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Broadband, TV and mobile operator Virgin Media and O2 has this afternoon announced an organisational change that will see them create a new Consumer unit to cover trading, propositions, digital, data and insights, customer service and retail. The new unit will be led by Lyssa McGowan OBE, who joins the executive team on 8th July as CEO of Consumer, reporting directly to Lutz Schüler.

The move effectively combines Virgin Media and O2’s existing Commercial and Data and Operations functions into a single unit that is intended to be “simpler, faster [and] focused“. As part of these changes Rob Orr, Chief Operations Officer (COO), and Christian Hindennach, Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), will leave the business, stepping back from their responsibilities in the coming weeks.

According to VMO2, the move will establish a unit that has the “focus, data and talent to better understand and enhance customer experiences, simplify decision making and move faster in a highly competitive market“. A cynic might view this as suggesting that VMO2 could have lacked some of those qualities before.

However, we suspect the reality here may be more about saving costs and learning to operate more efficiently, although there’s always the possibility that it might actually deliver some customer service improvements too.

Lutz Schüler, CEO of VMO2, said:

“It has always been our ambition to bring these teams together and these changes align squarely with our long-term strategy, ensuring that we are better set up to serve our customers and build even stronger foundations for the future.

This is a highly competitive and rapidly evolving market so just doing what we’ve always done isn’t the answer – we need to be simpler, faster and focused. These changes will do that with Lyssa being exactly the right person to lead our new consumer unit. Lyssa has a wealth of experience, and I have full confidence that she will bring fresh thinking and healthy challenge to the executive team.

I would like to extend thanks from all of Virgin Media O2 to Rob and Christian who have both shown true dedication to the business over many years and have been instrumental in shaping the vision for the new consumer organisation.”

The new CEO of Consumer, Lyssa McGowan, is a familiar name and has plenty of executive experience, including as CEO of Pets at Home and more than a decade at Sky (Sky Broadband, Sky TV etc.) culminating in her role as Chief Consumer Officer (CCO).

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Alternative network provider LightSpeed Networks, which is the business and wholesale side of retail UK ISP LightSpeed Broadband and has already deployed their full fibre (FTTP) network to cover 360,000 premises passed across the East of England and Midlands (36 towns), has today announced the appointment of Matthew Partridge as their new Managing Director (MD).

Partridge is said to be bringing over 30 years of experience across the telecoms and connectivity sector, including senior roles at Colt Technology Services. The announcement also comes shortly after Brett Shepherd, the CEO of LightSpeed – the group behind LightSpeed Broadband and LightSpeed Networks – “stepped down“ (here); he was replaced by Liam Hickey.

Otherwise, the new MD will be expected to lead the commercial and operational development of the business, overseeing the translation of LightSpeed Networks’ infrastructure, service assurance and operational capability into commercially deliverable propositions for mid-market and enterprise organisations, ISPs, channel partners and wholesale buyers.

LightSpeed Networks currently delivers Ethernet, dedicated internet access and wholesale connectivity underpinned by SLA-backed service assurance and direct operational ownership across their full fibre network footprint.

Liam Hickey, CEO of LightSpeed Group, said:

“The businesses and partners we work with need a connectivity provider that takes genuine ownership of the outcome, not just the contract. What we are building at LightSpeed Networks is the infrastructure, the operational model and the commercial leadership to deliver exactly that. Matthew and Ashley further strengthen our commercial leadership, enabling us to take that proposition to market with even greater depth and clarity. That is what our customers and partners deserve.”

The appointment also follows that of Ashley Griffiths as Senior Sales Director, who joined LightSpeed Networks earlier in 2026 to lead its direct enterprise and partner routes to market.

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A recent investigation by the Sunday Times, which was supported by analysis from TruthEngine®, examined unusual review patterns linked to broadband and mobile provider Vodafone UK and allegations over how some customers “had reviews posted in their names without consent“. Some of the reviews also praised individual store employees.

