Broadband

Anything that uses or touches broadband

Rural WiFi Boost From Ofcom?
UK regulator Ofcom is looking at plans to introduce high speed Internet access to broadband-starved remote areas by boosting the power of Wi-Fi signals.
Talking to the BBC, James Saunders, chief marketing honcho of Wi-Fi suppliers, The Cloud, welcomed consultation from Ofcom, adding that the turbo-charged Wi-Fi could, “provide great opportunities in rural areas that are currently without broadband. It makes it much more possible to put up a wireless network.”
Current limitations on the strength of Wi-Fi signals in the UK makes it prohibitively expensive to provide coverage to sparsely populated rural areas, but cranking up the power would make it possible to reach far more users without breaking the bank.
The bigwigs and boffins at Ofcom are currently mulling over the pros and cons of three proposals.
The first would see wireless signals (which are restricted to a tenth of the power permitted in the US) in all parts of the UK; the second would see the power increase limited to rural areas only; while the third option would include a balance of the first two plans, backed by a code of collaboration to minimise signal interference.
City networks
Although most UK towns and cities offer outside Wi-Fi access through hotspots in cafes, pubs and libraries, city-wide seamless networks are yet to be established.
Known as mesh networks, these let Wi-Fi’d folks roam freely from hotspot to hotspot without any interruption to their Internet access.
Although such networks are already starting to roll out in the US, the restricted Wi-Fi transmission levels in the UK mean that mesh networks would currently be prohibitively expensive in the UK.
Selina Lo, chief executive of home Wi-Fi antenna firm Ruckus explained, “With lower power you have to use a lot more access points to form the network.”
“A typical network will have hundreds or low thousands of access points. If you have power limits, these nodes have to be closer together and you need a lot more nodes,” she added
Ruckus, who are currently working with Google to test a free mesh network in Mountain View, California, have developed a new Wi-Fi antenna to help home users connect to city networks.
“People running city networks know that the Wi-Fi in customers’ home equipment is not powerful enough to do an outdoor long range connection….our device is designed to bridge that connection,” said Ms Lo.
Interference
Although boosting Wi-Fi signals looks to be a top notch idea, it’s not without its drawbacks in urban areas, where US hotspot operators are already experiencing “significant” interference between suppliers.
Despite this, Saunders said The Cloud was committed to making mesh networks happen in the UK in the future, but warned that, “a number of factors are needed to make mesh networks economical”.
The company is, however, already working with the Corporation of London to deploy a mesh network in the City.
The Cloud
Ruckus
Offcom
1 August, 2006
BT Change From Per Second To Per Minute Billing
As of today BT is reshuffling its phone pricing structure. In a typical move of a power-crazed ex-monopoly, it’s giving with one hand and taking away with another.
The ability to get going on this was given by Ofcom when they lifted restrictions on BT’s UK landline pricing structure.
The ‘giving’
BT hasn’t had the take-up with its bundled packages that it had hoped. From today, subscribers of its Option 2 & 3 package will receive around a third price cut. The included-evening/weekend calls to landline packages will move to £3.95 & the all landline calls to £9.95. This is the packages that they’re trumpeting – shame that most people won’t benefit from it isn’t it?
The other part BT is drawing attention to, is the reduction in price of calls to 0870 and 0845 numbers – the sort of numbers most people have been forced to call to speak to their banks. Oh … and they tell us that they’ve reduced the price of calls to mobile phones.
Almost to add insult to injury, BT is offering all of their 16m subscribes 25p off their monthly line rental at the end of the year- TWENTY FIVE PENCE! We’ve just wasted that typing this. Of course, much to our distress, most broadband services (supplied by BT Wholesale) need to pay the line rental. Why should we? and how much longer can this be allowed to continue? Come on Ofcom.
The ‘taking’
The majority of BT’s 16m customers pay per call on the Option 1 scheme. Sadly for them, things won’t be such a bargain. BT is changing their standard charging unit from per second to per minute – not something that we’ve seen since the wild-west days of early mobile phone companies, where the cowboy operators tried to extract the maximum amount of money from the ~~suckers~~ customers.
