Broadband

Anything that uses or touches broadband

BT Results Analysis: Stuck Between Rock And Hard Place
Poor old BT. Now that it’s reached a settlement with OfCom that allows it to keep retail and wholesale arms under one, some would say, severely stretched umbrella, commentators emerge from cover and say it might be better if it’d spit into two (or more) parts. The cost of Openreach has been put at £70m so far and in terms of efficiency in the UK telecoms market this could well be an ongoing sore.
BT has announced an IPTV offer for the retail market that some say offers too little too late. Early adopters of Digital TV are, in the main, already committed to Sky, who will look to rapidly integrate an Easynet download capability in an attempt to beat off the challenges from BT and a combined resurgent UK cable monolith formed by Telewest and NTL. The remnants of the consumer markets’ move to digital TV that BT will attract, are likely to be those less inclined to convert to a pay TV proposition, and they’re likely to be operating with tighter disposable incomes than those who have already left analogue TV behind.
Sky’s upcoming purchase of Easynet adds considerably to the pressure on BT.
Major Telcos in Europe have, by and large, a coherent mobile strategy and BT’s deal with Vodaphone is viewed as little more than a stop gap.
Where does this leave BT?
Interestingly enough, Telefonica’s bid valuation of O2 put the value of the former Cellnet constituent of BT above that of the remainder of the UK’s juggernaut Telco- perhaps BT Group could be of interest to another global suitor?
At present there’s a danger that not only will wholesale be delivering utility-style performance but that retail may be moving into a period of decline and could it be that the future of BT is again up for a re-evaluation by it’s major stakeholders?
14 November, 2005
Shoreditch Digital Bridge: Linking Residents
A project starting early next year in East London hopes to bridge the digital divide by broadband-enabling a number of housing estates.
The first stage of the Shoreditch Digital Bridge (SDB) will link-up 1,000 tenants of the Haberdasher and Charles Square Estates, Shoreditch before rolling out to the remaining 20,000 residents. Video Networks, who are best known for the broadband and IPTV service Homechoice, will be providing the connectivity.
Shoreditch/Old Street/Hoxton is a highly mixed area. It’s probably best known as a hip and cool area, mocked by some, celebrated by others and the source of the now-self parody Hoxton Fin haircut (pictured below). The flip side is deprivation. The apparent contrast makes sense. Artists moved into the area _because_ it was run down and the space they needed to paint in was cheap to rent, then over a ten year period it changed into a ‘destination.’
Happily, this project is focused on the original residents, not the ones who live in the £1/2m flats – sorry, apartments.
The functions available to the residents will be wide and ambitious.
The Education Channel will provide online learning, allowing students to submit homework assignments and work with virtual tutors. When this was used in Kingston upon Hull by KIT working with Kingswood school, it was a huge success.
One key part of closing the digital divide is the provision of a PC on TV, which will be operated adding a wireless keyboard using software such as Citrix. When we spoke to Homechoice about it, they told us this will be able to used with their current Set Top Box.
Interestingly, residents will be able to watch the CCTV cameras around the area – something that for years ‘the powers that be’ have said would never occur.
Additional services include a Health channel allowing patients to book GP appointments, provide virtual consultations and on-line health and diagnosis information; a Consumer Channel, allowing on-line group buying of common services such as gas, electricity and mobile phone tariffs; and an Employment Channel, providing on-line NVQ courses, local jobs Websites and virtual interview mentoring.
Satellite companies have for a long time had problems providing services to built up urban areas. Providing TV services over a broadband connection has for a long time made sense. The icing on the cake will be the Homechoice IPTV and broadband service, available at an additional charge.
We hope the SDB project will build on succeeded and lessons learned of previous pioneering work will be integrated.
The Shoreditch Trust
Shoreditch Digital Bridge
Hoxton Fin image courtesy of LondonCircus
Charles Square Image courtesy of Hackney Council
14 November, 2005
Sky Sniffs Around Homechoice
The wires are hot with rumours that BSkyB is contemplating a bout of wad waving in the direction of the video-on-demand, broadband and telephone company Homechoice, which is reportedly finding things tres tricky in the increasingly competitive TV broadband market.
Homechoice’s parent company, Video Networks, managed to notch up hefty losses of £46.5m in 2004 – £1.5m worse than the year before – and faces an uncertain future of fearsome competition from the likes of Sky, the recently merged NTL/Telewest and BT.
