Broadband on the up and up
| Broadband on the up and up | |
21 November 2005
With broadband now available to most people in the Highlands and Islands, the latest industry news suggests there are few, if any, compelling reasons left not to adopt the technology if it is available. To date, though, marketing of broadband by service provider has generally been on a national scale. Surprisingly, given the local nature of trigger point-era campaigns, there isn’t much in the way of concerted fanfare by ISPs when individual local exchanges are broadband-enabled. So if you haven’t checked the broadband status of your local exchange lately, now is a good time to do so. It could well be that rival companies have stolen a march and are already enjoying the business benefits of broadband. News of the continuing steady uptake of broadband connections comes in the half yearly results of BT. By the end of September 2005, BT was providing approximately 6.2 million broadband connections, up 89 per cent at the same period last year. A third of the connections were sold directly via BT’s broadband ISP division, the remainder sold by reseller providers. At the same time, BT is reporting a sharp fall in the volume of dial-up connections. Data calls by 56k modems are down by 40 per cent and the number of ISDN lines has also reduced in number, indicative of the broadband growth rate. (Interestingly, for what it’s worth, the word broadband appears 22 times in BT’s half yearly results. Voice, meanwhile, limps in with only two mentions while phone appears once and telephone not at all.) Helping, no doubt, the uptake of broadband is the fact that connection costs are falling. Prices for entry level services have fallen 7.1% overall in 2005 across 18 operators in 15 countries tracked by internet analysts, Point Topic. | |