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Network operator Openreach has today revealed that their engineers, alongside those of other alternative networks, are now resuming efforts to both maintain their existing network in the village of Bramley (Surrey) and to deploy new full fibre broadband (FTTP) infrastructure. Much of this was stopped a few years ago after the seriousness of a local petrol leak became clear.

Just to recap. Openreach and others have spent the past few years dealing with the “significant and ongoing impact” of the incident (here), which technically began 6 year ago after fuel started leaking from a local ASDA Petrol Station (the leak started under a different owner). But the full impact of this wasn’t fully appreciated until later. Over the course of that time the leak has begun to cause fuel smells in the area, harming local businesses, and has also spread into the groundwater (i.e. disrupting the drinking of tap water in certain areas) and even local utility services.

Suffice to say that a huge cross-sector operation was launched a few years ago to clear up the dangerous pollution and, much as we first reported in June 2025 (here), this has made significant progress over the past 18 months. The progress means that Openreach has now implemented softer local restrictions, which allows engineers to re-start running new fibre via existing cable ducts and conduct other work.

The network operator’s own FTTP build is thus “expected to begin in the coming weeks” (it was first announced in 2021 but got disrupted by the fuel leak), although local engineers will still be expected to follow special safety measures (e.g. wearing protective gear, carrying gas detectors and monitoring oxygen levels where nitrogen has been deployed etc.).

Andy Whale, Openreach’s Chief Engineer, said:

“This has been a really frustrating situation for residents and businesses in Bramley, but we now see some light at the end of the tunnel. We want to turn a bad situation good by not just repairing and restoring the damaged network that exists today, but by building something much faster, more reliable and longer lasting.

This Full Fibre upgrade is a long-term investment in Bramley’s future, supporting local people and businesses to move on from the disruption with a network they can rely on for decades. We hope it’ll help the local community and economy to recover, grow and thrive in a digitally connected future.”

Rt Hon Sir Jeremy Hunt, MP for Godalming and Ash, said:

“I’m delighted to support Openreach’s investment in Bramley. These upgrades recognise Openreach’s support for the wider Bramley community which is recovering from a very tough couple of years with the fuel leak.

Openreach’s ongoing commitment to Bramley is commendable and I would like to offer my personal thanks for the service the team have provided to address and resolve significant consequences of the fuel leak – a situation not of their making. Openreach enabling access to reliable and high-speed internet will bring substantial benefits to both residents and local businesses – this really is brilliant news for Bramley!

The new roll-out expects to cover 2,500 premises in the community, which is home to a population of around 3,600. But it should be said that the area isn’t yet completely safe (the clear-up is ongoing) and so engineers will have to work with some caution, which may make the effort go a bit slower than usual (no completion date was given for the roll-out).

Once again, it’s very important to stress just how serious and dangerous this situation has been and continues to be, both for local residents and the engineers who are trying extremely hard to resolve an incredibly challenging problem. Openreach has until now been maintaining connectivity in the area through a combination of remote fault fixes, temporary satellite hubs at key community locations, and alternative network solutions.

The operator has warned that it reserves the right to reintroduce stricter measures if the current situation changes.

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London-focused ISP Vorboss, which runs a 100Gbps speed fibre optic network in the UK’s capital city, has told Ofcom that reclassifying the UK’s market for high capacity leased lines to include “LeasedLine Equivalents” (LLEs), such as XGS-PON technology (underpins many FTTP broadband networks), would be “misguided, confusing, and ultimately detrimental“.

The industry regulator is currently in the process of conducting a major Telecoms Access Review 2026 (TAR), which reflects a wide-ranging market study that is typically only conducted every 5-years. The study is looking to make changes that “promote competition and investment” in gigabit broadband and business connectivity. But such things are always easier said than done, with vested interests frequently clashing.

Speaking of which, leased lines have historically been considered as private dedicated fixed lines, which offer guaranteed bandwidth and greater reliability via strong Service Level Agreements (SLA) to specific sites (point-to-point). But in recent years the increased roll-out of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband, which has narrowed the technology and performance gap, has started to muddy that debate (e.g. EoFTTP – Ethernet over FTTP).

