News roundup August 2016

A roundup of August’s news and developments:

• The Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) published its latest Broadband Performance Indicator showing figures to June 2016; 4,021,047 premises had a superfast broadband service made available by the end of June 2016 as a result of Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) supported projects.
• ISP Review reported that fibre to the premise (FTTP) networks now reach 780,000 UK premises, up from just over 350,000 last year.
• Computer Weekly reported that Europe lags behind the US in gigabit broadband deployments. This is according to network test, monitoring and assurance solutions provider Viavi’s global Gigabit Monitor, which tracks gigabit broadband roll-outs around the world. North America has the largest share of announced gigabit broadband deployments at 61%, compared with just 24% in Europe. Asia, Australasia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America share the remaining 15% of deployments.
• Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn published a Digital Democracy Manifesto, pledging to “deliver high speed broadband and mobile connectivity for every household, company and organisation in Britain”. Also see coverage from BBC News.
• Finnish operator Elisa announced a new world record in achieving a speed of 1.9 Gbit/s in its 4G test network. The company claimed this record is “a step towards the 5G network and also an excellent indication of all the opportunities the 4G network still has to offer.”
• The US Federal Communications Commission’s Connect2Health Task Force launched the Mapping Broadband Health in America tool to visualise, overlay and analyse broadband and health data at the national, state and county levels. The tool can be used by both the public and private sectors to identify opportunities and gaps in connected care, exploring aspects such as the relationship between connectivity and health or where infrastructure gaps and poor health outcomes coincide.
• The FCC also released the Twelfth Broadband Progress Notice of Inquiry, seeking “comment on the current state of advanced telecommunications capability, deployment and availability.” The FCC released its 2016 Broadband Progress Report based on its previous eleventh inquiry in January of this year.
• Also this month a US appeals court has struck down a previous FCC decision, intended to promote broadband deployment, which overturned laws in North Carolina and Tennessee limiting the expansion of existing municipal broadband networks. The court found that the FCC had no authority from Congress to prohibit such state laws; see FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s statement and coverage from Network World.
• Sandvine’s 2016 Global Internet Phenomena: Inside the Connected Home report found that the average North American household now has over seven active devices in use each day, with 6% of households having more than 15 active devices. Laptop and desktop PCs now account for less than 25% of total traffic on fixed access networks, while mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) on fixed Wi-Fi networks now account for almost 30% of North American fixed access traffic.
• ISP Review and uSwitch reported on the top UK universities for broadband speeds in student accommodation. The University of Leicester was highest with an average of 39.7Mbit/s in student areas.
• Finally, the BBC reported that its online coverage of the 2016 Rio Olympics set new records, reaching 68.3m devices in the United Kingdom, and 102.3m globally. The biggest single day for digital traffic was Sunday 14th August with 19m unique browsers across the world.