Topic: Broadband Initiatives

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.

The European Union has announced plans that it will invest £10m in a new research project for using peer-to-peer technology (P2P) for internet television.

It's planned to build an open-source service called P2P Next and will join 19 universities with broadcasters like the BBC to help them find better ways to reach the TV-downloading online audience and offer high-quality on-demand television.

The total budget of £14m will be used to provide the service to different devices including both PCs and set-top boxes.

Ofcom has said that if us Britons want faster connections for VoD and similar bandwidth hungry applications, then we will have to pay for it.

Speaking at a Video on Demand conference last week Jeremy Olivier, who is the regulators head of convergent media, thinks that ADSL2+ with at least a 24Mbps speed were needed for such applications and consumers would "have to pay to build this."

What he has failed to grasp is that for most people a ADSL2+ connection will be nothing like 24Mbps with only those living very close to the exchange fully benefiting.
During the conference it was said that ISPs thought the costs were prohibitive and there was not the consumer demand at the moment to build faster networks.

While faster copper networks would improve the situation, it's becoming increasingly obvious that the UK needs to more to fibre based systems to provide faster networks, either to fully fibre to the home or at least to the cabinet (FTTC). But as with all things costs will have great effect on when and how this is implemented.

After official reports that the scheme to provide broadband across the Highlands and Islands was six months behind schedule and over budget, the project is said to be "progressing well".

The £70m government Pathfinder project has connected 111 of the 452 sites which were due to be connected by 2009, and now it claims that those remaining will be connected in the original time frame. The Highland Council said the first sites in Shetland go live later this month with those in Orkney following on in February.

This is good news for those who live in the more remote parts of the Highlands and Islands, who without the project would have been destined to a life of dial-up.

Nearly all of the Uk's primary and secondary schools now are connected by has broadband.

The Telecommunications and Internet Federation (TIF) has announced that 98% of schools now have broadband after a £13.5m investment by both telecos and the Government via the Broadband to Schools programme

BT Openreach says it will offer lucky customers in the Ebbsfleet Valley development in Kent the chance of 100Mbps broadband.

From August they will be trialling the service to some of the 10,000 new homes being built on the development, which is the first in the UK to install last-mile fibre optic cable connections to all new residences in order to gauge public demand.
Actual prices which the consumer will have to pay have not been released by providers involved with the trial, but wholesale prices to those ISPs have been released, being £8.33 per month for a basic connection, rising to £44 a month for the 100Mbps connection.

The question is that if there is a large take-up will BT change it's course, and provide fibre rather than continue with it's 21CN deployment based on copper, which gives a maximum of 22Mbps. BT has previously held back on fibre stating that the financial benefits to itself are uncertain due to the huge outlay involved in an all fibre infrastructure.

Customers who sign an 18-month contract at the Carphone Warehouse for the Complete Mobile Broadband Package from 3 Mobile can get a free laptop.

The Dell Inspirion laptop is the same as offered to AOL last year and will cost punters £35 a month, for this you will get a 3 mobile broadband modem dongle, 3GB of data downloads and 200 texts each month, extra data can be bought for 10p per Mb. Coverage is boasted at 85 per cent of the UK with connection speeds hitting up to 3.6Mbps.

Although this may sound steep compared to fixed broadband alternatives, for anyone needing data on the move this may be the 'complete package'.

An alternative is a mobile broadband deal from T-Mobile which is cheaper at £20 a month but customers will have to make a one-off payment of £199 for the laptop and pick up a longer contract of 24-months.

The government has drawn up plans to provide all of the UK's six million children with home broadband access.

The plans drawn up by Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) are to improve education standards by making home internet available to the estimated one million children in the UK do not have access to a computer at home.

The DCSF said it is in talks with BT, Microsoft and RM, among others, to create partnerships and is also putting pressure on suppliers to bring down the price of IT equipment to make it available to those on lower incomes.

The government's Home Access Taskforce plans to due to publish a report in April.

The Rt Hon Stephen Timms, who is the government Minister for Competitiveness, addressed the Broadband Stakeholder Group last night and outlined the governments plans for a summit to discuss the future of broadband in the UK. The summit will especially focus on next-generation broadband services and funding.