We think it more than sneaky that BT have given people Call Minder, their free phone answering service, then charge people a fixed fee (3p) or ‘setting up’ the call, then charging whole minutes. When many people get an answer phone, they hang-up because they don’t want to leave a message, or to try to call their mobile – in the meantime BT will collect the setup fee PLUS a whole minute charge, for a couple of seconds.
As to how much the minute will be – we don’t know. We’ve looked, really we have, pretty hard too – we’ve even tried to use their price list search – but to no avail. Isn’t it a bit of a give away that if you need a search engine for your price list, you’re possibly going to be confusing the customer.
Interestingly, for the first time, BT have listed Skype on their pricing structure on the press release. Welcome to the future BT.
If you’ve got a couple of hours to spare, and fancy trying to extract pricing information, you can have a look at the BT Together site.
1 August, 2006
Vodafone 3G On Apple MacBook Via USB
Well they got there finally, Vodafone UK have announced that they’re releasing the less than catchy named Vodafone Mobile Connect USB Modem in the Autumn. It will support their 3G data service and, surprise, surprise, connect to computers using a USB lead. Rather neatly the software disks aren’t needed, as they’re installed directly from the modem.
This advance will broaden out the service to any machine that doesn’t have a full sized PCMCIA/PC Card slot because it’s too old, or it’s too modern, like the some of the new laptops which only support the smaller ExpressCard, or their Apple Macintosh’s that might not support either.
Connection to the HSDPA network, in optimum conditions, will be a healthy 1.4Mbps receive and 384Kbps transmit. Currently Vodafone high-speed 3G network covers the major conurbations in the UK, but not the whole of the UK. Their stated plans are 75% of the population by summer 2007.
There will be a suggested limit of 1Gb of data transfered a month. Those who do not comply “may be asked to moderate their usage,” and persistent usage in excess of the limit “may also result in suspension or termination of the customer’s service.”
1 August, 2006
Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns?
BSkyB results for the last year were broadly in line with predictions, but seasoned watchers of all things financial, recognise tell-tale signs of a flattening of the growth curve. The company has managed its spend on programming well, but technology costs remain high, with significant outgoings on expensive High Definition equipment, that won’t bring instant revenue returns.
Sky, as the company brands itself in the UK, looks increasingly like a utility platform-come-broadband wars‘ that are unlikely to see any great financial gains for those taking part.
As Telcos have become drawn into offering entertainment packages to make their own offerings ‘sticky bundles’ – that their customers are loathe to detach themselves from – the entertainment companies are forced to provide competing phone and broadband packages, along with the capability of on-demand TV downloads. This won’t be cheap, as Sky has already found to date with its Easynet purchase, and may prove to be more expensive, if they decide to acquire the UK AOL subscribers from Time Warner.
Sky’s average revenue per subscriber (ARPU) has dropped by £4 and along side this they’re facing stiffer competition from Freeview, the UK Digital Terrestrial platform. Freeview now has a free-to-air movie channel (Film 4) and is due to add two further entertainment channels provided by the UK channel ‘Five’ this autumn. Cost-conscious multi-channel homes will continue to gravitate to this low frills platform.
Sky, like pay-TV services worldwide, has a high churn rate, although its managed to reduce this, it remains somewhere over 10% (that’s the percentage of subscribers over the past year who ended their subscriptions). Achieving this has been costly with increased promotional spend and marketing offers to keep current subscribers signed, which has in-turn hit the bottom line.
James Murdoch the CEO of BSkyB told the corporate world that “Our industry is changing faster than ever before and for Sky, 2006 has been an important and exciting year.”
With the NTL/Telewest /Virgin mobile merger and its re-brand starting to gather traction, it looks like Sky can look forward to even more excitement in 2007.
31 July, 2006
AOL’s Steve Case Sorry for Time Warner Deal
Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, now ex-chairman of AOL-Time Warner, has said he was sorry for the merger between AOL and Time Warner. It is widely regarded as a deal that didn’t go very well, leading to internal wrangling and huge amounts of money being knocked of share values.
In an interview with well known US journalist, Charlie Rose, Case said he still believed the ‘idea’ of bringing together Time Warners content and broadband infrastructure, RoadRunner, with AOL digital expertise was right.
