Pembrokeshire County Council has announced that it has begun four new pilot schemes to deliver gigabit-capable full fibre broadband to rural premises in the areas.
Yorkshire-based ISP Purebroadband has joined CityFibre’s FTTP network and will deliver gigabit-capable broadband services across an initial nine regions in the north of England. Founded in Hull in 2009, Purebroadband has expanded to offer full-fibre broadband services to houses across the UK.
Hyperoptic has announced that it has partnered with 37 local authorities in the UK to deliver free 50 Mbps broadband to homes with slower connections in which children are home learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Broadband ISP Airband has signed a £4.5 million contract with Cheshire East Council to deliver gigabit-capable FTTP broadband to over 4,000 premises in rural and hard-to-reach areas in the region.
According to a study from Rouge Media, the UK government’s 2014 Digital Inclusion Strategy has failed to meet some of its core targets.
Full-fibre network provider Hyperoptic has announced that it will connect thousands of Southampton City Council social housing tenants to its network following a new supply agreement.
Spending watchdog the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has said that the UK government will miss its target of rolling out full-fibre broadband nationwide by 2025 due to a “litany” of failures by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
According to a survey of 3,000 people in the UK commissioned by Uswitch, around 5.38 million households who are out of contract with their ISP are overpaying for broadband due to a lack of confidence in the process of switching providers.
Openreach has said that broadband usage across its UK ISP networks more than doubled during 2020, reaching a total for the year of 50,000 PetaBytes (PB), compared to 22,000 PB in 2019.
According to Ofcom’s Connected Nations 2020 report, one in four homes across the UK can now access broadband speeds of 1 Gbps. The figure equates to almost 8 million UK homes, with the highest availability being Northern Ireland, where over half of homes can access gigabit-capable speeds.
Openreach has announced that it plans to hire a further 5,300 fibre engineers in 2021 as part of its £12 billion plan to extend its FTTP network to 20 million UK premises within the next decade.
CityFibre has announced that Giganet has joined its full fibre networks and will provide gigabit-capable home broadband across the south of England. Giganet will become the latest ISP to become a customer of CityFibre’s £4 billion Gigabit City Investment Programme.
According to a new survey by Eutelsat, UK homes that suffer from poor broadband speeds can sell for around £38,900 under their market value. Respondents to the survey said they would only be willing to buy a house with poor broadband connection if the price was discounted 16 per cent.
According to telecoms regulator Ofcom’s latest biannual update, the average download speeds of UK broadband ISP’s has risen to 71.8 Mbps, from 64 Mbps in May 2020, an increase of 7.8 Mbps (15 per cent). The report is based on data gathered in May 2020.
Ofcom UK CEO Dame Melanie Dawes has told the FTTH Council Europe that the regulator does not “expect to introduce cost-based prices for fibre services until at least 2031.” Ofcom is looking to giver full fibre providers as much flexibility as possible while they build and Dawes’ statement suggests it will be at the very least a decade before such charges
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.
