News

The direct-to-device (D2D) services will be available in the parts of North Carolina most badly affected by Hurricane Helene

On Sunday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave temporary approval for Starlink to provide D2D satellite services to parts of North Carolina affected by Hurricane Helene.

The hurricane, which impacted the US southeast late last month, has heavily damaged communication infrastructure across multiple states. According to figures from the FCC, over 74% of mobile towers in affected areas were knocked out by the hurricane’s initial impact. Follow-up reports from last week suggested that roughly 20% remain out of action.

In a statement, the FCC said that it was “ready to do all that is necessary to return connectivity to hard-hit areas and save lives”, with Commissionr Brendan Carr noting that “the focus is on enabling emergency alerts to smartphones”.

Following the approval, Starlink says it is working with its partner T-Mobile to broadcast emergency alerts to mobile phones across affected parts of North Carolina, as well as initiating tests for basic text messaging capabilities over the satellite network.

Starlink’s internet services – which require dedicated Starlink terminal devices to provide services – have already been made free to use for 30 days in areas affected by Helene.

Space X had initially planned to launch commercial D2D services with T-Mobile at the end of this year, but the process had been slowed by regulatory disputes with the FCC, following complaints by rival companies.

Thus, while this these temporary concessions are not a lasting solution for the company’s regulatory troubles, it will provide SpaceX with an invaluable live testing opportunity for its new technology.

Unfortunately, whether this situation will lead to a less adversarial relationship between SpaceX and the FCC seems unlikely. SpaceX’s billionaire owner Elon Musk has a tumultuous relationship with the FCC for many years, having clashed with the Commission numerous times over licencing issues and the topic of ‘free speech’.

In a Twitter post last week, Musk criticised the FCC for ‘revoking’ its $886 million in government funding for North Carolina back in 2022, saying that Starlink’s availability could have helped save lives in the aftermath of the hurricane.

“Had the FCC not illegally revoked the SpaceX Starlink award, it would probably have saved lives in North Carolina,” said Musk in a tweet on Wednesday. “Lawfare costs lives.”

The FCC, however, notes that it never ‘revoked’ funding for Starlink, but rather rejected the company’s bids for the fund as part of the normal review process.

“Chairwoman Rosenworcel stands by the FCC’s thorough review of a program meant to provide long-term access to reliable and affordable broadband in rural communities,” the commission said in a statement. “In this instance, the agency denied public funds to more than a dozen companies—not just Starlink—who did not meet the program requirements. As an independent agency, the FCC takes seriously its obligation to ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to entities that fully comply with the rules and the law.”

The FCC also noted that, even if the funds had been awarded to SpaceX, they would not have become available until 2025.

Are telecoms providers doing enough to support their customers in a crisis? Join the discussion on community connectivity at this year’s Broadband Communities Summit West, live in San Diego, California

Also in the news:
Hurricane Helene knocks out a fifth of mobile sites in US Southeast
Vodafone Germany leans into fibre infrastructure sharing to reach 11m
EE activates 25 Freshwave small cells in London

News 

The deal follows a $3.6 billion network equipment deal signed with Samsung, Nokia, and Ericsson just last month 

This week, Vodafone Idea (Vi) has expanded its partnership with Ericsson by signing new contracts to upgrade its 4G network and introduce 5G services in in key regions, including Delhi, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. 

This new deal builds on the long-standing relationship between the two companies and is aimed at strengthening India’s digital infrastructure to meet rising customer demands.  

In addition to expanding network coverage and quality, Ericsson’s deployment will also be more energy efficient, leveraging technologies like its mid-band Massive MIMO radios to improve network performance. 

“Collaborating with Ericsson will enable Vi to modernise its 4G network and rapidly deploy a world class 5G network. 5G deployment will enable us to seamlessly manage the growing data traffic on the Vi network, provide secure and reliable connectivity while enhancing the customer experience from the network,” said Vi CEO Akshaya Moondra in a press release. 

Vi is significantly behind its rivals Bharti Artel and Reliance Jio in its 4G rollout and has yet to deploy 5G at scale. As such, the company has been steadily losing market share for years.  

To make matters worse, the company is languishing under the weight of billions of adjusted gross revenue (AGR) dues it owes the government, a fact that has further hamstringed its attempts to expand and modernise its infrastructure. 

However, Vi did successfully raise $4.4 billion that the company raised in April and May via equity financing, and it is quickly putting these funds to good use. Last month, Vi inked a $3.6 billion network equipment deal with Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung. The deal will see the vendors supply Idea with equipment over the next three years. The company will use this equipment to expand its 4G population coverage from 1.03 billion to 1.2 billion, as well as launching 5G in selected Indian markets. 

