Noos

dahamsta

Loadsa noos today. More in Wireless.

BT Broadband is a flop

BT Broadband - the no-frills, access-only high-speed Net service - is a flop failing to live up to the telco's own expectations.

Since its £30m launch in September last year, the monster telco has flogged just 171,000 lines.

A spokesman for the monster telco told us that this was acceptable since it was a "new product".

What a difference a year makes. When BT Broadband was announced in April 2002 the company trumpeted: "BT Broadband will help drive rapid take-up of broadband in the UK and is a fundamental part of BT's stated aim of signing up one million broadband internet customers by summer 2003. BT plans to have connected 500,000 customers through the new direct service in the same period."

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UK has 2 million BB connections - Oftel

The UK now has two million broadband connections, Oftel has announced today, with new connections running at around 35,000 a week.

Garbage.

Oftel doesn't rate 128k services as broadband (there are around 400,000 or so at NTL) but still includes them in figures so that the regulator can be "in line with statistics on broadband connections compiled in other countries".

What nonsense. ®

Brussels hits Deutsche Telekom with fine

Europe's biggest phone company Deutsche Telekom is to be fined EUR12.6 million by the European Commission for overcharging for access to its network.
In a toughly worded statement, which called DT's practices abusive, unfair and anti-competitive, the European Commission said that the company was charging entrant telecommunications companies in Germany too much cash for access to Deutsche Telekom's local loops. Access to DT's network is required for rival companies to provide broadband services such as DSL.

Competition Commissioner Mario Monti added his own comments on the matter saying that the company had not unbundled its local loops as it had been directed to do in 1998. "Many new entrants have tried to compete with the incumbent operator. None of them has been able to reach significant market share, not least because DT charges competitors higher fees for local loop access than it charges its end users," Monti said

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[URL=]Ireland to lag in broadband uptake[/URL]

Broadband uptake in Ireland will amount to 14 percent of households by 2008, less than half the predicted European average, according to new research.

New figures from Jupiter Research say that by 2008, about 28 percent of European homes will have a broadband connection. Ireland, meanwhile, is predicted to have a mere 14 percent penetration rate in that year, the research company said. This is on a par with many southern European counties such as Greece, where broadband was only launched this year.

Though slightly ahead of Greece, Jupiter's numbers peg Ireland's current broadband penetration at about 1 percent, compared to a European average of 7 percent.

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