Posted by Admin on October 4, 2011 – 12:28 pm
BT customers accross the UK are experiencing problems with their broadband due to a power failure.
The fault, which is at a major exchange in Birmingham, has meant the loss of internet services for BT customers in several areas of the country, including London , Bristol, Cardiff and Yorkshire.
BT have said that the problem would only have lasted ‘for little more than an hour ‘ for most people and for most the problem had already been sorted out. A spokesperson was reported as saying ”Our engineers are on site and the majority of customer’s service has already been restored. We are working to restore service to the remaining customers as soon as possible this afternoon”
”Should any customers continue to experience difficulty in accessing their broadband service, they are advised to turn their hub or modem off and on again”.
Although the problem was said to have affected thousands of BT’s customers this would be no more than 5% of BT’s overall network.
Posted by Admin on July 27, 2011 – 11:20 am
Plusnet had been offering a half price deal for nine months but this offer has now been replaced by an offer of free internet for four months instead.
The offer still applies to Plusnet Value broadband deals when they are taken on line with home phones.After four months the packags costs just £6.49 per month with line rental at £11.99. Anytime calls are an extra £3.50 per month. This is a very competetive deal from Plusnet.
BT is offering its BT broadband and anytime call deal at 4 months free and then £18 per month. BT’s cheapest package is £16 per month, which is suprising when you compare the Plusnet deal which uses the same lines as BT. It is worth noting that Plusnet also include unlimited downloads in some of their deals.
Tesco offer a better priced deal than O2 with unlimited downloads all round. They charge £8.50 per month after the first 3 months of the contract.
Orange offer the first 3 months free with their off peak calls deal. It is then £7.50 per month.
There are some good deals out there and it is worth shopping around for the one that suits you.
Posted by Admin on May 16, 2011 – 2:33 pm
BT’s profits increased by 71% to £1.72 billion for the year to March. This was in spite of a 4 % drop in revenues to £20 billion mainly due to a fall in mobile phone traffic on its network.
BT is now without doubt the UK’s biggest broadband supplier and has seen a huge increase in the number of new customers during the final quarter. 162,000 new customers were added for normal broadband during the past three months, plus around 5,000 per week for superfast broadband which offeres BT Infinity. 30,000 new customers were gained by BT Vision.
BT’s boss Ian Livingston was reported as saying that 75 % of people say broadband is just as important to them as electricity ,while a third of small to medium sized businesses sell on-line.
BT also saw an increase in the demand for copper telephone lines for the first time in five years which was put down to more new homes being built and more people changing from mobile only to fixed lines.
Further good news for the group was that their pension fund deficit has shrunk from £9 billion to £3.2 billion.
Posted by Admin on February 6, 2011 – 12:36 pm
Various towns in Kent are hopingto have access to super-fast broadband services within a year according to recent reports. This is all due to BT’s fibre based expansion which is currently being rolled out. The lucky Kent towns are Sheerness, Sandwich and Feversham.
Altogether 41 market towns will be receiving BT’s high speed broadband as a result of this expansion. This will apply to both businesses and residents which is excellent news.
Farningham has been reported to have the slowest broadband speed in the UK with an average of 1.30 Mbps. It would take residents 12 hours to download a film.
5.5 million UK residents and businesses now use BT’s internet services and their profits increased by 30% in the 3 rd quarter of 2010.
Posted by Admin on January 23, 2011 – 9:21 pm
BT has been told by Ofcom, the telephone regulator that they must reduce the prices that they charge other internet service providers to use its network. They must make reductions of somewhere between 10.75% and 14.75%.
The regulator was reported as saying” Ofcom expects competion between retail ISPs. who will benefit from lower wholesale prices, to lead to reductions in retail prices which benefit customers. The changes may also lead to better quality services by enabling ISPs to allocate more bandwidth per customer which could deliver faster broadband”
BT responded by saying ” It is key that the details strike the right balance between control and incentives to invest in rural areas. As the UK’s main investor in rural broadband, we will engage fully in the consultation process which follows to make our case”
The price cut will come into effect later in the year and is expected to benefit 12 pc of the UK. The reductions are however not good news for BT as they will reduce BT’s revenues by tens of millions of pounds per year.
BT had to open its network to its competors to meet the Governments promise to provide cheaper broadband to everyone in the UK by 2015.
Posted by Admin on January 5, 2011 – 1:47 pm
BT have announced the winners of their Race to Infinity Competition.