Compared with Sky and NTL/Telewest’s subscription figures (7.8 m and 5.5m respectively), Homechoice’s last reported numbers of just 15,000 subscribers suggest that they could provide a tasty minnow for a major operator like Sky.
Homechoice currently provides a broadband Internet and telephone service, with on-demand programmes covering comedy, drama, music soaps, pay-per-view movies and home shopping.
Although Homechoice recently doubled the amount of homes that could receive their service to a more respectable 2.5m, there’s no guarantee that subscriber numbers will reach anywhere near that amount.
We got on the blower to Homechoice and were, not surprisingly, given the official line that, “There are no current plans to sell the business.”
City analysts, however, suspect that Sky could snap up the company as part of its plans for video-on-demand and broadband.
Homechoice
1 November, 2005
Networked Home “too confusing” for consumers
The futuristic vision of a connected home with content moving seamlessly from our TV to our PC and on to our mobile device is still a long way off, according to key speakers at The Connected Home conference in London today.
While David Sales (pictured right) from BT Entertainment waxed lyrical about broadband; Microsoft’s Elena Branet praised IPTV; and Mary Francia of Philips presented the Streamium product range; they conviently avoided the the area of interoperability.
It took Dimitri Van Kets (pictured left), from Belgian telco, Belgacom, to voice what many were thinking by announcing that the networked home was “little more than a mass of standards” and “too confusing” for the average consumer. Unless the service providers get together and educate customers, he said, true home connectivity was never going to happen.
Sky Interactive’s Paul Dale, speaking from the audience, said he’d been annoyed when a perfectly legal DVD of Thomas The Tank Engine wouldn’t play on his Windows Media Player. Luckily he’d been able to hack into it – but clearly this wasn’t the preferred way forward!
Paul Szucs of Sony said that service providers should “try not to lose the plot with content protection”, adding that “consumers simply want their devices to work together and share content.”
The mood was best summed up by Peter King of Strategy Analytics: “We’re not going to move any further without a massive consumer awareness programme funded by all players in the chain.”
Even Microsoft’s Branet admitted there was a need to “focus on educating consumers”.
But until the key players stop operating in silos, this isn’t going to happen.
Microsoft
Streamium
26 October, 2005
BT Starts Trials Of 8mbps Broadband
BT is planning to turbo-boost broadband connectivity by quadrupling basic connectivity speeds to 8mbps nationwide and giving the service a snappy name, “ADSL Broadband Max”.
Compared to some of the competition, BT’s current 2mbps basic broadband connectivity speed (quadrupled from 500kbps to 2mbps earlier this year) makes a glacier look light footed, so the upgrade is desperately needed to keep customers from straying elsewhere.
The 8mbps service will see BT reaching the theoretical top ADSL speeds it announced when the broadband service first launched in 2000.
BT has said it will begin trials of its ADSL Broadband Max service next month in London, Cornwall, South Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, with the trials gradually expanding into a national 8mbps roll out starting in spring 2006.
Cameron Rejali, managing director for products and strategy at BT Wholesale, was on-message, “BT is committed to ensuring everyone benefits from the broadband revolution, whether they live in valleys, villages or city centres”.
With the industry rapidly consolidating, BT is coming under increasing pressure from newly merged uber-telecos like Telewest/NTL and Sky/Easynet, with the former already offering speeds of more than 8mbps for no extra charge on existing broadband subscriptions.
Elsewhere, BT has started trialling optical fibre broadband services in Wales, connecting business to ultra-high-bandwidth services using strands of blown fibre run along using existing telegraph poles.
This technology saves BT having to mess about digging optical fibre trenches to properties and reduces costs of delivering optical services in “the last mile”.
BT
26 October, 2005
Sky/Easynet Purchase: Analysis
As we reported last week, Easynet has been bought by Sky – as long as they get shareholder approval, but since Sky have offered a premium on Easynet’s shares, this should be a done deal.
This is the first broadcaster (in the UK) to take control of the telecom’s infrastructure required to deliver a triple-play of voice, Internet and video, though it’s likely Sky will use the broadband piece to complement its satellite delivery channel. This does give them the much need backchannel that has been elusive so far (requiring dial-up to access SkyActive and other services).
