Is the new Labour government’s approach to digital infrastructure going to be effective?
In this Connected Britain interview, Simon Miller, Director of Public and Regional Affairs at Virgin Media O2, describes the “encouraging” discussions with government so far and how the UK’s digital infrastructure landscape is shifting in 2024.
Check out the full interview from the link below:
Nokia today announced the launch of a new sustainability calculator for private wireless networks for enterprises. This tool helps companies estimate the environmental and social benefits of using private wireless networks and the new Industry 4.0 applications they enable. Notable benefits include improved operations, reduced costs and carbon emissions, and fewer workplace accidents.
Nokia commissioned PwC UK to support the development of a Private Wireless Sustainability Calculator, based on Nokia’s extensive experience in deploying private wireless networks for more than 760 industrial customers worldwide. Nokia’s tool, initially created for mining, manufacturing and port industries, aids businesses in leveraging private wireless to reach their environmental and social objectives, catering to the growing demand from investors for transparency.
Digitalization is key to accelerating industry sustainability and enabling enterprises to achieve long-term growth. Private wireless networks provide high-performance connectivity for digitalization, enabling new applications such as drone inspections, digital twins, and real-time environmental monitoring. These applications, when combined with private networking and edge computing, improve operational efficiency and contribute to sustainability goals.
Industry 4.0 applications powered by private wireless networks offer significant improvements for businesses.
Reduced Greenhouse Gas Emissions: A GlobalData and Nokia report found 79% of surveyed enterprises saw a 10% or greater reduction in emissions after deploying private wireless solutions like drones, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and digital twins.
Improved Worker Safety: Medium-sized chemical manufacturing plants utilizing private wireless networks can save approximately EUR 1.4 million in societal costs (assuming consistent production volumes) and witness an average 35% decrease, on average, in health and safety incidents. Societal costs refer to the economic and social burdens associated with accidents, injuries, and illnesses, including healthcare expenses, lost productivity, and the impact on families and communities. This is due to factors like remote machine control, which reduces worker exposure to hazardous environments.
Improved Efficiency: Autonomous trucks powered by private wireless networks results in a 7% reduction in fuel consumption and wear and tear. Additionally, operations became 10% more efficient, leading to reduced energy consumption and improved worker safety.
The Nokia Private Wireless Sustainability Calculator draws on PwC UK’s expertise in measuring and valuing impacts, and its Total Impact Measurement and Management (TIMM) framework to develop the environmental and social impact methodologies for private wireless networks. TIMM is rooted in impact pathways, going one step further than most other methodologies to translate the costs and benefits to society in monetary terms.
The Nokia calculator uses data from multiple sources, including previous quantifications in other projects and network models to provide a comprehensive understanding of the private networks’ impact. From there, the model’s insights support users to identify opportunities to enhance business operations, including improving equipment lifecycles, reducing transportation downtime and fuel consumption, and improved worker health considerations. Through this process, the Nokia Private Wireless Sustainability Calculator offers enterprises vital findings and insights to improve their business – from improved operational efficiencies, worker health and safety, potential reductions in costs and environmental footprint.
Subho Mukherjee, Vice President of Sustainability at Nokia, said: “Many physical industries are heavy emitters of greenhouse gas and haven’t had the opportunity to reap the full potential of digital technologies yet. To reach our climate goals, we need to speed up their digital transformation through the power of networking, AI and cloud. Nokia is helping industries go digital to become smarter, more automated, sustainable, and efficient. Our new Private Wireless Sustainability Calculator is the first of its kind, showing our private wireless networks can help businesses be more environmentally friendly. It’s a strong step towards quantifying what Nokia believes in, that there is no green without digital.”
Mukherjee said the new Nokia tool underscores the company’s commitment to addressing climate change and resource efficiency in its value chain. Nokia has committed to reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, accelerating its previous target by 10 years. This places Nokia ahead of the Paris Agreement goal to reach net zero by 2050. This initiative is part of Nokia’s broader strategy to integrate sustainability benefits into its solutions for industries and develop Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) as a competitive advantage.
