Broadband News

Cable & Wireless (C & W) announced yesterday a ground breaking wholesale deal with Inuk networks to offer a national IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) service via broadband.

The contract worth £70 million over 5 years will see C & W providing Inuk access to one of the most advanced nationwide multicast networks, providing broadband, telephony and television services.

Inuk will then provide its service through its subsidiary Freewire in the form of triple play enabling DSL customers to take up the service and offer their customers the digital TV service. Inuk currently offer a service to University Students through its collaboration with JANET, the universities backbone network. To date over forty universities, with a combination of over 100,000 student rooms have signed up to the Freewire service. However with C & W’s help the Freewire service can be extended to home users from March 2008.

Jim Marsh, CEO, commenting on the deal said: “This is another great wholesale partnership deal for us and I’m delighted that we’ve been able to create the UK’s most compelling IPTV platform for Inuk. We will concentrate on providing an excellent customer service to Inuk and our other wholesale broadband customers - whilst they focus on delivering a range of triple-play services to our collective consumers.”

Marcus Liassides, the CEO of Inuk, said: “We’re delighted to have Cable & Wireless as our wholesale partner. The fact that we’ll be able to offer our customers the UK’s first truly converged IPTV, VoIP and broadband service is a major achievement and testimony to the way our two teams have worked together.”