According to the press shot, TruthEngine’s analysis found that the proportion of Vodafone UK Trustpilot reviews mentioning staff members by name rose from 7.6% before 2023 to 73% today. The company also found that more four and five-star reviews were posted during April 2023 alone than during the previous fourteen years combined. Reviews left by accounts that had only ever posted a single review increased by 44% since October 2024 and now account for 53% of Vodafone UK’s Trustpilot reviews, compared with a telecoms-sector average of 33%.

When contacted for comment, Vodafone is claimed to have attributed the rise in four and five-start reviews to a new system, introduced in 2023, that encourages customers to give feedback, so it could “continually learn and improve”. The Sunday Times also reported that Trustpilot removed 3,800 suspicious Vodafone reviews in 2025 and continues to monitor the company’s UK profile.

The report also highlights how advances in AI are making fake and manipulated reviews easier to produce at scale and increasingly difficult for consumers to distinguish from genuine feedback.

Daniel Mohacek, CEO of TruthEngine, said:

“The Vodafone case shows why businesses need much greater visibility and oversight of what is happening around their reviews.

When reviews mention named staff at this kind of level, and when there is also a significant increase in accounts that have only ever left a single review, it is a pattern that warrants proper scrutiny.

Most consumers read reviews assuming they have been written freely by genuine customers. If there is any pressure, incentive or interference behind those reviews, that trust can break down very quickly.”

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) now has direct consumer enforcement powers and can impose significant financial penalties against companies that abuse their rules, worth up to 10% of global turnover, without first taking a business through the courts.

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The EuroISPA (European ISP Association), which represents over 3,300 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) across the EU and EFTA countries (including the United Kingdom), has called for copyright holders to be “held accountable” when their measures to stop access to online piracy (copyright infringement) creates “collateral damage [due to] overbroad blocking actions“.

Broadband ISPs subject to network-level blocking orders, which in the UK usually flow from Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA), have over the past 16 years become very common. Hundreds of sites have been blocked through this approach (thousands if you include their proxies and mirrors), which usually include file sharing (P2P / Torrent), streaming sites, Sci-Hub and those that sell counterfeit goods etc.

However, the EuroISPA say they fully support an “effective, fair, and future-proof copyright framework” and the “protection of intellectual property rights“. The issue they have is that the sledgehammer approach to blocking piracy sites and services, which is often at least partly automated, often ends up restricting access to legitimate sites and services too. Getting such issues resolved can also be a slow and difficult process.

For example, websites that foster copyright infringement will often do so via shared IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and servers, which will also connect to many completely unrelated and legitimate sites and services that innocent users harness. Suffice to say that a blanked restriction against the same IP address will often end up catching out those legitimate services too.

The EuroISPA highlights various practical examples of this across several countries, such as in Spain: “Every weekend for the past year and a half, millions of Spanish internet users have lost access to banking apps, developer tools, and other platforms with no per-block judicial review and no mechanism for redress. Collateral damage has included Google Fonts, institutional sites, and payment platforms — all mistakenly blocked.”

The association further highlights a rise in the number of cases where network blocking measures have escalated “beyond local access providers to target global infrastructure providers with no direct relationship to the infringing content. These approaches are neither effective nor proportionate, and risk causing significant collateral damage to lawful users and services“.

In response the organisation has called for policymakers to review the effectiveness of existing measures and update their laws, such as to require that a prior assessment take place before blocking (i.e. to try and limit accidental overblocking) – with sufficient time being allowed for this – and to hold Rights Holders “accountable … for collateral damage caused by overbroad blocking actions“.

The latter idea above goes on to propose compensation mechanisms that must be clearly defined and enforceable, so as to reduce lazy blocking that risks doing more harm than good. The goal is to ensure that the burden of enforcement errors does not fall on innocent intermediaries (e.g. web hosting services, DNS resolvers, VPN providers etc.) and their users.

