Cable & Wireless Guernsey are offering 1MB and 2MB “Professional” broadband packages for £49.99 and £79.99 a month respectively as from June 17th.

So what do you get for your extra £25 a month with their 1MB pro service over their existing 1MB service?

Time for an update on the state of broadband in the Channel Islands. Some interesting home tariff cuts on both islands. The Office of Utility Regulation is pushing for further wholesale ADSL cuts in Guernsey. More news as it happens.

Now have usage limits in place on their “Rapid” broadband services with the exception of the top-end business service.

Newtel are dropping the price of their Guernsey 1MB unlimited service to £21.99 a month as from this coming Monday.

This compares very favorably with C&W’s £19.99 a month Pay As You GoPay As You Go and £26.99 AnytimeAnytime unlimited services.

The BBC web site finally reported the phone outage that hit the island yesterday. Like the Channel TV article it was poorly reported with little detail. Cable & Wireless’ news portal decided not to run the story at all although an apology can be found at their corporate site.

Lets look at the BBC article and break it down. I’m not having a particular go at the BBC or really even C&W just looking at how reporters play their personal tone through selection or words and selective omission of facts;

So the phone lines here have been out now for well over an hour. ADSL is still working as is Guernsey-to-Guernsey mobiles but everything else is giving dead tones, no tones or “Network failure” messages.

So much for a single point of failure or resilient network. They currently boast;

A few changes from the various players so a quick run-down.

While local ISPs could argue their bandwidth is limited they have no such excuse for charging 3x the price of a UK outfit for IP addresses as Newtel are doing in both islands.

This week is the annual Battle of Britain week here in Guernsey and today sees highlight of the weeks events, the air display. Alas, I missed the a chunk of it but managed to catch the star attraction The Red Arrows. As always it was most impressive, dives banks and turns at low altitude while retaining perfect form in an number of geometric shapes. The weather was less impressed and the low cloud ceiling canceled out the various cross-overs we are normally treated to.

Today sees the completion of Cable & Wireless Guernsey’s free ADSL upgrade from 512KB to 1MB. My parents and friends got theirs earlier but even mine was enhanced this morning. If yours is still running at 512KB give them a shout.

Wondering what happened to Cable & Wireless’ planned 1MBit ADSL upgraded service? Their web site has been very quiet so I emailed and got this response I thought I’d share;

Dear Customer

I’m still feeling a little ill but I guess the worst of it is past, poor Clarissa is still very unwell :(

I thought I’d cover some of the bits and pieces going on in Guernsey at the moment for a refreshing change…

Living in Guernsey requires you develop a thick skin with regards to availability of goods and services. Many a time you can find a great deal on-line only to find they won’t ship here or if they do they want to charge you £50 to get it here. And get used to phoning and emailing companies for your VAT back every time you order (such as for Amazon and Apple).

One such annoyance is the inability to use short-code text messages such as 604664 for Google SMS as well as the silly UK TV voting systems.

I want faster DSL…. 512KB just isn’t cutting it, I used to enjoy 2MB in Jersey… Let’s examine the pricing shall we…

Yes you could argue the C&W Gsy has better contention ratios but the fact is they don’t even offer a home service for anything above 512KB.