The competition which closed on 31 st December was designed to offer smaller communities the opportunity to show how much they wanted better services. Communities needed at least 1000 votes to qualify for the Race to Infinity. Each area was ranked as a pecentage by the amount of votes compared to the number of available phone lines. The top four areas completed the race with more than 100%
The top three in the race were Whitchurch in Hampshire, Caxton and Madingley in Cambridgeshire. Also sussessful were Blewbury in Oxfordshire , Innerleithen in the Scottish Borders and Baschurch in Shropshire.
The competition was for the top five areas but Baschurch did so well in the competition that BT decided to include it as well.
These communities would normally have expected to wait longer for faster broadband but they will now have the new high speed broadband packages up and running by early 2012.
Posted by Admin on September 3, 2010 – 6:09 pm
Last week BT signed up its 15 millionth user to its high speed network.
It is now 10 years since broadband was first introduced in the UK and it is now used by almost three quarters of the UK’s homes and small businesses. Britain can now boast a higher take up rate than any other developed nation due to widespread availability and low prices.
It was Virgins predecessors NTL and Telewest who first offered broadband services in 2000. BT became serious about broadband services in 2002 when prices were slashed by former chief excecutive Ben Verwaayen after broadband equipment was installed in local telephone exchanges.
BT was signing up almost 5,000 new customers each day although that rate has slowed down in the last couple of years due to a price war in the fixed broadband market.
Virgin Media serves 4.2 million customers over its cable network although last week it was revealed that 9 million people in the Uk have still never used the internet. Almost two thirds of the 15 million customers using BT’s network are using a rival internet provider such as Sky or Talk Talk who use BT’s infrastructure.
BT is now investing a further £2.5 billion to roll out fibre broadband to 2 thirds of the UK.
Posted by Admin on May 17, 2010 – 2:11 pm
Oftcom has revealed findings in a mystery shopper test conducted in March this year.
BT and Sky were found to be the two least likely Internet Service Providers to inform new customers of the maximum speed achievable on their line when signing up for an internet connection
O2 came top in this catogory in the test by informing 58% of callers with the information. BT provided the information without prompting to only 28% of callers and Sky to 39%.
However when prompted by the callers O2 came out worse by providing only 80% of the shoppers with the maximum speed information. Pulsnet, after prompting, provided 93% with the requested information. They came top in that category.
Overall Ofcom said that 15% of mystery shoppers failed to obtain a likely speed for their line , with 42% having to prompt the provider for the information. In addition 40% were told that the speed was an estimate and 31% were warned that a number of factors were involved in the actual speed.
Ofcom is planning to work with Internet Servics Providers to tighten the Voluntary Code of Practice on Broadband Speeds by creating a universal speed measuring test in an attempt to ensure UK customers are provided with more consistant and accurate information.
Posted by Admin on May 4, 2010 – 2:04 pm
Orange has abondoned its own broadband network in a deal with BT. Orange has handed over its fixed line network to BT after spending millions of pounds installing its own equipment in a bid to improve services to its customers.
It is thought that Orange would need to make substantial investment to maintain its broadband network but feel that the BT deal will allow them ” to take advantage of future technology developments” such as home and TV entertainment. Constant investment is needed to stay up to date.
In a report in the Times Bruno Duarte, vice-president of strategy said the reason for the change is because of dwindling demand for its broadband services. However they do need to remain in fixed line broadband and using BT’s network will almost double its broadband reach.
Orange is the 5th largest fixed line broadband provider and has around 840,000 customers. This figure was however around 1 million a year ago. It is hoped that the deal will allow Orange to become more competitive in the broadband market.
Orange recently joined forces with T-mobile and has nearly 30 million mobile phone customers.
Posted by Admin on April 19, 2010 – 3:16 pm
BT has been unable to deliver high speed broadband to the UK village of Lyddington so the residents have raised £37,000 to launch their own network.
Several telecom companies had said it was uneconomical to provide fast services to the village ,but Rutland Telecom can now offer the residents of Lyddington speeds of up to 40Mbps
The Rutland Telecom scheme was a joint effort between villagers and a local ICT company that was reselling BT’s broadband.
Dr David Lewis , Managing Director of Rutland Telecom was reported to have said” We found that any company could do, on a smaller scale, what Carphone Warehouse has done and take over BT’s network.”
They approached Openreach, the BT spin-off responsible for the UK’s network, to supply fibre optic cable to a street cabinet in the village. It was quite a slow process and the Ofcom regulator did intervene regularly , but after 2 years the network is up and running and already has 50 customers. The telephone lines of these customers are now completely cut off from the local BT exchange and running independantly.
Rutland Telecom have now been approached by 40 other rual community groups interested in a similar network for their own areas.
It was reported that BT said that they were delighted to help Rutland Telecom although they added that they hoped that other service providers would be allowed access to the new network.
