PC Pro online magazine has shortlisted the IT companies for its annual PC Pro Service and Reliability Awards which will be given away to the winners at a function to be held on 17 September 2008. This year, more than 15,000 readers have voted for the companies that contest in various product categories, PC Pro said.

The finalists for the PC Pro awards have been chosen on the basis of the customers’ experience with the companies, reliability, the customer support the companies offer and their ability to retain the customers etc.

As for the broadband internet related services, the shortlisted broadband providers are as follows:

Finalists for Best ISP Award
Be Internet, Demon Internet, Eclipse, Freedom 2Surf, Madasafish, Nildram, O2, PlusNet, Sky, Virgin Media, Zen Internet

Finalists for Best Web Host Award
1and1.co.uk, Fast2host, Heart Internet, Memset, Namesco, Zen Internet

Finalists Wireless Router Award
3Com, Buffalo, D-Link, Draytek, Linksys, Netgear, Zyxel

PC Pro also offers three editorial awards to the companies for their innovations and outstanding contribution to the business and technology. All the three awards – Real World Business, Technology Innovator and Environmental Innovator of the Year are decided by the PC Pro editorial team. BT Global Services, the major subsidiary of BT Group has been shortlisted for Environmental Innovator of the Year Award.

The Research firm, YouGov released its latest findings on the impact of mobile broadband in recent times. The survey conducted by the research firm shows that at least one out of every eight mobile broadband subscribers has been using it as an alternative mode of internet access or just switched from their current fixed broadband provider to a mobile broadband package.

Mobile broadband has been looked upon as a technology that is used to supplement to the traditional broadband technologies like ADSL or cable broadband. However, interestingly, some people have taken mobile broadband in place of fixed broadband services as new mobile broadband deals come with higher speeds and large download limits.

The report also shows that a few respondents (5 %) who use both ADSL or cable broadband services with mobile broadband have been thinking to leave their fixed line broadband ISP after a year or so and to completely adopt to the mobile broadband technology for their needs.

However, the majority of the mobile broadband users (64%) still think that mobile broadband is just an supplement to their current ADSL or cable broadband service and it may take some more time for mobile broadband to completely replace the existing fixed line broadband internet services.

Among the mobile broadband users, 4 percent of the subscribers get the mobile broadband service from their companies while three percent of the mobile broadband users are teleworkers who work away from the office.

Despite the stronger growth visible in mobile broadband market, significant number of mobile broadband users (25%) complain over the inconsistent speeds, the hefty cancellation fee and the expensive monthly cost of a mobile broadband deal.

Marek Vaygelt of YouGov has commented:
"Customers' find Mobile Broadband easy to use and install but transmission speeds and to a lesser extent network coverage reduce the initial enjoyment of getting up and running."

The Sky broadband provider has launched Sky+, a new digital TV package for its existing as well as new customers. The Sky broadband and Sky TV customers can get this package for £99 with free standard installation, according to the report.

However, the new customers will have to pay the normal price of £150 with £30 set up fee to get this package. Currently, Sky broadband offers three broadband packages – Sky Base, Sky Mid and Sky Max. Its See Speak Surf broadband bundles are available for the monthly price starting from £16. All the Sky customers can upgrade their DTV package to Sky+ package by paying just £99.

Meanwhile, Andrew Parker of the Financial Times has predicted better growth for Sky broadband. Since, only one-tenths of Sky TV customers have subscribed to Sky broadband services, Sky broadband is better positioned to attract more customers from its TV customer base.

Currently, there are 98.9 million Sky TV customers while Sky broadband has 1.6 million customers and is placed in fifth position in terms of market share of UK broadband market.

The latest financial results from Sky reported that the ISP has added 200,000 new customers during the Q2, 2008. Sky broadband offers a wide range of broadband bundles and faces fierce competition with other providers like BT and Virgin Media.

