So it’s 2008 and we already have ADSL up to 8Mbps from BTWholesale across most of the UK and also up to 24Mbps from Be Un Limited aka Be and Bulldog in the bigger town centres using LLU & ADSL2+ on BT’s network, but what is coming next? The main activity so far in the UK broadband arena during 2006 has been coming from the mobile phone operators. A number of which have been looking to add a broadband service provider to their portfolio, which will allow us to see the start of “triple-play billing”. We are now starting to see Broadband, fixed phone, mobile phone, mobile data, VoIP and TV combined "one provider" billing coming into play.

Mobile phone group O2, now owned by Spain's Telefonica, has followed rivals into the broadband market with the acquisition of provider Be for £50m. The move will pitch it against former parent company BT in the fiercely competitive home broadband market. Be is among the UK's most advanced internet technology groups, having operated for less than two years. However, in that time they have introduced 24Mbps broadband to 159 exchanges and have targeted another 300-odd for deployment by the end of the year, providing about 50% population coverage. Coverage will be extended to 924 active exchanges, around 70% by the end of 2007, making it one of the UK's largest broadband providers by installed local loop unbundled exchanges. Further to this, Be also have a very good reputation amongst their user base and Whilst all of the new dates are towards the end of this year and well in to 2007, this number of exchanges will result in coverage on very similar levels to that of Sky and Cable & Wireless.
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Pressure on O2 has grown since cable group NTL's £962m takeover of Virgin Mobile. Last month, it revealed plans to move into broadband "within months". The strategy will be to bundle broadband with existing mobile offerings in a single bill. To that extent it has now announced completion of the acquisition of Virgin Mobile, which also carries a licensing arrangement to allow the group to retail services under a Virgin brand. The full press release is on www.ntl.com. At this time the schedule is for the ntl:Telewest group to start to market a single set of services under the Virgin brand name sometime in the early part of 2007. This will mean that cable TV, fixed telephone lines, broadband and mobile telephones will come together in bundles, and with roughly 50% of households in an ntl:Telewest coverage area represents a strong competitor to the various other players looking to create one-bill type bundles. While lots of providers are moving into the double-play area, and a smaller number toying with triple-play, the ntl:Telewest group is pushing to be a quadruple-play operator in 2007.

O2's move into broadband follows BSkyB's purchase of Easynet earlier this year, and its anticipated summer launch, as well as Carphone Warehouse's highly popular £21 monthly phone-and-broadband service.

Opal Telecom, the Carphone Warehouse subsidiary responsible for administering its TalkTalk voice offering, has announced that Sonus Networks is supplying the foundation for its forthcoming IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)-based network. Opal’s target is 1,000 IMS-enabled exchanges by the first quarter of 2007 and has predicted that half of TalkTalk’s customers will be migrated into the new network within a year. IMS-based networks will mean customers will be using voice over IP (VoIP) rather than the traditional phone network, although from an customers perspective there should be no noticeable difference. From the provider’s perspective, IMS-based systems promise a huge reduction in operating costs, as well as a unified system that can handle anything from voice to instant messaging to streaming video. It is also apparent that Carphone Warehouse’s eventual offering will include services such as support for dual-mode phones, or fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) as a result of Opal’s £155,000 purchase of some low-powered GSM spectrum in May.

Orange owned by France Telecom have also rebranded Wanadoo (aka Freeserve), and with Vodafone having also unveiled fixed-line ambitions, the UK market is poised for a broadband war.

Bulldog's LLU coverage far exceeds any other LLU providers footprint right now, with 534 exchanges enabled and a 800 planned in total by autumn. Cable & Wireless, who own Bulldog have tried to make it very clear that they are committed to offering LLU services to corporates, and their rollout of some 120 exchanges since the end of March seems to support this. Bulldog will initially wholesale their fully unbundled double-play (voice and broadband) service to other ISP's only.

The number of options for businesses looking for symmetric dedicated bandwidth has just improved with the launch in the UK of EtherStream™ by Easynet. Easynet is first to break the Copper Speed Limit with EtherStream™ EtherStream ™ will shortly be available at 200 exchanges across the UK – reaching 60% of all UK businesses – with this set to expand significantly to provide UK-wide coverage. The service offers symmetrical speeds of up to 24Mbps when bonding 8 copper pairs, and should soon be available at 200 City centre BT Exchanges. As an illustration of the pricing involved, a 10Mbps service with a three year contract would cost around £19,000 per year, and be available to those with line lengths of under 4km. Previously for a leased line of this speed you were looking at £35,000 to £40,000 a year.

