BT chief executive Ian Livingston had said: “Our engineers have worked tirelessly this past year and BT has made a real commitment to the UK’s infrastructure. Rolling out fibre is no easy task and so to have passed ten million premises in such a short time is fantastic. Our roll-out is one of the fastest in the world and our engineers deserve lots of credit.”

In related news, BT has announced that ten communities are set to benefit from faster speeds, laying down the upgrade schedule on when several of the ISP’s copper networks will be upgraded. These include Arnside, Barrow-in-Furness, Brampton, Cleator Moor, Cockermouth, Keswick, Maryport, Walney Island, Wetheral and Windermere.

As a result of the upgrade, which will be done by Spring of next year, over 61,200 homes and businesses will be able to experience speeds that are twice as fast as what they currently have access to.

Sizable funding has been set aside to support the aims of the project, which amounts to a total of £980 million. And according to Virgin Media, the bulk of this amount is going to its rival, BT Broadband.

In a letter, Virgin Media chief operating officer Andrew Barron explained that the majority of the funding earmarked for the project is going towards subsidising the efforts of BT. “The noble ambition of locally procured rural broadband networks is protracted and likely to favour the incumbent, freezing out new entrants. The outcome of current government policy is likely to be the subsidy of already dominant infrastructure in areas where we are not, to the sum of hundreds of millions of pounds of public money.”

The remaining contenders for the funding are currently BT and Fujitsu. Other service providers, namely Cable & Wireless and Geo Networks, withdrew from the bidding, saying that BT had unfair advantage.

Barron adds: “If we agree competition is the best way to encourage further sustainable investment, and that embedding dominance in markets is bad for consumers, we must also accept that providing the vast majority of available public funding to an incumbent is not in the UK’s best interests.”

The British government has launched the Broadband Delivery UK programme in order to make the country’s broadband infrastructure better. Two of BDUK’s main goals are the following: to give all users in the UK satisfactory broadband connections of at least 2Mbps, and to bring next-generation broadband technology to at least 90% of users by 2015.

The BDUK project comes with allocated funding that is to be distributed to local councils and county governing bodies so that they can implement their own respective broadband plans.

The government has named 27 cities that have been shortlisted to receive funding for their projects: Aberdeen, Brighton & Hove, Cambridge, Chelmsford, Coventry, Derby, Dundee, Exeter, Gloucester, Kingston upon Hull, Leicester, Londonderry/Derry, Newport, Norwich, Oxford, Perth, Peterborough, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Preston, Salford, Southampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Swansea, Wolverhampton and York.

In a statement, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said: “These ultra-fast speeds will allow more cities in the UK to compete with the fastest in the world, bringing new opportunities for growth, the development of high-tech industries and the transformation of public services.”

Successful applicants will get funding to provide users with fibre broadband connections that provide speeds in the range of 80-100Mbps. Selected cities will join the government’s list to get a share of the £100 million broadband fund are: Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, Manchester and Sheffield.

Just a few weeks ago, the UK High Court issued a ruling which stated that UK Internet service providers should set up a block that would cut off access to The Pirate Bay, which is one of the largest torrent websites on the Internet. The site indexes hundreds of thousands of torrents which allow users to download the content illegally.

Now Ofcom is following suit with the announcement of its own set of anti-piracy policies for these ISPs called the Initial Obligations Code of Practice. The date for the publication of the policies have not yet been announced.

However, this code will detail what ISPs are supposed to do to deal with issues of piracy. The code explains technical measures and actions that the providers should undertake against file sharers, such as firing off warning letters and notices of broadband service disconnection.

The DCMS stated: “The point upon which we lost in both cases has meant that we have had to re-set how the costs of the process will be apportioned. This in turn has led to the Initial Obligations Code being delayed. However, we anticipate that the code will be published in June 2012.”

The Internet Service Providers’ Association said that while it had reservations about the implementation of such anti-piracy measures, they announced that they will be working hand in hand with the government and with Ofcom.

An ISPA spokesperson stated: “We understand… that a number of important practical details still need to be agreed,” a spokesman for the industry group said. “ISPA has a concern about the costs but welcomes the clarification that BT and TalkTalk achieved through their judicial review.”

Claire Perry, the MP who serves as the chairwoman of the Independent Parliamentary Inquiry on Online Child Protection, said: “Our inquiry found that many children are easily accessing internet pornography as well as websites showing extreme violence or promoting self-harm and anorexia. This is hugely worrying.”

Some service providers have responded to the call for better filters, including TalkTalk with their HomeSafe filters. On the other side of the spectrum stands the Open Rights Group (ORG), which is saying that these filters have taken to censoring “innocent” content on mobile, as well.

ORG has just released a report which explained that over sixty websites were wrongly blocked by the filters that were programmed to filter out adult content. These included personal web blogs, community websites, and political commentaries.

Peter Bradwell of the Open Rights Group, who wrote the report, said: “Child protection filters can actually affect many more users than intended and block many more sites than they should. These blunt blocks effectively add up to a system of censorship across UK networks.”

