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News

Applicants must provide a compelling element of matched funding to be eligible.

This week the UK Space Agency unveiled a £42 million grant call aimed at driving innovation in satellite communications and positioning the UK as a primary supplier for global low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations.

Managed through the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the third call targets key high-volume constellation technologies, including optical links, active antennas, regenerative processing, and advanced user terminals.

The agency plans to award grants ranging between £4 million and £25 million per project, with all successful applicants required to provide matched industry funding.

The first stage of applications closes on 7 September 2026, with final outcomes to be notified by December.

Some AI tools assisted in the crafting of this report.

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Partner Article 

If you have attended any Mobile World Congress event in recent years, you will never have been far away from a robot. From mechanical dogs prowling the halls at trade shows to robotic baristas serving coffee, robots have long been a novel way to demonstrate the power of mobile technology. 

With the advent of AI, however, the embodied AI is being springboarded towards practical deployments, with autonomous operations becoming increasingly viable. From Honor’s humanoid robot ‘Lightning’, which broke the human world record for a half-marathon earlier this year, to robot dogs helping provide security at the FIFA World Cup, the robotic era is almost upon us. AI that had once been confined to a phone or laptop screen will soon be making the leap to the physical world. 

What does that boom in physical AI mean for networks? 

At MWC Shanghai 2026’s 5G-A Industry Evolution Summit, discussions around 5G-Advanced (5G-A) were no longer focussed on simply greater speed and capacity, instead presenting the technology as a foundational layer upon which the emerging physical AI ecosystem would be built.  

But fully supporting multi-modal agents, real-time digital twins, and autonomous humanoid robotics will rely on more than a simple upgrade. Operators will be required to radically re-engineer the underlying 5G network, prioritising low latency, uplink and efficiency more than ever before.  

This paradigm shift will be a major challenge for the mobile industry, but it could offer a huge reward: the creation of a token-based business model that could lead a path to growth.  

Building symmetrical networks for happy robots  

Perhaps the most significant change represented by the advent of embodied AI is the greater demand for uplink. 

For many years, mobile networks have been designed for a downlink-heavy world dominated by consumer video streaming and web browsing. With the rapid rise of AI, however, this architectural norm is being overthrown. 

Humanoid robotics, autonomous industrial vehicles, and multi-modal AI terminals will all rely on evaluating large amounts of data – often from numerous sources in varied media – in real-time. This will require rapid compute capabilities to ensure the near-instant response times crucial for autonomous activity.  

The most basic solution for this would be to simply place the required compute capabilities on the device itself, whether that is a customer smartphone or a robotic sentry dog. The problem, however, is that running power-hungry GPUs directly on these devices destroys their battery life and commercial viability.  

“High energy consumption and the resulting short battery life is a limiting factor,” said Chen Qi, president of AI product line at TD Tech, a company she described as “a robotic brain business”. “Using a robotic brain [in the device] takes around 20-times more energy during autonomous activity than operating it remotely. We shouldn’t be putting that pressure on terminals – we should use the cloud and put that pressure on the networks.” 

Networks will therefore be required to balancing downlink and uplink, ensuring that a minimum level of uplink capacity is delivered to all connected AI terminal devices. Global operators are gradually reaching a consensus that 20Mbps uplink will become the baseline technical requirement to sustain real-time AI modelling, situational awareness, and digital twins.  

In a world full of AI terminals – 15 billion by 2035, according to Huawei’s Intelligent World 2035 report – 5G-A will be essential to ensuring that level of uplink at scale and maintaining cloud-edge synergy.  

“Scaling autonomous intelligence puts a lot of pressure on our networks,” said Yang Lifan, Deputy General Manager of China Unicom Beijing. “We can handle two cameras per robot, but what about eight? We can support five robots at the site, but what about a hundred operating simultaneously? We need to highly optimise our 5G-A networks for these conditions and that means a much greater focus on uplink.”  

It is no coincidence that Huawei launched its GigaUplink solution at the event, using multi-antenna technology upgrades and new algorithms to deliver a five-fold increase in uplink capacity. 

