Business

The Australian government are starting to mount a review of Broadband to discover why it take up has been slow.

A number of US consumer groups and Verizon have mounted a legal objection to the recent FCC ruling that would exempt high-speed Internet services from telephone-style regulation, clearly feeling the ruling, as it stands, doesn’t allow for enough competition.

The UK government detail their plans to spend £30m to boost roll-out of broadband. It encouraging to see that one of the ideas is to locally demonstrate the advantages that broadband brings – a vital link in converting people. There is a total breakdown at the DTI.

The European Commission is taking actions against a further five countries that they feel haven’t properly implement regulations on local-loop unbundling. This follows similar action taken against Germany, Greece and Portugal at the end of 2001. Interestingly they cited the delay that could be caused to Video over Broadband as a major reasons.

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.

The number two and three provider of broadband in Korea have suspended merger talks. The feeling is that both Hanaro Telecom and Thrunet are concerned about current levels of their individual debts.

Rumours are circulating that Liberty Media is in talks with debt-laden NTL about buying a stake of between 25-51%. Interestingly Liberty already own 25% of Telewest and would try to merge the two. Given they are the biggest two cable companies in the UK by far, I would imagine it may be investigated by the Mergers and Monopolies commission but given the fragile nature of the cable business in the UK, they just might pass it.

A less than flattering article that likens NTL to Enron.

A lobby of technology companies in the US, TechNet are ramping up their campaign to make BB ubiquitous.

It appears that the UK telco regulator, Oftel is actually starting to take some actions to ‘encourage’ the roll-out of BB in the UK by forcing BT to lower some of it’s LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) related charges. I’m not clear if the two reductions mentioned will have any meaningful impact of end-user pricing but I am sure the reduction in connection and rental charges would, sadly Oftel will not take any action on this until a ‘separate analysis of competition in the relevant market’ has been conducted.