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2
Dec 2008 |
Telecom says a power fault at its central Auckland exchange caused the weekend's catastrophic national broadband outage. But the telco has yet to work out the cause of the fault, and there is so far no word from its retail division on customer compensation.
The company says its broadband blackout began at 9pm Friday night, swamping its help lines. Basic internet connectivity was restored for all customers between 4am and 5am, but problems with some services, such as email, persisted into Saturday evening... |
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30
Nov 2008 |
BT is slashing the cost of its core broadband products for internet service providers in an attempt to prevent the nation's web connections grinding to a halt under the weight of bandwidth-hungry applications such as the BBC's iPlayer.
'There has been a lot of noise from our customers that end-users are consuming a lot more bandwidth,' said Steve Robertson, who runs Openreach, the business that leases BT's lines to its rivals. 'For us there is a real potential bottleneck that has to be addressed now.'
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28
Nov 2008 |
Home broadband customers planning to watch the BBC's new online streaming service have been warned they may exceed their ISPs' download limits.
Last week, the broadcaster announced it will deliver live BBC One and BBC Two shows online - with users simply logging onto the designated channel website from any PC, mobile phone or other internet-enabled device.
However, price comparison site BroadbandChoices said those regularly watching live BBC programmes online could exceed the monthly download limits i... |
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28
Nov 2008 |
European broadband users looking for truly fast services can increasingly turn to their cable operators as well as to the continent's growing band of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) players to satisfy their needs, according to industry lobby group European Cable Communications Association .
The trade association, better known as Cable Europe, says the region's cable players are making "significant progress in the rollout of super-fast internet services of more than 100Mbit/s," and identifies Numéricable in Fran... |
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26
Nov 2008 |
Sweden has the highest penetration of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connections in Europe, with more than 8 percent of households hooked up to an optical access line at the end of June 2008, according to new figures from the FTTH Council Europe .
Its neighbor, Norway, is not far behind, with a 7.2 percent FTTH penetration rate. Those are the only two European nations that have more than 5 percent of their homes hooked up with fiber.
In general, the Nordic countries dominate the European FTTH landscape. The... |
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25
Nov 2008 |
Easynet Connect is extending its Etherstream service to offer businesses a 40Mb/sec connection over copper.
The speed boost has been made possible by infrastructure guardian BT OpenReach, which has allowed the broadband vendor to access a frequency that wasn't previously available.
According to the company, the service will use the same backbone as its existing 20Mb/sec SDSL network, which offers identical upstream and downstream speeds
However, by transmitting data over the higher frequency and bo... |
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25
Nov 2008 |
Great news for internet addicts all across America - Virgin America has answered our prayers, and delivered the best news we could have hoped for; that they plan to have free WiFi available on all of their flights by April. This of course means that we can now look forward to keeping up on our e-mails, streaming our favourite music and checking the latest news, views and reviews on Geek.com whilst on the move.
Free WiFi on flights is great news for us all and was inevitably going to happen at some point,... |
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24
Nov 2008 |
We’ve had word from a Starbucks insider that the coffee chain will begin offering completely free Wi-Fi access next year, letting gadget-owners hop online without a T-Mobile account.
The change is still in the works, but could be in place across the UK as early as January 2009.
According to our source, it’ll offer completely free internet access for coffee slurping customers, bringing Starbucks into line with the likes of McDonalds, which already offers free access to customers in partnership with The... |
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23
Nov 2008 |
LEADING local mobile phone services company Vodacom Tanzania Limited is to launch a range of lower tariffs after being able to identify superfluous cell sites in under-utilized areas of its network, it has been disclosed.
The firm’s success in identifying the redundant cell sites follows network optimization from Aircom International, whose OPTIMA tool has produced enough regional network data to help set a benchmark for effective operational strategy within the Vodacom Group.
’’Vodacom is using OPTIM... |
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21
Nov 2008 |
Subscribers to DSL Internet services provided by Canada's biggest phone company will have to put up with having their online speeds manipulated by the telco, the federal communications regulator has ruled.
The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission said Thursday that Bell Canada can continue traffic-shaping during off-peak periods it began in the spring in an attempt to fight a minority of music, video and file-sharing downloaders it says are unfairly taking away bandwidth from other... |
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21
Nov 2008 |
Nearly nineteen out of twenty connections to the Internet are via broadband.
In September 2008, broadband connections accounted for 94.1 percent of all Internet connections, up from 92.8 percent in June 2008. This is according to the latest update from the survey of Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
The figures are released today as part of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) “Internet Connectivity September 2008”. Data showed that broadband connections reached 94.1 percent of all connections (r... |
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21
Nov 2008 |
By some measures, the U.S. broadband market is healthy -- prices have fallen, speed has increased and millions of people have become customers in recent years. But customer choices are still limited, and prices could fall even more with more competition, one telecom expert said Friday.
Other countries with higher speeds and lower prices have generally taken a different route than the U.S., which has generally relied on the marketplace to determine the cost and quality of broadband, said John Windhausen, ... |
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20
Nov 2008 |
The leaders of two of Australia's largest ISP's see a viable business model in offering free or discounted broadband connectivity, sponsored by advertisements targeted according to a user's Web surfing habits.
Privacy advocates have been rallying against the attempts of online advertising vehicles such as U.K. start-up Phorm to track Web surfer's habits at ISP-level to deliver them targeted advertising.
But neither Justin Milne, group managing director of Telstra Media or Simon Hackett, managing direc... |
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20
Nov 2008 |
Officials at the CDMA Development Group reportedly have announced that their cellular standard is currently enjoying 475 million subscribers as cell phones proliferate worldwide.
Interestingly, according to CDMA, the wireless standard now accounts for more than 52 percent of the cell phone market in North America, with a subscription of 145 million.
The CDMA subscriber base added 13 million users during the third quarter this year to exceed 463 million, while CDMA 1xEV-DO grew by 5 million net subscr... |
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20
Nov 2008 |
China Telecom, the largest fixed line operator in the country, said it has lost nearly 1.1 million fixed-line users in October, after losing 630,000 users in the previous month, sources reported.
The number of CDMA subscribers decreased by 680,000 in October, bringing down the total number of users to 28.4 million. Meanwhile, the number of broadband services users increased by 700,000, after adding 730,000 users in September.
In the Jan-Oct period, the firm has lost accumulatively 8.45 million fixed-... |
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