August news

Local providers are working with giants Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, and others to bring service to the region's most remote areas.

30/08/2007

India's plan to cover all its six lakh villages with broadband connectivity in the next three years has kick-started with public sector Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) shortlisting equipment vendors for the first phase of its share in the Rs 4,000-crore project, official sources said.

30/08/2007

Access to cheap broadband in South Africa is no longer a pipe-dream, after multi-billion-dollar deals were signed to construct underwater cables connecting the East Coast of Africa to India and Italy.

30/08/2007

The standard of education was falling in the Maldives before broadband Internet access brought a quiet online revolution to classrooms in the Indian Ocean atoll nation. Now Asina Ahmed hooks up to the Internet and uses a smart board with a touch-sensitive screen to liven up a maths class for a group of young Maldivian children on remote Rashdoo Island.

30/08/2007

Early this month, Statistics New Zealand released the Internet Service Providers Survey from March 2007, providing fresh information on broadband usage in New Zealand. Key to the report is the finding that more Broadband users are on faster download speeds, with 2 - 10Mps now the most common speed (as at 31st March 2007), a shift from the previous six months where 512kbs - 2Mbps was the predominant download speed.

30/08/2007

According to the Pew Internet Project’s July, 2007 survey, 47% of American adults have broadband at home, nearly double the 24% penetration level of three years earlier. Broadband penetration has this year already surpassed 50% of all homes in the country and it will have taken just nine years from the time the service became widely available for home high-speed to reach half the population. To put this in context, it took 10 years for the compact disc player to reach 50% of consumers, 15 years for cell phones, and 18 years for color TV. Each of those technologies, like broadband, represented an upgrade from a good or service with which most consumers had experience.

30/08/2007

Quote from the report: “The prevalence of broadband in the home has grown significantly. For the first time, there are more households with broadband than without. Above and beyond broadband at home, access outside the home is also playing a vital role in the broadband story. Taken together, 72 percent of all adults either have broadband at home or regularly access a broadband connection outside the home.”

30/08/2007

Almost 300 million people worldwide are now accessing the internet using fast broadband connections, fuelling the growth of social networking services like MySpace and generating thousands of hours of video through websites such as YouTube.

30/08/2007

Slovenian operator Telekom Slovenije has revealed that it plans to invest up to €450mn (US$619.295mn) between now and 2015 on a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network, in order to boost high-speed access capabilities and encourage uptake of advanced services such as IPTV.

29/08/2007

29/08/2007