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The latest data from broadband ISP BT (EE) has revealed that Wednesday’s night’s semi-final FIFA World Cup 2026 football match between England and Argentina triggered the “largest live streaming event ever seen” on the internet provider’s national network.

Streaming traffic is said to have exceeded BT’s previous record by nearly 30%, driven in part by customers tuning in via the BBC’s exclusive 4K iPlayer viewing experience. The record came during a tournament in which England’s matches generated significant increases in traffic through both BBC iPlayer and ITVX, although outside of streaming they didn’t have a dramatic impact.

BT compared the peak streaming traffic during each match with the peak recorded during the equivalent time window in an average week. The analysis found increases ranging from 160% to 683%, with Mexico v England producing the largest proportional uplift.

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The Comms Council UK, which represents the UK’s national Unified Communications and Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) phone industry, has today revealed the winners of their 18th annual 2026 awards event at a ceremony at Kitty Hawk in London. Some of the winners include Nebula, 8×8, Zayo and Daktela others.

Tracey Wright, Chair of Comms Council UK Council, said: “This was another brilliant CCUK Awards ceremony. It was great to see an exceptional response to new categories for AI and CX, reflecting the rapid pace of the industry and new developments in telecoms. Congratulations to all the winners and highly commended organisations.”

The winners are usually independently reviewed by several judges, although we couldn’t find a list of the panel members. As usual, there was also no specific category for consumer VoIP phone services, although in the past the SOHO (Small Office / Small Home) category did get a little bit closer to that, but they dropped that category for 2026.

Comms Council UK Awards 2026 Winners

Best Communications Provider Mid Market

Winner – Nebula

Highly Commended – bOnline

Best Communications Provider Enterprise

Winner – 8×8

Highly Commended – LoopUp

Best CX Experience

Winner – TSI and The TSI Partner Portal

Best Risk Defence Solution

Winner – Fuse 2 Communications

Best AI-Powered Communications

Winner – Daktela

Highly Commended – Fuse 2 Communications

Best Communications Enabler

Winner – Zayo Europe

Highly Commended – Netaxis – Fusion

Best Innovation

Winner – Nebula – CallSwitch One

Highly Commended – Elisha Telecom – Agentic AI Communications Ecosystem

Rising Star Award

Winner – NUWAVE Communications

Highly commended – Access4

Women in Telecoms Champion

Obiageli Okafor

Alongside her role as a Senior Product Manager at 8×8, she is an award winning advocate for women in technology. A TechWomen100 Winner, She Inspires Award winner and founding member of UNWomen UK, she has dedicated her career to opening doors for others. Through PMHelp, she has built one of the UK’s fastest growing product communities, reaching over 52,000 learners across 70+ countries through mentorship, training, internships and career development, with a strong focus on helping women break into and thrive in technology.

Outstanding Achievement Award

Adam Carter and Richard Clarke from National Trading Standards Scams Team

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The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has opened investigations into several alternative full fibre broadband networks (altnets) – including Internetty, Cambridge Fibre Networks, Optical Fibre Infrastructure, Pine Media and Trooli – after they found “reasonable grounds to believe” that they may not be meeting their duties to show they have secured funds for meeting their liabilities.

Breaking news.. more to follow..

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Contributed Article

The BoGuan LLM is enabling millions of visitors to enjoy historically accurate experiences from China’s ancient capital

Xi’an, situated in Shaanxi province, is one of the most celebrated cities in all of China. Internationally renowned as the home of the Terracotta Army, the city served as China’s capital for over 1,000 years under 13 different dynasties. Today, it is one of China’s largest domestic tourism destinations, attracting around 330 million visitors annually.

With the rapid rise of AI, the way in which tourists interact with the city is changing. As generative AI becomes increasingly commonplace, tourists are beginning to expect conversational, personalised digital experiences when visiting cultural sites. The problem, however, is that these models do not have access to specialised historical data and so cannot deliver truly unique – and historically accurate – experiences for consumers.

This is why Huawei and Shaanxi Culture Industry Investment Group (SCG) have co-developed BoGuan, the world’s first commercial multimodal large language model (LLM) dedicated to cultural tourism. The partners spent two years compiling a 1.2 Petabyte dataset consisting of 31 million images, 4.4 million minutes of video, and 960 million pieces of structured text to form a specialised foundation for the platform. BoGuan then leverages this data, acting as a unified gateway aggregating 10 open and closed-source models (including Huawei’s PanGu).