Beyond changes to throughput demand, the latency requirements of embodied AI are fundamentally different from consumer internet use. When a robot or autonomous vehicle interacts with human environments, it requires human-like response latencies – around 650ms – to ensure safety and precision. As a result, best-effort network delivery will soon be obsolete for B2B industrial use cases, with deterministic performance becoming an essential network feature. 

“Big bandwidth, uplink expansion, and user experience guarantee. Those will be the key network features that enable the mobile AI era,” said Eric Yang, President of Huawei Carrier Business. 

A call for Upper 6GHz spectrum 

Shifting network architecture strategy is only half of the battle for delivering continuous coverage for a rapidly AI ecosystem. Spectrum bottlenecks are a major concern, with additional capacity required to ensure ubiquitous smooth service.  

At the Summit, securing continuous midband spectrum was seen as foundational for delivering multidimensional experiences, with the upper 6GHz (U6G, 6.425–7.125 GHz) band positioned as a key resource. It offers a strong combination of both coverage and capacity, complementing existing mid-band 5G spectrum and bridging the gap to 6G.  

This call for access to U6G comes during an ongoing global debate about the future of the band. U6G is highly coveted by the Wi-Fi industry to relieve pressure on the crowded 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. However, as Tim Hatt, Head of Research and Consulting at GSMA Intelligence, points out “mobile is much more likely to be capacity constrained than Wi-Fi.”  

“We should actively promote U6G and align it with C-band, while refarming lower bands for even more capacity,” argued David Li, President of Huawei’s TDD Product Line. “U6G is the second-best spectrum for widespread 5G-A deployment after C-band (3.4–4.0 GHz). With improvements to our technology, we will soon be able to make the U6G coverage as good as C-band.”  

In tandem with U6G access, refarming spectrum in the legacy 2G and 4G bands will also be a priority. By pooling these frequencies through advanced carrier aggregation, they can deliver the ultra-wide bands that 5G-A demands, creating a robust foundation for mobile AI use.  

Tokens: A way out of the ‘volume trap’? 

Monetising 5G often appears to be an evergreen challenge for the mobile industry. Despite widespread 5G deployment and coverage reaching over 99% in premium testbeds like Hong Kong, global ARPU has consistently stagnated. The boom in AI terminals, however, is set to expose a fundamental economic disparity between raw data transmission and AI computational workloads.  

Under the traditional volume-based business model, operators generate minimal revenue from a gigabyte of data, even though transmitting the millions of AI tokens inside that data requires immense network resources and drives up computational electricity costs. By re-engineering network pipelines around token transmission rather than bytes, telcos can bundle, resell, route, secure, and bill for AI capacity in ways that reduce friction for customers and create new recurring revenue. 

“The industry is moving towards token monetisation models,” said Yang, noting that Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) frameworks would allow operators to offer tier-based, deterministic service guarantees based on user location, application profiles, and precise latency requirements. 

In this way, Huawei argues that operators need to evolve beyond the pure connectivity layer, becoming an orchestrator of not only data traffic but of compute power. 

“A byte-plus-token strategy will redefine commercial value for operators. In the future, the difference between data traffic and tokens will continue to grow. We must be ready to embrace that, both with how we build networks and how we monetise them,” said Li.  

Using 5G-A to embrace the future 

The consensus from MWC Shanghai 2026 suggests that an AI-native ecosystem requires a fundamental realignment of the mobile ecosystem, requiring both infrastructure upgrades and a shift to new commercial models. The additional speed, capacity, flexibility, and reliability of 5G-A – supported by additional spectrum in the U6G band – will provide an ideal foundation for the monetisation of the token economy. 

By acting as the unified orchestrators of both spectrum and computational power, telcos can step out of the volume trap and secure their place as the indispensable backbone of the physical AI revolution.

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Contributed Article

Regional operator htp built fiber–to–the–home (FTTH) networks a decade before they became mainstream. Today, it is showing the market how early builders modernize for the future. 

