ISPs review last decade ... and look to future

All the usual end of year reviews are coming out from the tech sites, but Broadband Genie has been talking to the various ISPs about the last decade and what their predictions are for the next ten years.

While it's quite long to summarise, they have spoken to Virgin Media, Be Broadband and TalkTalk amongst the big players.

Virgin Media's Jon James emphasised how far the market has come since they (then Telewest) first launched broadband in the UK in March 2000, and looked into the future with the company's 200Mb trials, increased upstream speeds and convergence opportunities.

Sylvain Thevenot of TalkTalk - who the site recently did a more detailed interview with, in which he was unconcerned about the impact of Tesco entering the market - believes that mobile based services such as mobile broadband and smartphones has been the big development in the last 10 years, and also refers to convergence along with different needs for different generations being what he expects to see in the future.

For their part, O2-owned Be Broadband highlighted the higher speeds delivered by ADSL2+ services and that they believe fibre is the future - with the next decade to be dominated by the possibilities that FTTC and FTTH services will bring.

Operations head Tom Williams also plugged their 'premium' broadband service, believing that users will gravitate more towards the quality end of the market.

Some comments from other providers and analysts can be found in the full article.