Car enthusiasts have warmly greeted Amazon’s spectacular launch of its The Grand Tour series, starring Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May (who originally presented the BBC’s Top Gear). According to Amazon, the first episode of The Grand Tour has become “the biggest premiere on Amazon Prime”, with millions of streams in the USA, UK, … Read more
Update: Sadly, BT has stopped trials of LR-VDSL as the technology has not proved as effective as it originally hoped. We think it’s best that BT focuses on bringing Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) to everyone as soon as possible. A major weakness of the Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) technology that BT is currently deploying for superfast broadband … Read more
2021 update: Read our latest blog posts about Sky Q and other TV services Last year, we reviewed the BT Ultra HD (4k) TV service on its launch. We were very impressed with the image quality achieved with BT’s flagship Ultra HD football content. We now review Sky’s own Ultra HD service, which is delivered … Read more
Updated February 2021. This product is no longer commercially available. With all the press interest in superfast and ultrafast broadband technologies, it is easy to understand the frustrations for consumers and businesses that only have access to basic ADSL services with low speeds. Despite the rapid roll-out of superfast fixed broadband services, the Department of … Read more
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BT has announced an ambition to roll out ultrafast broadband to 12 million UK premises by 2020 – two million more than previously announced. Two technologies will be used to achieve this: Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) and G.fast. BT’s FTTP plans are getting a boost, with BT aiming to reach two million premises with … Read more
Updated: February 2021. Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on how you see it), G.fast is now taking a back seat to Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology, which is a much superior technology. G.fast is fundamentally flawed because performance degrades the further you are located from the cabinet/distribution point. While it’s still relatively early days in the roll-out of … Read more
Reflecting the availability of a new (so called “55/10”) VDSL2 speed profile on BT’s fibre broadband network, BT has increased the maximum download throughput offered on its BT Infinity service to about 52 Mbps. Prior to the change, the BT Infinity 1 offering was based upon the standard “40/10” service provided by BT Openreach. This … Read more
Update: View our latest articles on TV by visiting our Blog Articles Related to Streamed TV. At 2.45pm on Sunday 2nd August 2015, BT made history by launching the first broadcast channel in Ultra HD format in the UK. On its new BT Sport Ultra HD channel, delivered by fibre broadband, BT screened the 2015 … Read more
For all our up-to-date articles on streamed TV services visit Blog Articles on Streamed TV. As described in our previous article HD and 4k Delivered by Fibre Broadband, Ultra HD content is developing nicely and BT has now arrived on the scene! BT has made a very promising start with the launch of the UK’s … Read more
Our favourite modem routers – the Billion 8800NL and the enhanced Billion 8800AXL – provide superb performance and represent great upgrades for broadband users using either conventional ADSL broadband or fibre broadband. For fibre broadband users, they are also fully compatible with G.INP, which is an enhancement implemented on BT’s fibre network to improve error … Read more
Read our latest articles: Blog articles related to streamed TV In this blog, we look at the delivery of TV services, including the very latest Ultra HD (sometimes termed ‘4k’) services from Netflix, Amazon and BT. Superfast broadband brings consumers the opportunity of enhancing TV delivered by traditional satellite (e.g. Sky HD and Freesat) and … Read more
Updated February 2021. A major enhancement called G.INP has been introduced to my fibre broadband FTTC connection, as part of BT’s rollout of a new technology aimed at improving fibre broadband speeds and reducing errors. In this article, I look at G.INP and its benefits, and show how you can tell if this technology has been … Read more
The last time I reported on the growth in BT’s fibre broadband take-up was in July 2014. Then, the take-up statistics showed absolutely no sign of an increasing upward trend and pointed to the failure of BT and ISPs to successfully get the positive messages of superfast broadband across to consumers and businesses. This was … Read more
This month, I was honoured to receive a national volunteering award from Prime Minister David Cameron. This is in recognition of my volunteering work on broadband, including support to Connecting Cambridgeshire and helping residents in my local community with broadband issues and to get online. After my online broadband guides on my village website became … Read more
On the 31st July 2014, BT announced its financial results for the quarter ending June 2014. It announced that its fibre broadband network covered about 20 million premises, and that about 3 million of these had signed up, making take-up about 15% of premises. As shown in the figure below, while the results indicate steady … Read more
Read our more up-to-date article: Fibre Broadband VDSL2 Vectoring Arrives (Nov 2017) We have just been connected to FTTC fibre broadband, giving us the opportunity to observe the adverse effects of crosstalk interference on speeds and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) margin at first hand. As the penetration of fibre broadband increases, so the likelihood of being adversely … Read more
Updated: The Billion 8800NL has been upgraded to the 8800NL V2, and now incorporates two external antennas to improve wireless range. We are really excited to bring you our review and optimisation guide for the new Billion BiPAC 8800NL wireless modem router. This new wireless modem router supports ADSL, ADSL2+ AND VDSL2 (i.e. fibre broadband) … Read more