The Digital Economy bill is receiving a fair amount of criticism from service providers and users, with ISP TalkTalk being one of the most vocal.

The Financial Times also published a letter stating the plans to suspend internet access to anyone illegally downloading is unfair and specifically criticizing the amendment passed last week in the House of Lords and backed by the Liberal Democrat and Conservative peers.

Internet service providers would be required to block access to certain sites pursuant to court orders.

The letter to the Financial Times states, “blocking access as envisaged by this clause would both widely disrupt the internet in the UK and elsewhere and threaten freedom of speech and the open internet, without reducing copyright infringement as intended. To rush through such a controversial proposal at the tail end of a parliament, without any kind of consultation with consumers or industry, is very poor lawmaking.”

The letter was signed on behalf of Orange, Facebook, Virgin Media, Google UK & Ireland, TalkTalk, ISPA UK, Consumer Focus, Open Rights Group, eBay UK, BT Group, Yahoo! UK & Ireland, Shooting People independent film makers, as well as academics from the University of Leicester, Queen Mary (University of London) and finally Tom Watson MP and Stephen Fry.

The BBC also reports that Chief Executive of BT Ian Livingstone has called for fines instead of disconnections.

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BT plans to open up its network of cabling ducts to competitors, however, although this has been announced, BT had to call for equality of access. They are putting pressure on Ofcom and ministers to gain access to Virgin Media’s ducts which will allow BT to expand its network.

A BT spokesman talking to The Time said: “It is remarkable that those calling for open access from BT are not willing to provide it themselves. We call on others to follow BT’s lead in offering to open its infrastructure and content to all on a fair basis.

Competition is a two-way street. We support Jeremy Hunt’s [Shadow Secretary of State for Media] call for open access to all networks and call for others to follow our example and to open their infrastructure and services.”

BT already cover the same areas on the access network that Virgin have deployed their cable network, but BT still rely on overhead cable access via poles in some areas. With access to Virgin’s ducts, this could allow them to deploy fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) services through these without having to rely on overhead cabling which can be more easily affected by adverse weather conditions, and couple be more costly to install.

Ofcom is expected to look through the issue of duct access in the Spring which will hopefully bring some definitive expectations of what providers will have to do. The logical solution would be to create an open access system for ducts controlled centrally which would hopefully help reduce the amount of people digging up the roads to deploy new networks where competitors ducting sits idly by.

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The EU has granted approval for the merger of T-Mobile and Orange in the UK, however, the approval was conditional on an amendment to the network sharing agreement between T-Mobile and Three, as the EU was concerned that the merger could possibly threaten the viability of Three, which is the smallest mobile network operator in the UK.

They also had to agree that the combined network would give up 25 per cent of its mobile spectrum within the 1800MHz band. Otherwise, the 60MHz contiguous spectrum held would be significantly larger than any of the other networks which means it would have the ability to run LTE, the next generation of mobile broadband services, as the best possible speeds within the current spectrum.

In light of these concessions, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) have withdrawn their request to review the case, giving a green light for the merger to go ahead. This will create the UK’s largest mobile network with a market share of around 37%.

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Point Topic has published a new report coining the phrase ‘Superband’ to refer to the Next Generation Broadband services appearing across the UK. The report suggests that broadband at 25Mbps and faster will be available to 2 million homes by the end of 2010, though they are ignoring the DOCSIS 3.0 fibre/coax hybrid network from Virgin Media in this figure, which gives the option of 50Meg to around 45% of UK households.
The two million households covers around 30 projects such as BT and other alternate network projects, though the issue with pretty much all of these is that so few people are connected to any of these projects. The current numbers will make a lot of people laugh, estimates suggest that these 30 projects had about 3000 lines actually connected at the end of 2009, with BT accounting for 1250 of these.
In short fibre roll-outs are happening, but the actual situation is not unlike that of 1998/1999 when BT was running a very small trial of ADSL that meant only a handful of people had the service. Some of the fibre projects mentioned by Point Topic are Independent Fibre Networks in Corby, Swindon and Andover, IsRightHere in Liverpool and Chelsea and Velocity1 in Wembley. H2O Fibrecity is fibering up Bournemouth with Dundee next on the list.
H2O Networks is a classic example, as we see reports from people in the area of work progressing, and we believe homes are connected, but as yet no positive sign of anyone with Internet access. Last we heard in 2009 was that a retail Internet Service Provider had been signed up, but H2O was unable to say who it was.
Things in theory are set to accelerate. Digital Region in South Yorkshire should have a good chunk of its 600,000 homes connected by 2011, and the BT FTTC wholesale product will be available to around 1.5 million homes by then. While this looks like good progress, if we compare this to Sweden 38% (1.2 million lines) of Swedish broadband connections are over fibre, so we are behind the leading edge.
While not purely a superband issue, adoption of BT Wholesale’s WBC product range does seem slow amongst broadband providers, possibly because apart from BT Retail, all the big providers have their own LLU network already offering ADSL2+ in the same areas and the investment needed both in terms of switching networks and training support staff means that many small and medium sized providers are perhaps reluctant to rush into the product. The adoption of WBC is critical to making sure that the Openreach FTTC products are widely available, and the LLU operators who in theory can take an uncontended Ethernet handover from Openreach appear too slow to adopt, possibly due to the lack of control of the actual VDSL2 kit in the cabinet and customers home.

