Carphone’s pre-tax profits have crashed ten per cent to £123.1million, with the company’s financial buttocks feeling the lash of their £80.5million free broadband launch.
The launch just wasn’t just painful for Carphone, with punters galore feeling the weals of a truly rubbish service, being forced to wait months on end while the company struggled hopelessly to catch up with demand.
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The DSL Forum today announced that the total number of DSL connections worldwide has exceeded 200 million at the World Broadband Forum in Beijing.
It’s estimated that this significant milestone was passed in April this year (2007), less than a year since the announcement of the passing of the 150m level.
SMC have launched a business friendly Wi-Fi HotSpot in a box (SMCWHSG14-G).
It’s designed to support up to 100 concurrent users and comes with a printer so Wi-Fi access codes and invoices can be issued simply.
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BT are rather pleased with themselves today as they’ve gained the number one position, as Britain’s most popular broadband retailer.
They now got 3.66m broadband customers which, in their words “leapfrogs” them over Virgin Media (NTL/ Telewest as was).
BT are of course running a reduced price scheme for the first six months of sign up – as are Virgin Media. The big difference between the two offers is the entry price – BT £8.95/month and VM £14.99. We would suggest that this has had a major impact in achieving BT’s current number one position (as well as buying PlusNet a short while back).
We’ve just a little, quick maths on the number of BT’s subscribers.
There’s healthy cash flows for BT in this game. Even taking the customers to be on the lowest package, they’ll be clawing in £66m _per month_. This rises to £91m if people are on the highest package.
On a yearly basis that’s broadband subscriptions earning for BT of between £792m and 1.092 Billion a year! Don’t forget you also _have_ to have a phone line with them to have their broadband, so extra earning there.
Not a bad little business broadband has turned out to be for them really. Makes you wonder why they were so reluctant to get going back in the late ’90’s/early 2000’s.
Tivo have released a new search function that searches over not only the content on the box or that provided by the broadcaster subscribed to, but stretches beyond this to encompass relevant results from the TiVoCast service and Amazon Unbox™ on TiVo.
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Want a quick recap on how the growth in the access to broadband has gone in the UK?
Lucky for you Christopher Huhne, the Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh asked the DTI
how many and what proportion of homes had access to broadband in each year since 2000; what (a) estimates of and (b) targets for broadband access his Department has made for future years;
Which led Margaret Hodge to share the following
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Much to our surprise, the UK public are starting to be told about the BT Vision service from BT, through a multi-million advertising campaign, with the two 60 second ads kicking off tomorrow during ITV’s ‘Grease Is The Word’.
The background
Since its initial ‘launch’, back in December 2006, when UK journalists were gathered together at BT’s head office (we covered it live) and were exposed to a very expensive event, there’s been very little further information – or even kit available.
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Digital-Lifestyles recently offered me (Reese) an invite to beta-test the new Joost application. As part of the deal, I promised to write this short response about my experience with the application and content.
No Joost on pre-Intel Macs
First off I have to confess that I haven’t been able to access the content offered by Joost because of my aged computer. I, like many others out there, use a pre-intel Mac, and Joost has yet to make their application compatible to our platform. That being the case, I have no response to the usability of their application, simply because I haven’t been able to access it.
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NetGear have announced the execution of a definitive agreement to acquire the privately-held Infrant Technologies, Inc, maker of RAID and NAS technology.
Netgear will be putting $60m cash on the table, with a chance for the Infrant shareholders to gain an additional $20m in cash for over the next three years if, in the oft-used phrase, “specific revenue targets are reached”.
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Vint Cerf is well known as being one of the founders of The Internet.
One of his roles (besides being Google’s ‘Internet evangelist’) is as chairman of ICANN.
ICANN performs a number of central roles in the inner workings of the Internet (explained), but is best known for handling and controlling domain names.
Well, this years he’s stepping down and is taking the intervening period to try and encourage many other people to get involved with ICANN.
Vint has issued a video giving an overview of ICANN and the sort of people he’s looking for to join. He calls it “a grand experiment”, and underlines its need to co-ordinate standards as, “in the absence of interoperability, we don’t have an Internet.”
There’s nine places becoming available within ICANN this year, including three at board level. Those hoping to jump from their jobs and join the ICANN payroll will be frustrated as the roles are “uncompensated effort,” although the travel arrangements look pretty good (see vid below).
We found it interesting that Vint referred to ‘Internets’, in the plural, a few times in his video (about 3:10 in), where most people rarely think of it as more than a blob called ‘The Internet’.
If you’ve got a bit of downtime, take a watch, or listen to Vint, may be you’ll be inspired, but act quickly because you have to get your application in by 16 May.
I’ve been on committees of this sort before, so here’s some personal advice – Getting change to happen through them can sometimes be like walking through thick mud, so make sure you’ve got a whole heap of patience.