no guarantee of nimble broadband speeds in Blighty, as download rates are a postcode lottery.
A new study by uSwitch revealed that folks living in the Barbican area of London have internet connections as slow as 5.3Mbps, while users in Charlton in Greenwich are zipping along four times as fast with …
Orange is the new TalkTalk of the broadband complaints league
Orange is once again the most whinged about telco in the UK, the communications watchdog Ofcom confirmed today.
The ISP provoked a barrage of gripes from bellyaching customers when it yanked its free broadband service away from punters who refused to pay line rental to the company.
Ofcom, which has compiled and published its …
ASA says 'unlimited' broadband can have 'moderate' limits on it
Britain's advertising regulator has upheld complaints brought against Virgin Media by BSkyB and BT over the cable company's "unlimited" broadband claims.
The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that Virgin Media had misled customers with an ad on the ISP's website that claimed punters could "get unlimited downloads".
But BT …
Watchdog warns UK.gov not to create 'them and us' digital divide
The National Audit Office has warned that the British government's fixation with its digital-by-default agenda could create a "them and us" mentality that excludes more vulnerable members of society who don't access the internet.
In a report entitled Digital Britain 2: Putting users at the heart of government’s digital services …
Wealthy London NIMBYs grit teeth, welcome 'ugly' fibre cabinets
BT has convinced residents of Kensington and Chelsea that they can live with "ugly" fibre optic cabling cabinets on their streets. The move comes after the Royal Borough rejected 96 of the installation proposals submitted by the national telco in May last year.
Opposition to the cabinets has now collapsed, however, with the …
NORKS switch off 3G data for tourists
Portly peoples' hero dictator Kim Jong-un has put the brakes on North Korea’s efforts to haul itself into the 21st century after appearing to ban mobile internet services for tourists less than a month after a historic decision was taken to relax 3G data restrictions.
The news came in the form of a brief update posted by Beijing …
BT scores £146 meellion more UK.gov cash to fibre up Balamory
BT is the only company still bidding for Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) government funds after Fujitsu officially walked away from the process last week: unsurprisingly the national telco has won another fibre contract.
This time, it's bagged a £146m government deal to deploy broadband networks in Scotland's sprawling Highlands …
Inside Adastral: BT's Belgium-sized broadband boffinry base
Geek's Guide to Britain Adastral Park is BT’s global research and development centre, one of the world’s most pioneering centres of technology and telecommunications.
Like other visitors to the area, I’ve gazed at the Le Corbusier-inspired building and its iconic tower cube rising out of the surrounding flat Suffolk farmland. It announces its …
UK biz ISP Entanet goes titsup, 'broke' a bit of Blighty's internet
Brit internet and communications provider Entanet is slowing bringing its systems back to life today after they metaphorically keeled over last night.
The Shropshire-based supplier of broadband, leased lines, telecoms and more has offered scant detail about its network outage, much to the chagrin of some of its biz and ISP …
NBN collapses* into chaos*
Australia's National Broadband Network, due for completion in 2021, has announced a three-month delay in its fibre-to-the-premises construction schedule, which if not recovered would represent a miss of a couple of percent on the project's timing.
While declining to direct blame outwards, NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley told a media …
Virgin Media boss to Osbo: Bung city fibre cash into small biz
Analysis Virgin Media has said it before and it's saying it again: the cable company wants the UK government to take at least half of Blighty's £150m set aside for urban broadband rollouts and pump it into improving digital skills in small businesses.
This time, in a well-spun missive to Chancellor George Osborne ahead of Budget Day, …
Has the ACCC tripped up in its ADSL declaration?
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) declarations are always news, and with good reason: The ACCC's regulated prices set the floor underneath a host of retail services – mobile, broadband, telephony, business data and so on.
New declarations are always accompanied by lobbying, both in media outlets and in the …
Fujitsu pulls a muscle, drops out of race for £530m broadband pot
Fujitsu has admitted it will no longer bid for money from a £530m pot of taxpayer cash to roll-out broadband in Britain's countryside - effectively leaving the lot up for grabs by BT.
The national telco has to date been the only preferred bidder to bag any of the dosh, dished out by the government's Ministry of Fun through its …
Copper load of that: Ofcom claims HUGE jump in 'average' broadband speed
Britain's communication watchdog claimed today that "average" broadband speeds had "doubled" in the space of two years.
The data published by Ofcom was fairly limited in scope given that, for example, it only included ADSL customers within 5km of the exchange but not outside of that range.
The regulator used broadband …
BT pockets more gov broadband millions. This time: Lincolnshire
BT has inked a deal to roll out fibre broadband in Lincolnshire, scooping up yet more cash from the British government.
The telecoms giant will deploy mainly fibre-to-the-cabinet technology for the rural county's council, and the work won't be completed until 2016. This follows on from other council jobs BT has won in what has …
What's most important? Bandwidth over kilo-miles, or milli-watts?
AT&T boffins reckon they can fling 400Gb/sec down 12,000km of fibre using a new modulation technique. Meanwhile, IBM's bods say they managed 25Gb/sec over just a few millimetres - but using just 24 milliwatts.