The operators who moved first on fiber are now facing a second strategic decision. Speaking at the BREKO Arbeitstag in a joint session with Udo Abt, senior consultant of sales engineering at Calix, Jochen Krauss, head of network planning at Hannover-based regional operator htp, explained how an early FTTH pioneer is evolving its network for the next decade. 

htp began deploying fiber to the home more than ten years ago and today serves 123.400 residential and 9.710 business customers. Sixty-three percent of its connections are now activated fiber-to-the-home lines, a penetration level most of the German market is still working toward. Originally built on point-to-point Ethernet, the network is now evolving. Today, htp is deploying native XGS-PON for all new construction and network densification. 

A business case with real numbers 

Before committing, htp ran a full total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis spanning network build and operations. The results showed a cost reduction of more than 40 percent. According to Krauss, realized savings have exceeded the model. 

The drivers are structural. Serving 2,000 subscribers on point-to-point requires around 32 rack units of central office equipment. XGS-PON requires roughly one rack unit. Power consumption per subscriber is significantly lower. Distributed splitters also eliminate many powered and cooled street cabinets, allowing the field network to run almost entirely passive. Service activation no longer requires technicians at both ends of the line. 

Why native XGS-PON 

htp evaluated GPON and Combo-PON alternatives before committing to native XGS-PON, in what Abt described on stage as “a battle of the best arguments between the two engineering teams.” Symmetric 10 Gbps capacity supports 1:64 split ratios without compromising the subscriber experience. ONT prices for XGS-PON also fell faster than any forecast predicted, closing the historic cost gap with GPON. The choice also secures the road ahead: The step to 50G PON can run in parallel on the same infrastructure when business services and backhaul demand it. 

Just as important were htp’s procurement requirements: no lock-in on optical components, open management interfaces, and hardware available for hardened outdoor deployment. Calix met all of them. 

Simplicity as strategy 

For a 250-person operator, operational simplicity determines technology choices. Because the Calix One™ platform abstracts the access technology, htp’s team configures PON services in the same familiar terms as Ethernet, and the engineer who introduced the platform completed his first test installation within just one week. Workflows are learned once; technology generations change underneath them. As Abt put it, “That is what consumers already expect from their smartphones, where 4G became 5G without anyone relearning the device.” 

The same principle extends forward. htp’s path to 50G PON, network slicing, and AI-supported predictive operations runs on the software foundation already integrated and already mastered. 

A planned evolution, not a crisis 

htp will continue operating its point-to-point base while migrating it to PON in a structured, multi-year program aligned with equipment lifecycles. New builds are XGS-PON by default. As Krauss observed, “Technology generations turning over is simply the nature of infrastructure, and the advantage belongs to operators who plan the transition rather than react to it.” 

For the many European operators now approaching the ten-year mark on their first fiber deployments, the message from the BREKO stage was clear: The second migration is coming for everyone. htp is proof it can arrive as a plan. 

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Interview

The Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) in-depth investigation into the proposed £2 billion merger of Netomnia and nexfibre has become one of the most significant competition cases in the UK’s telecoms sector in recent years.

Last month, the regulator confirmed it would fast-track the deal directly to a Phase 2 investigation, bypassing the initial Phase 1 review. The decision reflects the scale of a transaction that could reshape the UK’s altnet market and accelerate long-awaited consolidation.

With the investigation now well underway, Netomnia CEO Jeremy Chelot insists the merger is a necessity for securing long-term viability of the UK’s fibre market.

Consolidation is inevitable

Chelot explained the transaction was driven by the realities of the UK’s increasingly challenging altnet landscape rather than by a deliberate preference for nexfibre.

“It was not so much a choice. It was the fact that the UK market clearly needs consolidation,” he said.

According to Chelot, Netomnia had spent years exploring alternative consolidation opportunities, all of which had ultimately failed.

“We looked at quite a few players and tried to acquire companies to consolidate, and unfortunately, we failed at it. We also looked at opportunities to merge or be acquired by players bigger than us. Through those processes, Nexfibre was the only viable option from a valuation, capital, and overall perspective,” he said.

Despite the increasing pressure facing the sector, Chelot said the objective has remained unchanged since the UK’s fibre challengers first emerged.

“The goal since the beginning—and I think that’s what all the altnets had as an ambition when they started, whether you talk to CityFibre, Community Fibre, or us—was always to become a challenger and beat Openreach,” he said.