However, Andrew Parker says that Sky broadband can easily achieve speedy growth amidst its rival ISPs.
"Sky has taken the broadband market by storm since it began offering internet access two years ago. It has signed up 1.6m customers, and become the fifth-largest broadband company."

The UK telecom regulator, Ofcom released its Communications Market Report for the first quarter of this year. According to the report, the uptake of broadband bundles has gone up by nearly two hundred percent while the average budget that the UK households spend for the internet & broadband related services has declined from £9.87 to £9.45 during 2006-7.

It should be noted that Point topic, the broadband research has also reported the growing popularity of broadband bundles which are becoming cheaper option for the broadband customers when compared with stand-alone broadband deals. Confirming this fact, Ofcom’s latest report shows that the subscriptions to broadband bundles have grown up to 32% by March 2008 as against 18% in 2006.

Among the broadband types, fixed line broadband connections make up more than half of the total broadband connections (54%). ADSL broadband connections that are accessed via landlines have grown by 6 percent during the last one year.

Switching broadband providers has been on rise during the last twelve months. Around one-third (27%) of the broadband customers in the UK have switched their ISP at least once during the quarter ended in March, 2008.

As for the broadband speeds, the maximum speeds that the broadband providers advertised for their products were around 5.9Mbps on average in the last quarter, which was significantly higher than the advertised (3.6Mbps) speeds a couple of years ago. Although there was discontent with the speeds attainable by the broadband customers, the over-all customer satisfaction did not decline much thanks to the improved services offered by the ISPs in recent times.

While high speed broadband products are gaining more popularity in recent times, the mobile broadband is another product that has become huge success as it offers convenience to the customers to access the internet on the move. Many mobile broadband providers now offer free dongle with their packages while some mobile broadband packages come with free laptop offer such as the mobile broadband packages offered by T-mobile and 3 mobile broadband provider.

By the end of June, 2008, the monthly sales figure of USB modems (dongles) has exceeded 133,000 as against 69,000 dongles a month in February, 2008. Currently, there are more than 2 million mobile broadband connections in the UK out of which one-fourths of the customers (511,000) were added during the last five months.

Similarly, the 3G mobile phone users who use their handsets to access the internet have also increased significantly during the last twelve months. Currently, there are over 12.5 million 3G mobile broadband users thanks to the net addition of 4.7 million connections made during the last year.

IPTV services have also shown great growth as 17 percent of the broadband users are now watching on-demand videos and TV programmes on the internet. This means the IPTV services like BT Vision and BBC iPlayer have doubled the viewer-ship during the last year. Now, the major IPTV broadcaster, BBC iPlayer offers over 700,000 videos/day online to its subscribers. Online videos have also become hugely popular as the leading online video player, Youtube is now being watched by more than 9 million customers.

Mobile broadband internet is becoming hotter nowadays as many UK mobile broadband providers are shifting their focus on upgrading their mobile networks to provide better speeds to their customers. For instance, Orange has already announced its plans to launch 14.4Mbps mobile broadband service by the end of next year while Vodafone, the major mobile broadband provider currently offers 7.2Mbps products to its customers.

On seeing the potential demand for high speed mobile broadband services, Three (3) mobile ISP has also unveiled its plans to launch super-fast mobile broadband that can deliver up to 14.4Mbps speeds to its customers in near future. It should be noted that 3 mobile broadband products offer up to 2.8Mbps speeds while the ISP has been upgrading its networks to offer 7.2Mbps speeds on a gradual phase. Since, mobile broadband speeds vary due to many factors, most customers get speeds around 1 Mbps on average. The upgrade is likely to increase the average speeds to 2Mbps which, the ISP thinks, can cater the needs of majority of its customers.

"This means we might get 2Mb when we upgrade. The appetite for data is huge, so we have to have a sufficiently deep network, with the right amount of density and backhaul, to cater for all customers." 3 mobile broadband says.

However, the signal strength is a crucial factor for getting maximum speeds that largely depends upon geographical location of the customers.

"For instance, with 7.2Mb you have to be within around 200m of a mobile mast to really get the top speeds,"

The upgrading of Three’s HSPA mobile broadband network is expected to be completed in a couple of months. While 3 mobile broadband customers can access 7.2Mbps downstream speeds, the ISP is hopeful to increase it to 14.4Mbps in near future as the greater capacity of its networks will be used to achieve this.

O2 broadband provider who also owns Be broadband has released the latest half yearly financial results for the period that ended on 30th June, 2008. The report shows that the total broadband customers of the ISP rose to 194,220, thanks to the 62,800 net additions made during the last quarter.

It should be noted that the high-speed broadband provider has added 123,510 new broadband customers during the first half year while 60,711 were added during the first quarter of the year. Although the latest quarter showed marginal growth when compared to the previous quarter, O2 Telefonica is one of the UK broadband providers who have posted excellent growth during the second quarter in a highly competitive market environment.

O2 broadband offers not only offers reliable, cost-effective, high speed broadband packages (up to 24Mbps download speed) but also offers great value mobile and business broadband packages. It should be noted that O2 broadband has recently launched its new broadband package – Broadband Home Away which offers home broadband, wi-fi broadband access and mobile broadband to the customers for just a £20 per month.

Nick Wilkins of O2 broadband says:
"In previous years a lot of the uptake was driven by ‘free’ broadband offers, but now people are starting to appreciate the benefits of higher quality services," Mr Wilkins told technology news provider Hexus. Things like the BBC iPlayer mean that people now want higher bandwidth with higher download limits."

One of the anti-spam solution providers, ClearMyMail has released its latest report on spam affected broadband customers and a list of top ten UK ISPs who were adversely affected by the spam attacks during the second quarter of 2008. According to the research, the broadband customers of Orange broadband provider were found to be the most spam targeted email users among the broadband users in the UK.

While Orange tops the table with 96.63% average spam rate, Toucan and BT broadband providers have been placed in third and sixth place respectively. Tiscali and its susbdiary, Pipex Internet have also found a place in the top ten ISPs targeted by spammers with more than 80 percent average spam rate. The broadband bundle provider, Toucan which is placed in third position after Orange and Mistral Internet had a average spam rate of 93.71 %.

However, a few broadband providers like Sky have managed to guard their customers from spam attacks as seen by their improved positions in the table. Sky broadband which was in the seventh place (84.9 %) in the previous report, does not figure in the present list of top ten ISPs (affected by spammers), thanks to the efficient measures taken by the ISP to stop the junk emails from reaching their customers.

Likewise, the report also gives information on the top ten nations that send spam to the UK broadband customers during the last quarter. Accordingly, most part of the junk emails (19.65 %) that broadband customers in the UK receive come from the UK followed by other nations like the USA (12.57%), Uruguay (7.40%), Turkey (7.22%), Italy (3.98%), Russia (3.52%), Poland (3.48%), China (3.41%), France (3.33%) and Brazil (3.00%).

The UK cable ISP, Virgin Media has announced its second quarter 2008 results which shows that the total number of broadband connections has jumped from 3,781,800 to 3,836,100 during the last quarter. The percentage of customers who opt for its 20Mb broadband product (XL broadband) continued to grow, however, the number of single product subscribers and the number of phone only subscribers has fallen by 64,800 and 24,000 respectively during the quarter. There were also 19,500 net customer disconnections during the quarter.

The broadband bundle offers, especially, triple-play packages had received excellent response from its broadband customers, Virgin Media reports. The sale of bundle offers has grown at a record 53.1% at the quarter-end compared to 45.2% a year ago. There were 54,600 new broadband connections added during the quarter showing a marginal decline when compared with previous quarter, however, they were up 19% year-on-year.

What is impressive is there was 82% growth in Virgin Media XL 20MB broadband during the last 12 months, according to the latest quarterly results. The cable ISP is confident that the upgrading of its 4Mb tier to 10Mb will result in an improved percentage of customers subscribing to 10Mb rather than 2Mb.

Neil Berkett, Chief Executive Officer of Virgin Media, said:

"We have enjoyed another quarter of low churn and our customers buying more products from us than ever before. Combined with a rigorous emphasis on making the business a more efficient organization, we have seen OCF growth and strong cash generation. We have continued to focus on putting the customer at the heart of everything we do and improving the quality of the services and experience we offer. We're also pleased with the improvement in performance of our mobile operation from the prior quarter.

We will continue to exploit our competitive advantages in leading next generation broadband in the UK and redefining the on-demand TV experience. The second half of this year will mark a major milestone as we roll out our unrivalled 50Mb broadband service. We believe this superfast service, combined with our leading video-on-demand product, will prove extremely attractive to existing and new customers."

Samknows.com has published its first 'Performance Monitoring Report' on the UK broadband providers recently. The report which contains more than 40 pages is available in Adobe .PDF format and can be downloaded from its website. Earlier, Samknows has installed a unit on the home/office broadband connections in the UK that enabled it to monitor the performance of ISPs and get the essential data such as broadband speed, usage, throughput, connection failures etc.

Presently, the findings are based on 223 monitoring units, Samknows says, and the monitoring process will be expanded in the future. While the performance of the most broadband providers in the UK has been monitored (using 20 units on average), a few ISPs like AOL broadband provider is yet to be included in the test, according to the report. The performance of a few broadband providers like BT, Be and Virgin Media has been tested by more than 20 monitoring units.

Here are some of the findings based on the test conducted during six week period from 223 monitoring units:

There was little discernable difference between most ISPs in majority of metrics.

The ISPA award winner, Zen Internet offered the fewest failures across all metrics.

Among the ISPs, Virgin Media’s cable services and Be/O2’s services provided a consistently low latency throughout (means better speed). Virgin ADSL broadband services performed poorly in this area. Latency levels: Virgin Media (cable) - 29.03ms, Be Unlimited - 30.50ms, Plus Net - 37.68ms, BT - 37.84ms, TalkTalk - 43.99ms, Virgin.net (ADSL) - 62.56ms

BT broadband provider provided the fastest throughput when measured as a percentage of implied line speed.
The cable broadband provider, Virgin Media’s cable throughput remained consistent on their 2, 4 and 10Mbps products, however, was quite variable on their 20Mbps product (Virgin Media XL broadband).

Interestingly, the use of traffic shaping in the networks of BT and PlusNet, resulted in certain classes of traffic slowing significantly during peak hours.

The ADSL 2+ broadband provider, Be Unlimited which has a fairly robust DNS service has performed well in most areas like DNS performance, less number of pocket loss, VoIP performance, web page fetching times etc.

The latest quarterly (Q2) results from BT broadband provider shows that there are 13.0 million BT Wholesale broadband connections of which BT’s retail share was 35 per cent, with 31 per cent of net additions in the quarter. Accordingly, BT Retail that includes BT Total broadband, PlusNet and other ISPs has had net additions of 103,000 connections, taking the total figure to 4.5 million by the end of the quarter. There are also 4.8 million local loop unbundled lines with a growth of 1.8 million connections year-on-year basis.

BT’s IPTV service, BT Vision has managed to add 68,000 connections during the last quarter. Now, there are 282,000 BT Vision customers as of June 30 and BT Vision also offers Setanta Sports 1 for free with its IPTV package.

The revenue from broadband services grew by 17 % year-on-year basis while BT broadband provider continued to improve its services during the year.

“BT’s retail market share of net additions of DSL and LLU connections in the quarter was 31 per cent, the eighth consecutive quarter of achieving 30 per cent market share or more. The BT Total Broadband offering was further enhanced in July with the launch of the next generation Hub 2.0, offering our customers the latest wireless functionality and increased security. In addition, we launched the BT Total Broadband Anywhere package in May, combining BT ToGo and BT Total Broadband services in the home. The installed base of BT ToGo customers was 34,000 by June 30, 2008.”

BT Fon Wi-fi Community has managed to get over 121,000 members who can access wi-fi hotspots of BT Openzone in the UK and Fon hotspots outside the UK. The number of Openzone hotspots has also risen to 3,000 during the quarter thanks to the deal signed between BT and the Brend Hotels chain.

The broadband research firm Point Topic reports that fibre based broadband network that BT has announced to launch will not only provide super-fast broadband services to the broadband customers in the UK, but will also help the ISP to achieve higher revenues once the project is completed. Tim Johnson, the Chief Analyst, Point Topic says that the BT’s 1.5mn FTTP & FTTC network costs just £150 per household as against £800 per household reported by BT in its earlier estimate of £20bn fibre broadband network. In addition, the research firm believes that the existing copper network will be worth only scrap value within 10 years without the new fibre optic broadband services.

“I believe investment in NGA is essential for BT, and it should generate a good return for decades to come. On the other hand, if BT doesn’t renew its local loop infrastructure its existing copper network will be worth only scrap value within 10 years”

He has further said:

“Fibre in the local loop combined with BT’s 21CN project allows BT to provide a complete IP-based telecoms environment to the end user. Customers should get more flexibility for less cost and dreams like seamless fixed-mobile convergence will become reality,”

It should be noted that BT has recently announced its fibre optic broadband network to provide faster internet services to 40% of the homes in the UK. The project will cost £1.5bn and is expected to be completed in the next five years. As for the cost of the project and the revenues, Johnson says that “BT stands to make good margins on this first phase of its next-generation investment and needs to earn only about £3 per month per household for a good return.”

“Of course, even £3 a month would be a heavy extra burden to put on the price of broadband services. But the £3 is for the partial replacement of what broadband customers are already buying, not for something additional.”

“BT will also get lots of benefits from cost savings and other new services, besides basic broadband. So I don’t think the NGA investment should increase the cost of broadband overall – although people will get a lot more for their money.”

The latest report from the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO) shows that broadband connections in nations in Western Europe will touch 114m by the end of 2008. The report also shows that the revenues from the internet connections offered by private internet service providers rose 10.2 percent year-on-year to £26.6bn which was marginally lower than 11.4% in 2007.

Among the EU nations, Germany has the largest market of internet providers who have earned more than 8.4bn Euros from their businesses in 2008. This means, Germany has nearly one-fourths of market share in European nations and the revenues grew by 8.5 percent year-on-year basis

Likewise, the UK and France have an equal 13.6%.market share of 33.7bn (Euros) EU market. While France posted 22.5 percent growth in revenues and had 4.6bn Euros during the year, the UK had 7.2 percent year-on-year growth and 6 bn Euros from internet related businesses.

Spain and Italy had a market share of 3.2bn Euros and 2.9bn Euros respectively.

Bruno Lamborghini, the Chairman of EITO said:

“Innovative additional services and falling prices are helping the connections business to achieve vigorous growth. Fast Internet connections are being offered today in combination with low-priced telephone flat rates or online on-demand services for movies and music.”

BT, the largest broadband provider in the UK released its report '21st Century Life Index' which throws light on the prevailing broadband scenario in the UK. The study conducted by the ISP shows that the internet surfing habits of the broadband consumers have been changing drastically for the last ten years both in terms of time spent by the consumers online and the websites they visit. For instance, the number of broadband customers who spend an average 5 hours per week has gone up from 25% to 58% during the last ten years.

The statistical study also shows that the number of internet users who spend 7 – 10 hours per week has moved up from 14 percent to 27 percent while nearly one-fourths of the internet users go online 11 to 30 hours and 7% of the broadband users spend more than 30 hours per week online.

Likewise, broadband users seem to browse through different websites as revealed by the BT’s report. About ten years ago, nearly half of the internet users (45 %) used to visit up to five websites per week, however, currently, 35 percent of the broadband users visit at least six websites per week while some of them are found to be browsing more than 50 websites showing 49 % increase as against the same figures in 1999.

As for the uses of internet, online shopping, music downloads and VoIP telephony have been becoming popular activities and been witnessing tremendous growth since 1999. Currently, nearly half of the UK internet users (41 %) do regular online shopping as against just two percent in 1998. Among the online shoppers, 48 percent of them use internet to buy flights or holidays while books, videos & music and clothes are other things that the online shoppers frequently buy online.

Music downloads has been other favourite activity with internet users in the UK with 30 percent of them download music tracks/albums while one-fourths of them listen to web radio stations and 14 percent of the surfers use broadband for online gaming.

As a communication tool, email is all set to gain more popularity as seven percent of the internet users preferred to use email for their communication needs while just one percent of internet users opted for email ten years ago. The report also shows that employees and workers spend an average of 4.9 times per hour to check their emails. Interestingly, significant portion of the people still believed that face-to-face communication is more effective than telephony or email.

The BPI (British Phonographic Industry), the association of UK record companies has signed a deal (MOU) with the six largest internet service providers of the UK and the UK government to prevent illegal filesharing that takes places among the internet users. The Motion Pictures Association of America and BERR have also joined hands with the BPI to reach the historical agreement with the broadband providers.

According to the MOU, the ISPs will have to comply with the demands made by music and other rightsholders so that all the signatories will work together to reduce illegal filesharing on the internet. During the first year of implementing the new regulations, the broadband customers who are identified as sharing files illegally will receive informative letters from their ISPs while other while effective mechanisms to deal with repeat offenders will be implemented gradually.

BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor has commented:

“BPI has always believed that a partnership approach is the best way forward, as we showed with our education campaign with Virgin Media, launched in May. This has demonstrated that ISPs and the music business can work together positively to raise awareness about illegal filesharing. And, working with government, we have been able to build on that progress and encourage other major ISPs to start taking a responsible approach.

“In addition, the music business is constantly innovating to offer new, safe and legal ways to enjoy music online, and to create a future for digital music where creativity and copyright are respected. This MOU will help to create an environment in which such new digital services models can flourish.”

Entanet, the leading broadband network provider that sells broadband services to the UK broadband providers on wholesale basis has announced that its ADSL 2+ based products (Entanet 2Plus Broadband) have received immense response from its partners while claiming many ADSL customers switched to ADSL 2+ broadband since the launch.
Many prominent ISPs in the UK now offer Entanet 2Plus Broadband which offer upto 24Mbps download speeds to their customers while a few ISPs are expected to launch high-speed broadband packages in near future. Further, a few ISPs who are not associated with Entanet broadband network are also set to launch ADSL 2+ products next month, according to the report.

Darren Farnden, the Marketing Manage of Entanet said:
“We expected the launch day to be very much an awareness raising event among partners, with our sales teams and marketing communications promoting the availability of Entanet 2Plus broadband.

However, we were delighted to see orders coming through immediately, with customers modifying their existing ADSL connection to ADSL2+. What’s more, some of these customers were even live on ADSL2+ within a couple of hours.”

Meanwhile, Entanet has also said that the deployment of BT’s Wholesale Broadband Managed Connect (WBMC) is expected to be completed by next year. This means, the ISPs that get broadband infrastructure through WBC will need to wait for another 12 months to supply ADSL 2+ broadband services to their customers.

Darren Farnden has further said:

"Taking WBC is a significant part of our strategy and puts us in an enviable position to launch both resale and wholesale ADSL2+ broadband to the market well ahead of CPs who are looking to offer services based on BT’s more restricted managed WBC platform.”