Although the number of Wi-Fi hotspots is exploding it's clamed that they will become obsolete in the near future.

As you would expect the claims come from the mobile industry, Ericsson's chief marketing officer to be precise, who was speaking to delegates at the European Computer Audit, Control and Security Conference in Stockholm.

While using mobile broadband maybe more convenient than having to find a hotspot, there are two flaws in his argument. The first is regards to the speed difference between a Wi-Fi connection and using a mobile device, but this a minor problem with carriers improving their networks.

The main problem is down to cost, using a Wi-Fi connection at say Starbucks, costs the user nothing and there is no commitment. A mobile connection on the other hand is likely much more expensive, even though Bergendahl says that it could be as low as €20 a month.

Pipex Communications which is one of the UK's oldest ISPs and bought by Tiscali last year has decided on a name change and have gone for the less than catchy name of GX Networks Ltd.

Communications, such as emails and bank charges from Pipex will now show as GX Networks, but according to an email sent to customers it will be "business as usual" although Tiscali have made no secret of wanting to shift it's broadband business, so it could be that ex-Pipex customers will get another owner.

2008 which has been based on research conducted by YouGov and covers the top 10 ISP brands.

The survey was conducted online through out of the UK, but excluded Northern Ireland during January and February of this year and queried around 4,000 broadband users with at least 3,000 responding to each questions.

PlusNet came out top overall having top marks for five of the six categories

1 - PlusNet - (www.plus.net)
2 - Sky Broadband - (www.sky.com)
3 - Pipex - (www.pipex.co.uk)
4 - Tiscali- (www.tiscali.co.uk)
5 - Virgin Media - (www.virginmedia.com)
6 - AOL Broadband - (www.aolbroadband.co.uk)
=7 - BT Broadband - (www.bt.com)
=7 - TalkTalk - (www.talktalk.co.uk)
=7 - Tesco Broadband - (www.tesco.net)
10 - Orange - (www.orange.co.uk)

The Quality & reliability of your home Internet Service

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
PlusNet - 88.3%
Pipex - 87.9%
Virgin Media - 83.0%
Sky Broadband - 81.0%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
Tesco - 23.8%
Orange - 14.2%
TalkTalk - 13.9%
AOL Broadband - 12.8%

Download times of files and web pages

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
PlusNet - 82.9%
Pipex - 74.6%
Virgin Media - 71.1%
Sky Broadband - 69.4%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
Tesco - 36.5%
Orange - 21.2%
TalkTalk - 19.5%
BT Broadband - 19.1%

The clarity of pricing & billing

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
Sky Broadband - 77.1%
Tiscali - 75.3%
PlusNet - 74.7%
Orange - 73.2%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
Pipex - 16.7%
BT Broadband - 16.1%
Virgin Media - 11.3%
TalkTalk - 9.2%

After sales support

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
PlusNet - 73.9%
Pipex - 66.1%
AOL Broadband - 54.0%
Sky Broadband - 53.4%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
Orange - 28.8%
TalkTalk - 27.9%
Virgin Media - 24.4%
BT Broadband - 23.8%

Good value for money

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
PlusNet - 81.1%
Sky Broadband - 75.7%
TalkTalk - 73.7%
Tiscali - 62.4%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
BT Broadband - 28.7%
AOL Broadband - 18.4%
Virgin Media -16.5%
Orange - 16.0%

Speed of service activation (after sign-up)

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
PlusNet - 73.6%
Pipex - 67.7%
Sky Broadband - 66.8%
Virgin Media - 62.6%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
TalkTalk - 25.4%
BT Broadband -18.6%
Sky Broadband - 17.0%
Tiscali - 16.2%

Be Broadband has said that it plans to roll out ADSL2+ technology to an additional  400 UK telephone exchanges by June this year.

The company, which is owned by O2, has said that this will enable it to reach two million more households which will give it a coverage of 67 per cent of UK homes. As O2 broadband use the Be network infrastructure then this effectively increases it's network coverage also.

Be offers three packages which all use ADSL2+ technology, starting with the basic 8Mbps package at £14 a month rising to the Be Pro which will allow the full 24Mbps if line conditions are ideal, this costs £22 a month.

National Express has said that the number of Wi-Fi users on the East Coast railway has tripled during the first month since offering a free service.

Although it's been free for first class passengers for some time, unsurprisingly many 'normal' passengers didn't really want to fork out the £4.95 an hour to get connected. Now it's seen number of those connecting jump from 30,000 in December to a whopping 100,000 in January, with more that 85 per cent connecting using a laptop.

Fast4.net has launched a new ADSL2+ broadband service giving 24Mbps for under a tenner a month.

The ISP has switched to an entirely unbundled (LLU) network and said that some customers will be able to surf at 22Mbps with an upload speed of 1.3Mbps, though as with all ADSL connections this will decrease the further that you live from the exchange, as well as bad line conditions.

Five levels of service are available starting at £9.98 a month rising to £24.95 for the Pro package.

New customers who switch to Fast4 can also receive one month's free service and although the contract is only a minimum one month there is no exit fee

Virgin Media has announced it's best quarterly growth for seven years, and said that it should be able to hit 5 million UK customers by the end of the decade.

The telco added a total of 24,000 new customers in the last quarter of 2007, nearly twice as many as the same time the previous year. This brings it's total number of customers to 4.8 million of which 3.7 million also take advantage of their broadband services. Customers who take advantage of more than one service rising from just over 40 per cent last year to just under 50 per cent.

It seems that the predictions that the iPlayer would affect bandwidth and increase data usage may have been not far off the mark.

Data released by one ISP, PlusNet, shows that it's costs per user tripled in the first full month since the release of the iPlayer back on Christmas day. The streaming cost per user has risen from 6.1p a month to 18.3p in January, it this is a common value amongst ISPs then it's claimed that the iPlayer has increased the cost to the market as a whole in the region of £1m in it's first month.

Some ISPs have claimed that they will have to resort to traffic shaping, although some who already do have found that it's not the easy option.

The BBC claimed that the iPlayer is good for the broadband industry and has a "negligible impact on the UK internet infrastructure".

The government has announced that it will undertake a review of broadband in the UK and it's future.

It seems that in recent months most of the talk within the industry is how to provide a larger capacity connection to the UK's internet users, or more specifically how this is going to be funded. Both BT and the government saying that they would let market forces dictate what happens next, rather than investing in the massive cost for new infrastructure.

The review will be carried out by Francesco Caio, who is former chief executive of telecoms firm Cable & Wireless and will focus on how to provide future high speed broadband. This won't be a cheap option as it's estimated that the cost of upgrading the service to BT's 5.6m residential customers would be £1.1bn.

The review will report back to government ministers and Chancellor Alistair Darling in the autumn.

Government proposals for legislation to tackle illegal downloading are unworkable and should be scrapped in favour of self-regulation claim the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA).

It says that such laws which have been introduced to govern technology have a poor track record, with the last attempt, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, taking three years to implement.

ISPs were not that happy with the plans either "The plan transfers the cost of copyright enforcement to the private sector, which is not our responsibility as a neutral carrier of traffic" said a BT spokesman while Virgin Media said that "There is a lot of legal peer-to-peer traffic, and sorting legal and illegal content would be difficult,".