Category: Distribution

LLU arrives in Edinburgh.

Delta V are using a digital TV via a standard UHF / VHF antenna to receive up to 256k of Internet data with the user makes their request via a dial-up connection. The site is a bit light on technical detail, so it’s not clear how this service would scale to lots of user and still give them 256k download.

BT has started its publicly available ADSL self installation.

This is the kind of forward thinking that should be applauded. You might think that it’s an obvious idea but that doesn’t mean the people normally involved in this process would think of it. By using an internal conduit in the gas pipes, fibre can be passed though the pipes giving a 75 percent cost saving. Currently 60 percent of households in rural North Carolina don’t have a computer but the state can obviously see an advantage in this changing.

Amazing, BT announce that they are to scrap SDSL (sends and receives data at the same speed) due to a ‘lack of demand’. Perhaps the lack of demand is due to them not telling anyone about it (amply illustrated by the fact that a search for SDSL on BT.com returns no results). I spend a significant part of every day researching the BB market and I haven’t even hear of the trial. This is typical BT – they don’t want to do it (it would impact their very profitable leased-line business), so they say there’s no demand.

Good to see that Freeserve is actively trying to encourage broadband access in the UK – even if they still have to continue to pay a high wholesale price to BT.

A startup, ZeoSync are claiming a new compressions technique called Relational Differentiation Encoding that will eventually give 100 to 1 loss-less compression. Clearly groundbreaking/world-changing if true. Time will tell if it proves to be true.

Some figures on European ADSL take up. Telifonica in Spain had 360,000 users by the end of the year, with the aim to have 1m in 2003.

Deutsche Telekom (Germany) signed up 2.2m in the last three months of 2001, with 16,000 signing up on 3 Jan alone!

Alcatel and Thomson multimedia demonstrated TV and VOD over DSL. Interestingly the article also mentions encoding units by Nextream, claiming video over less than 1Mb/s.

A positive piece on BB satellie looking forward to 20002.