The Valuation Office Agency‘s imminent “revaluation” of business rates (due to take effect from the 1st April 2017) could do more harm than good to the roll-out of fibre optic broadband, not least by hitting BT and Virgin Media with a £1.3bn tax hike on existing infrastructure over the next [...]

Openreach (BT) has announced that their Single Order Generic Ethernet Access (SOGEA) product, which aims to give consumers a truly standalone (naked) FTTC / VDSL “Fibre Broadband” line without the voice (phone) service, will enter Phase 2 of its trial with UK ISPs from 2nd March 2017. The Phase 2 [...]

BP has restated its commitment to the North Sea oil and gas industry with a promise to be a “jobs generator” for the struggling oil economy. The commitment comes shortly after the oil major posted a $115 million profit for 2016 - a massive improvement on 2015's $6.5 billion loss. [...]

Donald Trump and global crude producers are set to take prices on a bumpy ride this year, according to the world’s biggest independent oil trader. As investors are kept on tenterhooks over U.S. policies and whether OPEC and other nations will curb output as pledged, global benchmark Brent crude may [...]

Urban fibre optic ISP Hyperoptic has taken a break from deploying “hyperfast” broadband to big apartment or office blocks in the major UK cities. Instead they’ve begun rolling out their Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) network to a housing estate in Hertfordshire’s Welwyn Garden City. The Bellway at QEII development, which is being [...]

Tullow Oil’s Erut-1 well in Block 13T, northern Kenya, has discovered a gross oil interval of 55 m with 25 m of net oil pay at a depth of 700 m. The overall oil column for the field is considered to be 100 m to 125 m. The objective of [...]

Danish wind energy giant DONG Energy has agreed to acquire 35% ownership of Taiwan’s first offshore wind project, the Formosa I project, which will start out at 8 megawatts and have room to grow a further 120 megawatts. DONG Energy announced on Wednesday that it had signed an agreement to [...]

Some 4,500 additional homes and businesses in the Lincolnshire market town of Louth will soon gain access to Virgin Media’s new 300Mbps capable cable broadband and TV service, which forms part of the operator’s on-going £3bn Project Lightning network expansion. Apparently the deployment has already begun and the aim is [...]

The first offshore components assembled at the Siemens factory in Hull  have been shipped out into the North Sea. The giant jack-up ship Sea Challenger left Alexandra Dock this morning carrying four towers, 12 blades and four nacelles destined for the Dudgeon wind farm 30 miles off the Norfolk coast. Barry [...]

The Connecting Devon and Somerset project has revealed that their Phase 1 roll-out of “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) services with BT (Openreach) will miss its target by far more than the “circa 1,700 premises” that was claimed in December 2016; it has actually fallen short by c.11,000. The CDS scheme recently [...]

Openreach (BT) will on Monday officially start the deployment phase for their new pilot of ‘up to’ 330Mbps capable G.fast (ITU G.9700/9701) broadband technology, which by the end of March 2017 should have been rolled out to 138,000 homes and businesses in 17 places across the United Kingdom. This huge [...]

In another shining example of renewable energy leadership, in 2016, Germany used more renewable electricity than ever before, receiving 32 percent of the gross amount of electricity consumed in the country from sun, wind and other renewable sources. The Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and the [...]