PARIS – BT, a communications services company, has selected Alcatel-Lucent to strengthen its customer service capabilities by using a new set of data collection and management solutions in its broadband and IPTV support departments. The agreement builds on BT’s long-standing use of Alcatel-Lucent’s portfolio of Motive Customer Experience Solutions, which has helped support significant improvements to the care and support functions BT offers its millions of broadband customers. These improvements include increased first-call resolution, which [...]

Another week, another gripe about British Telecom’s stranglehold on the UK fibre network: this time the whine has come from TalkTalk who have complained to the UK regulator, Ofcom, that the price they have to pay to supply fibre broadband is too high. It’ll come as news to most that TalkTalk have any interest in fibre services. The UK s leading “budget” broadband provider has offered an “up to 40Mb” fibre service for an extra [...]

LONDON — CityFibre Holdings Limited, a competitive operator deploying a fiber-to-the-home network in the city of Bournemouth in the U.K., announced that it closed a financing agreement with Citigroup, secured by CityFibre’s long-term contracted customer revenues. Arrangements were also agreed for Citi to assist CityFibre in its future financing requirements. A year ago, CityFibre took over the British assets of i3 Group (formerly H2O Networks), which had ambitious plans for deploying fiber to the home [...]

TELFORD, UK — British wholesale communications provider Entanet expanded its broadband portfolio with the introduction of FTTP packages that enable resellers to serve business and residential customers with upload and download speeds of up to 30 Mbps and 110 Mbps respectively. Entanet is a player in incumbent telco BT’s complex ecosystem. It colocates its MPLS network equipment at all the key aggregation points of BT’s 21st-century network, purchases wholesale bandwidth from BT and sells communications [...]

TELFORD, UK — British wholesale communications provider Entanet expanded its broadband portfolio with the introduction of FTTP packages that enable resellers to serve business and residential customers with upload and download speeds of up to 30 Mbps and 110 Mbps respectively. Entanet is a player in incumbent telco BT’s complex ecosystem. It colocates its MPLS network equipment at all the key aggregation points of BT’s 21st-century network, purchases wholesale bandwidth from BT and sells communications [...]

LONDON — British incumbent telco BT announced successful trials of “FTTP on demand” in St. Agnes, Cornwall. BT is building out a next-generation network using a primarily fiber-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) architecture, but this solution allows additional fiber to be run on demand to any home or business in an FTTC-enabled area and provide the customer with fiber-to-the-premises broadband. Previously, FTTP speeds weren’t possible in FTTC-enabled areas, but BT developed a solution that could take advantage of [...]

LONDON — British incumbent telco BT, which is rolling out fiber to the curb and fiber to the premises throughout much of the U.K., is inviting residents and landlords of apartment buildings to participate in a fiber-to-the-unit pilot project. Like many other deployers, BT started its FTTH rollout in greenfield builds and suburban developments; it is now beginning to tackle older apartment buildings, which can present a wide variety of challenges. In addition to the [...]

UK incumbent British Telecom has sued Google over the Android platform, claiming billions of dollars of damages due to infringement of a variety of patents. According to the lawsuit, Google Maps, Google Music, location-based advertising and Android Market products on Android all violate six patents held by British Telecom. BT joins a long list of companies currently suing Google over Android, including Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, eBay and security company Gemalto. Foss Patents breaks down specifically [...]

LONDON – The U.K. will have more than 10.5 million subscribers to superfast broadband (fiber to the curb or fiber to the home) within the next five years, broadband analyst firm Point Topic predicts. With another 4.6 million cable broadband connections, this means that almost 60 percent of the country’s broadband customers – and more than half of all homes and businesses – will be using speeds of 30 Mbps or more by the end [...]

UK incumbent BT Openreach announced yesterday that it will plough 300 million into the deployment of its fibre network over the next few years, ahead of schedule. BT s decision to reach into its 2.5 billion kitty more quickly than it had originally planned is clearly designed to strengthen its bid for the lion s share of the Government s 530m pot, set aside for delivering faster broadband to the last, least accessible, 30% of [...]