At issue is Google Fiber’s Terms of Service, which contains a broad prohibition against customers attaching “servers” to its ultrafast 1 Gbps network in Kansas City.
Google wants to ban the use of servers because it plans to offer a business class offering in the future. A potential customer, Douglas McClendon, filed a complaint against the policy in 2012 with the FCC, which eventually ordered Google to explain its reasoning by July 29.]]>
Peter Green, who lives in the community of Eggesford in Devon, is typical.
He got in touch to tell me of the frustrations of trying to run a holiday cottage business on a 500Kbps broadband connection - "We tried to upload videos but it was pointless" - and his fruitless efforts to find out just when the Connecting Devon and Somerset organisation might take his village into the 21st Century. A contract with BT was signed earlier this year, but he's still no clearer as to when or if that will help him. Contracts are late, the 2015 target for Britain to be the "best" superfast broadband network in Europe looks likely to be missed (both for the "best" and the date). What a mess.]]>
The £27.35m deal will see 472,000 premises – around 97% of the region – receive the high-speed service. The councils involved are investing £7.44m, while £7.44m will come from the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) framework and £12.47m from BT. A Staffordshire county council member described the fibre infrastructure as being "as important as road or rail in providing the accessibility and opportunities for our residents and businesses." And this apparently means we're just past the halfway stage in the national fibre broadband rolling.]]>
For a time, running an ISP was a trendy thing. Some 150 companies presently have a license, and about 20 are operational. But many of them are finding it hard to stay afloat. Even cyber cafés, many of which are run by ISPs, are beginning to shut down. Ghana’s biggest, which had 100 connections and its own satellite connection, closed in February. One would guess that mobile broadband is a lot higher than 23% by 2013. Another unexpected consequence of the rise of the smartphone: in effect, it drives arbitrage between pricing of mobile and fixed broadband.]]>
I hope people abide by this law in all their thinking about and planning for broadband, fiber, gigabit networks, application ecosystems, devices, control layers, residential and commercial demand, etc…because it holds across all of those instances.]]>
But, after raising half a million pounds from locals who bought shares on the promise of a fast connection, the project now needs to move to the next stage. In the Arkholme village hall this afternoon, B4RN is holding an open day, inviting anyone to drop in and test the broadband connection on their phones or computers.
The hope is that many will sign up to the £30 per month service, but that some will also buy shares in B4RN. Another £1.5m is needed if the full 265KM network is to be rolled out. That sounds ambitious - but having spent 24 hours watching the volunteers digging trenches, blowing fibre and learning a process called fusion splicing I can see they are a very determined bunch. For £30 per month, they get about 900Mbps down, 500Mbps up. How does your broadband compare?]]>
British Telecom was today confirmed as the winning bidder for the project to deliver internet speeds of at least 24 megabits per second to 90% of homes and businesses in the next two years. Thus reinforcing its monopoly that bit more solidly. The other 10%? 2Mbps or so. Dismal.]]>
The current factsheet for Q4/2012 was published on 26/11/12 and is available for download by clicking below:]]>
The FTTH Council Europe's latest “panorama” report reveals that, despite the fact that the government has announced plans to have the “best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015”, the UK is clearly lagging and has no large-scale FTTH deployment plans.
Having previously announced an ambitious FTTH coverage objective in 2011 – 2.5m homes passed by the end of 2012 – the UK incumbent BT has changed its strategy, deciding to focus on upgrading its copper network to offer fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) instead… Europe as a whole is slightly behind the rest of the world in deploying FTTH, with 8.7% of homes expected to be connected by the end of 2016 compared to 10.5% globally.]]>
Maria Miller, who replaced Jeremy Hunt earlier this week during Prime Minister David Cameron's reshuffle, said she planned to legislate immediately following consultation, and added the government would – if necessary – use existing powers to put an end to local bureaucracy that she thinks is slowing down the rollout of faster broadband. Have any fibre installations been stopped because of planning objections?]]>
The government’s latest twice-yearly data dump, the Statistical Report on Internet Development in China, recorded total internet users at 538m by the end of June, up from 513m in December and 438m a year ago.
Of these, 380m were fixed broadband users, down from 396m in December, and 388m were mobile internet users, up from 356m. More mobile than fixed users. The overlap (those with both forms of connection) is about 150m, or slightly less than half. That's a huge number of mobile-only subscribers.]]>
“I am planning a recommendation on non-discrimination," said Neelie Kroes, head of the EU’s Digital Agenda programme. "This would underline that equivalence of inputs is the best guarantee of non-discrimination, to ensure equivalence of access."]]>
The vast majority of BT's fibre services are fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) services, which still use the old copper connection between the street cabinet and the premises and are therefore slower than fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP). BT's FTTC currently has a maximum speed of 80Mbps, while its somewhat-delayed FTTP can go up to 330Mbps. Unless you're anywhere outside a city centre, of course.]]>
Then, during a conversation with Ken Fallon on a radio podcast the idea of sponsorship was born. The plan so far, is that for a donation of £5 you can sponsor a metre of our fibre duct. In return we put your name on a metre of duct and take a photo of it. Your metre of the B4RN network with your name on it will be buried on a Lancashire upland farm for posterity, and your generosity will enable another metre to be laid in our community network. Getting high-speed internet to the rural north, literally a metre at a time. What's really needed is for Ed Vaizey to change the ludicrous charging tariff on fibre so it's economic to lay and light it.]]>
It has so far only been trialled in 350 homes in Woodmansey and the Great Thornton Street area of west Hull. The average top speed currently provided by KC's internet provider Karoo is ten megabits per second. But the new network offers speeds of up to 100 megabits per second.
This allows users to download a music album in just two seconds, an hour-long television show in 31 seconds and a high-definition film in one to two minutes.What we really want is a way to watch a film in two minutes. Now that would be an advance in technology.]]>