On this front, one of the lesser-known parts of Ofcom’s proposals under the new TAR concerns its plan to broaden how they define the single product market for leased line access (LLA) services at all bandwidths (data speeds). Under the change, this would now include “leased line equivalent [LLE] services delivered over symmetric PON (e.g. XGS-PON)“, which is the same technology that underpins many consumer FTTP (full fibre) lines.

Extract from Ofcom’s TAR 2026 Consultation

We therefore provisionally conclude that services with features such as uncontended capacity, symmetric download and upload speeds, and quality of service parameters similar to point-to-point leased line services (e.g. fast repair times compared to WLA services) delivered over symmetric PON (such as XGS-PON) should be included within the LLA product market. We refer to these services as ‘leased line equivalent’ (LL-equivalent) services.

As with anything the regulator suggests these days, this idea isn’t universally popular, and business ISP Vorboss told ISPreview that they’ve expressed “serious concerns” over the redefinition. “While we appreciate Ofcom’s broader objectives of ensuring fair competition and encouraging investment, we strongly believe that this reclassification is misguided, confusing, and ultimately detrimental to both end customers and the business connectivity market,” said the provider’s regulatory submission.

Vorboss highlights several “fundamental and material differences” between point-to-point leased lines and Ethernet over symmetric PONs.

Vorboss – Examples of the Differences

These technologies are not substitutes from a technical, operational, or investment perspective. Including both in the same product market undermines these distinctions:

• Network Topology and Investment: Point-to-point leased lines are far more resource-intensive, requiring up to 100x more fibre per customer. The network architecture and build economics are entirely distinct from PON-based strategies, which share infrastructure across multiple users. Providers typically pursue one strategy or the other, not both.

• Bandwidth Capabilities: Leased lines can already support symmetrical services at 10Gbps, 100Gbps and beyond. In contrast, XGS-PON is fundamentally limited in both capacity and scalability. Current PON solutions do not support higher bandwidths, nor is there evidence of widespread provider plans to upgrade to future versions with such capabilities. This directly contradicts the increasing bandwidth demands of modern businesses.

• Contention and Performance: Unlike leased lines, PONs inherently introduce contention, which limits performance and reliability. Businesses requiring uncontended, high-performance connections cannot rely on PON-based services, which often fail to deliver even the advertised headline bandwidths in practice.

• Scalability and Upgrade Paths: Leased lines offer granular, customer-specific upgrades with minimal disruption. In PONs, any significant bandwidth upgrade necessitates area-wide infrastructure changes, reducing flexibility and responsiveness.

• Resilience and Redundancy: Business customers increasingly demand route diversity and power resilience. These requirements are practically impossible to meet using ethernet over symmetric PONs due to fixed routing and cabinet-based active equipment susceptible to environmental and physical risks.

• Customisation and Control: Leased lines allow bespoke route planning and deployment, enabling customers to tailor connectivity for operational or compliance needs. PON networks cannot accommodate such flexibility.

• Security Considerations: Leased lines provide a physically and logically isolated connection, offering higher levels of security. Ethernet over PON, by its nature, is shared and thus inherently less secure.

• Service Agreements and Reliability: Leased line SLAs reflect the premium nature of the service: guaranteed uptime, rapid repair times, and consistent performance. These are critical to business operations and are not truly replicable by PON services, even if nominal service terms are offered.

The key point above being that, by suggesting “equivalence” between these solutions, Vorboss says Ofcom “risks signalling to the market that the return on investment in genuine leased line infrastructure will be eroded or devalued“. In fairness, there has always been some inevitable impact on leased lines as the capabilities of consumer grade broadband have improved, which occurred with FTTC and now FTTP – particularly for smaller firms.

In addition some operators, like Netomnia, have already partly deployed 50G PON technology (50Gbps), with Cityfibre also considering 100G PON for the future – further narrowing the gap. The example given above for “bandwidth capabilities” is thus set to become increasingly debatable.

The fact that FTTP is such a significant enhancement on what has come before, which narrows the gap to leased lines, is ultimately at the root of why Ofcom feels a need to reclassify LLEs to include XGS-PON lines. But it’s also easy to see why this might upset and threaten operators like Vorboss, which are focused on selling a very modern high performance taken on point-to-point leased lines.