This could be a major blow for THUS who provide telecoms services for Sky as well as hosting various services (THUS developed parts of the WapTV service with Sky). Sky accounts for around £30m of THUS’s revenue (about 10% of their total) which could potentially go to Easynet which would make a huge dent in THUS’s revenue figures, though a lot of it is very low margin.However it might put THUS in a poor financial situation when viewed by the city.
Even though Sky are buying into LLU, Easynet only cover around 250 exchanges and currently all the voice goes to BT (Easynet use the shared metallic path LLU option), while Sky are likely to want to take the phone service as well (they already have a SkyTalk package using CPS provided by THUS). Sky will need to invest to make this a reality as well as increasing Easynet’s coverage. They have said they want to go into around 1000 exchanges, so that’s a build out of around 750 – which won’t be cheap (probably another £100m’ish at least).
For Sky that may be enough as it will cover all major city centres and that’s a big plus for Sky who estimate they can’t reach 20% of their potential audience due to issues with coverage (i.e. no satellite line of site due to buildings in the way, or no way to mount a dish, multi-tennant buildings etc). LLU will give them the means to reaching these people.
It still begs the issue of what’s going to happen when BT roll-out their 21CN and attack all 5,600 local exchanges and also offer a triple-play, but at least Sky will have a lead on them and already have the content ready to roll. BT are likely to be the winners longer term, but at least Sky may have a fighting chance in urban areas.
If all the LLU players aggregated infrastructure and competed on services, they could build a 21CN of their own now. LLU competition is going to be fiercely competitive with Wanadoo, AOL, Sky and even Be offering a triple-play – all competing for the same customers. – as well as BT (who will have nationwide coverage) and not ignoring NTL/Telewest who are also going into LLU.
The LLU operators have got maybe a 2 year window before BT get their act together, if they don’t do something co-operative now, in 2 years a lot of them will just be passing memories.
Easynet
Sky
24 October, 2005
BSkyB to Buy Easynet: Official
UPDATEDSky has today confirmed that it is offering £211m to buy publicly listed UK ISP, Easynet. This follows a period of general speculation, after Easynet issued an official statement on Monday past that they were subject to a possible offer.
Sky are offering 175p per share, around 81% above Easynet’s market price of a week ago.
Not surprisingly, the current Easynet price is now up 44% at 171p.
With this purchase, Sky buys straight into broadband in the UK, gaining a foothold in the Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) market, with 232 unbundled exchanges already under Easynet’s belt.
Importantly Sky have bought into Easynet’s expertise at unbundling exchanges, which, when combined with Sky’s financial clout, will lead to serious competition to the, (in our eyes), feeble rollout of DSL by BT. We also imagine that there will be sweaty brows at Telewest/NTL, the UK cable company over morning coffee.
Sky will gain income from broadband subscription and possibly entice further subscribers to their TV service taking them to their stated aim of 10m. Far more important is a new channel to deliver content through – one they have total control over. They like that.
This move puts BT’s broadband IPTV service on a less secure footing, which, as we broke at the end of September, plans to launch in Summer 2006. At the very least, BT won’t have it all their own way.
Sky has been talking for a while about broadband-delivery ambitions as well as other paths, indeed Sky COO, Richard Freudenstein confirmed as much just over a month ago.
Brace yourself. The news is going to be awash with opinion pieces second guessing what this all means to the future of broadcast and broadband in the UK …
Easynet
Sky
21 October, 2005
Wi-Fly; ISS Falling; i-Tunes 6 – Teenage Tech News Review
Wi-Fly
BBC news is reporting that BT is testing wireless broadband. What was that I heard? Been done already? Ah well, this is a new twist on a relatively old concept: These guys are using a balloon flying at 24km of altitude to send and receive wireless internet signals. This could mean a new way of accessing data: Although there are currently a number of ways of accessing the Internet on a laptop while on the move, these involve either overpriced GPRS connections over mobile networks, or few and far between Wi-Fi access points, which are not necessarily free either.
What this technology might enable, if it takes off (sorry, bad pun), is to enable laptop users to be finally able to use an affordable data service on the move that doesn’t suck speed-wise and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to use.
Guess what else? The team doing the initial research on the project are from my local university, literally five minutes down the road!
Is it a bird, is it a plane…
…No, it’s the ISS falling from the sky. ITAR-TASS reports that the latest ship to dock with the ISS has failed to boost it’s altitude, as it’s rockets failed after burning for only 3 minutes.
