NTL Gives Up On Bad Broadband Wireless In Milton Keynes
There was a lot of publicity when NTL decided to offer broadband wireless to customers who otherwise couldn't get broadband at all in Milton Keynes. However, after just a few months, NTL has announced they're shutting down the service, as it wasn't commercially viable due to "line of sight" issues. The obvious response, of course, is that that issue was their problem. As new, non-line-of-sight wireless technologies are coming to market, it looks like this offering was using out-of-date equipment that has tended to fail in many places in the past. Of course, if you look at the details from when this was first launched the story becomes a bit clearer. First, the group funding this project is apparently really interested in (even more problematic) satellite broadband, over wireless, and seemed to give in reluctantly to allow wireless broadband. Secondly, NTL wanted to be careful not to compete with places that could receive wired broadband -- so they felt the need to go with line-of-sight offering, where they could limit it to only those who couldn't get DSL. Considering it launched only 4 months ago, they didn't even wait very long before pulling the plug either. In other words, the project (despite all the hype) was pretty much set up to fail... and it did.
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