Vorboss are clearly concerned about a rise in providers promoting FTTP based “Ethernet” products, which they say could “artificially inflating the perceived level of competition” and dilute the meaning of Ethernet – opening the door to “misleading marketing from providers that may imply parity where none exists“.

The provider concludes its submission by urging Ofcom to reconsider its approach and “maintain a clear and distinct definition of leased line services” that excludes Ethernet over symmetric PONs. The regulator currently intends to publish their final decision in March 2026, although they’ll publish their semi-final proposals before that in order to allow time for consultation (probably before the end of this year).

Original article Total Telecom:Read More

News

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has moved to tighten subsea cable regulations, adopting rules that both accelerate decision‑making on cable projects and sharply restrict access by ‘foreign adversaries’

Announced on 7 August, the measures create a formal ‘presumption of denial’ for cable‑landing licence applications from entities controlled by designated foreign adversaries and ban the use of equipment listed on the FCC’s Covered List in submarine cable systems that land in or otherwise connect to the United States. According to the agency, the aim is to narrow a strategic vulnerability in global communications infrastructure without imposing an extra‑territorial ban on equipment used entirely outside US jurisdiction.

The new rules tighten and clarify long‑running national‑security concerns about undersea cables. The FCC’s Covered List identifies specific vendors and classes of equipment deemed to pose unacceptable security risks; under the August decision, use of that ‘covered’ kit on US‑connected systems is effectively prohibited. The Commission framed the changes as both a screening mechanism and a deterrent: applications from companies with foreign‑adversary control will now face a default refusal unless they can overcome that presumption.

Work to update the submarine cable regulations had been ongoing since last year, with the FCC formally announcing that it was considering banning equipment from the likes of Huawei, ZTE, China Telecom and China Mobile last month.

“We have seen submarine cable infrastructure threatened in recent years by foreign adversaries, like China,” said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a statement on Thursday. “We are therefore taking action here to guard our submarine cables against foreign adversary ownership, and access as well as cyber and physical threats.”

The Commission is also seeking public comment on a set of complementary proposals designed to shore up resilience in practice. These include incentives for the use of US‑flagged repair and maintenance vessels, programmes to promote “trusted technology abroad,” and potentially narrowing the ‘Team Telecom’ review for genuinely low‑risk applications that meet high security standards. Team Telecom is shorthand for the handful of US government agencies that oversee foreign investment into US and advise the FCC on whether investors represent a national security risk; it typically includes representatives from the Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Defense (DoD).

The agency says the measures will make approval processes for subsea cable landings more efficient while imposing clearer security tests. On the other hand, they trigger reciprocal measures and a new round of geoeconomic competition over who builds and sustains the world’s cables.

Washington’s hardening of policy comes in parallel with a growing Western push to bolster subsea resilience. The European Union in February set out an Action Plan on Cable Security that organises prevention, detection, and response to subarine cable damage by human agents. That plan, the EU says, prioritises ‘smart’ subsea cables equipped with sensors, as well as investing in new systems to increase redundancy and reduce single‑point failures for subsea data traffic.

Also in the news:
US judge rules Huawei must face charges of fraud and racketeering
Optus ditches football rights to focus on telecoms
Nokia launches digital twin platform Enscryb to digitalise energy sector

Original article ISPreview UK:Read More

In a somewhat surprising development, mainly because almost everybody assumed it had died a long time ago, AOL (America Online) – one of the very first consumer ISPs in both the USA and UK – recently caused a stir again by announcing that it had “decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet” on 30th September 2025.

According to AOL’s website: “AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.” But their email service will continue.

The change appears to have been announced within the past few weeks, although it wasn’t picked up more widely until journalist Ernie Smith noted it in a post on Bluesky. Just to be clear, the announcement above refers to the USA and Canada. However, we’re fairly confident that what remains of AOL UK (aka – TalkTalk) doesn’t have any legacy dial-up customers left, although we would have said the same about the USA and Canada too, until that announcement dropped (dial-up speeds in 2025 would be practically unusable). ISPreview is currently checking, just to be sure.

