All the latest broadband news from the Broadband Genie news team.
T-Mobile are currently offering a free WiFi enabled laptop for all new mobile broadband customers as part of a web exclusive offer.
Worth £349.99, the Acer TravelMate 5320 comes ready with WiFi HotSpot access and a free USB modem stick bundled with 200 free texts and is available to all those who sign up to the Mobile Broadband Plus 24 month unlimited package. The subscription costs £30 a month, but there is also a next working day laptop delivery charge of £14.99 on top of this.
The laptop itself features a 15.4-inch screen, a Web-cam, a 120Gb hard disk drive and runs on Windows Vista Home Premium.
For more information visit www.t-mobile.co.uk.
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A woman from a Grantham area village who battled to get broadband connections for cut-off residents has been given a pat on the back at the Government-backed UK Catalyst Awards.
Helen Anderson, a founding member of the South Witham Broadband social enterprise was honoured with the Individual Hero award after providing a broadband service for the area after national companies refused to help.
Anderson’s wireless broadband service now provides internet connections throughout Britain and specialises in “long lines” other providers are unwilling to service. Chief Executive Officer of the Community Broadband Network, Malcom Corbett, explained: “South Witham Broadband is a fantastic example of a social enterprise that delivers a first class service to their local community.
“When the big players turn their back on rural communities, creating so-called “not-spots”, it’s great when local people prove them wrong.
“We’re proud to work with SWB and look forward to continuing to help local people set up their own broadband services throughout the UK.”
South Witham Broadband founder, Helen Anderson received her award from Third Sector Minister Phil Hope. Anderson commented: “We’re proud to offer a price competitive, unique service, which relates to customers as individuals, something the big providers would find impossible to match.
“What’s more, through our membership of the Community Broadband Network, we are able to provide mentoring and advice to enterprises similar to ours throughout the UK.
“This enables more and more people to get connected and take charge of their own broadband future.”
Source: Grantham Journal
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Any commuters passing through St Pancras International Station will be able to catch up on emails for free after an announcement that a new wireless broadband hotspot has been set up.
Set up and managed by City Space, the free Wi-Fi access will be available in every nook and cranny of the station - a new initiative that could benefit up to 45 million travellers every year.
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MySpace has struck a deal with The Cloud to offer users access to free Wi-Fi access at more than 7,000 hotspots across the UK until October.
Initially a free service for MySpace social networkers, after October users will have to subscribe to the Wi-Fi service in order to carry on connecting.
As more mobile broadband subscribers are now find that they can connect to the internet without hunting down a hot spot, this partnership is another in a series of similar contracts between The Cloud and a third party.
Managing director of MySpace UK, Anthony Lukom, is confident that this partnership with The Cloud will be enticing for social network fanatics: “MySpace users want to easily communicate with their friends and discover exciting, relevant content wherever they happen to be,” he said.
Source: PC Pro
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Keep an eye out for TV’s ‘How Clean is Your House’ presenters Kim and Aggie as they promote BT’s new IT support line.
The new tech support line will be available between 8am and 11pm 365 days a year for £8.99 a month for all BT customers, with the new promotion suggesting that people should ‘clean up their home technology’.
“It is no longer about just keeping the bathroom clean or the bedroom tidy,” says Kim. “Gadgets and technology are very much at the heart of the modern home, and should be kept in tip top shape.”
“For those of you who need a helping hand, the BT Home IT Support team can literally ‘clean up’ all your technical problems, without you lifting a finger.”
A BT Spokesperson explains: “For more complex issues, a home visit from a BT engineer can help with installing broadband or wireless, improving broadband and computer speed with its new BT Accelerator service, or undertake a full computer health check.”
As well as broadband issues, for £8.99 a month, customers will also be able to seek advice on problems for other household gadgets such as printers, mp3 players and digital cameras.
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Following an announcement last week by Manchester City Council that it hoped to extend its Eastserve wireless broadband connection across the city as part of a new ‘Digital Strategy for Manchester’ scheme, Vodafone has confirmed that it will carry out major upgrade work to its mobile broadband coverage within the city.
As part of a multi-million pound investment Vodafone intends to improve wireless coverage, increase download speeds and will also alter the way it bills its customers. The service will be available through USB dongles, data cards or plug-and-play software, with the expectation that a 2 MB file will be able to be downloaded 10 seconds faster than previously.
Alec Howard, head of PC Connectivity for Vodafone UK, commented on the improvement plan for Manchester: “Manchester, along with five other major conurbations, is now the fastest network in the UK. We have been heavily investing in the network so that when people are out and about they can get the same wireless experience that they do in the office.”
“What’s really important for Manchester is that people travel from all over Britain to do business in Manchester and if they know that the wireless coverage is really good it will drive productivity.”
Source: Manchester Evening News
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ISP PlusNet has announced that it will launch a new £16.99 a month package that includes bundled broadband and phone benefits.
The new 12-month minimum contract offer will give customers the benefits of ‘up to’ 8Mbps broadband download speeds, 1GB of data allowance (although it’s not tallied up if you download between midnight and 8am), home phone line rental and all weekend UK landline calls.
For those who don’t manage to keep within their download cap, additional data usage will be charged at £1 per GB in advance or £1.25 per GB on billing.
Neil Laycock, Plusnet’s CEO explained the thinking behind the new package launch: “There are millions of people paying too much for their broadband and not getting a decent service. It is our response to the economic slowdown. Customers want value-for-money deals and we are confident this fits the bill.”
Additionally, PlusNet has also doubled the usage restrictions on its Broadband Your Way Option 1 package. This now stands at 2GB for £9.99.
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New customers to Be Broadband (O2) will be able to make use of a new ‘888’ promotion launched this week, where an 8Mbps broadband service (1.3Mbps upload) will be available for £8 per month until the end of 2008.
With an ‘out of offer’ monthly subscription price of £14 per month and an initial set-up fee of £24, the offer-enabled package – ‘Be Value’ includes “unlimited usage”, a free 24/7 customer support hotline and a bundled wireless Be Box modem.
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Orange announced today that it will be carrying out improvement work on its 3G network across Scotland, Northern Ireland and North-East England in a hope to make the service faster and more reliable.
The enhance network in these areas should mean that 3G customers are able to make use of a 99 percent call set-up success rate on mobile phones. It is hoped that a faster variant of its 3G/HSDPA service that will support mobile broadband will also be launched in the near future.
Speaking about the new improvement scheme, Peter Marsden, vice president of IT & Networks at Orange, commented: “A robust and reliable network is at the heart of everything we do at Orange and we are dedicated to ensuring our customers in each and every region of the UK feel the benefit of this.” He added: “We are investing heavily to improve our network and this investment is one step closer to our goal of becoming the best UK network for coverage and reliability by 2009.”
Orange will be installing over 450 new 2G and 3G sites over the next twelve months to ensure customers can make calls, send texts and access mobile broadband services with a better success rate.
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Three of the UK’s largest ISPs – Virgin Media, BT and the Carphone Warehouse (TalkTalk, AOL) have come under fire following research results from Internet analyst firm Envisional’s illegal music study.
It was found that 65% of all illegal P2P torrent downloads were carried out by subscribers to these services, with around 28,000 unique IP addresses involved in download activity. Of those active downloaders, 26 per cent originated from a Carphone Warehouse service in June, 21.6 per cent from Virgin Media and 21.2 per cent from BT. July figures showed similar results with changes of no more than 0.2 per cent either way for each provider.
Together, the three providers highlighted in the survey account for approximately 11 million UK-based broadband customers.
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