EuroISPA Statement

EuroISPA believes that it is essential that policymakers understand the structural limitations of network-level blocking as an enforcement tool. ISPs providing access infrastructure are the furthest from the point of infringement. They can only respond to orders by blocking domain names or IP addresses; they cannot remove individual pieces of infringing content, which can only be accomplished at the hosting level through notice-and-takedown procedures.

Because the Internet is designed to be global and redundant, domain or IP blocking is inherently incomplete and prone to over-blocking. This structural reality is confirmed by independent analysis: an April 2026 study by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) concludes that IP-based blocking is structurally overinclusive, that rightsholders bear none of the implementation costs and therefore have no incentive to avoid collateral damage, and recommends that IP-address blocking be avoided altogether in favour of DNS- or URL-level mechanisms where blocking is used at all.

The issue itself is not a new one and has been raised again now because the European Commission (EC) is currently reviewing the copyright provisions of their Digital Single Market Directive (CDSM Directive, EU 2019/790). But it should be noted that the focus above is on IP-level restrictions, while DNS and URL-level mechanisms get more of a pass.

We recommend reading the EuroISPA’s full submission in order to get all the detail and it’s a fairly smooth 10 page read.

EuroISPA Document on Overblocking
https://www.euroispa.org/../EuroISPA-Contribution-to-the-Targeted-Initiative-in-Copyright-2026.pdf

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The UK’s largest alternative broadband provider, CityFibre, has today announced that they’ve agreed a deal to sell their non-core off-net business, Entanet, to telecoms entrepreneur Tom O’Hagan, who is best known as the founder and former CEO of Ethernet provider Virtual1 (this became part of the TalkTalk group in 2022 – here).

Regular readers with a long memory may recall that business-focused communications provider Entanet was previously acquired by Cityfibre in July 2017 for a cash consideration of £29 million (here), which was initially used to help grow their business wholesale base via a number of ISPs. But the brand hasn’t really been spoken about much in public since then, so this is quite a blast from the past. Entanet used to be a very well known brand in the sector.

As for CityFibre, their full fibre broadband network currently covers over 4.7 million UK premises (4.5m Ready for Service) and they aspire to reach 8 million premises in the future. The new Entanet transaction, which is subject to final approvals, is said to enable the operator to focus “exclusively on scaling services delivered over its own full fibre infrastructure, while positioning Entanet for growth under new ownership“.

The sale includes Entanet-linked partners that are served outside CityFibre’s network footprint, along with associated managed services, network assets, systems and support functions. Under the deal, Entanet will now operate as a “standalone wholesale aggregator” and benefit from “renewed investment in products, systems and customer experience” (expect more automation and new off-net products).

Drawing on his experience of building and scaling Virtual1, Tom O’Hagan aims to expand Entanet’s proposition, invest in its Telford base, and grow its partner relationships. Entanet will also become a new strategic wholesale customer of CityFibre.

George Wareing, Chief Commercial Officer at CityFibre, said:

“CityFibre’s acquisition of Entanet almost a decade ago played an important role in accelerating our business market growth. This sale is the natural next step, allowing us to simplify our model and focus exclusively on providing services over our own infrastructure. We’ll be able to innovate faster, further improve performance and support all our customers more effectively. We welcome Entanet as a new strategic customer of CityFibre and look forward to growing together as demand for full fibre continues to accelerate.”

Tom O’Hagan said:

“I have built a leading UK wholesale business once before, and I see a great opportunity with Entanet. This is a strong business with 30 years of heritage and a loyal partner base and our intent is to build it into a wholesale platform of real scale. That means serious investment in automation, a broader product portfolio, and service that delights partners and leads the market, alongside a relentless focus on their success.

CityFibre’s network is central to that ambition, and we will expand what we deliver over it as we grow the connectivity portfolio on our aggregation platform. I also see real opportunity to consolidate a fragmented wholesale market, and Entanet is the right platform from which to do it.”

