Itelligent Communications Update 12th September 2007
Kingston Communications Lack of Competition
The only remaining UK independent local phone company ahs denied allegations that it holds local business and consumers to ransom by not allowing competitive ISP’s facilities to offer their broadband packages.
The Independent carried a story that the Liberal Democrat MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside Diana Wallis had tried to push for an investigation into the broadband market in Hull.
Kingston is the sole Broadband ISP in the area and she felt her constituents were being deprived of competition to Kingston.
Kingston Communications, the UK’s only remaining independent local phone company, has hit back at suggestions from an MEP that Hull’s businesses and consumers are “held to ransom” by lack of competition in broadband.
Kingston have denied the allegation by stating that it does offer wholesale packages to other ISP’s but as yet there have been no takers. Simply put in a statement Kingston said that they are obliged under Ofcom rulings to offer wholesale packages to other ISP’s without limit. Whether alternative providers take up the offer is entirely based on commercial decision by those providers and their view of the attractiveness of the market.
As no fibre network has ever been put down in Hull, Virgin Media cannot be a prospective player in the marketplace.
BT Expands City Wi-Fi
Manchester Belfast and Waltham Forest are the latest areas to be covered in BT’s ‘Wireless Cities’ project. The other areas that are covered or are about to be covered include:
Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Nottingham, Portsmouth, Cardiff, Sheffield, Bristol and the City of Westminster.
Anyone with a Wi-Fi equipped computer or laptop can access BT’s network from £25 per month or £6 per hour. The pressure presented by rival 3G could drive these prices lower in the ensuing months. The Cloud still offers a very competitive package at £9.99 per month and it is certainly worth finding out if it covers an area where you live or work. Created in 2003 The Cloud now is one of Europe’s top Wi-Fi providers.
In June Virgin media in an effort to cut the number of technical support calls that were unrelated to broadband being made announced that callers would be paying 25p per minute. It certainly appears to have worked as they have announced that they now need to reappraise the staffing levels of the outsourced IBM controlled call centre in Liverpool, around 90 staff were told that they would no longer be required at the centre.
VoIP provider Skype has again seen a Malware worm released through its instant messaging service. The worm known as Ramex; Skipi or Pykspa arrives as an innocent looking message inviting the recipient to download and run an image file which carries the malware.
The worm can disable ant-malware packages on the PC and it can also disable the security update function, it then propagates itself by sending a message to all in the contact database of the infected PC.
Typical subject headings include – ‘This really funny’; ‘Look what crazy photo Tiffany sent to me….’
With company securities getting to be a hot potato many organizations are looking to control the use of VoIP in their companies with some 62% saying that blocking was essential.
Following the launch of Tradespace earlier this year which is an online community that brings SNE’s and Individual Sellers together with potential customers. BT has announced the launch of a set of free business management tools – BT Business Builder.
BT Business Builder offers functions such as bookkeeping, invoicing, sales, planning, and payroll. HR and Health & Safety plus a 24 hr Legal Helpline.
BT also feature another service known as BT Workspace a web-based, easy to use hosted software that helps groups of people share information, manage projects, and improve customer relationships.
Basic packages are Free but as an alternative, there is a fee based service that offers additional features.
(All entries on this Blog are based on snippets of information drawn from a variety of sources and are accurate to the best knowledge of the collator featured for information purposes only
September 16th, 2007 at 9:03 am
By the way, Virgin does do services over DSL too. I hear that the infrastructure in Hull needs a massive investment, so can see why nobody else is coming in if its uneconomic.
H
September 16th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Yes I agree, sorry if it was not too clear re Virgin I was of course alluding to Hull when I said that Virgin had no fibre in place.