Goonhilly, which is one of four earth stations operated by BT, is to offer a 100Mbps connection for use in its Internet cafe. BT are billing it as 'probably the world's fastest internet café'. The word 'probably' is very much a key point, because 100Mbps is not that an uncommon connection speed for home users in Korea and Japan. Once you realise the amount of traffic that Goonhilly handles in terms of Atlantic fibre connections and satellite transmissions, using 100Mbps for the Internet cafe should be a mere drop in the ocean for the connectivity to the site.
Computer Business Review as well as other journals have picked up on the news, and are making it sound as if 100Mbps broadband connections are something we may see in the home soon. Alas the truth is that while anyone can have a 100Mbps connection now, not everyone has the bank balance to install it or run it. The reality for what we can expect from the BT Group in respect to national broadband products can be read about in the PDF document - 'Broadband Access Speeds in the Fixed Network'.

So what does the future hold? Well the document was published in March 2006, just before the Max products were available across much of the country, and estimates of 60% of customers managing a 5Mbps line speed are made, though if broadband take-up exceeded 25% by a large margin then increased crosstalk may reduce the maximum line speeds. Something like 78% of customers should in theory manage 2Mbps. So what next? Well companies like Be, Bulldog and UK Online are rolling out ADSL2+, and it seems BT has this on the cards, but the deployment of ADSL2+ by BT is linked to its 21st Century Network (21CN) plans. In other words until the 21CN roll-out is complete which is pencilled in for around 2008, maybe 2009 we should expect BT to rely on the original ADSL standard. This means that we should not expect ADSL2+ to be available in the near future, if BT sticks to an exchange based roll-out of ADSL2+, then we can expect perhaps 50% of customers getting 8Mbps line speeds. The other option is to shorten the length of copper cable used in the telephone line by deploying Fibre to the Cabinet technology (FTTC), these trials are still underway, and no commitment to a roll-out appears to have been made.

Well that is fixed “via the phone line” covered but what about wireless Broadband ?

As with all network connections, wireless broadband will need to go even faster to keep up with the demands placed on it. We already have three current standards of WiFi: 802.11b (11Mbps), 802.11g and 802.11a (54Mbps). What's next? Well the current 802.11g and 802.11a standards use OFDM Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing to transmit the data over the radio link, to get higher bandwidths we will need to move beyond this type of modulation. One camp ("TGn Sync" consortium) led by Atheros proposes using 40 MHz of bandwidth (up from 22 MHz in the 802.11b/g specs); Intel is part of this proposal. They call their approach IEEE 802.11TGn. On the other side of the fence in the other camp so to speek is multiple-in/multiple-out (MIMO) antenna system maker Airgo which plans to build around 20 MHz of bandwidth; Broadcom and Texas Instruments most significantly stand on their side. Their name: World Wide Spectrum Efficiency (WWiSE). WWiSE is set to introduce this new standard as IEEE 802.11n. To that end, the WWiSE proposal mandates the use of WiFi's 20MHz channel width, which also ensures backwards compatibility with existing WiFi equipment. WWiSE itself uses the Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MIMO) many-antennae technique and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) to boost data throughput rates to a maximum of 540Mbps. Such rates can be achieved with a 4 x 4 aerial array and a 40MHz channel width. MIMO technology aims to take advantage of natural radio wave propagation by incorporating two 'smart' antennas onto one device in order to send and receive data via one channel. In countries where spectrum regulations forbid such a channel width, kit based on WWiSE will fall back to a 2 x 2 array and the 20MHz channel width. The proposal also includes optional advanced forward error-correction coding techniques to boost coverage and range. The firms behind WWiSE to offer their intellectual property under "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" - which they have to if the IEEE is to accept its incorporation into a standard - and to do so without charging a royalty fee.

RAIL travellers on the London to Brighton line will soon be surfing the internet and sending e-mails at high speed from their notebook PCs and laptops, thanks to a deal signed by high-tech company Nomad Digital with T-Mobile and train operator Southern. The Northumbrian-based company has teamed up with telecoms giant and train operator to launch the world's first truly broadband Wi-Fi service on trains .
Nomad has spent two years developing the technology behind the system and, although there are already a small number of other existing services based upon satellite technology that provide internet access on trains, this is the first in the world to offer a true bi-directional broadband connection, making it many times faster than any existing system. Nomad's system uses 37 trackside basestations at train stations and locations along the 60 mile route (utilising IEEE 802.16 technology, also known as [pre]WiMax technology), which create a link to the train as it speeds past. The links can pass data to and from any train at up to 32Mb/s, making it the fastest data link to a train anywhere in the world and the potential is enormous.
The system can be used to provide passengers with high speed internet access. For busy commuters, who perhaps spend up to two hours a day travelling to and from work, this technology will allow them to use that time productively, sending and receiving e-mails, or accessing the internet and their own corporate networks - all on broadband. That could mean a shorter working day. More than that, the system could be used to support other services for train operators, such as closed circuit television (CCTV) and allowing onboard systems to be checked in 'real time'.

So that’s what you can expect to see appearing in the near future - nationally, but what is Victory4 going to be up to in Sussex in the coming months?