No details of the summit have been released, but the UK needs to act sooner rather than later in it's fibre-to-home plans.

BT has chosen Entanet, as it's only non-BT partner which will participate it the forthcoming 21CN broadband trials.

The trials are planned to start on 1st November 2007 from one of BT’s Birmingham exchanges and then will be expanded to ten exchanges by January 2008. The inclusion of a non-BT ISP marks a change in direction, as previously BT had only been using it's own Wholesale and Retail divisions in limited trials.

The 21CN trials will be focusing on providing ADSL2+ connections to customers, with speeds of up to 24Mbps...if you live next door to an exchange that is.

Local Loop Unbundled lines have reached the 3million mark according to The Office of the Telecommunications Adjudicator (OTA) August update.

The exact number of LLU lines had reached 2.997 million, but the bad news for customers is the problems involved when moving lines away from BT. When fully unbundled lines, where an ISP takes over provision of both telephone and broadband, are involved there is currently has a 20 per cent failure rate, and things don't make better reading the further you go on, with between 20 and 30 per cent of repairs across partially and fully unbundled lines, and rented wholesale lines failing.

LLU saw a very poor second quarter with the addition of new lines falling from 590,000 in the first three months of the year, to 510,000 between April and July as BT concentrated on repairing lines damaged by flooding across the UK. But things picked up in July with a record 250,000 new lines and an estimated 300,000 in August, doubling total numbers in just over six months.

It seems that the LLU companies still have some way to go if they are serious about becoming an alternative to BT.

Thinkbroadband has hinted that the UK may start to see Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) deployed by BT as early as 2008.

Openreach is laying out proposals for a based fibre deployment to Greenfield sites, and if this is successful it could possibly be increase to include Brownfield sites, although this will be more expensive to implement.
FTTP using Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) has the possibility working over lengths of 16km with initial speeds being around 10Mbps downstream and 2Mbps upstream although support for speeds up to 1Gbps is possible.

The interesting bit is that as these Greenfield site will be all fibre, there will be no copper infrastructure to support existing xDSL technology. This means that BT are mooting the pricing of FTTP to be roughly equivalent to that of existing xDSL connections.
Now before you all go and sell your houses to move to a new housing estate it's worth remembering that these are long term plans, but it's encouraging to see BT starting to realize that the UK is seriously lagging behind many other countries when it comes to fast internet connections.

Have you heard about 21CN but are not really sure what it's all about? If so, you are probabbly not alone, but help is on hand at samknows.com.

With the national migration to 21CN starting in just a few months, Sam has put together a comprehensive overview of the 21CN systems and what it will mean to the average punter in the street.

Such questions are:-

• What 21CN is and why BT are doing it
• How 21CN will affect you
• New 21CN broadband products
• A summary of the national roll-out plan
• The 21CN network structure
• What are all the 21CN related acronyms.

With the roll-out rapidly accelerating and new information arriving on an almost daily basis, he intends to keep these pages up to date with the latest 21CN developments. Check out his pages on the 21CN overview and  21CN broadband.

Ofcom will scrap then need for licences and allow UK consumers to use Ultra-Wideband (UWB) devices from Monday next week (13th).

UWB, also known as wireless USB, has been banned here in the UK as it uses frequencies that are not open to the public, but in places where it has been legal, such as the US and Japan, UWB hubs are used to construct a wireless network for connecting mobile devices such as computers, DVD players, cameras etc.

The advantage of UWB is that it allows communications at far higher speeds that current technologies, up to 2Gbps can be transmitted over a fairly sort distances of around 30metres.

Broadband subscriptions are likely to rise above the 500m mark by 2011 according to a new report.

 research group claims that there will be 536 million broadband lines accounting more more than half of all internet connections and thinks that WiMax and fibre connections will continue to be the two fastest growing technologies.

Revenues from these broadband services are expected to rise to over £73bn resulting in a nice 13 percent return in investment.

According to David Mercer of Strategy Analytics "Fibre-to-the-home will eventually provide the ultimate broadband experience for many users, including high definition TV and lightning-fast interactive web-based services,"

With such a return in investment, maybe he should speak to BT about Fibre-to-Home.....

BT looks like it is calling a halt on it's speed battle with LLU operators according to it's director of product management.