Phase 2: The sooner the better

Regarding the decision to request a move directly to Phase 2 of the CMA’s investigation, Chelot said that a swift conclusion was important not only for the deal’s viability, but also to reduce market uncertainty.

“This is a landmark, important transaction for the UK that will shape the future of broadband and telecom in the country,” he said. “If you do a Phase 1 investigation and end up going into Phase 2, you’re talking about a process that could last 18 months. Whereas if you fast-track it immediately, the process is going to be a lot shorter, giving additional time for the CMA and Ofcom to investigate thoroughly and address the important issues.”

Overcoming competition concerns

The merger has faced criticism from rival altnets, most notably CityFibre, which has raised concerns about the impact on competition and re-establishing a duopoly of BT and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2).

Chelot, however, argued that CityFibre’s comments in a recent article in The Times undermine their objections around competition.

“CityFibre was saying that they would consider being acquired by nexfibre or VMO2, but they would rather get the VMO2 traffic onto their platform. If CityFibre says that, they’re basically saying that my transaction is completely fine, because they are saying that having VMO2 traffic on their network, or being acquired by Nexfibre or VMO2, is a good [competitive] outcome,” he said.

He also downplayed concerns around network overlap between Netomnia and nexfibre, saying that fibre duplication between the two networks is limited to “a low double-digit number.”

Instead, he believes the merged business presents little risk to competition because neither Netomnia, nexfibre nor VMO2 is currently a significant wholesale provider to the UK’s largest broadband retailers. He also notes that YouFibre will remain an independent brand, hence retail competition will not be reduced.

“From where I stand, I don’t really understand where the issue is,” he said. “I’m not wholesale, VMO2 is not wholesale, and Nexfibre is not wholesale – we don’t have Sky, Vodafone, or those larger players. So, we would be increasing wholesale competition. If you look at retail, YouFibre is still there, and with a new wholesale platform, retail ISPs using that platform will become more competitive, resulting in better pricing for people.”

“The main issue is that CityFibre is just not happy, and therefore, they make a lot of noise,” he added.

The CMA’s ‘what if?’

A central consideration for the CMA will be establishing the counterfactual – what would happen had if the merger does not take place?

Chelot argues that Netomnia’s options were increasingly limited.

“Could we build a lot more homes? Where is the capital for that? Would we be a successful wholesaler with Sky and Vodafone? I tried for five years and got nowhere. Would we have merged with another altnet? I’ve been trying for years and was unsuccessful,” he said.

Commenting on these failed deals, Chelot pointed to the inherent complexity of these network deals.

“As soon as you try to [merge with an altnet with] half a million, a million, or more [premises passed], you’re most likely going to have to live with the shareholder on the other side for a very long time. That brings lots of governance issues, valuation challenges, and complicated processes.”

Funding constraints have only made those challenges more acute across the sector, with many altnets being forced to slow or even halt their deployment plans as a result.

“Finding capital to build more homes and generating the right level of return on those homes is currently next to impossible,” he said.

Building a more competitive future

Indeed, Chelot believes approval of the merger is crucial unlock a wave of consolidation that is sorely needed.

“It will signal strongly that consolidation is possible in the UK. Let’s be clear, a lot of the consolidation that’s happened so far has been out of problems or stress, rather than combining two companies that actually think it’s the right path for growth,” he said.

“I think it will spark more consolidation. We’ve seen recently that Community Fibre and Hyperoptic are up for sale. My view is that CityFibre will consolidate more – I think they will get to 8 million homes, maybe more, and to achieve that they’ll need to consolidate 3–6 players,” he added.

Speculating about the future of the UK market at the end of the decade, Chelot said the market will ultimately be dominated by four national fixed-network operators.

“I think we’ll likely have four players with national scale, with at least 8–10 million each or more: Openreach, VMO2, nexfibre, and CityFibre,” he said. “Depending on consolidation, there could even be a fifth player – maybe some kind of rural champion.”

Until this rebalancing of the market, Chelot says the altnet community must not lose focus of their original goal of competing with Openreach.

“People should talk more about the dominance of BT and Openreach. In the past 6–7 year have rolled out fibre to 25 million homes, which is more than everybody else. People sometimes think that, because the altnets occupy so much of the space it is like we won against Openreach. The fight is very much alive,” he said.

