Telstra gets more government pressure to split
Reiterating its older demands, the Australian government has demanded that Telstra break up its retail operations from its wholesale network.
Stressing that the split would mean that the national broadband network roll-out would be much easier, this demand came after warnings of a shaking shift in the telecommunications industry. The government suggests that Telstra break its structure voluntarily.
These series of demands were relayed by communications minister Stephen Conroy, who said they have yet to hear a response from the country’s largest telephone company.
Largely private since 2006, Telstra used to be a state-owned and controlled company. Telstra still owns and operates the old copper telecommunications network which the government sees as duplication to its pursued speedier broadband service all over Australia.
If Telstra gives in, the roll-out of the new network would be much faster and easier, said the communications minister. It was also learned that foundations for the legislative processes for the project will be submitted to the parliament soon. Among the groundwork would be vesting more powers to competition authorities and bar Telstra from adding wireless spectrum among its services, unless the separation is accomplished.
Apart from all this, the Australian telecommunications giant will be pushed to sell off both its cable network and FoxTel, with which they have interests in pay-per-view television. Also included among the legislative measure would be barring Telstra from purchasing more mobile bands than it already have at present.
After such demand from the Australian government, Telstra saw its shares going down the drain. Their profits naturally followed by going downhill, and its mobile operation profits on fixed line business went down as well.
David Thodey, Telstra’s new chief executive, reduced profits targeted even if there was a 10% profit earned for the last year. He added they are pursuing network plans in Canberra and will look into the concerns of their shareholders.
More details related to this this post are available at: BBC News
Companies aren’t properly protected against connection losses, a survey finds
A survey conducted recently found that nearly 80% of business users were concerned about the loss in productivity due to a possible outage in their network connection and nearly 56% said that they didn’t have a backup plan for their network connection.
This research also found that the WAN networks and the internet connections of companies in the country could possibly suffer from a lot of downtime if there was no backup plan in place.
51% of the 110 IT executives that took part in the survey admitted that, during the past year, their company has been victim to some form of network outage at least once.
The survey also revealed that at least 57% of outages that harm the primary network links could have been avoided if the company had made an investment in some secondary link in order to steer clear of such problems, the research said, which involved companies that either had to connect to a number of locations or had to support remote workers.
The MD of CI-net, Graham McLean, which is a fully managed wide area networks, hosting and internet service provider, also participated in conducting the survey and said that nearly 56% who participated in the poll said that they didn’t have a backup system to keep connectivity intact in case of an outage. This is shocking, to say the least, because most of these companies were fully aware that a connectivity problem could disrupt connections between branches or even disable access to the network for remote workers, thereby seriously affecting their operations.
The same survey also noted that business continuity was considered as one of the top priorities that IT executives mentioned for their network for the next year. This was considered more important than cost cutting, showing the priority given to connectivity for organizations.
Fixed line broadband for businesses now offered by O2 and BT
In their individual pursuits to render reliable and affordable communications link, 02 and BT Wholesale recently signed a new deal for five years. This deal involved delivering a fixed-line and business broadband services to areas within and beyond that they are currently serving.
With this new agreement which was received positively by consumers, BT will underpin the entry of 02 into the market of business communications. This will mean that 02 will be responsible for designing and managing a loyal portal and service management center. It also means that 02 will undertake all operations aspect involved in business communications.
The joined-up package from 02 should be more helpful to business pursuits in marketing and sales as it is deemed a unified solution for all business telecom demands. This will mean that mobile connection, fixed line, data and broadband will be brought forth to customers as one package. For consumers, this mean ease in billings and payments, while for both BT and 02, it means that they are saving from administrative and operational expense.
Ronan Dunne, CEO of 02 in the United Kingdom sees the partnership positively, particularly for the consumers of both BT and their company. He said that working with BT Wholesale opened doors of opportunity for their company to give their business clients a reliable end-to-end service with their varied connections now served as one.
Dunne also added that alongside the package will be the unique consultancy that 02 have been known to provide its consumers. “We see this deal as an exciting prospect for 02 to widen its range of products for our consumers in the business sector.
On the other hand, BT Wholesale announced recently its partnership with Vodafone. Soon, Vodafone will also offer fixed-line communications to the UK business sector.
More details regarding this post could be found at top10-broadband.co.uk
UK broadband speeds slower than those around the world
A global broadband connections survey has shown that the broadband speeds in the UK are much lesser than that of countries around the world.
This survey, conducted for the Communications Workers of America (CWA), showed that the speed of internet which was experienced by most UK broadband customers was lesser than the speed of nearly 30 developed countries.
Moreover, most of these countries have had to overcome a number of geographical obstacles which are not present in the UK.