Keep up to date with all of the latest telecoms news with Total Telecom’s daily newsletter 

Also in the news:
Vodafone and Three defend merger amid CMA warnings
Verizon offloads mobile towers to Vertical Bridge for $3.3bn
Korea Telecom and Microsoft sign multibillion-dollar AI partnership

A new report from the Social Market Foundation (SMF), which is a cross-party think-tank, has highlighted how the UK is still a long way from reaping the benefits of achieving ubiquitous 5G mobile (mobile broadband) connectivity. The report finds this is partly because previous policies toward mobile telecoms have “unintentionally hindered investment.” Solving that won’t be easy.

According to Ofcom’s data from January 2024 (here), some 85-92% of UK premises can now get outdoor 5G coverage by at least one operator, although this collapses to just 16-28% when looking at outdoor coverage by all operators combined. The regulator doesn’t yet offer a 5G figure for geographic coverage, but if they did, it would surely be a fair bit lower than the 85-92% mentioned earlier.

The new SMF report – ‘Growing Connections‘ (PDF) – similarly examines older (2023) crowdsourced data from Opensignal to show that 5G availability, when measured by the proportion of time users spent with an active 5G connection, sees the UK trailing many countries. For example, 5G users in the UK only have access to it around 10% of the time, which compares poorly with India (43%), South Korea (38%), France (20.6%) and Italy (17.9%) etc.

The report also highlights an analysis of international 5G download speeds, which was again sourced from Opensignal and suggests that the UK, which scored 113Mbps, is amongst the slowest. On the one hand, 113Mbps might not sound too bad, but many of the other big countries deliver between 133Mbps (Italy) and up to 437Mbps (South Korea).

Overall, the UK does seem to be lagging behind in its 5G performance and coverage, which is disappointing given that we were one of the first countries to start rolling the technology out. The SMF then highlights how another study had shown that, by 2035, “widespread availability and use of 5G could add £159 billion to the UK economy“. But such predictions should always be taken with a pinch of salt, since good 4G mobile services can already deliver many of the benefits that 5G is often associated with.

What went wrong

The report goes on to highlight how “a number of factors including previous policies towards the mobile telecoms sector have unintentionally hindered investment“. But surprisingly, there’s no specific mention of the previous UK Government’s decision to ban Huawei after the rollout had begun, which came as quite a significant blow to most mobile operators and set deployment plans back.

Instead, the report talks more generally about the Government and Ofcom’s “approach to spectrum,” which focuses on both the high costs involved in accessing / using mobile spectrum and the shortness of spectrum licences that are awarded (i.e. deterring “very long-term investment” and making it “less useful as an asset“). But we’d add that Ofcom being slow to release more spectrum bands for 5G hasn’t helped much either (e.g. other countries have had access to mmWave bands for years, but UK mobile operators are still waiting).

Curiously, the report does more specifically remark upon the impact from “some of the efforts to try cutting the cost of building infrastructure“(i.e. making it cheaper for MNOs to operate mobile masts), which it says “have resulted in less land being supplied for infrastructure and an unprecedented rise in the number of disputes between landowners and infrastructure builders along with a significant increase in costly litigation“.

At this point it’s worth highlighting that the new report was “kindly supported by APWireless,” which is a company with its own vested interests. Some operators view them as being a land aggregator, which adopts a lease premium model that sometimes seems to involve buying out expiring leases from landowners and charging mobile operators a lot more for them in the process.

Naturally, a company like APW may thus have issues with the new government’s potential plans for reforming the Electronic Communications Code (here), which governs land / property access – particularly if those changes end up threatening their business model.

The report then goes on to highlight other obstacles, such as the well-documented delays in the planning system and related objections to new masts, which are complex areas to resolve as politicians don’t want to upset the electorate. But at the same time, they also have to balance that against the need to support the roll-out of better mobile and broadband networks, particularly in some of the hardest to reach areas, where commercial models often struggle.

Finally, the report notes how there have been calls for consolidation (i.e. allowing the Vodafone and Three UK merger) to address the “comparatively low levels of profitability” of the country’s four mobile network operators, which is seen as limiting the investment that is needed. But the evidence around the impacts of consolidation remains mixed, with the competition watchdog (CMA) noting that it may reduce competition and result in higher prices for consumers (negotiations are taking place to try and address that).