In case anybody has forgotten. The original AOL UK experience was somewhat of a walled-garden way of accessing the internet, which forced you to use the company’s own software and restricted your ability to access certain internet services. This had the benefit of simplifying the experience, but AOL later fell behind the curve and ended up being overtaken by rivals.

The Carphone Warehouse (CPW) ultimately won the auction to buy AOL UK’s Internet access business in 2006 for £370m (note: AOL’s content division became a separate business). At the time, AOL were the UK’s third-largest ISP with around 2.1 million customers (600,000 on dial-up and 1.5 million with broadband) and were later re-branded to AOL Broadband.

A second big change occurred on 29th March 2010, when CPW and TalkTalk separated (demerged) – the latter became a separate business, which included customers from CPW’s prior acquisitions (e.g. AOL Broadband, Tiscali etc.). Several more years passed until May 2014, when TalkTalk confirmed that AOL Broadband (formerly AOL UK) had stopped taking on new internet and phone customers (here), although no mention was made of the dial-up base.

We’re certain that plenty of our readers (those now of a certain age group) will have stories to share of the early AOL UK days. Yours truly only used the original service briefly, before promptly switching away as the UK’s then dialup (narrowband) internet market became more competitive, affordable and less restrictive. It’s a service I was glad to forget, but it played an important role.

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City-focused broadband ISP Hyperoptic, which has spent the past few years rolling out their own full fibre (FTTP/B) network to cover 1.9 million UK premises and is also in the process of onboarding via Openreach’s network (here), this week announced that they had appointed Sam Horrocks to take on the role of Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

The operator, which is currently home to 400,000 active subscribers and recently suffered another round of redundancies, is currently going through somewhat of a strategic shift that has seen their own network build switch to focus more on commercialisation. On top of that, they’re also now working toward reaching the rest of the UK by harnessing Openreach’s growing national FTTP network (due to start becoming available from early 2026).

Suffice to say that there’s a lot of change happening within Hyperoptic right now. As part of that, they’ve appointed a new CFO to replace Richard Woodward, who after 4 years at the provider recently resigned in order to “make a change from a life-long telecom industry career to join the amazing team at Neko Health” as their CFO.

By comparison Sam is said to have a strong track record as a finance leader in telecoms, tech and private equity-backed businesses and brings over 25 years of experience in driving performance and growth at companies including Vodafone, Inmarsat and, most recently, as Deputy CFO of Travelport. One of his longest stints was the nearly 14 years he spent at Virgin Media, occupying various strategy and senior financial roles.

Dana Tobak CBE, CEO and co-founder of Hyperoptic, said:

“This is an exciting time for Hyperoptic as we continue our upward trajectory of growth and innovation. Sam’s strong background in financial planning, business partnerships and commercial and operational delivery makes him the ideal fit for this role.”

Sam will no doubt find quite the challenge in navigating today’s highly competition and consolidation prone broadband market. But being the CFO of a well-established alternative network like Hyperoptic isn’t a bad place to start.

Original article ISPreview UK:Read More

Rochdale-based ISP Zen Internet has today announced that ITS Technology‘s business-focused UK full fibre network is now live on their Fibre Hub, which forms part of their recently agreed partnership (here) and essentially aggregates access to a number of full fibre broadband networks for partner providers. But that’s not the only development that Zen has announced.

The CEO of Zen, Richard Tang, has also announced that they will be launching Sky (Sky Business) based leased lines to their partners from next Wednesday (13th August 2025), Trooli’s FTTP broadband in a couple of weeks (we assume this means online ordering as they’re technically already live), and CityFibre leased lines around mid-September 2025.

In addition, Richard said the ISP had just agreed heads of terms that will onboard two additional alternative networks, and they’re already busy integrating them. The official announcements on both of those should surface within the next 3 months. Finally, Zen said they’d also added Freedom Fibre’s consumer FTTP footprint to their platform, although this was technically also confirmed a month or so ago (here).

None of this came as a big announcement, but rather via a short video summary.