“General large models lack specialized knowledge in museology, archaeology and history, making it difficult to meet the nuanced demands of niche scenarios,” noted Edric Chu, General Manager of Huawei’s Shaanxi Rep Office. “We completed 12 high-quality cultural tourism datasets […] using Huawei Cloud Data Engineering to process and label text, images, audio and video […] Supported by three major standards of data collection, management, and circulation, the platform transforms raw data resources into data assets with verifiable ownership.”

New cultural experiences and revenue opportunities

BoGuan underpins a wide range of cultural tourism services across the province, including AI travel assistants, multilingual tour guidance, museum interpretation, AI-generated marketing content, digital preservation of cultural heritage, and short-form video production.

In the B2B sector, BoGuan powers an AI “Video Factory” that fully automates short drama and advertisement production. Meanwhile, for consumers, the model powers ‘Xiaoqi’, an AI travel companion on the GO-SHAANXI app, and the Zhiying Camera mini program, which allows tourists to instantly merge their photos with AI-generated historical settings.

Since its pilot launch in September last year, Huawei says applications powered by BoGuan have reached more than four million users, and it is already delivering a major revenue boost for SCG.

“With the same team size, thanks to these technologies[…] from last year to this June our revenue has increased by roughly 30–40%,” explained Jin Yan, Chairman of the Digital and Intelligent Culture Technology Group at SCG. “The sales of related digital collectibles and creative products have exceeded 2 million Chinese yuan ($300,000).”

SCG has already begun collaborating with tourism authorities in Xinjiang and Guizhou to replicate the BoGuan framework, with the goal of potentially exporting it nationwide in future.

Network infrastructure foundation

Of course, to successfully deploy BoGuan at scale requires powerful network and data infrastructure. Thousands of simultaneous AI interactions require both massive data throughput and dense computing capabilities.

To solve this, SCG’s runs on an on-premise 48P computing platform built with Huawei’s SuperPoD architecture. It uses Huawei’s UnifiedBus technology, an interconnect protocol for SuperPoD that interconnects physical servers so that they can learn, think, and reason like a single logical server.

At the same time, China Telecom Shaanxi and Huawei have blanketed Xi’an’s Grand Tang Mall with a 5G Advanced network capable of delivering downlink speeds of 3.5 Gbps and uplink speeds of 600 Mbps. This, the partners explain, is crucial to support the scale of AI use cases being accessed throughout the region.

“The Grand Tang Mall is a textbook example of a high-traffic, high-concurrency, and high-interaction scenario, which poses an immense challenge for any network,” explained Wang Hao, Director of Mobile Communications Network Business at China Telecom Shaanxi. “Within this area […] we have deployed 46 base stations within this compact area, a density that far exceeds standard regions.”

These base stations are also equipped with AI-powered intelligent control boards that can trigger service acceleration protocols when AI photo generation is taking place.

“The embedded AI intelligently and dynamically allocates network resources to match your real-time demands,” Wang said, noting that the network can support 23,000 concurrent users during holiday traffic surges.

Bridging the AI talent gap

Beyond the technology itself, another key them to emerge from discussions about BoGuan – and about creating purpose-built LLMs for other vertical industries – is the lack of workers skilled in both AI usage and their specialist field.

“The industry faces a deficit of millions of interdisciplinary professionals who bridge the gap between cultural tourism and AI,” said Chu. “Shaanxi alone faces a talent gap of 30,000 to 50,000 in culture tourism plus AI, and the national gap is expected to exceed 1 million by 2030.”

As a result, further developing BoGuan and similar LLM projects faces a significant talent bottleneck that can only be overcome through largescale training projects.

“SCG, Huawei, and over 10 institutions have jointly established a talent training base […] aligning vocational certificates with Huawei AI certifications and university micro-majors,” explained Chu. “We expect to train over 1,000 people this year and more than 3,000 next year.”

Proof of vertical AI success

The success of BoGuan is a demonstration of how purpose-built AI models can create new revenue opportunities for telecom operators by combining connectivity, cloud, AI compute and industry expertise into a single commercial platform. Rather than competing solely on network capacity, operators must move to monetise vertical AI through managed services, industry-specific applications, and data products. With its unified AI infrastructure, platform-level scalability, and training on vertical-industry data, the BoGuan LLM helps industries tackle bottlenecks in content production, cost management, capability integration, and data security—ensuring that AI can be practically deployed to fuel sustainable business growth. This same model, in turn, serves as a blueprint for telecom operators seeking to generate lasting growth in the AI era.” Artificial intelligence is not simply a stack of technologies,” concluded Chu. “[In Shaanxi] it has become a key enabler that can activate thousands of years of cultural heritage, reshape travel experiences, and inject new momentum into the industry.”