Sadly, the report doesn’t seem to include a list of clear recommendations and is more attempting to summarise – at a high level – the current state of play and where it perceives the problems to exist, albeit at least in part coming from the perspective of a company that harbours a particular vested interest in this area. Take with a pinch of salt.

Mobile network provider giffgaff, which is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) on O2’s platform in the United Kingdom, has announced the completion of their effort to deploy two long awaited new service features – Wi-Fi Calling and 4G Calling (VoLTE). This process originally began during the spring (here).

Just to recap. 4G Calling is another name for Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) technology, which means that any regular calls you make or receive will stay on the 4G mobile network (signal allowing), rather than dropping back to 2G. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi Calling enables consumers with a supporting Smartphone to harness their home broadband ISP or other WiFi connection to make mobile voice calls, instead of using your mobile network.

Admittedly, giffgaff’s migration process to their new platform didn’t go through without causing a few issues, some of which are still being resolved on a case-by-case basis. But otherwise, the new services are finally live, albeit with the usual caveats around device support (see below). Credits to th_442 on our forum for spotting this update.

Will my phone be compatible?

The following devices will be compatible with VoLTE and WiFi Calling. If your device is not listed here, it may not be able to take advantage of VoLTE or WiFi Calling features. You can continue to use SMS or Voice calls over the 2G band as you do today. Data will not be affected.

Apple Devices:
iPhone SE (2nd generation or later), XR, XS Max, XS, 11, 11 Pro, 11 Pro Max, 12, 12 mini, 12 Pro, 12 Pro Max, 13, 13 mini, 13 Pro, 13 Pro Max, 14, 14 Plus, 14 Pro, 14 Pro Max, 15, 15 Plus, 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, , 16, 16 Pro, 16 Plus, 16 Pro Max
You need to have iOS 17.4 software or later downloaded for these devices
Samsung Devices:
Galaxy A04s, A05s, A13, A14, A15, A23, A25, A34, A33, A52, A53, A54, A55, S21 Family, S21 FE, S22 Family, S23 Family, S23, S24 Family, Tab A7 Lite, Tab A8, Tab A9, Tab 28, Tab 29, Tab, S9 FE, Z Flip3 5G, Z Flip4, Z Flip5, Z Flip6, Z Fold3 5G, Z Fold4, Z Fold5, Z Fold6
Nokia Devices:
Nokia C12, Nokia G22
Google Devices:
Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7a, Fold, 8/Pro onwards
Motorola Devices
Cancun
Please note – we are awaiting confirmation of when the new firmware that enables VoLTE and WiFi Calling on these devices will be available.
Sony Devices:
Xperia 1V and 10V onwards.
Xiaomi Devices:
All devices with a Snapdragon chipset.

New independent data has revealed that 85.06% of premises across the United Kingdom can now access a gigabit-capable broadband ISP connection (1000Mbps+), which is up from 80% at the end of 2023 and means the first target under the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit programme has likely been achieved. The figure drops to 70.84% when only looking at full fibre (FTTP) lines.

As usual, it’s necessary to point out that the figure for “gigabit-capable broadband” coverage is currently much higher than full fibre (FTTP) because it includes both the impact from FTTP builds and Virgin Media’s Hybrid Fibre Coax (Cable / DOCSIS 3.1) network, as well as a bit of FTTB. All of these can deliver gigabit download speeds, and there’s a lot of overbuild between them in urban areas (Virgin will upgrade all their coax to FTTP by 2028).

The vast majority of this rapid network expansion is currently still being dominated by commercial deployments from numerous network operators, such as Openreach (BT), Virgin Media (O2 + Nexfibre), CityFibre, Netomnia, Hyperoptic, Gigaclear and many more (Summary of UK Full Fibre Builds).

The progress also bodes particularly well for the Government’s Project Gigabit programme, which for the past few years has been aiming to extend 1Gbps download speeds (200Mbps+ uploads) to cover at least 85% of UK premises by 2025, before hopefully achieving “nationwide” coverage (c. 99%) by around 2030 (here).

The project focuses upon the final 10-20% of hardest to reach premises (5-6 million premises exist within this area, but they won’t all need help from public funding) and we usually tend to interpret “by 2025” as meaning one of two things – A) completion by the end of a financial year (i.e. March 2025), or B) completion by the end of a calendar year (i.e. Dec 2025). The fact we’ve hit this figure today suggests Project Gigabit is a little bit ahead of schedule.

Looking forward, Ofcom’s study of Planned Network Deployments recently predicted (here) that full fibre (FTTP) broadband ISP lines are currently on course to cover 95-96% of all UK properties by May 2027 (29 million premises), which rises to around 97-98% for “gigabit-capable broadband” networks (FTTP and HFC).

