Luxembourg has been given two months to transpose an EU directive on telecoms services into national law by the European Commission. The directive was passed down in 2003 by the European Court of Justice but, thus far, Luxembourg has failed to implement it. The EC has written to Luxembourg arguing that the country has failed [...]
UK telco BT said it expects the UK to pass the 10 million ADSL subscriber milestone this week, boosted by an uptake in unbundled lines. BT said that its wholesale division supplies services to more than 8.7 million customers, via service providers including BT Retail, whilst Openreach supplies more than 1.3 million lines to customers [...]
Vodafone will next week, launch fixed broadband in the UK, responding to increasing challenges in its home market. The company has inked a deal with British incumbent, BT, to provide the infrastructure for the new broadband internet service, dubbed: “Vodafone At Home.” Unlike rivals Sky and Carphone Warehouse which have limited domestic coverage, Vodafone’s alliance [...]
The success of local loop unbundling across Europe could be its undoing, according to a new report from industry analyst, Analysys. The analyst firm argues that exchanges are becoming overcrowded and, pointing to the Netherlands as an example, suggests “the balance of power may shift back to incumbents”. In its latest report, “The Competitive Dynamics [...]
Industry analysts at Ovum have heard that Tiscali is looking to sell its UK division with a speculative price tag of around £600m. If true, the news comes as something of a surprise. Only a couple of months ago, Tiscali revised its group strategy to focus on its core markets of Italy and the UK [...]
UK telco BT said on Monday that “under a new and more conservative actuarial methodology,” its pension deficit has been recalculated as £3.4bn, considerably higher than previously thought. Under the new scheme, BT will make deficit payments equivalent to £280m per annum for 10 years with the first three years instalments paid up front. The [...]
On Saturday night, Iceland lost much of its Internet connectivity after one of two submarine cables that serve landings on the island failed. Downstream customers including a major hospital, the national academic network and thousands of DSL users were affected by the outage. International telecoms connectivity to Iceland is dependent on two links – either [...]
Every week around 1.25 million consumers around the world sign up for broadband, according to the latest statistics published by industry analyst Point Topic on Friday, with around two thirds of new subscribers choosing DSL. At the end of September, the global broadband subscriber base reached more than 263 million, with DSL contributing more than [...]
As BT gears up to launch its IPTV service next week, industry analyst Forrester Research has warned of low consumer interest and only moderate revenue potential for the technology in Europe. Even after a slow ramp up, Forrester predicts only one in four European xDSL/fibre broadband subscribers will have IPTV by 2016. Although this average [...]
French operator Orange made the enterprise version of Unique, its fixed mobile convergence (FMC) offering, to the first corporate users in France on Tuesday. The Business Together package, which is a suite of SIP-based multimedia services, unifies telephony, collaboration, instant messaging and multimedia communications into a single interface, which can be accessed from a computer, [...]
Only 4 per cent of UK internet users regularly use Skype to make VoIP calls, according to figures published by Jupiter Research on Monday. However, VoIP services in general are used by 12 per cent of online consumers, the analyst found. According to Jupiter, unlike the situation in many countries, Skype faces tough market conditions [...]
The UK’s incumbent carrier BT said Tuesday that it has started transferring the first customer lines over to its next generation 21st Century Network (21CN). BT has started to move customers in the village of Wick, near Cardiff, as part of the first phase of the national roll out of the 21CN. All work will [...]
BT has confirmed it is to launch its long-awaited internet television service next Monday. The BT Vision service will pump television over broadband into people’s homes for the first time in the British incumbent’s history. A spokesman told Telecoms.com that the service will “only be available to BT broadband customers initially”, he would not be [...]
France Telecom’s mobile unit Orange said Friday that it has launched High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) services in Toulouse and Bordeaux. The operator said users of the new network would typically experience better latency, enhanced usability of current applications and would be better able to deploy new types of real time applications in the [...]
The German government agreed minor amendments to the country’s telecoms bill on Tuesday evening, paving the way for a “regulatory holiday” for incumbent carrier Deutsche Telekom (DT) while threatening to stifle competition in the broadband market. The amendments appear to hinge on the definition of new markets, proposing that regulation be reduced on those companies [...]
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