Broadband Weekly News Roundup (29th Feb 08)

By Neil Hawkins Staff Writer Friday, 29 February 2008

THIS week’s broadband news roundup is one of a kind! Not for another 28 years will you be able to peruse the broadband news on Friday 29th of February so count yourselves privileged folks!

Featured Broadband Providers This Week Compare the broadband packages of: Compare broadband packages from O2 Broadband Compare broadband packages from Virgin Media Related Broadbands News See our other recent related news stories: O2 Broadband Discount for O2 Prepay Mobile Customers O2 Broadband continues its march to become the best UK broadband provider by now offering its discounted rates to O2 pay as you go customers too. Is O2 Broadband Any Good? WITH all this talk of O2 Broadband reaching 100,000 customers, you may be wondering: Is O2 Broadband any good? Neil Hawkins looks closer at O2 Broadband and finds out. Virgin Media Cuts Broadband to £4.50 CREATING one of the cheapest broadband packages in the UK, Virgin Media has slashed the cost of broadband to £4.50 when you take a Virgin Media home phone package. Broadband News Roundup (22 Feb 08) IN a look back at the week's broadband news, Neil Hawkins covers O2 Broadband's cuts prices for O2 prepay customers, AOL & CarphoneWarehouse change their free laptop from Dell to HP and how much the BBC iPlayer is costing ISPs. Broadband News Roundup (15 Feb 08) Neil Hawkins looks back at the week's broadband news, including Orange's half price broadband, O2 Broadband's increase in popularity and is Tiscali's new Tiscali+ PVR any good?

O2 Broadband reaches 100,000 subscribers

O2 Broadband has announced that it now has 100,000 subscribers using its broadband network.

This is up from around 71,000 subscribers in late 2007.

The increase has come about after O2 Broadband cut prices for non-O2 mobile customers and extended its discount to Pay As You Go customers.

The discount worth £5 a month was initially only available to contract mobile customers in common with other providers such as Orange Broadband.

But as we have seen O2 Broadband is looking to cement the advantage it has over the opposition by providing a product rival mobile networks don’t have, up to 20 Mb speeds, at very competitive prices.

Not only that, but O2 Broadband and sister ISP Be* Broadband both have very good reputations for customer service.

A survey back in December gave O2 an 81% ‘very satisfied’ rating amongst customers and over 80% of customers switching from other providers rating O2 Broadband ‘better’ than their previous broadband supplier.

O2 Broadband has managed to develop this service by not over subscribing it’s capabilities and here at ChooseISP we certainly rate them as one the best value broadband providers in the UK.

A marketing campaign is launching soon for O2 Broadband but what that'll mean for their time-limited offers we can’t say at the moment, but keep an eye on the ChooseISP broadband news for updates!

Virgin Media £10 per month offer

VIRGIN Media has introduced a new broadband offer by reducing the price of their basic unlimited 2 Mb cable broadband package to £10 per month for the first 6 months.

This is reduced to £4.50 a month when bundled with Virgin Media's Broadband and Talk package.

This means that at the moment all of Virgin Media’s broadband packages are on special offer. Size L and XL broadband are currently priced at £17 and £29 respectively for the first 6 months.

Compare of all their broadband products on our Virgin Media comparison page.

Fears of privacy as advertisers go the Google way

BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse (which owns AOL and TalkTalk) have come to an agreement with an online advertising company called Phorm.

The deal means that browsing habits of 10 million customers will be sent to Phorm who’ll use the data to target users with more relevant adverts.

The main issue most people have with this deal is that not only were customers not consulted by the big three but the involvement of Phorm’s chief advertiser, Kent Ertegrul in PeopleOnPage, an old adware program.

BT, Virgin and Carphone all reported to The Register that they had satisfied themselves through due diligence that all is above board and no privacy issues will arise. So that’s alright then.

From YouTube to NoTube

PANIC set in across the world this week as millions of office workers simultaneously didn’t know what to do when YouTube went down for about an hour.

The outage on Sunday and Monday was caused by technicians in Pakistan responding to calls from the Pakistani government to block access to un-Islamic videos.

Instead of just preventing access in Pakistan, engineers accidently knocked out global access by manipulating the manner in which IP addresses work.

Essentially, they told the world that Pakistan was the best, fastest route for all YouTube traffic when, in fact, it most certainly wasn’t.

Say 'what' again! - Virgin Media wheels out Samuel L Jackson in new advert

CONSIDERING their first wave of adverts featured Uma Thurman, it makes sense that Virgin Media's new TV adverts are to be fronted by another star of Pulp Fiction: Samuel L Jackson.

After all, we're not so sure Travolta would have been quite right for the role.

The clutch of 30 and 40 second adverts will go on air in April and are rumoured to be pushing Virgin Media's Video on Demand and Catch-up TV service.

It is not yet confirmed whether Jackson will be using the phrase 'Motherf*cker' a lot or not.

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