“All of the altnets were created out of a desire to challenge Openreach. Anything that gets us closer to that is a good thing,” he concluded.

How is the UK fibre market evolving? Join the industry in discussion at Connected Britain, the UK’s largest digital economy event

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The Wiltshire Council in the South of England has praised rural broadband ISP Wessex Internet for exceeding 40% of its connectivity targets under their £18.8m (public subsidy) Project Gigabit contract for South Wiltshire (Lot 30), which has so far expanded full fibre broadband to reach 7,500 premises in hard-to-reach areas.

The original contract, which was announced back in March 2024, aimed to build their 10Gbps capable FTTP broadband network to cover “around” 14,500 hard-to-reach premises in the area (here). But since then it’s expanded and is currently contracted to reach a total of 18,700 homes and businesses across South Wiltshire over the remaining years.

The operator has been making steady progress on this, which is in stark contrast to some other alternative networks that have struggled or even needed to scale-back or withdraw from their contracts completely due to wider market pressures (e.g. here, here, here, here, here and here).

Cllr Helen Belcher said:

“We are delighted with what Wessex Internet has achieved at this early stage of the programme. Their work represents the very best of rural delivery: ambitious, collaborative, and community focused.

One of our key priorities is to ensure our communities have the infrastructure they need to thrive. Wessex Internet’s strong partnerships, commitment to public engagement, and high standards of customer service set a benchmark for others to follow.”

Hector Gibson Fleming, CEO of Wessex Internet, said:

“A brilliant milestone to hit, and a testament to the hard work on the ground.”

The deployment has now been running for over two years and is expected to continue for another three years before reaching completion.

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Carlisle-based alternative broadband provider Grain (Grain Connect) has today published an update on their latest company results, which among other things reveals that their point-to-point full fibre (FTTP) network now covers 300,000 UK premises (up from 270k in Jul 2025) and their customers increased to 56,000 (up from 43k in March 2025).

The altnet, which now serves existing homes across more than 60 urban centres and more than 150 new build developments, has been steadily continuing to deploy new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines at the same time as many of their competitors in the same space have stalled.

The latest results summary, which only offers a limited preview, states that “profitability has continued to improve” (they announced being EBITDA positive back in April 2025), with the network provider now delivering a 10% EBITDA margin across the year (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation). But sadly we don’t get any solid financial figures or information on company losses etc.

Otherwise, Grain reports that EBITDA margins still grew to over 16% during Q4, with Gross margin also expanding from 67% to 77% for the full year. Homes ready for service grew by 19% during the financial year to cover over 300,000 premises across the UK and the rate of expansion is now “expected to accelerate even further in the coming year“.

Customer numbers also increased by 31% to 56,000, with penetration growing to 19% (up from 17% last year). Excluding new sites which went live during the year, penetration on the existing footprint grew from 17% to 21%. Grain’s network typically costs less than a lot of other altnets to deploy, which means that even a modest take-up can be more favourable than it might first appear.

Grain CEO, Richard Cameron, told ISPreview:

“The Altnet market has experienced significant challenges this year, with many providers struggling to deliver an efficient platform to compete in the market.

We are proud to be doing something different and unique amongst altnets; building our own fully owned end-to-end network, giving us an efficient asset that delivers long-term profitability and cash generation.

Others are undoubtedly being hit by the high operating and connection costs driven by the decision to build PIA based networks.

I am pleased to say that these are problems which Grain doesn’t face, putting us in a strong position to compete over the long term.

We’re excited about the future of Grain and the competition and choice it offers, allowing more customers to make the move to Full Fibre broadband, with affordable and transparent pricing.”

Richard added that Grain is “fully funded” and plans to continue investing significant capital into expansion of its footprint, thanks to the “strong financial returns being generated“. But we’ll have to wait for the company’s full results to be published before being able to judge the complete picture.

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Earlier this week Ofcom introduced new measures to help UK mobile operators “block, limit and disrupt scammers” from sending messaging scams (here). The changes, while positive, overlooked the fact that the regulator ended up rejecting an already adopted (in other countries) and UK developed fix that would have been more effective, partly due to BT and others complaining that it would be too “onerous“.