He continued: “Default-on blocks can have significant harmful and unintended consequences for everybody’s access to information.”

To respond to ORG’s report, Hamish MacLeod, chairman of the Mobile Broadband Group, explained that this wasn’t the case. “Even allowing for the ORG missing a few, 60 misclassified websites does not amount to anything that could reasonably be described as ‘censorship’, particularly when mobile operators are happy to remove the filters when customers show they are over 18 and will re-classify websites when misclassifications are pointed out to them.”

MacLeod added: “This is how the small handful of websites that get referred to mobile operators each year are already dealt with.”

- Provide universal broadband access with speeds of at least 2Mbps across the entire country
- Bring next-generation broadband technology to ninety percent of the UK by the year 2015

In line with this, Rutland has just signed a £3 million contract with provider BT Broadband in order to bring superfast broadband to households and business establishments in the area. The agreement launches the Digital Rutland programme, which aims to provide high speed Internet services to over 97% of Rutland’s users.

Deputy Leader of Rutland County Council, Terry King, stated: “Broadband coverage in Rutland is poor and in some areas very poor, which is why we need a solution like this for the whole county addressing ‘not spots’ and areas the market will not penetrate.

“This will provide benefits for the wider community such as developing education through e-technology and giving residents access to new models of care and social interaction.”

Rutland was awarded with £710,000 from the BDUK funding. BT Broadband will be adding £800,000 to the project’s funds, which totals £2.2 million including the funds contributed from Rutland’s council.

Users in Shropshire are bent on getting some of this funding and some private investments to set up superfast broadband for their area. In line with this, residents of Shropshire are being called to participate in a campaign to drum up support by month’s end to entice private investors to get involved in the cause.

The Shropshire Council is looking towards the private sector to add support to the £8.2 million funding that it has set aside for the cause. A spokesman explained that ”more public support will mean a greater likelihood of securing more external funding.”

Martin Taylor-Smith, who is the authority’s cabinet member responsible for information and communication technology, stated: “Whatever happens, this project will result in better broadband for Shropshire. People are starting to get the message. We have now hit the 4,000 mark, but we would love to get a lot more than that.”

TalkTalk currently offers pay-as-you-go mobile plans and deals. In the statement, the operator announced: “Our mobile base continues to grow with over 70,000 customers now taking mobile in addition to their phone and broadband service. We plan to launch a handset proposition later this year in addition to our existing SIM-only and data products.”

TalkTalk also stated that they were looking to increase its current fixed-line network by upping its capacity by more than a hundred times over. The provider added: “Over the next five years, we plan to increase our network capacity by over 100 times. Primarily this will take the form of cost efficient backhaul scaling against a sustainable exchange footprint.”

“In addition we will continue to optimise our network for video content, security and access to cloud services.”

This forecast was made by telecoms analyst firm Point Topic, who said that the UK will be host to over 25.9 million broadband lines by the end of that year, with the connections established from fibre optic cables.

Ofcom had just recently made the confirmation that over 63% of the United Kingdom’s households already have access to superfast broadband services. These are defined to be ”having a potential headline access speed of at least 20Mb, with no upper limit.”

The results from Point Topic’s study injects a wave of enthusiasm in the state of UK’s broadband. The firm released a statement: “As BT and Virgin Media build scale in premises passed and end users signed to their superfast broadband services some of the UK’s alternative network operators are beginning to find their niche. Clearly not all altnets will be successful and questions remain concerning the long-term viability of alternative network operators as significant players in the country’s superfast broadband future.”

“Nevertheless there are circumstances in which their varied and localised approaches look set to bring superfast broadband to individual communities that have often been struggling with access to even the most basic of broadband services.”

In related news, Ofcom has just called on these service providers to come clean in their sales calls with customers. Ofcom recently did a mystery shopping phone exercise and reported pretty dismal results.

The regulator reported that ISPs failed to provide potential customers with a quote on their speeds in 41% of all sales calls. This is clearly a breach of code that was set up last year in order to protect consumers. TalkTalk was found to be the worst offender, as they were found to offer a quote, unprompted, in only 47% of their calls. BT Broadband came in second, by offering a quote in just 48% of calls. These are nearly ten percentage points lower than the average across all providers of 59%.

Through a spokesperson, BT has said: “Ofcom has suggested we should make a minor change to mention the speed quote earlier in the sales conversation, which we are happy to do and will implement straight away. Overall, Ofcom found that the level of compliance with the code has improved since our previous mystery shopping exercise in 2009.”

TalkTalk also added: “ ”No one enters a contract with us without receiving a speed estimate tailored to them. Anyone can log onto our website and get an accurate speed estimate, based on the capabilities of their phone connection.”

The providers that fared well in the mystery shopping exercise are Karoo and Sky, which provided quotes in 76% and 72% of their sales calls, respectively.

Responding to the study, Marzena Lipman, policy manager at campaign group Consumer Focus, commented: “The most common problem for broadband consumers is ending up with a slower broadband speed than they expected. So, while it’s good news there have been improvements, it is disappointing that this research shows many providers still aren’t being as up-front with their customers as they should be.”