The UK's Ministry of Fun is still trying to give away piles of cash to companies tempted to install superfast broadband, with £95m up for grabs from last autumn's commitment to splurge £195m. The third round of the Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN) Challenge Fund giveaway was rolled out today, aimed at enabling "gigabit capable …

For the first time, the number of folk in the UK accessing speeds of 1Gbps is greater than those poor souls unable to get a meagre 10Mbps, according to an Ofcom report today. Although neither of those statistics should be read as an especially encouraging sign. The number of premises that cannot get 10Mbps fell by 150,000 …

Four in five Britons has experienced broadband molasses in the past year and most of us are also "bamboozled" by the terms that telcos use to peddle their wares at us, according to a survey. Just one in five, meanwhile, would change network to escape from crap internet speeds, says survey purveyor uSwitch, a price comparison …

More than one million British people now have access to high speed broadband as Westminster's plan to deliver access to "superfast" speeds to 95 per cent of the UK by 2017 gathers pace. Some 40,000 people are being handed the keys to a speedier internet every single week, the government has announced. Some £1.7bn will be …

A year after Neelie Kroes expressed severe displeasure at budget cuts that reduced funding for the Connecting Europe Facility project from €9.2bn to €1bn, the vice-president of the European Commission for the Digital Agenda has welcomed formal allocation of the smaller sum. The Connecting Europe Facility hoped to spend the …

EE has received a stern talking to from the Advertising Standards Authority for website claims of "superfast" connectivity, though when Kevin Bacon says the same thing on TV that's OK. The difference is the context: on TV Kevin's words are accompanied by numbers and comparisons to 3G, while the web ad just made the "superfast …

A €9.2bn fund proposed by Brussels officials to help bring faster broadband to the 27 Member States by 2020 has been obliterated after the European Union agreed to a budget cut that was engineered by Brit Prime Minister David Cameron. It's a disaster for commissioner Neelie Kroes, whose digital agenda has been left in tatters …

A £52m government-subsidised superfast broadband project in rural parts of Somerset and Devon that was won by national telco BT has been delayed over "contract issues". "Significant" problems have arisen between the Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) programme and the telecoms giant that are yet to be resolved by either party …

Four kilometres to the north of here, in semi-rural Kent, the pavements are stuffed with fibre-optic cable and the streets are lined with drab green cabinets, all nicely tooled up for superfast broadband. But here, we rely on plain old ADSL piped in from a small BT exchange, 1.7km to our south (as the crow flies). You can see it …

The government's current fixation with pushing for the deployment of faster broadband connections to most of the UK's population by 2015 should not shape its future policy, a leading Tory think tank has argued. Policy Exchange - which published its The Superfast and the Furious report (PDF) this morning - added that, while it …

Multi-billion pound telecoms giant BT has landed another broadband government subsidy to lay fibre in the countryside: this time for a £56.6m joint local authority project between Herefordshire and Gloucestershire that won't be completed until 2016. That's a whole year behind Whitehall's 2015 "challenging target". The fibre- …

Brits will no longer be able to object to the arrival of "ghastly" fibre optic cabling cabinets outside their homes: Blighty's new broadband minister has stamped her authority on moves to upgrade the nation's internet infrastructure that sidestep local councils. Maria Miller, who replaced Jeremy Hunt earlier this week during …

Fujitsu has walked away from bidding for a slice of the £530m Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) pie that the government set aside to improve the country's broadband network. The move leaves incumbent BT as the only provider to have successfully secured state investment to date for the project. "At the moment there are no bids …

BT is on the lookout for around 1,000 residential buildings to sign up to a pilot to allow the national telco to test superfast broadband speeds in apartment blocks. The company said it needed to carry out the pilot on buildings in areas where its broadband had already been laid. Fibre-to-the-premises will then be blown into …

Virgin Media is planning to whip its broadband into a wild gallop in a £110m upgrade that will produce a top speed of 120Mbps. The company won't be charging its existing customers for the new speeds, and folks who have an old modem incapable of handling the super-fast internet – such as those on the 20Mbps package – will get a …

BT has brushed aside the possibility that it could be hampered by any number of problems that might delay its plan to push "superfast" broadband to two thirds of the UK come 2015 2014, by hiring 520 more ex-armed forces bods. The company said today it had jumped one year ahead of the original target it set for rolling out BT's …

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt ambitiously declared earlier this year that he wanted Britain to be gifted with the fastest broadband network in Europe by 2015. But as of today that plan remains a huge challenge, given that its success is heavily reliant on endorsement and big financial subsidies from local authorities and the …

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt slapped £4.4m on Northern Ireland's broadband pile today in a move to roll out the tech to the entire country. The NI Executive is tasked with matching that sum of cash in order to reach out to the final 3 per cent of homes and businesses not yet upgraded to faster broadband technology. "Matching …