Tom Beagent, Sustainability Partner at PwC UK, said: “Technology has a huge role to play in tackling social and environmental challenges. It is great to see Nokia using its expertise to support its customers to see the potential of private wireless in tackling issues such as health and safety and carbon emissions. Monetizing impacts with frameworks like TIMM really help decision makers to understand the social and environmental return on investment and the role technology can play in delivering on their sustainability goals.”
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Also in the news:
Meta resumes use of UK user posts to train its AI models
Verizon’s 4,800 job cuts will cost over $1.9 billion
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In a rather unusual service outage, some of Sky UK’s customers are suffering from a serious and ongoing issue that is preventing them from being able to switch-on their broadband-based Sky Glass and Sky Stream pay TV streaming devices. We can’t say we’ve ever heard of many issues quite like this one before, but hopefully the devices can be remotely recovered.
The bulk of complaints about this most bizarre of faults began to surface just before 5pm yesterday and more issues started to be reported as the night rolled on, but sadly they’re continuing to come in this morning. The reports also suggest that the issue can be quite sporadic, with some customers who own multiple ‘pucks’ (Sky Stream boxes) and Sky Glass TV sets saying that some work, while others do not.
Some customers report that their devices have since returned to normal, while many others are continuing to suffer the same problem and seeing flashing red or white lights as their devices attempt to start. The fact that this issue seemed to gradually grow last night suggests, at least to us, that Sky could have been trying to push a firmware or configuration update of some sort at the time of the incident.
Sky soon acknowledged the issue, but there is frustration that the operator hasn’t published any further updates since late yesterday afternoon. Sky’s website currently states (here): “Some Sky Glass/Stream customers are currently experiencing technical issues when trying to switch on their devices. Our technical teams are working hard to fix this. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused and remember you can watch on Sky Go right now.”
A few customers have had some luck by unplugging their devices for 10 minutes and then re-connecting them, while others found that holding the power button down for several seconds (likely initiating a reset) worked and enabled them to re-activate their Sky Glass devices online. But others have not been so lucky and the Sky Community Forum is chocked full of complaints, suggesting this may be impacting a lot of people.
UPDATE 8:33am
We’ve seen some indications that similar devices in some of Sky’s other European outlets are suffering from the same issue, but this is not yet confirmed.
UPDATE 8:52am
For customer who want to try and recover / reset their pucks (Sky Stream), the procedure is as follows (this works for some but not others).
Reset / Recover Sky Stream Puck
1. Switch off the Sky Stream puck at the mains plug socket.
2. Press and hold the Standby button on the bottom of the Sky Stream puck.
3. Keeping your finger on the button (underneath the puck), switch the power back on at the mains and wait until you see the LED lights flash amber then green, then remove your finger.
4. Let the Sky Stream puck complete the recovery process. This can take up to 15 minutes (may depend on your broadband speed).
5. Switch the Sky Stream puck back on and follow the on-screen steps to set it up. You might need to go to www.sky.com/activate for further steps.
Similarly, some of those with Sky Glass found that this reset worked, but again it doesn’t for everybody.
Reset / Recover Sky Glass TV
1. Switch off your TV at the mains again. There’s no need to unplug it.
2. Press and hold the Standby button on the right-hand side of the TV.
3. Keeping your finger on the button, switch the power back on at the mains and wait until you see the LED lights flash (this could take 20 seconds before the LED starts flashing), then remove your finger.
4. Let the Sky Glass TV complete the recovery process. This can take up to 15 minutes, depending on your broadband speed.
5. Switch the TV back on and follow the steps on screen to set up your TV.
UPDATE 9:06am
Sky has just updated the Service Status message on their website, which now also pushes advice to use the reset procedure (as above).
Sky Status Update – 08:58 AM
Some Sky Glass and Sky Stream customers are currently experiencing technical issues when trying to switch on their devices. Our engineers are working hard to fix this. In the meantime please visit the links below and follow the process listed in order to restore your device. Sky Glass https://www.sky.com/help/expert/articles/power-issue-help-sky-glass Sky Stream https://www.sky.com/help/expert/articles/power-issue-help-sky-glass-sky-stream-puck We are sorry for any inconvenience caused and remember you can watch on Sky Go right now.