Rather than spending it's dosh on fibre to the home (FTTH) which it has been trialling since 2004 it now seems that it will push broadband as an "application driven" service like IPTV.
While this maybe seen as some as a defeat, the telco has a point when it says that FTTH is a "UK PLC issue", rather than a matter for the national telecoms network owner alone, especially when considering the cost for such a project and the payback. As Angus Flett, BT Wholesale's director of product management puts it  "If you do VDSL2  then you have to do fibre to the cabinet, and if you do that then the economics mean you might as well do fibre to the home."

So the majority of UK broadband users could be stuck at 24Mbps even when BT's 21CN is fully operational, but many users would disagree with Flett when he says: "I think the speed wars didn't provide value for customers...[they] don't give two hoots about speed."

It seems BT will be looking at the quality rather than the quantity of bandwidth, but then that is the cheaper option.

BT is to start moving it's £10bn 21st Century Network (21CN) onto the next stage with trialling mass migrations of customers.

Currently two small South Wales towns, Wick and Bledinog have been used as BT's test bed to prove the technology before further rollout in Swansea and then to the rest of the country.
BT hopes that the move to the IP network will be seamless with customers not noticing the change, with downtimes in the region of minutes or even seconds during the night.

The telco says it has proved the technology behind its £10bn nationwide 21CN project in two g. Now it has to demonstrate that it can move people over to wholly IP-based voice and broadband exchanges without them noticing.

BT has said it has spent "tens of millions" on the trials, but refused to comment on whether the savings of 21CN will be passed onto customers.

The Broadband Stakeholder's Group (BSG) which advised the government on broadband issues says the UK could fall behind Europe unless we act.

It is is specifically concerned about high-speed broadband services, like BT's 21CN which are capable of speeds of 20Mbps or more as these are needed to deliver high definition video content, VoIP (voice-over Internet Protocol) and P2P (peer-to-peer) services. Failure to provide such a network could result in falling behind in terms of economic and social development.

While the 21CN can theoretically provide 24Mbps, even BT admit that many users won't be able to get near those speeds.

BT Wholesale's chief technical officer, Matt Beal, that traffic shaping wouldn't be an issue with BT's next-generation network, 21st Century Network (21CN), as there will be enough bandwidth, even with the ever increasing demand from both the number of customers and the high bandwidth services such as internet TV (IPTV).

Traffic shaping is often a contentious problem, while some may see it as delivering performance for time critical services such as VoIP, others see it as a way that operators can promote services by giving them greater priority.
"It is up to us at the core of the network to make sure there is enough bandwidth for [our services and those of our competitors]," he claimed.

He did admit that there wouldn't be the great speed increase for customers with 21CN that some are hoping for, he thought that the 24Mbps top speed would not be achieved "unless you are… in the exchange" and realistically these would be in the 8-12Mbps region.

Although 21CN maybe good news for BT, us poor users who live outside cable areas and not next door to an exchange will have to wait for further technologies, such as Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) to gain any advantages.

In an interview on Ofcomwatch, Ofcom's CEO Ed Richards, has denied that a serious competitor to BT's next generation network would need any kind of public funding.

The 21st Century Network (21CN) is currently being rolled out across the UK by BT, but Ofcom hopes that this will make it easier for other suppliers to roll out other services to customers, but some industry insiders fear that BT could end up with little or no competition. Cable & Wireless, Easynet and Thus are planning similar networks, but these will be on a far smaller scale that those of BT.

So it seems Ofcom are taking a backseat and seeing how things pan out first before thinking on any action, no change there then.

Integrated Digital Services Network (ISDN) is synonymous for those who remember the pre-ADSL days and wanted extra speed, is about to be culled by BT.

BT's consumer ISDN first known as HomeHighway and later MidBand provided 64Kbps or 128Kbps speeds which now seem ludicrously slow compared to today's xDSL technology will be phased out, although there are only belived to be a couple of thousand users in the UK as most have already transferred to quicker xDSL solutions. BT itself stopped taking new HomeHighway orders back in September 2005.

