BT’s new telephone network, called the 21st Century Network, is well underway with the first call being made yesterday.

The new network will use voice over internet (VoIP) technology to carry calls and will cost BT £10 billion to complete. It will be finished in 2010.

The 21st Century Network will lead to lower costs to consumers, faster speeds and more services being made available. It certainly is the future of telecommunications and will be one the most advanced telephone network of its kind in the world.

More information at BBC

BT has made a cash offer of £67 million to buy broadband provider Plusnet. If accepted, Plusnet will remain as a separate brand. Plusnet has over 200,000 broadband customers.

This is yet another example of a rapidly consolidating market with bigger providers continuing to swallow up smaller ones.

Orange and TalkTalk have lost ground in a customer satisfaction survey released by uSwitch. They came joint bottom in the survey for overall customer satisfaction.

TalkTalk scored highly in the last uSwitch survey in May. Since then, it has revolutionised the industry by being the first to offer free broadband. However, customers are less than impressed with some customers not being connected and unable to get through to the customer support help lines.

Orange has suffered with outages to its broadband service.

Telewest scored very well and came top in quality of connection, customer services, billing, and tech support. Its sister company, NTL, did less well and finished 8th overall.

Virgin.net came top of the survey overall.

Vodafone has announced that it will offer a broadband and home phone bundle, called At Home. For £25 per month, you will receive an 8Mb broadband service, all your UK phone calls and a 25% discount on mobile calls. You must be a Vodafone mobile customer to get the deal for £25 per month. If not, it will cost £35 per month. The Vodafone At Home package will be available in January 2007.
Vodafone joins a number of big name brands, such as Orange, Sky, Carphone Warehouse and BT who are battling it out in the broadband sector by offering very competitive bundled packages.

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Read more on the Vodafone announcement from the BBC

Sky Broadband is exceeding expectations with more than 113,000 new orders and more than 1 million people expressing an interest in the service. The Sky Broadband service was launched in August of this year as Sky moved into offering the “triple play” products: broadband, digital TV and home phone.

The battle in the market now seems to be focused on the big companies like Sky, BT, NTL:Telewest and Orange. All of these companies offer multiple packages services.

The Sky story (The Times)

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