News

The Preston City Council (PCC) in Lancashire (England) recently announced that it will be the founding member of a new Preston Digital Cooperative (PDC) organisation, which seeks to promote digital inclusion across communities in the city through the deployment of new digital infrastructure (e.g. free broadband WiFi) and enhancing digital skills. The cooperative is being set up as a way to “bring together public, voluntary and private organisations” working to improve access to connectivity,...

The national regulator, Ofcom, has this morning hit BT with a fine of £17.5m for being “ill-prepared to respond to a catastrophic failure of its emergency call handling service last summer” (here), which readers may recall occurred after a technical fault (“complex software issue”) resulted in 14,000 emergency calls being disrupted. The disruption lasted for 10.5 hours. Just to recap. BT previously revealed that a software bug had caused a “caching issue“, which resulted in impacted calls...

The States of Guernsey, which is the government for the English Channel Island of Guernsey, have moved to improve and simplify the handling of consumer broadband, phone and mobile complaints by adjusting their rules to make clear that the States of Guernsey’s Trading Standards Service (TSS) will be the main body for handling such things. Just to recap. The local government gave telecoms consumers new rights last year, which formally recognised TSS as the body responsible for consumer...

Some of BT’s broadband ISP, phone, TV and mobile customers, specifically a proportion of those who have been or are in the process of being migrated to EE, appear to be experiencing a variety of problems with the process that is causing headaches. Missing services, trouble accessing accounts and general admin errors are just some of the issues being reported. As most readers will hopefully recall, BT has spent the past couple of years gradually working on a big branding change (here and here)...

Alternative UK network operators Trooli and OFNL, which are in the process of rolling out a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTT) groadband network across various parts of the United Kingdom, have today become the latest providers to join the Fibre Cafe connectivity aggregation platform. Fibre Cafe’s platform is essentially designed to tackle the significant integration and automation challenges for broadband ISPs when onboarding new networks (e.g. common processes, a national...

The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of UK broadband ISP and network business TalkTalk, James Smith, has revealed that the debt-laden group’s existing shareholders have “confirmed their intent to provide new funding of over £200m” to support the company’s “working capital and operational costs“. The provider has already spent much of the past couple of years wrestling with its existing c.£1bn debt pile, which in 2023 culminated in a plan to demerge the group into three separate businesses...

A new report from think tank Create Street has suggested that the new UK government should make it easier for local authorities to remove old and “ugly” pay phone boxes, which are said to damage the look of many high streets by attracting litter, graffiti and.. other things. The focus here is on the more modern boxes (e.g. KX100+), rather than BT’s classic red kiosks across the UK or KCOM’s cream-coloured ones in Hull – many of those are now protected. There are now roughly 20,000 remaining...

Existing customers of BT’s online Cloud storage service, which was once frequently offered alongside their various broadband packages, have been notified that the long-running service will finally be switched off on 31st October 2024. At this point “all information will be deleted“, so now might be a good time for users to download anything of relevance. The move, which was spotted by one of ISPreview’s forum community members – ‘Some Edinburgh Guy‘ (here), should not come as too much of a...

Merseyside-based UK ISP BeFibre, which is powered by FullFibre Ltd’s national gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, has sweetened the existing discounts on their top 900Mbps (symmetric) broadband package by throwing in a £75 Amazon gift card (£50 if you take a shorter 12-month term). The package costs from £29 per month on a 24-month term (£45 thereafter). The package itself includes free installation, a WiFi 6 capable Linksys router, a pledge of no in-contract price hikes and...

News Telcos will not longer be allowed to implement mid-contract price rises linked to unclear metrics like inflation In December last year, Ofcom proposed the introduction of stricter rules surrounding mid-contract price hikes for mobile, pay-TV, and broadband customers, after an investigation found that many customers were confused The issue primarily related to inflation-based price increases, where pricing would be linked to indexes like the consumer price index (CPI) or retail price index...