The ISS floats at around 350km above the earth, and at this point in space, there is still a significant amount of drag caused by the earth’s atmosphere. What this means when it’s at home, is that the atmosphere causes friction on the ISS, which means that the space station is constantly losing altitude. What prevents the ISS from falling from the sky are occasional boosts from visiting spacecraft. There is a graph of the ISS’ height and it is clearly visible that it is currently at the lowest that it has ever been at. If the space station’s height deteriorates lower than 300km, it is easily possible that it will fall out of the sky and land on earth, or burn up in the atmosphere.
Although the ISS is kinda cool, I do still have my doubts as to it’s usefulness: What the hell is it actually good for? This is the view of a lot of people in the scientific community, and a lot of people think that it might as well be de-orbitted and the money spent on it every year spent on a better cause. Imagine if the $6.7 Billion that NASA is spending annually on the ISS and the shuttle program went to better causes. Imagine what impact that money would make.
Besides, I want a space elevator, dammit!
Oooh Aaargh, ‘cos we’re pirates!
A few days ago, Digital-Lifestyles covered the new video enabled iPod and accompanying iTunes 6 software. iTunes 6 allows you to download selected TV shows and other content for a fee from the iTunes music store. What if you want to add other recording and stuff to your iPod? Hack-a-day has an article on how to automatically download TV shows via Bittorrent.
They also have an article up on how to use the Tivo To Go software which accompanies the Tivo to transfer Tivo recordings to your iPod.
These hints should help all you cheap skates out there to enjoy a nice, free, iPod video viewing experience. Of course, it also means that it will be possible to watch shows on the iPod not yet available for purchase from the iTunes music store.
Enjoy!
21 October, 2005
137m Broadband Subscribers In OECD
Figures just out from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), report 137m broadband subscribers throughout the OECD countries and that’s up 18m since the last figures, six months ago.
It’s interesting to note that voice and video services are increasingly being provided over these connections.
Korea continues to be top of the list with 25.5 subscribers per 100 inhabitants, with The Netherlands following up close behind with 22.5, mainy due to comprehensive cable penetration.
The strongest growth over the last two reports, ie 12 months has been Finland, the Netherlands, Iceland, Norway and the United Kingdom.
The US is at 12th position (14.5 subs per 100), with the UK sitting one slot lower at 13th (13.5 subs per 100).
Over all of the countries, DSL is still the preferred method (61.2%), cable modems at around half those levels (32%) and what they describe as ‘other technologies’, ie fibre optics, LAN, satellite and fixed wireless sitting at 6.8%.
The ‘other technologies’ have enjoyed the the highest percentage growth in the past six months, growing 13%.
Looking at absolute subscribers numbers, the US is way out in front at 42.6m, followed by Japan (21m); Korea (12m); Germany (8m); UK (8m); France (8m).
Enjoy all of the delicious details at the OECD site
20 October, 2005
PIPEX Purchases Freedom 2 Surf
There still seems to be plenty of cash slopping around the broadband sector, as PIPEX has just waved its weighty wad in the direction of Freedom to Surf (F2S) and bought the company for £10m.
F2S is a major UK ADSL provider, boasting 40,000 broadband customers at the end of September 2005.
When added with PIPEX’s existing customers, the combined user base will make the company the 5th largest broadband DSL provider in the country
It’s uncertain whether existing Freedom2Surf customers already using LLU via the EasyNet LLUStream range will stay where they are or be shunted on to a PIPEX LLU product.
PIPEX had previously announced that it was currently unbundling 60 exchanges, and the acquisition of F2S will greatly increase customer density around exchanges already allocated for unbundling, thus improving return on their investment.
The 40,000 extra customers also makes the possibility of unbundling a further 40 exchanges more feasible.
Peter Dubens, Chairman of PIPEX, said: “In the light of our recent decision to unbundle an initial 60 exchanges, we are very pleased to add F2S to the PIPEX group, which will further increase the density of customers around each exchange, thus improving the return on capital and enabling us to offer higher speeds to a greater number of our customers. F2S’s customers will be able to benefit from our extensive network and the broad range of services we provide.”
Elsewhere, Wanadoo UK revealed yesterday that it has already unbundled 150 BT exchanges in five UK cities (Leeds, London, Bristol, Manchester and Birmingham) and has plans for another 500 exchanges over the next 12 months.
PIPEX
18 October, 2005