The transition for Entanet is already said to be “underway” and will be carefully managed to avoid problems. Entanet will continue to operate under its established brand, with no disruption to ordering, provisioning or in-life service support.

The same announcement notes that during the first quarter of 2026, sales of Business FTTP and Ethernet on CityFibre’s network grew 133% and 42% respectively year on year. The development essentially ensures that CityFibre keeps its national broadband and Ethernet network to a wholesale-only focus.

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National broadband access provider Openreach (BT) has revealed that they’ve signed a new partnership with EV charging company Source, which is jointly owned by SSE and TotalEnergies, to help support their transition to electric vehicles. The network operator will thus gain access to Source’s growing collection of “ultra-rapid charging hubs” across the UK.

At present Openreach, which manages the second-largest commercial vehicle fleet in the UK (c.23,000 vehicles), is currently aiming to upgrade the “vast majority” of their diesel-powered vans and cars to EVs by the end of March 2031 (supporting their Net Zero target for the same date). So far, they’ve already adopted a total of over 7,000 EVs and rising.

In order to support the transition Openreach have been busy installing EV charging points at operational sites and engineers’ homes (they’ve done more than 4,000 of these) for convenient overnight charging. However, despite the progress, the broadband operator recognises that charging can still be a problem, particularly with around one in three of their engineers being unable to install a home charger.

The company has thus been busy building other partnerships, such as with First Bus, so engineers can charge their vans at First Bus depots, taking pressure off public charging points and making life easier for those who live in flats. A similar deal to the First Bus agreement was recently agreed to harness Sainsbury’s nationwide EV charging network (here) and today’s agreement with Source aims to expand on all that.

Source’s UK sites feature ultra-rapid chargers of up to 300kW, which they say “allow most electric vehicles to ‘charge and go’ in less than 15 minutes“. But it’s worth noting that EV’s don’t all charge at the same rate and charging often slows considerably for the final 20% or so of battery capacity.

Source currently plans to open 300 charging hubs across the UK and Ireland.

Alice Aprile-Smith, Head of Partnerships at Source, said:

“Openreach operates the UK’s second largest commercial fleet and is serious about its transition to electric – that’s exactly the kind of partner we want to be working with. Source is built to deliver ultra-rapid public charging reliably, at scale, across the breadth of the UK. We’re proud to be supporting one of the country’s most ambitious fleet electrification programmes.”

Judy O’Keefe, Director of Fleet at Openreach, said:

“Moving a fleet our size to electric is a big job. Charging needs to be simple, safe and reliable for our engineers. That’s why partnerships like this matter. They give our people fast, flexible charging when they’re out on the road.

“That keeps them moving, so we can keep serving customers and communities right across the UK. And as we switch to electric, we’re already seeing the benefits – cutting emissions, improving air quality and helping create healthier places to live and work. It’s all part of our move to a zero-emissions fleet by 2031 and our wider net zero plans.”

Openreach’s goal is to enable their telecoms engineers to use a mix of home, workplace, depot and public charging, depending on where they live and how they work. The operator is also busy testing “cross‑pavement charging“, which allows people without access to off-street parking to charge their EVs at home by running a cable through a shallow channel (gully) in the public pavement. “A small group of engineers are testing whether these solutions are safe, practical and easy to use,” said Judy in May 2026.

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Broadcaster ITV has announced that they’ve selected MainStreaming’s edge video delivery network to help power their ITVX streaming platform and app, which is mostly said to be down to its ability to integrate deeply within broadband and mobile networks, strengthened by its recent strategic partnership with telecoms giant BT (EE).

The change will see ITV add MainStreaming to its multi-CDN (Content Delivery Network) strategy, which they hope will deliver a more controllable approach to video delivery that enables “greater visibility, optimisation and performance management at scale“.

