Topic: Telewest Broadband

UK telco Telewest, or is that ntl:Telewest even just Virgin have completed it's round of upgrades for it's cable broadband service.

Over one million broadband customers are now have connections of 2Mbps, 4Mbps or 10Mbps product without any speed increase from their old service.
Old 512Kbps users have been increased to 2Mbps, 1Mbps to 4Mbps and 2Mbps to 10Mbps with the prices staying at £17.99, £25 and £35 respectively. All three packages remain free of usage limitations.

Telewest users are struggling with email problems the last few days which rear their head at peak times.

Although the company says that only a few users are affected the problem is serious enough to take the rest of the week to fix, so not just the odd mailserver.

Telewest have beefed up security measures for it's Blueyonder broadband customers.

As part of it's 'PCguard' service both new and existing customers can benefit from free software, this includes a firewall, anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, a pop-up blocker and parental control as part of a single download package.
The service will initially be free to all blueyonder broadband complete and broadband elite customers, but those opting for the entry-level broadband service can get the full package free until the end of the year. After then they be given the option to pay for some elements on a monthly basis, although no pricing details have been announced.

This move follows a survey by the company which highlighted that 74 per cent of its customers were worried about online security, but 27 per cent still admitted to having gone without protection  measures at home.

Telewest customers can find more info and download the software here.

Telewest Broadband has carried out the first round of its promised Internet speed increases to 10Mbps which were announced last month.

Scotland is the lucky place to be with 40,000 customers seeing their connections boosted for no extra cost, and it is hoped that all of Telewest's  Scottish customers will be upgraded by the end of October. Not to be left out London's 100,000 customers will soon start to see speed increases, with the compete network upgraded by the start of next year.

All of the increased packages are marketed as completely unlimited, although the effect customers taking advantage of the upgraded speeds on Telewest's network will have to been seen.

A compete listing of the upgrade locations and timescales can be found on the Blueyonder website.

Telewest Broadband has carried out the first round of its promised Internet speed increases to 10Mbps which were announced last month.

Scotland is the lucky place to be with 40,000 customers seeing their connections boosted for no extra cost, and it is hoped that all of Telewest's  Scottish customers will be upgraded by the end of October. Not to be left out London's 100,000 customers will soon start to see speed increases, with the compete network upgraded by the start of next year.

All of the increased packages are marketed as completely unlimited, although the effect customers taking advantage of the upgraded speeds on Telewest's network will have to been seen.

A compete listing of the upgrade locations and timescales can be found on the Blueyonder website.

Telewest has struck a two year deal with Virgin to become it's preferred provider for it's new music download service.

Virgindigital.com was launched last week and provides customers with the option of downloading music or listening to sample clips, either by paying on a per track basics starting from 79p or a £9.99 monthly service where customers can have unlimited downloads or streams.

Blueyonder (Telewest Broadband) users can benefit as they can get various free seven day free trials and free downloads, although they will have to be running Windows 2000 or XP.

Telewest have followed NTL and announced a 10Mbps service for some of it's cable customers in a shake-up of it's connection speeds.

As will NTL there will be no cost penalty, but the good news is that the service will remain uncapped, as opposed to NTL who seem to favour a PAYG approach. This will mean that although the initial cost of the connection is slightly more, there will no no nasty surprises in store for heavy users.

Also Telewest are planning a much more aggressive upgrade program than ntl with upgrades starting next month and completing in early 2006, whereas NTL won’t have completed their upgrades until the end of 2006.

They have also released more details on the proposed upload connection speeds, the details so far released are:-

• 512k increases to 2Mb for £17.99 (upstream increased from 128K to 256K)
• 1Mb increases to 4Mb for £25 (upstream increased from 256K to 384K)
• 2Mb and 4MB (two tiers merged) increases to 10Mb for £35 (upstream of 384K).

Cable telco Telewest has started a trial for its blueyonder TV service, with the beta currently offers four channels which you can view, and pause at will. A three-day guide allows users to select content from anywhere in the previous schedule.

The channels are:

• blueyonder01: An entertainment channel including highlights from the LIVINGTV, Bravo, Challenge and Trouble channels.
• broadsports: sports including snowboarding, motor racing and sailing
• broadwise: video guides to what is happening in the online world
• broadway: a range of entertainment, including films.

Content can be played with speeds of up to 1.8Mb/s for the top quality images, with the quality decreasing for slower connections.

The trial is in partnership with Narrowstep, who have recently announced similar broadband schemes to provide TV via broadband connections. The trial appears to be available to all broadband users and not just those with blueyonder connections. Details at blueyonder.tv.

It's bad news if you have a Telewest email, nearly a million of addresses owned by the cable company have been blocked by the 'The Spam Prevention Early Warning System' (Spews)  blacklist.

The problem appears that many of the computers connect to Telewest's network have been infected by virii, which turn a healthy machine into a zombie. Many of these are compromised with an e-mail engine which is installed without the users knowledge, and is then used to send spam e-mails out to others.
According to Ironport, which monitors net addresses to find machines which ones have been hijacked, 16,000 Telewest computers have an e-mail server engine installed, with one unsuspecting punter sending out more than 100,000 e-mail messages per day!

Telewest have said it was working on a more permanent solution to problem, but the scale of the problem seems to indicate that this should have been taken a long while ago.

Cable operator Telewest seems keen not to get left behind in the recent race for ever increasing speeds. With both BT and NTL either planning or currently running high speed trial, according to ISPreview Telewest have quietly revealed it is going to trial faster speeds also.

A customer has revealed that they have received an invitation to join the 10Mbps trial and has kindly posted a scan of the letter here.
The good news is that the date on the letter is not April 1st!!