He resolved that “Ultimately it comes down to execution,” and that in this case that hadn’t been successful. Case said he missed the ‘power’ to execute what he thought was right.
When questioned further about it, Case then refered to his current company, Revolution, saying that they will only enter into agreements where they have a controlling interest, so they can “Take a long term view.” We take this as implying that this wasn’t the case when dealing with Time Warner.
When Rose asked him straight, “Was it a good idea, or not?”, Case gave a half smile and then laughed, trying to avoid a direct answer.
When pushed, Case said from the point of shareholders of the two companies, employees & customers – it didn’t go as he’d hoped, it had been a disappointment and a source for frustration. Given the wide range of those included by Case, we don’t know who else might be disappointed who wasn’t included.
Given the stark choice of, “Sorry, Yes or No?”, Case said, “Yes I’m sorry I did it.”
Watch the video. The section relevant to this story starts at 30 minutes in.
27 July, 2006
Sky Broadband: Analysis
Yesterday saw the press unveiling of Sky Broadband, showing the eventual absorption of EasyNet, the UK ISP that they 3).
If your reaction is, “Don’t Sky do satellite TV?,” you haven’t been paying much attention recently.
Sky’s offering is simple. Three different speeds of connection – 2Mb (Base) for no payment; 8Mb (Mid) for £5/month; and 16Mb (Max) for £10/month. Connection fees vary with Base at £40, Mid £20 and Max being free.
Each of the bundles include a wireless router and McAfee security software.
Sounds cheap? Well there’s a slight caveat to the ‘free’ service; you need to be a subscriber to their TV service.
Registration via their Web site or SkyActive has been available from noon today and the product will start selling from August.
Sky marketing have been taking their now-expected simplistic approach to the name of the product, with Base, Mid and Max. It’s genius like this that produced the name Sky+, the name that sold 100k+ PVRs to the UK public, when previously they didn’t understand what the hell it was.
How does it fare against the others?
The prices are considerably lower than most of the offerings in the UK, with an equivalent pay-for 2Mb connection from BT costing £18/month.
True, to qualify for these Sky Broadband services you do need to subscribe to Sky TV, but surprisingly at only the cheapest, £15/month package. This approach differs from what they’ve done for many of their other recent ‘hi-tech’ offerings like Sky By Broadband, Sky By Mobile, which required subscription to one of their ‘Premier’ packages.
The closest offering to ‘free’ broadband in the UK are two fold – Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk, and Orange, post merger with Wandadoo. TalkTalk requires an 18-month contract for a phone line with a rental of £20.99/month and Orange requires a mobile phone bill of at least £30/month.
Installation
As per most UK broadband offerings, Sky is expecting most of their installations to be done by the customer, after they’ve received their bits and pieces through the post. The wireless router (which looks like a 3Com unit), sounds self configuring, with the subscriber just needing to load software on their suitably-equipped PC, or …. shock/horror, Macintosh.
If people feel they’re not up to the job, the ever-helpful Sky will send an engineer around to your house to install it all for £50, unless you’re a Sky Max subscriber, in which case it will be free.
This is a big differentiator with the Sky offering. This isn’t offered by other ISPs – it’s simply not economic to do it. It’s also quite a bargain. Depending on the part of the country you live in, you would normally be hard pushed to get someone to come around to your house to install and set up your DSL and a wireless network for that sort of money.
One thing that Sky does excel at, is customer service, and they clearly want this to go as smoothly as possible.
Coverage
These packages aren’t available all over the UK, as Sky Broadband’s reach is limited to the number of exchanges that have been unbundled by EasyNet, as was. Sky are quoting coverage at 28% of the household of the UK, with the high speed (16Mb/s) service only available to an estimates half of these, giving coverage of about 14%.
With their promise to invest around £400/m over the next three years, Sky will be increasing coverage with the stated aim being 70% of UK households by 2007.
Those who fall outside these have to make do with what they call Sky Connect, which is limited to an 8Mb/s service at £17/month.
Analysis
Sky are doing a smart thing here – effectively getting their customers to install another means of Sky delivering content into their homes.
No-one at Sky would be drawn to talk about any firm plans to deliver video content over the broadband connections, but clearly that will be the next move. They can pre-load films, while the connection isn’t being used by the family.