It's not the end of all ISDN connections as BT's ISDN2e services will remain, as this are compatible with BT's 21st Century Network (21CN) and provides an alternative to xDSL services for users where latency and congestion could cause problems, such as outside broadcasting. ISDN delivers what it says on the tin and is not affected, like IP solutions, by how many users are connected or how busy the network is.

Telecoms group Thus has signed a £70m contract with the Highland Council to provide broadband to schools, libraries and other council buildings for a seven-year period. Details are a bit vague and it's not certain that it isn't an extension of a previous deal to provide broadband access to schools and council offices.

Northumberland is to get a £8.7m boost to provide better broadband access to the county.

A deal between Northumberland County Council and One NorthEast via the Northumberland Strategic Partnership have agreed to jointly fund the investment £6.3m from the Council and £2.4m from One NorthEast.

The money will support the delivery of a Next Generation Broadband infrastructure to give a faster and bigger broadband capacity and plans to place Northumberland at the front of e-commerce. Although many might think of Northumberland as a backwater but with a rural broadband takeup of 40 percent, it rivals Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

This Northumberland Open Network, developed in 2006,  has provided a backbone fibre connection from Morpeth to an Internet Service Provider in Newcastle and now gives high speed broadband access to Northumberland County Council and to south east northumberland. The new plans will mean extending the network to provide fibre connections to Alnwick, Berwick, Tynedale and South East Northumberland.

According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) nearly 80 percent of the 16 million internet connections in the UK are connected broadband.

Now while that may sound like a good thing, and compared to five years ago it is, only two percent of those connections are faster than 8Mbps, with a whopping 60 percent still not over the 2Mbps barrier.

At the end of last year (December 2006)figure show that broadband accounted for 79.2 percent of all internet connections which was up from 75.8 percent in September. This is in line with the increasing broadband take-up, back in December 2005 the figure was at 65.2 percent  and in December 2004 it stood at just 43.7 percent.

The full info is in a PDF from the ONS website.

BT has announced a ground-breaking fibre to the home (FTTH) deal with UK real estate investment trust Land Securities and British Sky Broadcasting.

The use of FTTH technology at Ebbsfleet Valley – the largest private developer-led community scheme to be undertaken in the UK – will be a first of its kind for the UK residential market on a mass scale.

Ebbsfleet Valley, near Bluewater shopping centre and adjacent to the new Ebbsfleet International station, covers 1,000 acres with 9,500 new homes and up to nine million square feet of commercial offices, retail, leisure and community facilities.
BT will provide next-generation access network and end user connectivity through FTTH technology, using the latest optical fibre networks.

The provision of optical fibre networks will also include benefits such as on-demand (high definition) entertainment services and voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phone services enabled in every home.

The network, which will be developed by Openreach,  will provide multiple fibre deployment to each home, including satellite and broadcast media services. This means that each home and establishment in Ebbsfleet Valley will be pre-enabled to receive Freeview and satellite-based entertainment services and DAB radio via the network, avoiding reception issues and the need for individual satellite dish installations.

Broadband could be worth a total of £3.4bn to the Scottish economy by 2015.

This is according to a report by consultants SQW who examined the value the businesses due to the increasing availability broadband, not just ADSL but of different generations of new technologies.

Although the report concluded that it was still to early for ministers to intervene with the new technologies, they advised that ministers should work to minimise barriers to network investment.

Using broadband to connect to the internet is now cheaper than dial-up services, according to a report by SimplySwitch.com.

It is now, 'almost certain' that customers would save money by switching from dial-up to broadband. The reason for this is that although the average Briton spends over two and a half hours online every day, just surfing for two hours a week would mean broadband is cheaper.

Telewest and NTL customers could save almost £60 per year by switching to broadband from dial-up, while those with Tiscali and AOL could save £33 and £12 respectively per annum, according to the report.

We feel sorry for those who still using slow expensive internet rather than switching!

Swindon is the broadband capital of the UK, according to survey published this week, by Point Topic.

The Wiltshire town has a high-speed penetration rate of 59.8 percent as of 30 June 2006, an increase from 51.1 percent in December last year.
The national average broadband usage is 40.4 percent but the 'digital divide' is still an issue as in rural areas, particularly in Wales and the East Midlands only have less than one in three households obtaining broadband access to the internet.