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The post Huawei’s purpose-built tourism LLM shines in Xi’an appeared first on Total Telecom.

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Independent wholesale broadband and leased-lines aggregator, VeloxServ, which is used by a fair few retail UK ISPs and alternative networks (altnets), has expanded their ‘Unity Partner Portal’ to add a bunch of new features that “simplify service management, improve operational efficiency and provide partners with greater visibility and control“.

The portal now enables partners to search availability across all integrated supplier networks from a single interface (i.e. making it easier to identify the most appropriate connectivity solution for customers). Partners can also benefit from fully integrated end-to-end ordering and they’ve added real-time order monitoring capabilities provide greater visibility of delivery progress, as well as the ability to request updates directly through the platform.

VeloxServ said operational support has also been strengthened through integrated diagnostics for CityFibre, Vodafone and ITS Technology, enabling partners to investigate and resolve issues more quickly without leaving the portal. On top of that there’s also enhanced user profile management, improved invoice visibility and an API that has entered testing (i.e. partners will soon be able to integrate Unity directly with their own business systems and automate workflows).

Steven Wood, Head of Sales at VeloxServ, said:

“Our objective has always been to remove complexity for our partners. As our supplier portfolio continues to grow, it’s increasingly important that partners have a single platform that brings everything together in one place.

The latest enhancements to Unity are all about improving efficiency, reducing administration and giving partners the tools they need to deliver an even better experience for their customers. Rather than switching between multiple supplier systems, Unity provides a streamlined, centralised platform that helps partners work smarter.

This is just one phase of our ongoing development programme, and we’re excited to bring even more powerful capabilities to the platform over the coming weeks.”

Further enhancements are already scheduled to be released over the coming weeks, such as Estate Management (i.e. a comprehensive view of customer services from a single dashboard) and the migration of historically manually placed orders into the portal. VeloxServ are also preparing to introduce Radius Management functionality, enabling partners to view live usage information, monitor online and offline status, and suspend user sessions directly through Unity.

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Mobile operator O2 (Virgin Media) has today announced that they’ve switched-on their next-generation 5G+ (5G Standalone) mobile broadband network across more of Oxfordshire in England, which is said to reach more than 450,000 residents across 495 towns, villages and hamlets.

Just to recap. O2’s rollout of 5G+ / 5GSA first began in February 2024 (here) and aims to reach “at least 90% outdoor coverage” in every location they cover. The operator’s latest rollout across Oxfordshire includes locations such as Oxford, Banbury, Abingdon, Bicester, Witney, Didcot, Carterton, Kidlington, Henley-on-Thames, Thame, Wantage, and Farringdon.

The new 5G+ network is currently live across around 86% of the UK’s population. The technology offers a pure end-to-end 5G network that can deliver ultra-low latency times, greater energy efficiency, better speeds (particularly uploads), network slicing, improved support for IoT devices, increased reliability and security etc. By comparison, early 5G networks used a Non-Standalone (NSA) approach, which was hobbled by being partly reliant upon older and slower 4G infrastructure.

The new network is typically available to O2’s customers with compatible devices “at no extra cost“, although we do wish that mobile operators would start giving geographic coverage figures for their 5G+ network as population figures always sound better than the reality often shows.

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Broadband and mobile provider Vodafone has published their new Mobile Market Index (MMI), which benchmarks the UK against nine international peers (inc. USA, Germany, France, Spain, South Korea, Australia, Norway, Singapore and Hungary) to assess the environment facing Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) in each.

Overall the UK places 8th in the new Mobile Market Index, above France and Spain, for Operating Environment (i.e. reflecting the factors that affect a mobile operator’s ability to operate and invest) and 9th for Consumer & Market Outcomes (i.e. outcomes consumers and operators experience as a result of the operating environment). But take this all with a pinch of salt as it reflects Vodafone’s own vested interests in the changes they’d like to see.

Otherwise, the Index highlights how UK operators face the “second highest energy costs and planning red tape“, while the UK is ranked 7 out of 10 for the pipeline of relevant skills. The cumulative impact of these pressures affects the service MNOs are able to provide the UK in comparison to other countries.

“The current environment limits operators’ ability to monetise the full extent of their network and invest sustainably in the digital infrastructure the UK needs to meet the demands of the future. Without action to support investment into UK networks, the Index suggests that the UK risks falling behind its global peers in supporting digital public services, national resilience and economic growth,” said the report.

Operating Environment

Consumer & Market Outcomes

The Index argues that affordability and competition should remain central, albeit alongside a stronger focus on investment, resilience, security and advanced network capability.