Sky has yet to respond to our comment request, but when they do it’ll probably mirror the ones above. But in the meantime, we must stress that the aformentioned reset/recovery process does not currently resolve the issue for everybody. In addition, if you run into an issue with PIN number acceptance, then we think this is normally the last four digits of your phone number (unless you changed it before).
Some people had to do the reset procedure a few times, usually with gaps of a few hours between attempts, before it finally worked.
UPDATE 10:01am
Sky has issued another update, albeit this time with a link that doesn’t require a staff login to work .
Sky Status Update – 9:25am
Some Sky Glass and Sky Stream customers are currently experiencing technical issues when trying to switch on their devices. Our engineers are working hard to fix this. In the meantime please visit this link in order to restore your device – https://www.sky.com/help/articles/sky-glass-stream-wont-turn-on
We are sorry for any inconvenience caused and remember you can watch on Sky Go right now.
We’ve also had an official response from Sky, but as expected they’ve merely repeated the aforementioned statements and so there’s nothing new to add. Sky did not respond to our query about the cause possibly being an attempted firmware or configuration update.
TIP: When trying to reset the Sky Glass TV, you might need to hold the power button for up to 20 seconds.
The annual Mobile Industry Awards event for 2024 was held last night at the Royal Lancaster in London, which among other categories saw Sky Mobile being named the ‘Best MVNO‘ (virtual) operator, while EE won the ‘Retailer of the Year‘ and VOXI’s GenAI Chatbot was named ‘Innovation of the Year‘.
As usual, this is one of those industry events where the shortlists for each of the categories are all judged by a panel of 20 people who either work directly within or alongside the same industry, with no real consumer representation. Take the results with a pinch of salt.
One slightly interesting aside to all this is that Vodafone’s related press release (here) notes how their ‘Great British Broadband Switch’ campaign was also shortlisted for ‘Campaign of the Year’. In the end, Lebara Mobile won that category, which is probably just as well considering that the advertising watchdog recently had a few bones to pick with Vodafone’s campaign (here).
Mobile Industry Award Winners 2024
Innovation of the Year Product or Service: VOXI GenAI Chatbot
Best Mobile Service & Solution Provider: Aerial Direct
Best Wholesale Service & Solution Provider: Three Wholesale
Best Recycling and Refurbishing Service (sponsored by Compare and Recycle): Preloved Tech Ltd
Best Repair Service: Likewize
Best Mobile/Gadget Insurance Service (sponsored by Bamboo Distribution): Asurion
Best Mobile Security Product or Service: Appdome
Distributor of the Year: Eurostar Global Electronics
Retailer of the Year: EE
Campaign of the Year: Lebara Mobile
CSR Initiative of the Year: Vodafone
Sustainability Initiative of the Year (sponsored by Sky Zero): Mobile Component Repair – TMT First
Team of the Year: Three UK – Retail Experience Team
Best Customer Service: Tesco Mobile
Best Place to Work: Genuine Solutions
Best MVNO: Sky Mobile
Best Network for Business: Three Business
Best eSIM Provider: GKT eSIM
Best SIM Only Network (sponsored by GK Telecoms): SMARTY Mobile
Network of the Year (sponsored by Likewize): EE
Smartphone Manufacturer of the Year (sponsored by Lebara): Samsung
Accessory Manufacturer of the Year: Belkin International
Phone of the Year: Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra
Person of the Year (Power 50 Winner): Marc Allera, EE and Consumer Division at BT Group
Shop Idol: Aadil Naveed, Vodafone
A new London-registered alternative network provider called Countryside Fibre has cropped up with a plan to deploy a gigabit-capable full fibre broadband network (FTTP vs GPON) across parts of North Somerset in England. The provider will sell packages both directly to homes and businesses, as well as via wholesale through other ISPs.
Applications for Code Powers are typically sought to help speed-up deployments of new fibre and cut costs, not least by reducing the number of licences needed for street works. The powers can also help with supporting access to run new fibre via Openreach’s (BT) existing cable ducts and poles (PIA), which is something that Lightning Fibre have harnessed in the past and would clearly use again.
