The European Commission has delivered a huge blow to the idea of VULA (virtual unbundled local access) broadband right the way across Europe, as it has moved to open an investigation into precisely how the practice is being introduced in Germany by Deutsche Telekom since 2012. For the uninitiated VULA came about as a way to promote vectoring in telco based broadband. Broadly speaking vectoring can take copper twisted pair broadband up to 50 Mbps (depending upon the exact distance the node is from the home), but if all of the lines in a wiring bundle have their interference cancelled in the same server together, it can go closer to 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps for two bonded pairs. From…