Original article Total Telecom:Read More

Interview

BMC Helix’s Hector Villena discusses telcos’ autonomous network ambitions and how AI agents are unlocking hands-off Business Support Services (BSS)

As customer expectations rise and switching communication service providers (CSPs) becomes easier than ever, telcos are under intense pressure to differentiate through exceptional service and smarter operations. That pressure is driving a shift toward AI-powered automation, resulting in smoother service for customer and greater efficiency within CSP operations.

This shift is at the heart of BMC Helix ServiceOps, the company’s cloud-native platform for service management, operations, and automation. Launched back in 2020, the platform quickly proved popular, resulting in it being spun off as a separate company earlier this year.

“The landscape is changing very quickly, and flexibility is everything,” explained Hector Villena, Area Vice President for Sales in BMC Helix CSP Go-To-Market. “That’s why we decided to rearchitect the whole platform from the ground up, with a SaaS first mindset, open architecture, AI driven and completely interconnected. This means our customers can deploy on-prem or SaaS with the same capabilities.”

BMC Helix’s goal was to combine the company’s two strengths: Service Management and  Operations Management. Traditionally these two fields have been largely separated in the telco world, with data largely siloed off and unavailable for simple cross-analysis. With the AI powered tools from Helix, however, data from both worlds can be combined, resulting in a higher level of automation and efficiency.

“The biggest CSPs that we deal with have hundreds of thousands of assets, from servers and storage to network devices. Managing all of that is highly complex. We help them to visualise those assets and quickly assess how the components are related to each other. We then add our AI-driven BSS capabilities, analysing data, monitoring events, and providing a better understanding of that environment,” said Villena. “When you combine the ticketing information from the network with the data coming from events, metrics, logs, and telemetry, and use the topology of the services as a common map to link them, you have something really powerful”

Within the network itself, the benefits of these advanced AI tools are already being felt by customers. Using AI and advanced analytics to assess network data, networks can be made to better anticipate and prevent service disruption, improving uptime and avoiding network outages. When an incident does occur, the platform can also use AI to identify and diagnose the issues behind it and even automate remediation.

“You have millions of tickets going through those platforms. We collect data about previous incidents and their solutions, then apply AI to help deliver a resolution,” said Villena. “For starters the platform can quickly correlate and identify those events and incidents that are essentially related, reducing the number of tickets dramatically. Some of those resolutions can be automated, but for those that can’t, it’s still providing a major boost in efficiency. It’s providing the data and instructions so a Level 1 technician can handle the issue much faster. The initial results we are seeing in our customers are outstanding: 70%-86% Qualified event noise reduction within days, MTTD reduction by 90% or MTTR optimisation over 55%. I understand such a range of improvement is hard to believe, but I do invite any CSP struggling with these challenges to give us a call and allow us to understand their process and prove how the platform could deliver these transcendent improvements to them.”

A growing role for AI agents

AI agents – AI algorithms specifically designed to automate workflows through problem solving and decision-making without human intervention – are playing a major role in this digital transformation. CSPs are already beginning to deploy these agents to automate various customer journeys, helping provide support to staff in call centres or create bespoke packages for B2B customers.

But, for Villena, AI agents’ biggest strength could be their use for internal CSP operations. To date, BMC Helix has released 12 agentic AI agents, focussing on areas of telco operations that can provide the biggest gains in efficiency. The ‘Employee Navigator’ agent, for example, serves as the first layer of AI interacting with the user in the Helix platform and can handle simply administration tasks for employees.

“If an employee needs to book annual leave, for example, they can talk to the Employee Navigator prompt in plain language, and the prompt will ask for the data it needs (if any) to clarify the situation, and then it will book the leave automatically. The employee doesn’t need to manually go through a complex HR system,” Villena explained. “We’re trying to stop employee questions from ever reaching a human agent if they don’t have to, so everyone has more time to focus on higher value tasks.”

The agents can also impact event resolution itself.

