UK Broadband ISP Airband has revealed that it is planning a major FTTP deployment after Aberdeen Standard Investments (ASI) acquired a majority stake in the Worcestershire-based firm.
A new Prysmian Group study, commissioned by Europacable, has found that Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) is the most energy efficient broadband, compared with other technologies such as FTTC and Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC).
CityFibre has announced that Zen Internet has become the latest provider to join its national Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network. Zen Internet joins the likes of major operators TalkTalk and Vodafone and smaller providers like Giganet on CityFibre’s network, having previously focused on selling Openreach products.
The European Commission has ruled that the proposed merger of mobile operator O2 (Telefonica UK) and broadband provider Virgin Media should be referred back the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
Over 2,000 Stoke-on-Trent homes will now have access to gigabit-capable FTTP broadband resulting from a £19.2 million partnership between Stoke city council and Swedish firm VXFIBER (VXF).
The Plaid Cymru-lead Carmarthenshire Council has approved an investment of £55 million for digital connectivity for the region. Plaid Cymru said that the upgrade, which constitutes part of the wider Swansea Bay City Deal, is essential for the region’s economic development.
Oil giant Shell Energy is reported to be among a number of bidders in the running to acquire the Post Office’s telecoms division. The business has around 500,000 phone and broadband customers and would reportedly be valued at around £100 million.
Ookla, the company behind speedtest.net, has published its Q3 2020 study of fixed broadband and mobile data speeds across the UK’s largest providers. Smaller providers were not included in the study, likely owing to a lack of data.
Ofcom has begun an investigation into BT potentially overcharging customers in remote areas who seek to install broadband or upgrade their current connection, following reports that some customers were quoted up to £100,000. The telecoms regulator is reported to have held talks with the provider about how it has been calculating its quotes.
Hull-based ISP KCom has announced that it will bring its Fibre to the Premises network to 10,000 North Lincolnshire premises as the first phase of a £100 million extension of its network.
A new partnership between ISP ClearFibre and connectivity provider Connectus looks set to bring gigabit-capable broadband to thousands of new build homes in Northern Powerhouse regions.
North Yorkshire County Council will next week vote on awarding the £12.5 million contract for Phase 4 of the Superfast Broadband North Yorkshire (SFNY) project, which could bring superfast broadband coverage in the county up to 97 per cent.
Virgin Media has unleashed its largest ever broadband upgrade, with millions more customers now able to access contented speeds of up to 1Gbps downstream.
BT has announced that it has started work on a new £2.2 million ultrafast broadband network in Plymouth and South West Devon.
The contract to upgrade broadband in the area was won earlier this year and requires BT to install a fibre broadband network across a total of 131 buildings. These will include hospitals, clinics, schools, libraries and council buildings.
The Quantum Group of Companies, which includes the ISP Quantum Air Fibre, has acquired engineering firm QConex and now plans to undertake a major Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network rollout to 120,000 premises in Lincolnshire.
The state-supported Fastershire project has struck a deal with rural broadband provider Gigaclear and rival firm FullFibre to deliver access to a 1GB-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to 5,000 premises in the town of Ledbury, Herefordshire.
The Marriott Hotels hospitality chain has been has been fined £18.4 million by the UK's data privacy watchdog.
According to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the breach of data security may have affected up to 339 million guests, including seven million UK-based guest records.
The Scottish Government has announced that it will combine the Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme (SBVS) with the UK's Rural Gigabit Connectivity (RGC) programme to boost the amount of funding available to remote properties in Scotland.
Three UK has announced that it has agreed a £100 million investment deal with SSE Enterprise Telecoms to upgrade its fibre optic capacity in 250 UK towns and cities. The mobile network operator says that the deal will help it to “deliver the UK’s fastest 5G network” and “significantly enhance Three UK’s 4G (mobile broadband) service”.
Ex-BT CEO and former trade minister Lord Ian Livingston will head up a new “Telecoms Diversification Task Force”, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has announced.
According to a survey conducted by Point Topic for the Independent Networks Cooperative Association (INCA), close to nine out of ten (88.7 per cent) of the UK’s challenger broadband networks are in favour of the creation of a common platform through which to provide wholesale services to third-party providers.
The Scottish government has announced that it will launch a £4 million package to establish a nationwide network of 5G hubs. The aim of the S5GConnect Hubs is to increase take-up of 5G based mobile technology. The project will be delivered through the Scotland 5G Centre (S5GC) and the S5GConnect Programme.
Videotelephony company Zoom has added two-factor authentication (2FA) to its video-conferencing platform as it looks to help organisations tackle identity theft and security breaches.
According to a new report from consultancy firm Arthur D. Little, 10 countries have now passed the 95 per cent threshold for full fibre broadband networks coverage. The report indicates that the UK continues to lag behind these levels, but is improving quickly.
The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has joined calls for the UK government to form an Infrastructure Bank to help with the delivery of infrastructure projects, such as the expansion of gigabit-capable full fibre broadband, housing, roads and railways.
Northumberland County Council is poised to next week approve an investment of £537,000 to provide 18 rural primary schools with a gigabit-capable broadband connection. Cabinet members will vote on the investment, which comes via the Department for Education’s £200 million Rural Gigabit Connectivity (RGC) programme, on September 8.