The system we’re talking about above is a mandatory, centralised sender-ID registry (aka – A2P sender ID registration). Ofcom’s announcement, if you dig deep enough, recognised that a mandatory sender ID registration for Application-to-Person Messaging (A2P) messages could be an “effective means to tackle messaging scams“.

In short, when a scammer sends you a text message that says it is from your bank or doctor, the word at the top of the screen is not usually checked by anyone. The sender fills in that field, but some countries have decided to clamp down on this by requiring businesses to register the name they send under, which is more effective at stopping an impersonator’s messages (i.e. they can’t use the same name).

Five countries now mandate registration in this way, including Spain, Ireland, India, Singapore and Australia. The countries differ in how they expect operators to respond to messages from unregistered branded senders (some block it outright, while others flag it as suspicious etc.). Singapore’s regulator reported a 64% fall in SMS scams after it adopted this, and they merely marked messages as “Likely-SCAM” for users to decide.

The Sender ID Protection Registry (SIDPR) actually began in Britain in 2019, as a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) that was backed by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), UK Finance and Mobile UK. The funny thing is that SIDPR still exists and is run by the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF), albeit as a voluntary solution that charges brands a fee to sign up (many brands use this to protect their SMS messages, although impersonated texts carry no warning).

Sadly, Ofcom this week opted not to make this mandatory, which would have imposed new regulator-led set-up and ongoing costs on brands. So, Britain built it, found it worked, saw it adopted by other countries and then declined to require the same system itself.

Why did Ofcom reject mandatory sender ID registration?

As usual, there are issues of cost and complexity to consider. BT (EE) said that a sender ID registry system would be “expensive, burdensome, and would reduce the ability of individual providers to tackle new, emerging threats” (they also suggested that such systems have not necessarily reduced the volume of scams immediately). The MEF said that a regulator-run registry would also “require public funding and be slow to design and deploy“, while TechUK stated that mandatory sender ID registries have “proved to be cumbersome and risk disrupting A2P traffic flows“.

On the flip side, consumer magazine Which?, Twilio, CCUK, XConnect and The Campaign Registry broadly seemed to support the idea of a mandatory registry to address the industry’s inconsistent application of anti-fraud measures and create a more reliable source for verifying sender IDs. Finally, VodafoneThree (Vodafone and Three UK) liked the idea but wanted it to be adopted via an industry-led model, rather than through the government or regulator.

Ofcom’s Statement

We recognise these comments and, in line with our consultation position, we believe that there would be significant up front and ongoing costs associated with both registering IDs and maintaining a registry. Charging models for a registry could vary, such as charging businesses directly when registering IDs, or charging mobile operators and aggregators to register IDs on behalf of their customers.

Where the costs are charged to companies registering IDs, this is likely to increase costs for aggregators and/or the business end-users that use A2P mobile messaging. These costs could particularly affect small and medium sized businesses, which would have to register to use a sender ID even though they are not likely to be spoofed by scammers. Anybody responsible for setting up and maintaining the registry would generate costs in administering a sender ID registry that people and businesses would ultimately bear. We therefore consider that this approach would represent a more significant intervention than our measures to prevent alphanumeric sender IDs from being abused.

…

At this stage, although we consider such an approach could be an effective way to meet our objective, our view is that we can achieve our objective through the other, less onerous A2P measures set out above. These include requirements for parties onboarding new business senders to check the alphanumeric sender IDs that they intend to use against the legitimate business purposes described in KYC checks, and the maintenance of policies by mobile operators in relation to the use of certain protected or generic alphanumeric IDs and the use of special alphanumeric characters.

Ofcom does clearly recognise that such a registry, even though they’ve rejected the system, could make it “harder for criminals to use alphanumeric sender IDs” by requiring them to be registered centrally before they can be used, with proof that each sender ID is being used for legitimate purposes.

As a result, the regulator has left the door open for them to potentially return to this idea in the future, but for now it’s being left to gather dust on the regulator’s shelf of ideas. Just don’t be surprised if, once scammers adapt to the regulator’s preferred solutions, we end up back here again to consider it once more in the future

However, if Ofcom does ever revive the idea, then we suspect they might end up preferring an industry-led solution to help balance against the cost of implementation by network operators.