VodafoneThree Networks Director, Andrea Dona, said:

“Since the merger we have raised the bar for connectivity in the UK, eliminating thousands of not spots and providing millions of people with access to our fastest 5G speeds.

But we cannot afford to lose momentum. Fast, reliable and quality mobile networks are a fundamental driver of economic growth and prosperity. Which is why we support the UK Government’s efforts to examine the barriers holding back our mobile networks. Bringing the UK’s investment environment up to the standard of our international peers could help to support public services, eliminate digital divides and enable communities to thrive.”

VodafoneThree said it would like to see three policy changes resulting from the Mobile Market Review, including planning reform (i.e. modernise the planning system for the era of 5G connectivity and speed up advanced network rollouts), energy reform (i.e. mitigation on energy costs like other sectors receive) and support for enabling 5G network slicing technology (i.e. Ofcom’s net neutrality rules currently limit network slicing to prevent abuse).

Broadly speaking these points reflect many of the same recommendations that frequently crop up from the mobile sectors via various other reports (e.g. here, here, here, here, here and here). The Government, both through existing legislation, their 10-Year UK Infrastructure Strategy (10YIS), proposed changes to planning rules (here) and the complementary Mobile Market Review (MMR), are already progressing some improvements on the planning side of things. But it remains to be seen how much progress is made on energy and network slicing etc.

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Network benchmarking firm Opensignal has today published a new report, which used device-level measurement tracking of real broadband switching (changing ISP) events across the United Kingdom to find that alternative broadband networks (altnets) grew their market share by 4.4 percentage points in just the last eighteen months (holding 11.4% of UK subscriptions).

The research – ‘Q2 2026 UK Broadband Subscriber Analytics Report‘ – reported that altnets now pass an estimated 66% of UK premises with “superfast broadband coverage” (we’re unsure how they define “superfast“, but the 66% figure appears to be based on INCA’s 2026 State of Altnets report), although the new data shows that they still account for just 11.4% of national broadband subscriptions (this closely aligns to INCA’s earlier figure of 11.9%). Despite this, the additional 4.4pp added in the last 18 months shows a strong positive direction of travel.

The degree to which altnets have an impact also varies depending upon location (some areas, such as cities and towns, have a higher density of choice than others). For example, London and Northern Ireland lead on altnet share (21% and 18%), having gained about a third of that share between Q4 2024 and Q2 2026. This pattern, of altnets recording a big chunk of their wins in the past eighteen months, holds across all twelve UK regions: the switching we are reporting points to where the market reshaping is headed.

The research also found that not all of the main incumbent retail ISPs are losing market share equally. For example, the main BT brand, which exclusively uses Openreach’s national network, fell by 3.4pp over the period and TalkTalk fell by 2.8pp (the latter has had some big challenges to overcome due to financial struggles). But others, such as Vodafone, grew their position by 1pp, partly due to their altnet partnerships with CityFibre and CommunityFibre that help to complement their Openreach base.

One other interesting observation is that Three’s 4G / 5G based Home Broadband product, which could be considered a sort of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) package, has managed to attract a 2.9% national share – making it bigger than any individual fixed line altnet. The charts below give a good visual summary of all this.

We should point out that some of the providers in the tables above act as both retail and wholesale providers – vertically integrated (e.g. CommunityFibre both builds their own network and acts as a retail ISP, while also offering some degree of wholesale access). Similarly, others, like Zen Internet, are primarily retail ISPs that also help aggregate other altnets via wholesale for different partners / ISPs to harness. Suffice to say, it’s a complex market.

Generally, Netomnia leads the main pack of altnets with a 2.0% share (mostly via their retail ISP YouFibre and a smattering of smaller wholesale players), just ahead of CommunityFibre and Hyperoptic (both 1.7%). Netomnia is still trading independently while its acquisition by nexfibre awaits clearance by the competition regulator (CMA).

Breaking news.. more to follow..

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Popular video streaming site TikTok, which can be used by those who are 13 years of age or older (18+ for livestreaming), appears to have landed itself in hot water with Ofcom’s enforcement of the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) over their use of “age inference” technology to identify the age of their users (i.e. this is not something the regulator considers to be “highly effective” for age verification).

The focus around the regulator’s requirement for “highly effective” age verification is often expressed as being something targeted more towards porn and other “harmful” adult content. But in reality, the new requirements also stretch to almost “all user-to-user and search services” in scope of the act (e.g. social media, online forums, tube sites, cam sites, and fan platforms) – both big and small sites alike. Only a few exceptions exist.