An Opinium survey of 2,002 people in the UK, commissioned by Zen Internet, claims that customers are increasingly moving away from TV and broadband bundles, with streaming services said to offer better value.
UK MPs have called on local council authorities to help support the wider rollout of 5G networks and gigabit-capable broadband. The government has claimed that some deals for telecoms operators to access private and public land to build new networks “are not progressing quickly enough”.
UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has published its 2020 survey of service quality, call wait times, complaint response and install times at the UK’s largest broadband ISPs and mobile operators.
CityFibre has announced that it is planning to deploy a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises broadband network in the towns of Slough, Berkshire and Swindon, Wiltshire. The Slough roll-out will cost £24 million, while Swindon will see a £40 million investment.
Scientists at University College London’s (UCL) Optical Networks division have released a research paper detailing the successful use of “hybrid discrete Raman and rare-earth doped fibre amplifiers” in attaining a record single fibre speed of 178.08 Tbps (Terabits per second) over a 40 kilometre distance. The previous record speed stood at 150.3 Tbps.
According to a new Opinium survey from Uswitch.com, 4.7 million people across the UK have suffered a broadband outage of more than three hours within the past year, which it claims cost the economy around £1.5 billion.
Following recent roll-outs of its Gig1 broadband this month and in July, Virgin Media claims that it now has the UK’s largest gigabit capable network. The roll-outs mean that 3.6 million properties across the provider’s network can now access this connectivity and that a quarter of its network is gigabit enabled.
Broadband customers on Openreach FTTP-based networks, across various providers, have reported that their requests to regrade their service to faster tiers are facing delays. The delays seem to be largely impacting new build properties on greenfield sites and is being attributed to a system change made by BT Wholesale.
CityFibre, in partnership with Vodafone UK, has announced the completion of its £10 million FTTH broadband network rollout in Stirling, as well as a £2 million extension to the network. The Scottish city becomes CityFibre’s first completed “Gigabit City” build.
The Digital Scotland project with BT Openreach is almost at an end, and is expected to provide fibre broadband to a total of 950,000 extra premises.
Initially, the project aimed to deliver FTTC and FTTP services to hard to reach areas, which otherwise would not have been upgraded through commercial projects.
At least seven British higher education institutions have been targeted in a global ransomware attack on education cloud computing provider Blackbaud.
According to the company, student and alumni data was stolen in the attack, which took place in May this year. However, the firm has confirmed that no bank account details, credit card details or social security numbers were stolen.
A new YouGov poll conducted among 1,000 London adults between July 2nd-6th and commissioned by broadband ISP G.Network has claimed that around two-thirds of Londoners have experienced broadband problems.
The Channel Islands has suggested that it will follow the UK in excluding Chinese telecoms operator Huawei from acting as a supplier for its 5G networks. The UK government took the initial decision due to ongoing security concerns surrounding the company.
BT Chairman Jan du Plessis has dismissed rumours that the telecoms company is considering selling a stake in broadband business Openreach, saying at the company’s annual shareholder meeting that Openreach “remains an important part of the BT group”.
The Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) project, which has so far helped 300,000 premises across the counties gain access to superfast broadband, has signed extension contracts with Airband and BT to add a further 8,200 premises by the end of 2021.
The Shetland Islands Council (SIC) has suggested it will look at rolling out superfast broadband across the remote islands itself, due to what it calls the Scottish government’s “failure to deliver” under its £600 million Reaching 100% (R100) programme.
UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has called for broadband providers, phone providers and mobile companies to offer continued support to customers struggling to pay their bills due to the coronavirus pandemic, saying that: “The pandemic has changed how we live, with people more dependent than ever on home phones, mobile or broadband services.”
Hyperoptic has reached an agreement to expand its gigabit-capable full fibre (FTTP) service to cover 5,400 houses in Sheffield City Council’s housing portfolio. Currently, Hyperoptic’s service is deployed to around 3,500 private homes across Sheffield, meaning that the new agreement with the city council brings its coverage in the city up to 8,900.
O2 has announced that its 4G mobile broadband network is now operational in over 18,000 regional towns, villages and hamlets across the UK. The announcement follows a service upgrade during 2020 across over 91,000 postcodes since the year began.
Bahrain-based Bank ABC specialises in providing financial services to retail and wholesale clients. Having launched 40 years ago, the bank has had to adapt over the years to meet the changing needs of consumers.
Thousands of Virgin Media customers in London reported significant broadband outages on Thursday, leaving many without internet connectivity. Virgin TV customers in other parts of the UK, including Manchester, Belfast, Birmingham, Liverpool and Leeds, reported being hit by separate outages.
In newly released figures, Virgin Media has revealed that households on their network have used an extra 325GB of data on average since the beginning of coronavirus lockdown. The Virgin network registered its busiest month on record in April 2020, with usage in May close behind, as people worked from home and children attended classes remotely.
A cross-party group of MPs and former ministers has called on the government to ensure that 1.3 million children have a reliable broadband connection at home, or else risk causing serious harm to their education.
Internet service provider Swish Fibre has revealed the full list of 33 Home Counties towns where it will roll out its 10 Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network. The plan, which was unveiled with the first tranche of 11 towns in December 2019, will see the FTTP network made available to over 250,000 Home Counties premises.
