Author: Simon Perry

Details of BT ADSL price cuts

Reports in the UK Sunday Times that BT will cut its wholesale price to 20ukp, which should lead to retail prices of around 30ukp from the current 40ukp. I’ve heard from someone who is close to top BT management that they might half the price. We’ll should get to know the facts on Tuesday.

Ultra Wideband murmurs

Ultra Wideband (UWB) – its civilian use has been talked about for a while (the military been using it for about twenty years) and now the US FCC has revised some of its rules to enable be used commercially.

Its major advantages are low-cost implementations and low-power consumption – leading to one example of it use being to tagging goods to track them on a dock-side or in a ship. Civilian uses are currently less clear but with single devices peaking at over 50Mbps over 10m, distribution of high-quality video over short distance would be possible.

Intertainer get rights to MGM films

MGM have agreed to have their movies distributed by Intertainer. This adds to the deal they did last year with Universal. Viewers will be able to watch the movies on-demand (VOD). Intertainer currently only distribute their content to users who live in a number of region in the US and have at least a 580kbps connection. Not a great deal of chance of them distributing in the UK as the base BT ADSL service offers UPTO 500k – even if they could sort out movie distribution deals.

SightSound Technologies claim distribution patents

An initial ruling by a US federal magistrate on patents held by SightSound Technologies states they cover the distribution of audio and video content over all telco networks, including the Internet. The ramification of this could be that all online music and movie venture will have to pay a license fee to SightSound.

BT to roll out satellite broadband across Scotland

After a tiny trial of twelve companies, BT is now rolling out their satellite delivered broadband across Scotland.

The fact that there’s satellites footprint over the area gives them 100% coverage, no matter how remote the location. Sadly the service is significantly more expensive to install (a minimum of nearly £900) and use than ADSL, so to get things moving government bodies are subsidising it.