Jurassic Fibre and Lineal Sign New Partnership

Lineal are delighted to announce our new partnership with Jurassic Fibre, bringing faster broadband to South West businesses.

Exeter-based Jurassic Fibre are a regional connectivity provider rolling out new ultrafast full-fibre infrastructure to thousands of addresses across the West Country.

At time of writing, Jurassic Fibre’s £250m investment in a new fibre network already includes numerous towns and rural communities such as Barnstaple, Bridgwater, Bude, Exmouth, Honiton, Okehampton, Sidmouth, Sowton, Taunton, Wellington and Yeovil.

Lineal Software Solutions Ltd. are a Barnstaple-based IT support and software development company assisting businesses and organisations across the UK and beyond.

Lineal’s Managing Director Mike Matthews said: “Thanks to Jurassic Fibre many businesses will finally have the option of true ultrafast, ‘pure’ fibre broadband at low cost, provided over cutting-edge infrastructure that simply hasn’t been available from any other provider.”

“We’ve been impressed by what Jurassic Fibre have built. Every day Lineal’s Technical Support teams encounter businesses depending on ever more cloud-based technology, and requiring faster connection speeds – together we’ll help deliver the connectivity options many so desperately need to run their businesses effectively.”

Jurassic Fibre said: “We are proud to be serving both business and residential customers across North Devon with our ultrafast full-fibre broadband services. Our partnership with Lineal enables businesses to take full advantage of their new bandwidths by providing the platform to utilise new technologies to serve their customers better.”

Jurassic Fibre is available in a range of speeds from 100Mbps down (20Mbps up) up to gigabit grade, and via private-fibre ‘leased line’ gigabit ethernet, for businesses needing exceptional quality connectivity.

 

For find out how faster connectivity options could help your business, please contact Lineal today.


Gamma Roadshow 2020

We recently attended the 2020 Gamma Communications Roadshow at Stamford Bridge – hearing the latest business telecoms and technology trends from across the UK. But what do businesses need to be aware of?

 

Clock Ticking for ISDN

BT will officially turn off all ISDN services by 2025, with the ‘stop-sell’ order coming as early as 2023.

With UK businesses just getting used to putting ‘2020’ on paperwork, this is no longer a drill – if your phone system uses ISDN, your business needs to begin preparing to switch to a digital services such as SIP or better still, a hosted VOIP platform.

There are perhaps as many as 1.5 million ISDN channels still in use by businesses across the UK. Gulp.

 

Ultrafast Fibre Rollout Gathers Pace

Superfast broadband (‘Fibre to the Cabinet’ or FTTC) prices are falling all the time, but the big story of the decade is likely to be the steady roll-out of ultrafast ‘Fibre to the Premise’ to many more businesses – to around 40% availability over the next few years.

Salisbury is the first single-year rollout ‘test’ area trialling complete fibre infrastructure (booking a new copper line in the Salisbury area is likely to be rejected).

Interested in fibre for your area? Perhaps you should speak to your friendly neighbourhood IT provider…

 

Not all 5G is born equal

We’ve known for a while how the smallest of the UK’s four mobile networks (Three Mobile) is arguably in the best position to deliver data, although it’s now becoming clear Three has an enviable technical advantage over some of the other major providers – and is even using the cheeky marketing slogan: ‘If it’s Not Three, It’s Not Real 5G’.

The reserved spectrum range favours Three to such an extent that EE/BT, O2 and Vodafone have all submitted strongly worded complaints over preferential access. Gulp.

 

Microsoft Teams Telecoms Emerges

Among Gamma’s most exciting news was the announcement of a Direct Call Routing service for Microsoft Teams – which effectively plugs into the back of Teams and Microsoft’s ‘Phone System’ PBX add-on, to turn your Microsoft Teams software into a fully fledged business phone system.

teams phone

Until now Microsoft’s Teams platform has been a strong option for video/audio conferencing, screenshare, instant messaging and collaboration – but have always lacked the more robust business call-handling feature-set of true phone systems, or suffered from a shortage of physical handsets. With both of those challenges solved by Gamma and the Teams app available on a variety of devices, it’s easy to imagine Teams phones appearing on desks.

Direct Routing for Teams is expected from April 2020. The final pricing is likely to be somewhere in the region of between £15-25 a month per user (including Microsoft Office licensing) – finally unifying telecoms under the same single user account as Microsoft Office 365 hosted email, files storage, office apps and collaboration software. Watch this space.

 

For communications services and expertise, please contact our team today.


Compensation for Broadband faults, Ofcom rules

Communications regulator Ofcom has ruled that automatic compensation for broadband faults will be available to customers experiencing service faults.

Customers of BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Zen internet (roughly 90% of UK customers) will be able to claim £8 per day for disconnections not fixed after 2 days, £5 for delayed repairs, and £25 for scheduled engineer visits which do not happen.

Ofcom estimates automatic pay-outs could exceed £142m annually, considerably more than the estimated 15% of claims currently paid out by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) each year.

The new system has been designed to improve service delivery, encourage users to report problems, and incentivise ISPs to keep a tighter control of faults.

Customers will be expected to follow a complaints procedure to receive compensation – revised guidance will be published in advance of the changes coming into effect in 2019. Existing rules detailing what types of faults should currently be referred to your ISP are available here. 

As before, compensation is not expected to cover internal network or internet connection delivery problems at a property, with BT levelling charges on customers who request unnecessary engineer call-outs.

Broadband customers can learn more about their statutory rights on Ofcom’s website here.

Need IT Support? – call Lineal’s experienced team today.