The regulator’s related guidance sets out how the legal duty works and makes clear that any age-checking methods deployed by services must be “technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair” in order to be considered “highly effective“. But TikTok currently uses a type of age assurance known as “age inference“, which involves analysing a user’s activity and behaviour on a platform to estimate whether they are a child or an adult (as well as just asking them to input their date of birth).

The problem for TikTok is that age inference is not included in Ofcom’s industry guidance as a method that is capable of being highly effective for this purpose. “Our Age Assurance report published today also raises serious doubts about the effectiveness of some of these models. Our evidence suggests that, in some cases, age inference methods may be failing to correctly detect significant numbers of children, putting them at risk of exposure to harmful content,” said the regulator.

In response Ofcom has opened a new investigation to establish whether TikTok’s age checks are effective in preventing children from encountering harmful content on its platform.

Ofcom Statement

The opening of an investigation does not mean that Ofcom has reached any conclusion about whether the provider has breached its duties. However, where we identify compliance failures, we can impose fines of up to £18m or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue (whichever is greater).

In the most serious cases of non-compliance, and where appropriate given risks of harm to individuals in the UK, we can seek a court order to require third parties to take action to disrupt the business of the provider. This may require third parties (such as providers of payment or advertising services, or Internet Service Providers) to withdraw services from, or block access to, a regulated service in the UK.

The move isn’t all that surprising as the OSA tends to be targeted towards the largest social media platforms and TikTok are certainly in that grouping. On the other hand, big questions remain over the credibility of age verification requirements in general, not least in terms of the fact that such providers are often unregulated (i.e. can you really entrust your private details to them) and it raises the risk from data breaches.

Back in 2023 the European Policy Information Center (EPICENTER) published a report that summed up some of these challenges quite nicely, not least by highlighting the tendency of politicians to “promise the impossible without fully understanding the dynamics of what they are trying to regulate and without giving sufficient consideration to the side-effects of the proposed solutions.”

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The UK’s fraud prevention service, Cifas, which is home to over 775 members including major telecoms providers such as Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2), BT, Sky Broadband and more, has joined the Global Signal Exchange (GSE) to “strengthen the global fight against” online scams by collaborating to identify, disrupt, and prevent online scams at scale across borders and sectors.

The UK telco industry’s involvement is vital to help reduce scams because, with their help, Cifas members can share scam signals (such as suspicious URLs, domains and internet [IP] addresses) to shut down malicious online content even quicker, and on an international scale.

According to the announcement, online scams were estimated to cost the global economy $579.4bn (over £433bn) in 2025 or almost £10bn in the UK, which is a figure that only seems to increase with each passing year. The new partnership will address this by allowing Cifas to connect its UK network of organisations – spanning industries including banking, retail, insurance, and telecoms – with a rapidly growing global ecosystem of technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Meta, financial institutions, infrastructure providers, and law enforcement etc.

At the heart of this effort is a system called Scamlink – Cifas’ centralised repository of scam signals, contributed by members and used to detect and disrupt scams. Cifas has already shared its first batch of signals with the GSE, which delivered almost 500 new signals on the first day of operation to enhance the platform’s global intelligence and shut down malicious activity.

Each signal – which includes data such as suspicious URLs, domains, and IP addresses – strengthens the wider network, improving the ability for organisations to act quickly and decisively. These signals are then combined with over 1.3bn data points already processed by the GSE’s advanced analytics engine, which provides a real-time, global view of significant scam activity such as phishing, malware, and spam content.

Mike Haley, CEO of Cifas, said:

“Scams are a global threat and tackling them demands coordinated action across sectors and borders. Through the GSE partnership, Cifas members are helping to identify and disrupt harmful content at scale – with their critical and specialist insight contributing directly to the takedown of scams across jurisdictions.

Connecting into a global network of technology platforms and infrastructure providers ensures our members can take faster, more decisive action. This also marks an important step in Cifas continuing to bring organisations together to enable a truly collective response to stopping scams at source.”

Emily Taylor, CEO of Oxford Information Labs and Co-Founder of the GSE, said:

“Scams don’t respect borders, and neither can our response. Cifas brings deep, specialist intelligence from nearly 800 UK organisations, and connecting that into the Global Signal Exchange means those signals can now drive takedowns anywhere in the world, in real time.

Every partner who joins makes the whole network sharper. That is the point of a shared clearing house: the more the ecosystem contributes, the harder it becomes for the facilitators of fraud to hide.”

Clearly, it’s the scale involved that helps to make GSE such a useful tool and Cifas are now playing an important role in that.