“What Ofcom has done is more considered than a refusal. It accepts the registry could work — it says so in terms — and judges it can reach the same place by a lighter route. That’s a legitimate call. The open question is whether the lighter route is lighter for everyone, or only for the businesses that would have had to register,” said Peter — founder of Tutela Digitalis (independent fraud education).

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Openreach (BT) has launched a new trial on Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP lines, which so far as we can tell appears to be based on an earlier Proof of Concept (PoC) that will make it easier for the operator to determine, in real-time, whether a network incident or Planned Engineering Work (PeW) is affecting a customer’s live service.

The network access provider’s public briefing on the FTTP trial for pre-emptive incidents and PeWs provides no useful information to help explain it (here), but we have managed to extract some details from a few of our sources. At present trying to identify whether a network incident or PeW activity has impacted a customer’s live service usually relies on assumptions based on the network elements involved.

The new approach aims to try and take those assumptions out of the equation and produce something much more accurate, which can operate in real-time and then proactively communicate with end customers directly using SMS. The original PoC for this is understood to have gone well, thus the new trial is an attempt to expand that in order to gather more data before a final decision on implementation.

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Broadband, phone and TV provider Virgin Media (O2) has introduced a new technology – created in-house – that harnesses AI-powered robots to monitor TV services in real time (i.e. more than 220 IPTV channels), which can be used to help the provider spot and resolve issues faster than ever before.

The AI robots, in-between planning their overthrow of the human race (kidding.. I think), are designed to watch TV services exactly as customers experience them and, using automated monitoring, continuously check channels for any degradation of service, including any issues with video and audio quality. Whether or not these bots do this while clutching an ice-cold beer and swearing at the screen during sport content is another matter.

Naturally, any issues that do get detected will then be automatically flagged to human monitoring teams, where the issues can be investigated and hopefully resolved, all with greater accuracy than ever before. The most-watched of the 220 IPTV channels will be checked every six minutes, although it’s unclear how often the bots will check niche channels.

Jeanie York, VMO2’s Chief Technology Officer, said:

“Creating and launching these new TV robots means we’re able to identify and address any service issues faster and more accurately than ever before, and in some cases before a customer even realises there was a problem.

Whether our customers are watching the big final on Sunday or other live sport, their favourite film or the season finale of their favourite programme, reliable TV makes these moments possible. This new capability is another innovative step in giving our customers a great experience and ensuring we provide the reliable TV service they expect.”

The new system is still being improved, and additional enhancements are already being planned for the future, including how AI can be used to identify a broader range of service issues and further strengthen monitoring capabilities. Hopefully in the course of watching Goggle Box or Coronation Street the new AI bots don’t self-terminate or try to wipe out the human race in revenge for the torture they’ve received.

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Network analyst firm Streetwave has confirmed that they’ve been chosenb y Cornwall Council in England to survey mobile network coverage and 4G / 5G data performance across the region, harnessing 7,250km of the county’s road network and testing all three of the primary mobile networks – EE, O2 and VodafoneThree (Vodafone and Three UK).

Just to recap. Streetwave works by harnessing waste bin (refuse) collection lorries to map mobile network coverage and data speeds across various parts of the UK (e.g. here, here, here, here and here). In this setup, refuse trucks are installed with several off-the-shelf Smartphones using special software, which run continuous network tests (once every 20 metres in rural areas and 5m in urban areas) as the vehicles go around their routes.

The data they collect is often then used by local authorities to help identify areas that may require additional intervention in order to improve local mobile coverage and or network capacity, while also giving locals access to some of this data via address-based coverage checkers and interactive maps (https://app.streetwave.co/coverage-checker/).

The survey will run throughout July and August 2026, providing “valuable insight into how tourism impacts mobile infrastructure across one of the UK’s busiest visitor destinations” and helping the local authority to identify connectivity gaps, support future digital connectivity interventions, and ensure staff working across the region can access the best-performing networks. The results should be available to the public a bit later in the year.