| Posted: Sunday 23rd July 2006 by
Sam |
I remember noting a few months back in the news how static Easynet's LLU deployment was, while at the same time Bulldog and Be were steaming ahead with new exchanges. Well, the tables seem to have turned now! Easynet have brought 124 exchanges online for the LLU service in the past 28 days, whereas Bulldog have remained mostly static, and Be has completely stopped. In fact, Be have not only stopped bringing new exchanges online, they have in fact removed a sizeable number of ready-for-service dates from their site (Although this now seems to be because of BT delays in deploying the LLU equipment).
Be's halt on deployment coincided perfectly with their buyout by O2, and Bulldog's dramatic slow-down also coincided with parent Cable and Wireless's decision to focus on the wholesale market. Therefore it's fairly safe to assume that internal reorganisation and consolidation is to blame for the slow down.
Of course, Sky's recent announcement of their own "free" brodaband service (which will be provisioned over Easynet LLU exchanges) has no doubt played no small part in ramping up Easynet deployment as well. The target of 700 exchanges by Autumn is still set it seems.
At the other end of the spectrum, BT Wholesale have been continuing to enable the remaining exchanges for their wholesale ADSL service. A further 16 are due to go live by the end of August, leaving 43 exchanges without ADSL after that.
Wireless provider Now, formerly known as Netvigator, has been continuing to expand along the Thames Valley in recent months and is now in reach of nearly half a million homes and businesses. Whilst they may not be well known throughout the rest of the country, within Reading and parts of London it's hard for a day to go by without seeing one of their Now branded Smart cars driving around!
In unrelated news, we're going to be performing some server maintenance one evening this week (Wednesday probably, providing the hardware arrives on time). This may result in some downtime of the website, although this should be limited to a few minutes. Users of version 3 or above web services will be switched to use a different server in the cluster automatically. An email will be sent around later this week about to potentially affected users. |