The State of Play in the Broadband Market

Broadband – it’s all about bandwidth, which delivers the speed and reliability both consumers and business are increasingly looking to make the most of Digital

The current data transfer protocol Docsys3 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) not only meets today’s speed requirements but for relatively small additional investment has capability to be upgraded.

Mobile companies are looking to take advantage of this data bandwidth by transferring their signals from air to cable as quickly as possible.

Some mobile companies are choosing to buy cable operators to get control of the cable network, eg Vodafone Last September Vodafone sold its 45% stake in Verizon Wireless for a cool US$130 billion. There is clearly cash available for acquisition.

So access to fast broadband is increasingly important for your business and your home for your children’s education. We are fast developing a two tier society of the haves and have not’s in the broadband stakes. This is clearly a critical social and economic issue.

Also the situation has just got worse. In the UK there are three main players SKY who use BT for cable, BT themselves and Virgin Media.  Virgin Media have just been bought by an American organisation Liberty who have just announced that they will not be investing any further in Cable in the ground. It should be remembered that both NTL and Telewest ran into difficulties putting cable in the ground and were merged to form Virgin Media

Here are two useful websites –

The first showing BT’s cable installation program by post code http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/

The second showing the available broadband packages by post code

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/broadband_checker

The Strategic point is that in 21st century scale is critical to future of the communications industry. A standalone Virgin Media would not have succeeded. So managing the operators as globalisation takes place is the real challenge