“A technician can, thanks to HelixGPT, ask an agent for a problem classification synopsis, a brief root cause summary with the contextual information (metrics, events, behaviour of the system, etc.) and actionable insights. Following that, the technician can ask the system to provide step-by-step recommendations guide to solve the issue. Or, if the issue is so complex it requires the involvement of different subject matter experts, it will automatically create a Teams group chat pulling in the right resolution engineers where all relevant stakeholders can ask questions to the agent (to get a full 360º on the situation, or root cause analysis) and can work with each other to solve the ticket. These are just few of the use cases that can be delivered by the BMC Helix platform” said Villena. “It’s optimising not only the Mean Time to Repair, as it brings the resolution to L1, but also reducing the overall cost per ticket”

BMC Helix is planning to expand their roster of AI agents in the coming months to cover even more use cases, helping to empower telco workforces even further.

Is the ‘Dark NOC’ within reach?  

With more and more AI agents within the telco network, just how far can telcos take automation within the Network Operations Centre (NOC)?

The NOC serves as the nerve centre of the network, the physical location from which network activity is monitored and managed. Currently, most NOCs are highly manual, with network engineers overseeing data traffic and the status of the networks vast physical and digital assets.

As AI and automation becomes more sophisticated, however, the need for manual, human intervention in the network is decreasing. This naturally leads us to the concept of a ‘dark NOC’, a fully autonomous NOC that leverages AI and machine learning to manage the network without the need for any human oversight at all. This, says Villena, is the end-goal for most CSPs.

“CSPs are trying to work smarter and as a result automate as many operations as they can. A consistent objective for many of them is to reach ‘zero touch’ operations, where the operator does not interact manually with the network at all. Network incidents come into this big AI brain and then get identified, triaged, root caused, and resolved automatically. That’s the aspiration of all CSPs.”

But just how far are we on this journey towards fully automated NOCs?

“We’re still a long way from [the dark NOC]. But each part of the network will have a different level of automation, with some already being highly automated,” said Villena. “There’s a big difference between the level of autonomy telcos have in their network functions and their wider IT architecture.”

“In terms of their IT architecture, most telcos I talk to categorise themselves as between Level 0 and Level 1,” he added, referencing TM Forum’s framework of Autonomous Networks Levels, with Level 0 being fully manual and Level 5 being fully autonomous. “Our aspiration is to enable these telcos to get to Level 4 within a short period of time”

But rapid advances with AI and related technology means progress towards greater automation has been fast.

“Some CSPs are aiming to have 80% of network incidents automated by the end of 2026, and to achieve full autonomy by 2030. That’s a very aggressive timeline, but the aspiration is clearly there,” said Villena. “AI has really enabled that transformation. We’re seeing some incredible results in our platform which really show this could be achieved in the next years. The level of improvement is enormous.”

Part of this acceleration relates to the increasing convergence of IT and telco functions.

“As networks are becoming more virtualised and cloudified, the division between telco and IT systems is becoming blurred,” said Villena. “Part of our ‘Operations in the future’ strategy is to enable and integrate with those systems that exist on telco and in IT. With this, we’ll be able to help our customers move from Level 0 and Level 1 to Level 4 and Level 5 autonomy very quickly.”

The building blocks for even greater autonomy

While for now achieving the dream of a Dark NOC remains tantalisingly out of reach, there is little denying that the convergence of CSP systems and the introduction of more sophisticated AI is making rapid progress towards this goal. AI-driven platforms like BMC Helix are proving critical in bridging the gap between legacy complexity and autonomous efficiency, helping to deliver better experiences for consumers and major cost savings for operators.

Also in the news:
US judge rules Huawei must face charges of fraud and racketeering
Optus ditches football rights to focus on telecoms
Nokia launches digital twin platform Enscryb to digitalise energy sector

Original article ISPreview UK:Read More

The debt riddled TalkTalk Group has issued an additional update this afternoon on their recent £100m funding deal (here), which reveals that the funding level has been increased by £20m to total £120m. The modest boost came other existing financial stakeholders agreed to participate.

According to the statement: “The new funding facilities will be used to strengthen the group’s working capital position and support new product and other investment across its two businesses – PXC and TalkTalk. The Group also confirms that more than 90% of its first lien creditors and approximately 87% of its second lien creditors have signed up to a support agreement to implement the transaction announced on 25th July.”