The new platform will thus support the delivery of ITVX’s core catalogue, including flagship programmes, news and live content, while also leveraging its distributed Edge architecture to deliver high Quality of Experience (QoE) while optimising total cost of ownership (TCO).

ITV also noted that BT customers, both via fixed broadband and EE’s mobile network, are said to make up a significant share of ITV’s audience. This is relevant because MainStreaming and BT last year agreed a key partnership, which supports BT’s adoption of MAUD (Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery) technology for live-streaming (here).

Mark Ison, Director of Engineering at ITV, said:

“ITVX is a strategic platform for ITV, and our delivery architecture needs to be ready not just for today, but for where streaming will be in the next ten years. MainStreaming’s video-first, capacity-based approach helps us enhance our platform as our expected demand evolves, and its proven ISP partnerships – including BT – give us confidence we can address quality, scalability and efficiency for a significant portion of our audience, while continuing to build on our already world-class streaming platform.”

The collaboration is said to reflect a shared commitment to continuously optimise streaming performance, which is certainly something that ITVX would benefit from.

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Rural broadband ISP Quickline, which is building a new full fibre (FTTP) and fixed wireless (FWA) network across parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in England, appears to have had its Project Gigabit contract for Lincolnshire and East Riding tweaked. The result is a reduction in their contracted coverage target for the intervention area.

According to the latest Contract Modification notice from the government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency: “The awarded contract value for the “Initial Scope” has decreased by £210,188 to £115,149,812 from the original value of £115,360,000. The modification includes an addition of 3,977 initial scope premises, the removal of 4,805 initial scope premises, resulting in a net removal of 828 premises. There is also a removal of 28,187 “Deferred Scope” premises.”

The change to Deferred Scope premises isn’t so significant as that typically represents premises where BDUK were waiting to see whether commercial plans or voucher projects by other operators translated to delivery (i.e. if other operators don’t deliver then such premises might have potentially been included into Quickline’s contract at a later date). We assume the removal of 28k above is due to commercial builds, but it’s not completely clear.

Otherwise, the latest June 2026 data from BDUK indicates that Quickline has so far covered 20,610 premises under this contract (here), which is out of a total contracted figure of 47,800. The key thing to remember is that these contracts are not static and their scope, as well as committed levels of public funding, will change over time for a number of different reasons – informed by regular reviews (OMR) of existing UK deployment plans. For example, commercial operators may expand or reduce their roll-out plans in the same region(s), which can reduce or grow the scope for public investment within those same areas.

The contracted operator could also find the deployment to be more expensive, or possibly even cheaper, than previously envisaged. Such adjustments may occur due to changes in build costs and interest rates / inflation, as well as any unexpected obstacles to street works or greater efficiencies of build than planned or expected.

Suffice to say, there can be various reasons why the contracted scope of related builds and the level of allocated public funding may change over time. In addition, there may be further changes in the future, which could go in a different direction. So, it’s not always easy to tell what the final picture will be until you actually reach the end.

At the end of 2025 Quickline’s full fibre broadband network covered 200,000 premises (excluding fixed wireless coverage, which also covers c.200,000 premises – not all gigabit-capable). The operator currently aims to extend gigabit-capable broadband to a further 360,000 UK premises.

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A new eSIM focused virtual mobile provider has recently launched called Fuse Mobile, which as the name suggests is designed to provide consumers with mobile data plans than can automatically harness the 4G and 5G networks of EE, Three UK, Vodafone, and O2 through a single eSIM plan.

The service, which will automatically connect your mobile phone to whichever network has the strongest signal, is intended to help overcome the areas of weak signal that often exist in certain areas between different mobile networks. In addition, on the operator’s Pulse and Surge plans, your data allowance will also work in 130+ countries abroad “at no extra cost“.