At the time of writing we couldn’t find a website for Countryside Fibre, but their company details state that the business was only incorporated on 6th October 2023 and is being run by David Swanston (Director). David previously ran an altnet called RunFibre, before it was scooped up by FibreRay (here), and earlier this year he also setup another altnet and ISP called Gigability (inc. Gigability Infra) – focused on Shropshire (here).
Code Powers Statement
The Applicant is a new venture which seeks Code powers to facilitate the deployment of a Gigabit Capable full fibre optic infrastructure with Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) technology in North Somerset and across the United Kingdom.
The Applicant has stated that while it takes advantage of Openreach PIA products as much as it can, around 30% of its build is planned for private dig in the highway and private land, in an equal ratio across the two.
The Applicant intends to allow and encourage other providers to access its network to sell their products and thus increase the local economy, competition, and overall connectivity.
The Applicant has stated that it plans to roll out to premises in North Somerset premises, and the bespoke network used will be built and maintained by local, in-house engineers. Countryside Fibre sells broadband services to residential, business and on a wholesale basis. Beyond these areas, Countryside Fibre intends to roll out further infrastructure across the United Kingdom.
At present there are no details on the funding or roll-out plan for the new network, which currently seems to be more in the experimental stages of development. But suffice to say, starting a new alternative network (altnet) in this market, which is already aggressively competitive and under a lot of economic strain, is not for the faint of heart. Time will tell whether or not this one blossoms into something bigger.
This week, French mobile network operator Free, owned by telecoms giant Iliad Group, has announced the launch of 5G SA services.
“Today, Free is announcing that it has deployed 5G SA (Standalone Access) on the 3.5 GHz frequencies of its public network on a national scale. By doing this, it has become the first mobile operator in France to offer this technology to its subscribers,” reads the company’s translated press release.
More specifically, the operator says it has switched on 5G SA at 6,950 of its 20,000 5G sites across the country, with customers able to access the new technology on compatible devices at no extra cost.
The new SA architecture will provide customers with higher speeds and lower latency, as well as unlocking a host of potential new use cases, from extended reality to network slicing.
“5G SA is the final phase of the development of the 5G network, enabling faster speeds, lower latency, and higher reliability,” explained Free. “Its large-scale deployment will allow the full potential of 5G technology to be realized through the massive take-up of new services and 5G applications in many domains, ranging from industry, health, education, and entertainment through to smart cities.”
It should be noted that while the announcement claims the standalone deployment to be at a “national scale”, this is presumably not the same as ‘nationwide”. Free says its 20,000 5G sites provide coverage of coverage of roughly 95% of the French population, which would suggest that there are still many thousands of sites left to upgrade before truly national coverage can be achieved.
This is the second major 5G SA announcement this month, with EE (BT) having announced the launch of the new technology in 15 cities a few weeks ago. Interestingly, EE’ 5G SA network will only be available to customers via new premium packages and will not be accessible for customers on existing plans.
This is in contrast to rivals Virgin Media O2 and Vodafone, both of whom will allow existing users to access the new network at no additional cost.
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Also in the news:
Meta resumes use of UK user posts to train its AI models
Verizon’s 4,800 job cuts will cost over $1.9 billion
CMA questions Vodafone–Three merger after second probe
According to Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), working in partnership with EkkoSense across 20 of the company’s UK data centres has led to an average saving of 15% in data centre cooling energy usage.
In environmental terms, this means reducing the company’s carbon footprint by around 760 tonnes per year. In financial terms, it’s a reduction in energy bills of over £1 million a year.
These savings have been achieved through better understanding the data centres’ existing energy usage, leveraging various monitoring and analytics solutions from EkkoSense. These include using IoT sensors, AI analytics, and digital twin technology.
“With our software collecting thousands of data points every five minutes – adding to the millions of data points already collected, we’re able to continually refine the effectiveness of our machine learning algorithms for Virgin Media O2,” said Dean Boyle, EkkoSense’s CEO. “Having access to this level of real-time insight means that Virgin Media O2’s operations team are able to track how their data centres are performing from a cooling, power and capacity perspective. They are also able to identify further energy optimisation opportunities in terms of cooling energy usage and overall savings.”
This additional insight from EkkoSense has allowed VMO2 to adjust its energy usage in real-time to meet demand, enabling them to run more efficiently.
“In partnership with EkkoSense, we’ve optimised our data centres so they operate efficiently, using real-time data so we can make airflow and cooling improvements, resulting in significant cooling energy savings,” explained Adrian Lazenby, Head of Technical Site Engineering and Delivery at VMO2.
In recent years, the data centre industry has experienced a surge in growth, much of which is related to the ongoing boom in AI. However, providing energy – particularly renewable energy – for these power-hungry data centres, remains a major challenge. Indeed, we have even seen data centre projects rejected recently due to fears that the local energy grids could not support the additional demand.
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Also in the news:
Meta resumes use of UK user posts to train its AI models
Verizon’s 4,800 job cuts will cost over $1.9 billion
CMA questions Vodafone–Three merger after second probe
In a fascinating development, researchers in Japan are deploying and deploying a way of making 5G mobile (mobile broadband) infrastructure more discreet by creating transparent glass antennas that make it possible for windows to serve as base stations.
Modern 5G and future 6G networks only tend to deliver their best multi-Gigabit broadband speeds when they’re able to harness lots of higher frequency mobile spectrum. However, due to the limitations of signal propagation over distance from such low power communications, you need a dense and complex network of cell sites to fully utilise this.
The problem is that building a dense network of cell sites is expensive, as well as being one that tends to be increasingly hard to disguise and thus only really works at its best in the busiest parts of large cities and towns. But one possible way around that could be to turn ordinary windows into antennas.
The idea has actually been around for a few years now (here), albeit initially more focused on the automotive sector (here). However, the Tokyo-based communications company JTower recently deployed a glass antenna on part of a building in the Shinjuku district, which was developed by glassmaker AGC and mobile operator NTT Docomo (credits to ISPreview readers for spotting the IEEE Spectrum story). More deployments are planned to follow.
At present this only seems designed to work in the sub-6GHz bands (i.e. 617MHz to 5000MHz) and we don’t know much about its actual performance, but it seems unlikely to be able to beat a modern metal antenna. On the other hand, it could make up for that by being able to harness the mass of windows that exist pretty much everywhere, although only time will tell how practical this really is to deploy at scale.
Speaking of deploying at scale, it probably doesn’t help that there will be a distinct lack of suppliers for such kit, given that a technology like this is likely to be restricted due to control over related patents. Suffice to say that we probably won’t be seeing this happening much in the UK anytime soon, but’s it’s an interesting solution that could one day help to make mobile networks more discreet.
Watch our full interview with Virtyt below:
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Also in the news:
Meta resumes use of UK user posts to train its AI models
Verizon’s 4,800 job cuts will cost over $1.9 billion
CMA questions Vodafone–Three merger after second probe
This week, India’s Supreme Court has rejected the latest appeals from Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea that seek to have debts they owe the government recalculated.
The AGR fees, which amount to a combined total of roughly $11 billion, were calculated by the government in a court ruling back in 2019.
Since then, the affected telcos have been arguing to have the fees recalculated, reduced, or otherwise delayed, citing the highly competitive market and their impoverished financial positions.
These arguments have generally fallen on deaf ears, with the Supreme Court agreeing to extend the payment period to 10 years but not budging on the total owed to them by the telcos.
This latest appeal comes in the form of a ‘curative petition’, with the telcos once again arguing that the AGR fees had been miscalculated. In their plea, the telcos said the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had made a “grave error” in its calculations and described the resulting figures as “arbitrary”.
The Supreme Court, however, has once again rejected these pleas, saying that no case had been made “within the parameters indicated in the decision”.
The decision has seen the share price of Vodafone Idea – which owes around three-quarters of the total AGR dues – fall 15%.
Keep up to date with all of the latest telecoms news with Total Telecom’s daily newsletter
Also in the news:
Meta resumes use of UK user posts to train its AI models
Verizon’s 4,800 job cuts will cost over $1.9 billion
CMA questions Vodafone–Three merger after second probe