Both teams will present their research at next week's OFC-NFOEC conference in Anaheim, California, where the future of …
Applications to run more white-space Local TV stations invited
Ofcom is looking for more aspiring telly barons, with another 28 Local TV franchises up for grabs along with the two that no-one wanted last time around.
Those two are Swansea and Plymouth, but the other 19 Local TV channels from round one have been awarded and should be on air around the end of this year. Now, anyone who …
BT denies spiralling engineer no-shows - Reg readers DISAGREE
BT has denied that its Openreach engineers are increasingly failing to turn up to fit or fix customers' broadband - even though complaints about the number of no-shows appears to be rising.
In the past few months, more and more readers of The Register have complained to us that they've waited at home all day in vain for an …
BAN SMUT, rage MEPs: Purpose of internet must be EXTERMINATED
MEPs are being urged to back a non-binding resolution that calls on the European Parliament to, in effect, ban pornography from the internet. A group of Euro politicos hope the web filth block will bring about a "genuine culture of equality" online.
A motion was tabled this week by the EU's committee on women’s rights and gender …
Virgin Media keeps mum as punters fume at crippled web access
Some Virgin Media broadband customers have struggled for weeks to access a number of websites over the telco's network - but the company is keeping schtum on the exact cause.
The Register has learned that a "sizeable" number of VM's subscribers are frustrated with the ISP for failing to offer a workaround to the ongoing …
BT to slap overalls on 1,000 new bods in fibre broadband boost
BT hopes to hire 1,000 engineers to pump high-speed fibre internet connections to street-side junction boxes, homes and businesses in Britain. The recruitment drive is part of the national telco's £2.5bn investment in its broadband network.
BT said that once the jobs are filled, it will have 6,000 engineers working on the …
WE CAN still be BETTER than Germany on broadband, says Ofcom
Comment Britain's communication watchdog has published a pathetic "scorecard" that compares this country's broadband prowess with that of only four other nations in Europe.
The move comes after the British government finally caught up with the idea that it was never going to achieve the unreachable goal of having the "best" superfast …
Opposition leader raises ‘your Internet will cost you more’ spook
With opposition leader Tony Abbott declaring unchallenged that the NBN is going to “triple the costs” of access to broadband over the weekend, The Register decided to do some plan searching and come up with a comparison.
The quote that got us busy can be found here:
“Malcolm [Turnbull] is the Shadow Minister for Communications …
Official: Sky to buy O2 and BE's home broadband product in £200m deal
BSkyB has swooped in on the consumer broadband and fixed-line biz of Telefónica UK-owned O2 and BE with a proposed deal worth up to £200m.
The Register exclusively uncovered in January that Sky execs had been spotted sniffing around O2's office. We also revealed that the mobile telco was effectively squeezing all it could out of …
Mobile data prices rise as capacity crunch bites – ACCC
The capacity crunch in Australia’s mobile airwaves has brought a response from carriers, with the ACCC reporting that real prices for mobile broadband services reversed their long-standing trend and rose in 2011-2012.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission yesterday delivered its annual “state of the nation” report …
BT argues Ofcom is 'mistaken' on Ethernet price capping plan
BT has hit out at Ofcom over its plans to tighten control of pricing of the national telco's wholesale Ethernet services outside London and Hull by describing the decision to regulate high speed data links as a "mistake".
The move came as Britain's communications watchdog notified the European Commission of its proposals to …
France tries again, with EU20 billion broadband fund
French president Francois Hollande wants to take the cable-cutters to the country’s copper, announcing EU20 billion ($AU25 billion) worth of broadband funding to be spent over the next ten years. His aim is to bring universal fibre-based broadband to the country.
The cash-strapped government won’t be providing all the investment …
Official: More than 7 million Brits have NEVER accessed the interwebs
Brits who are disabled, over the age of 75 or poor are among the vast majority of people living in the UK who make up more than 7 million citizens found to have never been online, official government figures show.
People over the age of 75 are - perhaps unsurprisingly - the age group least likely to have ever accessed the …
Just what does BT have planned for its 4G licence: We drill into UK LTE
Analysis So, the UK's 4G auction is over, but questions remain: who bought what exactly, why did they pay so little, and, most importantly, when can we expect some 4G goodness?
The hammer has fallen on Blighty's airwaves, but the exact frequency allocations haven't yet been decided: winning bids were for blocks of spectrum within …
Quit the 2D internet, flee your cave, and GET LAID, barks rock star
Rock star Jack White, formerly of The White Stripes and The Dead Weather, has told fans to switch off the "two-dimensional" internet, get out of their "cave" and start experiencing something in "the real world".
Recently appointed as an ambassador for the world's official Record Store Day, the musician has been getting into the …
'On demand' fibre: Could it happen in Oz?
A question posed by El Reg to Australian opposition communications spokesperson Malcolm Turnbull has opened up something of a can of worms.
It’s probably unfair to say that Turnbull “floated” or “supports” the idea of Australia imitating the Openreach “Fibre on Demand” model. He merely didn’t dismiss the notion out-of-hand.
But …
Turnbull says NBN Co could offer FTTN with optional fibre-for-cash
Australia's shadow Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull has said he sees no reason NBN Co could not offer a “fibre-on-demand” (FoD) service that would see those offered xDSL connections under a fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) scheme offered the chance to pay for a fibre optic cable to be connected to their premises.
Turnbull's …