The catch with multi-network operators like this is that their plans often have fairly limited data allowances and don’t come with the usual unlimited calls + texts features. Fuse currently has just three monthly plans, all on a multi-network eSIM: Spark (5GB of data at £5.99 a month), Pulse (10GB + roaming in 130+ countries at £9.99) and Surge (15GB + roaming, £14.99). Every plan is rolling monthly with “no contract“.

In addition, new customers are being invited to try the service free for its first 7-days of service and Tethering (Hotspots) are supported on all plans. We should point out that Fuse aren’t the first eSIM provider to come up with such a product, with Anywhere eSIM being able to do something similar, albeit based around more of a pre-paid model (i.e. you pay £50 for 12-months and that gets you 1,000 minutes, 1,000 texts and 10GB of data) – acting as a secondary SIM.

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The Conservative MP for Hinckley and Bosworth, Dr Luke Evans (Shadow Health Minister), has tabled a new Private Members Bill (PMB) that seeks to “prohibit” mobile, landline (phone) and broadband providers from increasing their prices mid-way through your contract. But it’s chances of becoming law are fairly slim.

The issue centres around Ofcom’s January 2025 changes (here), which required telecoms providers to improve pricing transparency by adopting a new approach to mid-contract price hikes. The change did away with the old and sometimes confusing percentage and inflation-based model – replacing it with one that required providers to set out such price rises “clearly and up-front, in pounds and pence, when a customer signs up”.

On the surface this seemed like a good idea, but it also made it more difficult for communication providers to balance price rises across lots of different packages, which resulted in many of them adopting a flat price rise instead (usually increasing by c.£2 to £5 per month each year) – set at the same level for every package.

The catch is that this approach ends up hitting those on the cheapest broadband and mobile packages the hardest (i.e. if you pay £20/month then a £4 rise equates to a 20% price hike each year), while only giving a reprieve to the smaller portion of consumers who take more expensive packages (e.g. if you pay £60 then a £4 rise equates to a 6.67% increase) – not very fair to those on cheaper packages. A recent study confirmed that, when compared with the old policy, this had indeed inflated prices for most consumers (here).

The New Private Members Bill

The ‘Telecommunications (Fixed-term Contracts) Bill‘, as tabled by Dr Luke Evans MP, seeks to address this problem by banning mid-contract hikes in law and describes itself as follows: “A Bill to prohibit the increasing of charges payable under certain fixed-term telecommunications contracts within the duration of those contracts; and for connected purposes.”

At the time of writing this bill is still in its early stages and so hasn’t yet been fully drafted (i.e. it’s not yet fully published for the public), which makes it tricky to analyse. However, the reality is that only a minority of Private Members Bills ever become law (they can be tabled by any MP, not only those from the Government), but they do often serve a purpose by creating publicity around an issue and encouraging wider debate.

The key things to watch thus centre around how much support the new Bill picks up from other MPs as it progresses and whether its provisions are focused on consumers or also extend to businesses, as well as other areas of service provision (e.g. optional paid add-ons or calling charges). We suspect it would not be workable to include optional extras or call charges, as well as business connections, but that doesn’t mean to say the bill won’t try.

In addition, it’s worth remembering that broadband, phone and mobile providers are NOT immune to cost increases. Providers, much like consumers, are also suffering under the burden of rising supplier (e.g. wholesale) and lease costs, high inflation, high energy prices, the cost of adding all sorts of new services (e.g. FTTP) and catering for new regulations etc.

So, if providers can’t raise their prices mid-contract (spreading their risk to consumers), then they’ll probably front-load them instead, which may raise the general pricing of packages across the market to balance against the risk they take over longer terms. But we imagine that competition would still ensure plenty of diversity and choice, while pricing would also be a lot clearer for consumers.

The reality is that providers, at least among most of the largest market players (not all providers adopt mid-contract hikes), currently seem to be abusing Ofcom’s policy to increase consumer prices in a way that is now unfair – particularly for those least able to afford the most expensive plans. One way or another, this needs to be addressed. Credits to Ben for spotting the bill.