As an example, the average speed connection in the US is 5.1 MB, which makes it 29th in the world. This is despite the fact that the size of the country as well as the number of rural states make it less cost – effective to supply broadband to particular parts of the country.
The other countries with faster broadband include the Netherlands and Sweden, where they got 11 Mbps and 12.8 Mbps speeds respectively. However, South Korea is simply amazing with the average speed being 20.4 Mbps.
This survey is likely to renew criticism of the Digital Britain report, one of the proposals being to deliver 2 Mbps broadband speeds to every home in the country in 2012. Critics say that this speed isn’t enough to cater to next – gen broadband services.
However, speeds in the country could improve in the future with a recent announcement by BT that they had finished the initial stages of an upgrade to their network which would provide millions of people with a 20 Mbps connection, which would be achieved partly by the ADSL2+ technology and the free software BT Broadband Accelerator.
Virgin Media is also entering into a venture to improve speeds with their fibre optic broadband network and has been marketing a 50 Mbps connection since late last year. September will see the price of this reduce from 50 pounds a month to 30 pounds, thereby potentially increasing the usage of this high – speed broadband in the country. The marketing manager of Top 10 Broadband, Jessica McArdle, said that No.31 is not the ranking which the UK should have and hoped that the 50 Mbps package and 20 Mbps package offered by Virgin Media and BT will push the ranking of the country further up!
Total number of broadband connections in home and businesses top 17.557 million
Ofcom has released the latest quarterly Telecommunications Market Data Tables for this year, which also had a breakdown of the total number of home and small business broadband connections. By the end of the 1st quarter of 2009, there were about 17,557,000 small business and residential connections in the United Kingdom, which is an increase of nearly 1.6% when compared to the last quarter of 2008. The number of connections breaks down into: BT Retail DSL (ADSL) – 4.634 million, Other DSL (excluding LLU) – 3.408 million, Virgin Media (Cable) – 3.73 million and other inc. (LLU DSL) – 5.786 million.
Something which is notable from these stats is that the market share of BT Retail has remained quite stable but it has dropped from 26.9% in the last quarter of 2008 to 26.4% in the first quarter of this year, which is despite the continued and strong growth in their LLU DSL broadband services, which was unbundled.
Unlike the other previous quarters, the increase in the unbundled LLU broadband connections like TalkTalk, O2 and Sky Broadband hasn’t been complemented by a decrease in other DSL such as BT Wholesale based ISPs. This fell only a bit from the 3.41 million in the fourth quarter of last year to 3.408 million in the first quarter of this year. This could be an indicator that the presence of new connections was on the rise when compared to migrations from other networks.
When looking at the whole picture, the quarter growth in the number of broadband connections was about 281,000, which is about 1.6%. This is a bit slower than the 2.3% increase which was found in the quarter before this. Generally, these numbers do not include statistics from Mobile Broadband, Wi-Fi or Satellite broadband.
Source - ISP Review
Zen Business Broadband Reviews
Please add your reviews below in order to help others looking to make a decision on which business broadband to choose. All reviews about your experience are welcome, be it positive or negative attributes of the provider or their service provided. All Zen business broadband reviews are the opinion of our users and not Broadband Blogged.
The average Zen business broadband ratings from all of our users can be seen here:
Plusnet Business Broadband Reviews
Please add your reviews below in order to help others looking to make a decision on which business broadband to choose. All reviews about your experience are welcome, be it positive or negative attributes of the provider or their service provided. All plusnet business broadband reviews are the opinion of our users and not Broadband Blogged.
The average Plus.Net business broadband ratings from all of our users can be seen here:
Namesco Business Broadband Reviews
Please add your reviews below in order to help others looking to make a decision on which business broadband to choose. All reviews about your experience are welcome, be it positive or negative attributes of the provider or their service provided. All Namesco business broadband reviews are the opinion of our users and not Broadband Blogged.
The average Namesco business broadband ratings from all of our users can be seen here:
Be Business Broadband Reviews
Please add your reviews below in order to help others looking to make a decision on which business broadband to choose. All reviews about your experience are welcome, be it positive or negative attributes of the provider or their service provided. All Be business broadband reviews are the opinion of our users and not Broadband Blogged.
The average Be business broadband ratings from all of our users can be seen here:
Eclipse Business Broadband Reviews
Please add your reviews below in order to help others looking to make a decision on which business broadband to choose. All reviews about your experience are welcome, be it positive or negative attributes of the provider or their service provided. All Eclipse business broadband reviews are the opinion of our users and not Broadband Blogged.
The average Eclipse business broadband ratings from all of our users can be seen here:
