Ofcom has announced it will not stand in the way of companies and organisations investing in super-fast broadband services for UK homes and businesses. For UK homes, this will mean that different members of a household will be able to access a variety of high-bandwidth services simultaneously, e.g. TV programmes, online games, music downloads. For UK business, this will mean that businesses will have improved data retrieval, remote access and video conferencing. The 2 main investors in super-fast broadband will be Virgin (who already offer a 50Mb broadband speed) and BT (who aim to offer a 100Mb broadband speed). This Ofcom video shows the benefits of super-fast broadband.
Ofcom’s CEO, Ed Richards, has said "We want to promote investment to support the widespread adoption of superfast broadband but we want to balance that with the need for competition," He added that this would be done in 3 steps:
1. provide the current conditions for investment in fibre
2. look at how to reach the areas not covered by this market-led approach
3. consider the evolution to even faster technologies
This Channel 4 video shows Richards and and Steve Robertson, CEO of BT Openreach, talk about their plans to roll out super-fast broadband across the UK.
Plum are keeping tracks on the progress of super-fast broadband. Click here in order to sign up and find out when super-fast broadband comes available, please start the message with SFB.
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
Ofcom give a thumbs-up for super-fast broadband
Thursday, 20 November 2008
Telecoms Industry Giants Cut Thousands of Jobs
Last week BT announced that they were to cut 10,000 jobs worldwide, with 7,000 to be cut in the UK. This news shortly after BT announced a shock £80 million drop in profits, and UK unemployment levels were reported to be as high as 1.83 million. BT is the 4th large telecoms company to announce job losses in the past week; Virgin Media plans to cut 2,200 jobs over the next three years, yellow pages group Yell is cutting 1,300 posts this year, and Vodafone wants to reduce costs by £1bn a year with an unspecified number of job losses.
BT’s Chief Executive, Ian Livingston, explained that BT’s cuts were part on an ongoing efficiency programme: 'This reflects the fact that our prices have been falling every year for several years now,' he said. 'Since that is the case we have to deliver costs savings every year. But we also anticipated reasonably early on that economic conditions were worsening.”
With these large companies cutting jobs, what effect will this have on small and medium-sized companies? At Plum we feel that we can adapt to the current market forces and are bullish about the future. We have recently hired business graduate Rhodri Lloyd to help us improve our customers’ experience.