Multimedia and cloud driving insatiable appetite for bandwidth

Having just celebrated its 10th birthday, IP telephony services company, Blueface is continuing to ride the wave of adoption towards Voice over IP (VoIP) and hosted voice services with strong business growth reported.

According to Brian Martin, business development manager organisations large and small are responding positively to its message of significant cost savings, which the company claims can be achieved when moving voice traffic to an IP platform.

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Strong 4G adoption enabling greater mobility

In its latest assessment of the telecommunications market, ComReg reveals that the number of smartphone/tablet users increased to 2,811,170 in Q2 2014, up by 3.4 per cent from Q1 2014 and a whopping 14.7 per cent compared to Q2 2013.

And with global pre-orders of Apple’s iPhone 6 and 6 plus currently standing at over 4 million units, our love affair with the smart device and the immediacy of staying connected on the go, is set to continue.

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Business broadband choices: moving and shaking

Momentum in the broadband market has gathered pace with a raft of acquisitions, joint venture and strategic alliance announcements of late.

ESB and Vodafone have embarked on a joint venture to invest €450 million in a 100 per cent fibre-to-the-building broadband network offering speeds from 200 Mbps to 1000 Mbps across 50 towns and 500,000 homes and businesses.  Mobile network operator, Three has just completed its acquisition of O2 and the company has also recently signed a 4G network sharing agreement with eircom to run until 2030.

Should businesses be concerned about this level of market flux and does increased consolidation weaken competitive forces?

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Bringing broadband connectivity to the promised land

It’s a tiresome debate – tackling the rural/urban broadband deficit, yet high speed, reliable broadband connectivity is as important as other key pieces of economic infrastructure.

Just ask the people of the UK, who in a recent survey for the Institution of Engineering and Technology said that extending superfast broadband nationwide would deliver more economic benefits than building new airports.

Minister White inherits the unfortunate accolade of being the fifth minister of communications to publicly proclaim that high-speed, broadband connectivity will be made available to all, irrespective of geographic location.

So is there any reason to believe that the National Broadband Plan (NBP) – designed to inject a further €1 billion of investment to tackle this infrastructural deficit through a public/private partnership model – will come to fruition under his stewardship?

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