The news follows shortly after the provider published its annual accounts (here), which among other things revealed that they made a statutory loss before tax of £465m for the year ended 28th February 2025 (up from £153m last year). The group’s overall level of net debt (excluding leases) has now risen from £985m last year to £1.2bn this year, or from £1.78bn to £1.96bn if you include leases.

Original article ISPreview UK:Read More

UK ISP Plusnet has refreshed the discounts they offer across their home broadband plans for new customers, which for example has cut the monthly price of their top 900Mbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) package to just £36.99 per month on a 24-month term (mid-contract price hikes apply). Some packages also now include reward cards worth up to £100.

The internet provider’s fibre broadband packages are typically data-only plans (no home phone) that include unlimited usage, a Hub Two wireless router (re-branded BT Smart Hub 2), UK based support, a 24-month minimum contract term, Plusnet SafeGuard and Protect – both powered by Norton – and free activation.

But take note that on 31st March each year the monthly package price will now increase by £4 for broadband. We’ve summarised what this means and the latest deals below.

Plusnet’s August 2025 Broadband Discounts

Full Fibre 145Mbps (30Mbps upload)
£65 Reward Card (pre-paid Mastercard)
Price: £26.99 per month

Price increases to £30.99pm on 1st April 2026 and £34.99pm on 1st April 2027

Full Fibre 300Mbps (50Mbps)
Price: £29.99

Price increases to £33.99pm on 1st April 2026 and £37.99pm on 1st April 2027

Full Fibre 500Mbps (75Mbps)
£75 Reward Card (pre-paid Mastercard)
Price: £31.99

Price increases to £35.99pm on 1st April 2026 and £39.99pm on 1st April 2027

Full Fibre 900Mbps (115Mbps)
£100 Reward Card (pre-paid Mastercard)
Price: £36.99

Price increases to £40.99pm on 1st April 2026 and £44.99pm on 1st April 2027

The provider also sells a 74Mbps FTTP or SOGEA (FTTC) based home broadband package that starts at £25.99 per month, which currently also comes with a £75 Reward Card.

Original article ISPreview UK:Read More

Some homes and businesses in the Hampshire (South Coast of England) town of Bishops Waltham have been left with poor 4G and 5G mobile (broadband) reception from EE for around six weeks. This appears to have occurred after one of the few primary shared masts in the area went partly offline during stormy weather.

The town, which is home to over 6,000 people, is technically within reach of two or three masts that sit just outside the community – varying a bit depending on network operator. One of the main masts is a shared site in the SO32 area, which has a good view over the town but has also been struggling, at least for EE’s customers, since stormy weather in June 2025.

A number of other mobile operators in the area have also been experiencing issues, although it’s unclear if those relate to the same site or issue. For example, both O2 and Three UK are reporting that local network congestion “means your data could be slower than normal … our team is aware and working to make it better” (O2’s status). Three UK also recently had a service outage in part of the town, but they’ve since told ISPreview that “these issues should now be fixed“.

However, the problems for EE’s customers appear to be more complex, with some locals reporting a protracted period of lost service lasting nearly seven weeks and others highlighting issues with weak 4G and 5G signals (likely due to roaming on to a different cell site). Some limited information via EE’s forum also suggested that there had been a delay in being able to access the site, and that engineers have since found they needed to carry out a treeline survey due to a site-to-site Microwave capacity (backhaul) link possibly being blocked.

An EE spokesperson told ISPreview:

“We’re sorry that customers are experiencing issues with their service and we’re currently addressing this. We encourage any EE customers in the area who might be experiencing issues to contact our customer service team so we can support them directly”.

Sadly, EE didn’t confirm what the cause of the issue was, although ISPreview understands that the operator has ordered replacement parts and are continuing to work with the landowner in order to access the site. The plan is then to carry out the work as soon as possible. In the meantime, impacted customers are being encouraged to use WiFi Calling, where possible, and they should still be able to make 999 (emergency calls) as these get routed via any available network.

The complexity of some sites, as well as any safety considerations and problems with existing access (wayleave) agreements, can sometimes mean that it ends up taking longer than usual to resolve such problems. The exact issues in this case remain unclear, but in the absence of a solid fix time, we can only hope that EE are able to resolve the problems sooner rather than later.