Cardiff took the second place and had a residential broadband penetration rate of 57.8 percent in June 2006 an increase of 11.1 percent.

Only a quarter of UK internet still still use dial-up connections according to figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

This is in stark contrast to only three years ago when over 78  percent used dial-up as the way to access the internet, now 75.2 percent use broadband as of September, up from 72.6 percent in June.

www.statistics.gov.uk has all the details.

Broadband provider Thus has signed an agreement provide services to schools, libraries and council offices in the south of Scotland.

The £32 million project is with the Dumfries and Galloway Council and Scottish Borders Council, in partnership with the Scottish Executive and the technology will be installed over the next two years to enable teachers and pupils access to educational resources over the internet

A £32 million Scottish broadband project will be "on a par with the railway" in it's effect says a local council leader.

The scheme is to provide 120 council offices with a 16Mbps broadband network which has been dubbed the South of Scotland Pathfinder Project, this will increase the current network capacity 150 times by 2009.
Schools will also benefit from the two year fibre laying with their network speeds being connected at a minimum of 4Mbps, which will allow them to share in 'virtual classes' especially beneficial to those in rural areas.

The funding will be provided mainly by the Scottish Executive.

Roll over Broadband over Power Lines (BPL), the gas companies are after your business.

According to a report in USAToday a company in San Diego are planning to send broadband over existing gas cables connected to customers houses. As US  federal rules that limit the strength of ultrawideband signals don't apply in underground pipes the proponents of the idea say that power levels can be boosted to provide each household bandwidth of up to 6 gigabits per second, nice.
Yet the power is low enough so that signals can share the pipes with natural gas without starting a fire, which is good. Like all good technologies it has an acronym, Broadband In Gas, or BIG.

As the proposed installation cost is half that of BPL and only a fifth of cable you would expect gas companies to be queuing up to test the technology, but as so far none have done so shows that it is an idea rather than a serious contender to deliver broadband.

Will it be the waterpipes next?

The Welsh Assembly Government is after someone to provide public sector broadband connections.

It is asking for tenders to give high speed broadband using existing infrastructure as part of a Public Sector Broadband Network for Wales, which could be worth up to £150 million to the successful candidate.

Fed up with the support you get from your ISP, keep getting connected to a support line far from the UK? ICBroadband say that they have the answer, they will provide help and assistance not only to their own customers, but to those of other ISP's as well.

As you would expect it wont be for free, but at £3.99 a month and having a local (0845) centre number it may appeal to those who are either having general problems or just need help with email or downloading music etc.

Named JustSupport it also includes @icbroadband.com e-mail addresses with anti-virus and webmail service, but for those who need more a Premium service is available with a named technician/advisor, email to fax service and other extras costs £9.99 a month.

The confusion may arise when punters ring up with billing, account problems or anything else not under ICBroadbands control.

Bonded ADSL lines are usually provided by your ISP, but networking company Managed Communications can provide this without the need for switching provider.

Up to 16 SDSL, ADSL and Max lines can be bonded, and rather than using the traditional method of Multi-Link PPP (MLPPP) they use a virtual tunnelling protocol creating MPVs (multi path virtual private network links) which link back to their central datacentre infrastructure.
All that is required at the customers end is a speedtouch ADSL router and a XRIO bonding device, with an enterprise carrier grade bonding device at the datacentre.

As this is obviously targeted for business use so there are no prices available, but one thing which comes to mind is that if you bond three ADSL Max connections then maybe two of them will be connected at any one time without dropping!!!

Telco Thus has been picked as the preferred bidder to provide public Scottish broadband, beating BT in the process.

The £70m project is to wire up schools, libraries and other council buildings with high speed broadband services, with wo-thirds of the 800 sites are due to be connected to the new infrastructure within two years.

The Highlands and Islands Pathfinder Broadband Procurement Project is due to be signed in October, and is a partnership between The Highland Council along with councils in Argyll and Bute, Moray, Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles to provide "a very high speed broadband services to more than 800 sites".

Good news to those wanabe broadband users in Wales who happen to be unlucky enough to live near an unviable exchange.