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BT Retail has announced for the fibre to the cabinet/fibre to the home (FTTC/FTTH) based broadband services, marketed as ‘BT Infinity’. These new products will bring faster download and upload speeds to users and will be available to order from January 25th, if your area has been upgraded for it. Users can check their area availability on the BT website.
Download speeds will be at up to 40Mbps and this will be available at £19.99 a month with a 20GB usage limit. A £50 connection fee applies. The unlimited usage variant will cost £24.99 a month, but does save you the £50 connection fee. It also increases the upload speed from 2Mbps to 10Mbps.
Both products do come with a fair usage policy. Details of this will be released on the 25th of January, but we home that as the products are marketed with usages such as “simultaneous use of services such as HD catch-up on TV” this does reflect the higher usage that may occur.
Gavin Patterson, CEO of BT Retail said: “The internet is essential to our customers’ lives and they are demanding more and more as richer and even more compelling services become available. BT Infinity gives customers the capacity and reliability they need in an instant and at a great value price they can afford. We want to give our customers the best possible online experience and are committed to rolling out super-fast speeds across the UK.”
The product is competitively priced when compared to Virgin who offers 50meg broadband over their cable network for £38, or £28 if you also have a phone line with them. It is worth noting that with Virgin, your line will always connect at 50meg but you may not get this speed due to congestion in the Virgin network. With BT’s 40meg Infinity service, your line may not connect at this 40meg speed due to distance from the roadside cabinet, and you may also suffer congestion within the BT’s network.

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Broadband providers sometimes have something of a battle on their hands figuring out whether when a customer contacts them complaining of an intermittent problem with their ADSL or ADSL2+ service where the fault lies. Very often the voice side of the telephone line will be functioning fine, and traditionally this is when a Special Faults Investigation visit would be booked, which carries the understanding that if the fault is found to be with the customers equipment, e.g. ADSL modem or extension wiring then the visit will be charged. According to a draft Openreach document, this existing SFI visit looks set to be replaced by a service called SFI2 which will always carry a chargeable call out fee. The actual SFI2 product is expected to appear in February 2010.
In theory this SFI2 type visit should only be needed when the line is working according to the specification (defined in SIN 349 and Openreach’s line test system says everything is OK. Alas this does not cover all types of faults, and particularly with intermittent faults which may not show up when Openreach does its testing. This means there is the possibility that a provider and hence the consumer may get charged for multiple visits, and as two types of booking are possible, i.e. one that looks at external network and one including a visit to the consumers home, the scope for people getting a big bill with little understanding of why are very evident.
One of the big problems here is that with the current rules there is no way for providers to verify the results of testing by Openreach engineers, i.e. no independent third party testing system exists, thus we may see local loop faults that Openreach are meant to fix only being fixed after multiple SFI2 visits.

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Yesterday, CCS Insight issued a report that shows the UK is leading the way to cheap mobile broadband in Europe. Of the five leading markets, the UK was the lowest, compared to France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The UK has brought down average prices for mobile broadband to around €17 (£15.20). The country with the highest broadband cost was France, where 4GB of data can cost as much as €85 (£76), but on average users pay twice as much as in the UK.
In these five major European markets, broadband subscribers are expected to rise from 22 million at the end of 2009 to over 43 million in 2011 with revenue rising from €6 billion to €11 billion over the same period. Although most mobile broadband providers charge a flat rate fee for a set amount of usage, in Italy, most tariffs charge on a time-based model. However, this is expected to change somewhat in 2010 with these operators following the trends of their European counterparts.
The prediction of the GSM Association is that this coming growth will help boost the technologies used for mobile broadband which will provide users with better services.
“As the GSM family of technologies continues to evolve and we see increased deployments of HSPA+ and LTE networks, mobile broadband users will experience even faster data rates, more than sufficient to compete with fixed line broadband offerings.”