That explains one of the reasons they’re doing it, but why else?
Since James Murdoch took over running Sky, its stated ambition has been 10 million subscribers by 2010, but as we get closer to that, it’s getting hard to convert over those naughty-non-subscribers.
To build toward 10m, Sky really need to keep hold of their current subscribers, and some find they don’t need satellite TV anymore. Bringing them in and locking them into a broadband service is a great way of doing it.
The other thing they need to bring in, is new subscribers and offering potential subscribers incredibly cheap broadband is a pretty good way of doing it.
Other things that Sky are doing is getting their subscribers more closely linked in, or locked in to their service. It’s interesting to see that Sky will be providing a personalised portal of their own, providing photo management and address book. If you’ve ever tried to extract yourself from a photo sharing service – and escape with your photo’s – you’ll know it’s not easy.
Other bits that will be given over are as the previous Sky By Broadband offerings of film, sports and news clips. Oh and, big wow, you’ll also be able to get an @sky.com email address (wonder if [email protected] has gone already?)
Sky will really put the cat among the pigeons with this one. It’s a very keen price, that will hopefully start bringing down the price of broadband for the UK.
Sky Broadband
19 July, 2006
Sky Broadband – From Free!
As expected, Sky has released details of their new “free” broadband promotion, which offers their 2Mb Base package for nowt.
[Read our analysis of Sky Broadband news]
But skinflints looking for a free feast of broadband take note: you only get the service if you’re already an existing SkyDigital network customer, and it comes with the additional sting of a £40 activation fee.
I’d rather jack
Punters who don’t know their phone jack from their Monterey Jack can also expected to be thwacked around the head with the extra optional £50 fee to get their home install sorted by Sky.
Users of the free broadband deal will find their downloading pleasure limited to a 2GB monthly usage cap, although they can upgrade to the ‘MID’ package, offering up to 8Mbps on a 40GB data cap for a fiver a month, with a lower £20 activation fee.
There’s also a ‘MAX’ option, which gives ‘unlimited’ downloading at a speedy 16Mbps with no activation or home install costs, all for a tenner a month.
For users out of a Sky network area, there’s the pricey ‘Connect’ option which offers up to 8Mbs connectivity, 40GB usage cap, £40 activation fee and £50 home install for a distinctly upmarket £17 per month.
All the offers include a free wireless Sky broadband box.
Growing the network
Easynet (owned by Sky) now owns a LLU network covering roughly 28% of UK homes, based primarily inside urban/city areas, with the company expecting to reach 70% coverage by the start of 2008.
Sky reckons that its broadband service – currently swallowing up £400m of operating profits and costing £250m in capital expenditure – will start to hit the break-even point sometime between 2009 and 2010.
30 per cent of Sky customers on broadband
The company also said that it expects 30 percent of its approximately 8 million customers to be signed up to its new broadband service by 2010.
Sky’s chief executive James Murdoch claimed that many of his rivals had been overcharging their customers, “A lot of incumbent players have been charging a lot of money for a long time for not a lot. It could be uncomfortable for them.”
“We can see huge growth in this market from a revenue perspective and for customer loyalty. We can also grow market share,” he added.
Jon Florsheim, managing director of Sky’s customer division, was ready to go even further, insisting that research showed that Sky would pick up new business from competitors.
“The bloodbath is not going to be on our front lawn,” he added, in his best Clint Eastwood voice.
It wasn’t all joy and happiness in the City after their announcement though, with Sky’s shares slumping 3.9% after the announcement of the new broadband service.
Sky Broadband
18 July, 2006
BT Tops UK Broadband Performance Table
A new report has awarded the honours to BT, Virgin, Demon, AOL and Orange as being the UK’s top five consumer ADSL broadband services throughout the second quarter of 2006.
The new study by Customer Experience Management (CEM) firm Epitiro placed BT as the top dog of their overall ADSL index.
BT, along with Virgin and AOL, were the fastest services to actually connect to the Internet, while BT, Pipex and Orange were found to be up to four times faster than the industry average at delivering email.
Gavin Johns, Managing Director of Epitiro said, “Our consumer ADSL testing found that in terms of Internet performance, BT topped the overall rankings for the period April to June 2006. BT was also found to provide the fastest service as a percentage of its theoretical maximum.”