BT group has (unsurprisingly) won the contract to enable these exchanges as part of a deal with Regional Innovative Broadband Support (RIBS) project. This work should be complete by the Autumn and will allow approximately 10,000 homes and businesses to have a first-generation (512Kbps to 2Mbps) broadband service, then they can be upgraded to 8Mbps along with the rest of the country.

The broadband rollout will be implemented in a two-staged approach. Stage one will concentrate on enabling the final exchange areas. Once this work is completed, there will still be a small proportion of the population who live inside enabled exchange areas but still cannot access broadband. Stage two of the rollout will then focus on identifying these remaining blackspots and exploring ways of bringing broadband to these residents.

The magic number of 10 million broadband connections has been reached according to an Ofcom report.

It has published it's interim Communications Market Report, which showed that connections were over 10m compared with 9.792m in December, this means that 57% of the UK now have broadband.

An interesting figure is also in the number of Local Line Unbundled (LLU) connections made during the past year, back at the start of 2005 there were only 50,000 lines which were independent of BT's equipment. This figure has now shot up to 250,000 and is still sustaining a considerable growth rate.

Later this year, Wales will see 35 of its exchanges enabled that were previously allocated "unviable". The enablement of the exchanges comes as part of a Welsh Assembly initiative to provide competitive broadband across Wales.

A snapshot taking just last month shows Cardiff boasted the highest level of broadband connectivity in Wales with 41% of the Capital’s residents accessing broadband. The Vale of Glamorgan (51%), Neath Port Talbot (46%) and Swansea (44%), Monmouthshire (41%), Flintshire (40%) and Conwy (38%) are also all seeing good penetration of the technology.

Those in Wales who are still without broadband, or indeed want faster services are advised to register their details on the The Broadband Wales Observatory website (http://www.bbwo.org.uk or http://www.abec.org.uk for the Welsh language version).

The UK become the European number one in the number of broadband lines.

A report from Topic Point shows that Britain has 9.8 million broadband connections, 2.8 million of these have been added in the last nine month and has overtaken France on the top spot who only added 2.2 million in the same period to bring it's total to 9.7 million. Germany came in with 8.4 million connections.

The report also focused to the issue to Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) and warns that the UK is lagging behind it's European neighbours in it's adoption. Britain currently has only 122,000 unbundled lines, which is dwarfed by the number in France with stands at 2.5 million.

It also predicted that next year will be a slower for broadband take-up compared to this year, but predicts that there will be 13 million broadband lines in the UK by the end of 2006.

Rural businesses and communities across South West England are to benefit from a £1.3 million investment to increase broadband internet access.

The South West of England Regional Development Agency has agreed to put aside the £1.3m to move the region even closer to its target of 100% access to broadband. As part of the push, a major project has been planned to give broadband access to the last remaining 20 areas in the region - increasing access to 99.99%.

Broadband4Devon are seemingly very pleased with the announcement ...

The following exchanges will form those to be enabled through the project

• Devon: Brendon, Lydford, Farway, Manaton, Chillaton, Clayhanger, Filleigh, Rackenford, Widecombe in the Moor, Drewsteignton, Postbridge
• Gloucestershire: Leighterton, Rodmarton
• Somerset: Lydeard St Lawrence, Crowcombe, Brompton Regis
• Wiltshire: Wylye, Oxenwood
• Cornwall: North Tamerton, Scilly Isles (St Martins)

Students of Portsmouth University will soon be getting free fixed line and wireless broadand, thanks to an initative that will start in 2006 which will see video podcasting offering prospective students a chance to observe what life is like in the university.

The University will be working with local colleges to develop the scheme. In return students will be given free iPods and be encouraged to take an active part in the work.

The Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPA UK) is supporting a new website launched by EuroISPA to raise awareness of the dangers of phishing, and offer advice on how to avoid phishing scams.

Phishing is a form of online fraud where users are tricked into disclosing important personal or financial information most commonly through ‘spoof’ or imitation emails which appear to originate from a trusted source like a bank, a financial institution or an e-commerce site.

The site can be found at www.euroispa.org/antiphishing

Research from Internet research firm Nielsen/NetRating shows that broadband is helping leading brands to increase their internet audience.

The findings come from a new report which shows that Disney has increased it's audience by 269% over the past year in the UK by providing visitors to it's website with a richer media experience