Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) declarations are always news, and with good reason: The ACCC's regulated prices set the floor underneath a host of retail services – mobile, broadband, telephony, business data and so on.

New declarations are always accompanied by lobbying, both in media outlets and in the more formal channels of submissions to ACCC inquiries. Access seekers have an eye to their balance sheets, the ACCC has an eye to avoiding the extraction of monopoly rents, and Telstra wants to protect its margins.

Analysis Virgin Media has said it before and it's saying it again: the cable company wants the UK government to take at least half of Blighty's £150m set aside for urban broadband rollouts and pump it into improving digital skills in small businesses.

This time, in a well-spun missive to Chancellor George Osborne ahead of Budget Day, today, VM's outgoing-boss Neil Berkett urged Britain's thin-lipped occupant of Number 11 to ditch a large amount of the broadband investment plans for major cities around the UK in favour of splashing around £75m on helping little firms to get to grips with

Brit internet and communications provider Entanet is slowing bringing its systems back to life today after they metaphorically keeled over last night.

The Shropshire-based supplier of broadband, leased lines, telecoms and more has offered scant detail about its network outage, much to the chagrin of some of its biz and ISP punters - who took to Twitter to moan about the service going titsup.

Entanet's Richard Partridge said in a post on Entanet's website :

Between approximately 18.30 we began work to resolve the issue and by 20.45 all but two sites were reinstated successfully. The remaining sites were restored

Australia's National Broadband Network, due for completion in 2021, has announced a three-month delay in its fibre-to-the-premises construction schedule, which if not recovered would represent a miss of a couple of percent on the project's timing.

While declining to direct blame outwards, NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley told a media conference call yesterday that the delays became clear when reviewing forecasts from the project's construction partners. Rather than the 341,000 premises due to be passed by June this year (268,000 in brownfields, 55,000 in greenfields), Quigley stated that the June forecast is now that the network will pass between 155,000

Geek's Guide Adastral Park is BT’s global research and development centre, one of the world’s most pioneering centres of technology and telecommunications.

Like other visitors to the area, I’ve gazed at the Le Corbusier-designed building and its iconic tower cube rising out of the surrounding flat Suffolk farmland. It announces its modernising mission to passengers staring out of the windows of cars hurtling along the A12 past Ipswich and on to the east coast.

The site has a rich history of military invention and technical achievement, and is now home to thousands of engineers not just working on the frontier