Solutions galore
Epitiro – a company very partial to using the word ‘solution’ in every other sentence – explained that they used their (ahem) “customer experience monitoring and competitor benchmarking solution, ISP-I” to monitor the ADSL broadband services by periodically connecting from ten key geographic locations around the UK from April to June 2006.
This information was compiled into Epitiro’s Consumer ADSL Internet Performance Index (IPI), which awarded a performance score of 1 to the best performer in each test throughout the period.
1 BT 2.78
2 Virgin 4.79
3 DEMON 5
4 AOL 5.22
5 Orange 5.23
With the ADSL industry’s average IPI score for Q2 2006 being 4.72, this shows that BT really are ahead of the game right now.
Epitiro
17 July, 2006
YouTube Brookers Signs TV Deal
OK, you’re used to us breaking news here, but here’s one that slipped through without us noticing. We think it’s sufficiently important for us to swallow our pride and report it anyway.
In an inevitable move, an LA production company, Carson Daly Prods, has signed talent/development deal with Brooke “Brookers” Brodack, who has made quite a name for herself on YouTube. We’re sure you do, but just in case you don’t know what YouTube is, it’s a phenomenally popular Web site that holds videos watched at the rate of about 40m per day.
While it is predictable (yes, we’re surprised this type of deal hasn’t happened sooner too), it doesn’t make it any less significant. What was previously known as ‘the entertainment industry’ (music, films, tv, etc) has been very slow on the uptake to even notice that the ‘people’ have been madly creating their own entertainment and sharing it online. It finally looks like they’ve started to notice … and not only that, but guess what? It’s a pool of cheap talent to plunder, one without agents and prima-donna salaries and demands. That should get them listening.
Brookers, as she’s known as by tens of millions of YouTube viewers has been posting videos for about nine months, mostly featuring her doing pieces to camera, often miming to sound tracks.
The one that brought her to wide attention was her homage to Gary Brolsma’s Numa Numa.
It’s clear that Brookers has gone a number of steps beyond just plonking herself in front of her Web cam (as many homages do), they’re more of a production, using changing camera angles and locations.
Of course it’s not all about TV deals, realising the size of her audience, she’s recently posted an entry asking for people to donate to her car fund. Very cheeky.
How many people will continue to be able to show their talent like this in the future isn’t clear as various music industry voices have been talking about stopping ‘their music’ in personal videos. Strange – we thought it actually promoted the music.
Variety cover the story
5 July, 2006
BBC World Cup Website Scores!
When it comes to World Cup football Web coverage in the UK, the BBC isn’t just dribbling past its rivals – it’s positively crushing past them, according to figures released by Nielsen NetRatings.
England’s dull-as-ditchwater victory over Ecuador in the first knock-out round pulled in the biggest UK audience to sports and gambling sites of all the matches so far, with one million users pushing the weekly audience to over 3 million for the first time.
Of that figure, the BBC Sport website attracted 1.58 million unique visitors overall last week, recording an average viewing time of 11 minutes.
This amounts to a hefty 58 per cent share of the weekly sports and gambling audience, with the official Yahoo FIFA World Cup Website coming over like a bunch of Third Division cloggers, managing only a fifth of that traffic.
The Beeb’s closest rival was Sky Sports, which managed 423,000 unique visitors, each hanging about for an average of five minutes each, followed by Premium TV (419,400), FIFA World Cup (298,000), Sporting Life (209,360) and Yahoo Sports (187,000).
Interestingly, the Sporting Life site proved the ‘stickiest’ with punters spending the longest time on the site (an average of 36 mins each).
Overall, the World Cup has seen a 51% growth in online punters visiting sports and gambling websites in the UK over the last four weeks.
Match by match analysis
Breaking the figures down to individual games, the report shows that the first match against Paraguay attracted an online audience of 979,000 users with the BBC grabbing 51% of that total, followed by Trinidad & Tobago (885,000 users, BBC with 51%), Sweden (936,000, 47%) and Ecuador (1,016,000, 47%).
The BBC added that when the worldwide traffic was added to the total, its overall sports traffic as high as three million unique users.
Nielsen
BBC World Cup
28 June, 2006