From Colin Mann in London Quad-play service provider Virgin Media has launched the UK's first 50Mb broadband service, which it proposes to roll out to all 12.6 million homes covered by its fibre optic network during the Summer of 2009. By the end of 2008, Virgin Media aims to have completed deployment to 40 per […]

The first official European Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) ranking shows smaller countries leading the way in FTTH connections. Mid-term projections show, however, that bigger economies are closing the gap. Sweden, Norway and Slovenia are the leaders in the first official European ranking of FTTH penetration published by the FTTH Council Europe today. The ranking shows the percentage […]

China has confirmed that it will build its first high-capacity optic fibre network nationwide, which is able to carry Internet, TV and phone services through one network. The Ministry of Science and Technology signed an agreement with the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) on building the national network. The backbone network of […]

The BBC iPlayer's series stacking feature – allowing Viewers to stream any episode, after it has first been broadcast, for the duration of an entire series. – is now available on Virgin’s digital cable TV service. The 'series catch up' option has been added to the iPlayer’s cable home screen, bringing functionality that has been […]

Swisscom has started connecting Swiss homes to its fibre-to-the-home network and expects to have hooked up 100,000 homes by the end of 2009. The company has already laid out a fibre-to-the-node network to neighbourhoods and fibre-to-the-office to large companies, and has now started work on connecting homes with fibre-to-the-home in Zurich, Basel and Geneva. Swisscom […]

Virgin Media has confirmed that it will introduce network monitoring technology in 2009 to specifically target and restrict BitTorrent traffic. The move will represent a major policy shift for the ISP/cable provider. Virgin Media currently temporarily throttles the bandwidth of its heaviest downloaders across all applications at peak times, rather than targeting and shaping specific […]

The BBC is planning to share some of its content with the Telegraph Media Group in a deal that could see the iPlayer video catch-up service embedded on the Telegraph.co.uk website. Described by the BBC as a “non-exclusive pilot scheme”, the content-sharing venture could eventually be rolled out to other newspaper groups as part of […]

BSkyB CFO Andrew Griffith has publicly stated it could make sense to buy the UK unit of Italian broadband operator Tiscali in order to increase the number of broadband households it can reach. “At the moment, we only address 9 million homes, so Sky broadband products -great value though they are – are only speaking […]

Liberty Global's Swiss subsidiary Cablecom has said it plans to lay off up to 150 staff as part of its organizational streamlining, citing 'increasingly fierce competition.' Cablecom, Switzerland’s largest cable operator also said that Managing Director Rudolf Fischer will resign. He will remain in his post until a successor has been found, the company said. […]

Jupiter Telecommunications has announced that it will start offering a new HDR Plus service, delivered via an advanced STB across all service areas from December 17th. The new STB model "TZ-DCH8000" features an enhanced DVD drive with high-definition video recording capability as well as an expanded 500 gigabyte hard disk. HDR Plus will allow users […]