Summer 2010 broadband news round-up
9th August 2010.
Lots of summer broadband news, so we've packaged it for you in one bite-sized digest:
BT and TalkTalk have sought a judicial review of the UK Digital Economy Act, requesting the High Court to clarify the legality of the act before it is implemented. The act means ISPs must hand over user details to copyright holders whenever the copyright holder has the feeling someone may be pirating their works, and gives the courts powers to disconnect file-sharers. BT and TalkTalk claim the act was rushed through in the final days of parliament (wash-up) before the general election and hasn't received a thorough enough review. They also claim a conflict with the EU e-commerce directive, and the privacy and electronic communications directive.
Meanwhile in the US President Obama has announced an additional $800m for broadband, taking the total to 8 billion dollars. The $800m is dedicated to "new projects, creating jobs and getting broadband to more rural communities."
Finland has made broadband a legal right with every citizen having the right to 1Mbps internet access from 1st July. They are also aiming for 100Mbps access by 2015 (for everyone).
Meanwhile Briton's have fallen out of love with broadband or the providers more particularly.
The UK budget confirmed the scrapping of the broadband tax (yay!), and announced that future broadband infrastructure updates would be done by the private sector and some of the costs would come out of the BBC licence fee. So expect another 5 years of generic sitcoms from the US and rolling repeats of Dad's Army on the BBC.
The UK's new culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, in a statement of the blindingly obvious said the previous government's target of 2Mbps by 2012 was "unambitious." Muttering generic aims and broad goals he added nothing concrete to how this would be improved upon though and offered no new funding.
The latest global internet speeds report ranked the UK 27th out of 201 countries, with an average speed of 3.8Mbps, comfortably behind Latvia (6.3Mbps) and most of our European neighbours. The global average is 1.7Mbps, and the fastest country (South Korea) averages 12Mbps.
Ofcom says that there is need for clarity with ISPs advertising of broadband speeds. 97% of consumers in the UK don't get the advertised speed. They're pushing ISPs to adopt a new code of practice, so you might see some change in the next 12 months on this. Ofcom in contradiction to the global survey above, rated the UK average speed as 5.2Mbps - still behind those super-fast Latvians though.
Phew! And now you're up to date with the world of broadband changes, and we can get on with reviewing all those new routers stacking up in our offices.