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Broadband provider BE has announced the launch of their line bonding service which will be available from early February. There have been delays in this product coming to fruition and this is somewhat reflected in the launch. BE will be taking a soft approach, with the product being available only to existing Pro customers. The development time has been costly, so it will not be a cheap service. Pro customers will be offered a discounted price of around £50 to £55 a month with the connection fee around £85. Customers will also be required to have a second BT phone line to provide the service.
The product is designed to provide about double the current broadband speeds. For instance, if you get around 20megs now on BE broadband, you can expect about 40meg, and about 5meg for upload speeds. You will also have two lines, so that if there is a problem on one line, you sill still remain connected on the other.
Those interested in the service should register for it, as the service will only be available to a few customers to begin with, however, it will be available anywhere in the BE network.
If you do not live in a BE broadband area, you can still get bonding services from other ISPs. Timico and AAISP offer bonded solutions using BT lines, with AAISP also able to give a redundant connection using a BT and BE wholesale line.

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Your broadband router has a significant impact on the quality and speed of your broadband service. You must choose the right router to support the service you are subscribing to, and there are many variations between manufacturers and models.
One wholesale provider, Fluidata, whose software runs on the BE Unlimited LLU platform, has carried out testing on BE LLU broadband connections to identify which routers perform the best.
This testing has identified that some of the most expensive Cisco ADSL routers perform quite poorly in comparison to more common brands, but even Linksys (now owned by Cisco) routers can vary, depending on the actual model.
The testing was carried out on a 1,550m BE LLU phone line capable of an ‘up to 24 meg’ service downstream with 1.3 meg upstream capacity. The speeds shown are in Kbps and represent the average sync speed rather than actual IP throughput over five tests per router.
Device Firmware Average Downstream Average Upstream
Netgear DM111P 3.64p 18,309 1,320
SpeedTouch 608WL 8.2.1.4 17,921 1,313
Netgear DG834 v4 5.01.01 17,719 1,329
Netgear DG834 v4 5.03.14 17,674 1,314
Linksys WAG160N 1.00.14 17,599 1,314
ZyXEL P-660R-D1 3.40(ANZ.6)G1 17,568 1,238
ZyXEL P-660R-D1 3.40(ANZ.6)G0 17,510 1,245
D-Link DSL-320B UK.1.10 17,220 1,304
D-Link DSL-2640B UK.4.00 17,076 1,303
ZyXEL P-660H-D1 3.40(AGD.3)C0 16,586 1,235
Netgear DG834v2 3.01.38 15,833 1,208
SpeedTouch 608WL 6.2.10.3 15,444 1,321
Cisco 1801-M/K9 3.0.33 15,099 1,187
Cisco 877-M-K9 3.0.14 14,976 1,176
Cisco HWIC-1ADSL-M 4.0.15 14,785 1,173
Cisco 857-K9 3.04 14,199 1,185
Cisco 877-K9 3.04 14,199 1,187
Cisco HWIC-1ADSL 4.0.15 14,199 1,188
Linksys WAG54G2 1.00.16 9,997 1,178
ADSL2+ sync speeds. Speeds recorded in Kbps
This data provides an interesting insight into the variations in speed that routers can provide. In particular, we would highlight the SpeedTouch 608WL which is one of the top performers at 17,921 Kbps using the 8.2.1.1 firmware, but which only achieves 15,444 Kbps using the older 6.2.10.3 firmware. Users should note that with a few exceptions (e.g. Cisco), firmware upgrades are free and simply take a few minutes to install.
It is important to note that while the figures above do provide an insight into BE lines, this data may not be accurate for customers on other broadband services.

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The European Commission will closely monitor planned trials of deep packet inspection (DPI) which will be used by Virgin media to monitor the amount of illegal file sharing in its network. No personal or identifying data will be collected or stored, but the system could potentially be modified in the future to support this.
Privacy International does not see DPI as a legal thing for Virgin to do, and has advised that it would lodge a criminal complaint against Virgin if it goes ahead with the trial as it believes that under RIPA, ISPs don’t have the right to monitor communications without consent or a court order. Similar complaints happened when BT ran it’s trial of Phorm, and the City of London Police did not deem that any wrong doing had occurred. The European Commission weren’t impressed with the way the trial was run and opened its own investigation in to how the UK are implementing European data protection laws.
The Commission has identified three gaps in the UK law so far. First, there is no independent national authority to supervise the interception of communications, required under the ePrivacy and Data Protection Directive. The RIPA act authorises interception of communications where the party has reasonable grounds for believing that consent has been given which doesn’t comply with EU rules defining consent. The RIPA act also only prohibits interception where it intentionally occurred, rather than the EU law that requires Member States to prohibit any unlawful interception.
Although Virgin may or may not fall foul of current UK law as it stands, they may do so of EU law, but until the UK pull their foot out and fix things up to EU standards, there may not be any sanctions except financial penalties to the UK government for not conforming to EU law.

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