However, none of this will mean anything to those of you who still live in poorly served areas (often rural locations and some patches in urban locations), where the wait for something better to arrive continues to be a slow and painful one. But the fact is that the country is continuing to see both rapid and dramatic progress in the roll-out of these networks, which is making for an ever-smaller gap left to fill.

Interview

At Connected Britain this year, we spoke to CityFibre’s CEO Greg Mesch to discuss the company’s recently announced deal with Sky, the current market state, and why he thinks altnet consolidation is inevitable. Watch the full interview below!

News  

The cash injection makes it one of the most valuable private companies in the world 

OpenAI, the AI company behind tools like ChatGPT, has raised $6.6 billion in a new funding round, with giants such as Nvidia and SoftBank as key investors.  

The latest investment brings OpenAI’s valuation to $157 billion, nearly doubling from $86 billion in January this year.  

The capital injection comes from investors including Microsoft, SoftBank, and Nvidia, who are betting on OpenAI to lead in the growing AI sector.  

Microsoft remains the largest cumulative investor in the company, having ploughed more than $13 billion.  

A report from CNBC suggested this week that over 250 million people use OpenAI’s products weekly, with over 11 million subscribed to the paid ChatGPT Plus plan. 

The newly raised capital will be used to strengthen OpenAI’s AI research, focusing on improving large language models and scaling its computing power.  

Despite the ongoing investment success, OpenAI has yet to tur a profit and is set to lose around $5 billion this year, with its high expenses related to developing and maintaining its infrastructure. 

However, with this significant financial boost, OpenAI plans to push further ahead in AI innovation. The company is not only focused on software but may also venture into hardware. Rumours are swirling that OpenAI is potentially designing its own machine learning chips.  

While rival companies like Anthropic are also seeking fresh investments, OpenAI’s increased valuation places it firmly at the forefront of the sector.  

“This credit facility further strengthens our balance sheet and provides flexibility to seize future growth opportunities,” said Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI in a statement. “We are proud to have the strongest banks and investors in the world supporting us.” 

Keep up to date with the latest international telecoms news by subscribing to the Total Telecom daily newsletter   

Also in the news:
Vodafone and Three defend merger amid CMA warnings
Verizon offloads mobile towers to Vertical Bridge for $3.3bn
Korea Telecom and Microsoft sign multibillion-dollar AI partnership 

Mobile network operator 1p Mobile appears to have recently reduced the “minimum spend requirement” period on their classic Pay As You Go (PAYG) plans from at least £10 every 90-days, to £10 every 60-days. But the provider’s Terms & Conditions appear to be confused about when this change was actually introduced.

The change, which was spotted by one of our readers (credits to Ben), appears to have occurred sometime over the past few weeks. But a quick look at 1p Mobile’s T&Cs (here), which at the time of writing are dated to be “Effective from 08 February 2024“, confusingly suggests that it was introduced a long time ago, when it wasn’t.

A quick history check via the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) shows that both the PAYG page and T&Cs were still showing the previous 90-day period up to around the end of August 2024. In other words, somebody has updated the T&Cs, albeit without correcting the date at the same time or uploading a historic ‘version‘ copy to help customers identify exactly when the change to their legal text was updated.

We’ve notified 1p Mobile of all this and so hopefully the issue should be resolved soon, although it’s currently unclear why they’ve reduced the minimum spend requirement. But it may result in some very casual PAYG mobile users having to pay more.

UPDATE 6:31am

A spokesperson for 1p Mobile has informed us that the incorrectly dated T&Cs was likely to have been a “server cache” issue, which has now been resolved. The new terms appear to be dated to 3rd October 2024. In addition, the reason given for the change to the minimum spend requirement is indicated to be because their costs have increases and “until this year we haven’t increased our prices since 2019.”

The industry-led One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo) has issued a progress update on its work to support Ofcom’s new One Touch Switching (OTS) system, which started to go live last month and aims to make it easier for consumers to change broadband ISP. A total of 100,000 switch orders have been placed since launch, albeit with only 32,000 successful completions.

Progress is clearly being made, with 265 brands (i.e. internet providers and related companies) now live on the messaging platform and the switch match success rate reaching 60% this week. But TOTSCo acknowledges that it still needs to improve the success rate of the “matching process” (i.e. ensuring that customer switches are correctly verified and migrated between ISPs) before the backup is removed on the 24th October 2024. Ofcom required ISPs to maintain the old migration process until that date, as a fallback for switching failures.

The regulator recently drafted in the Telecoms Adjudicator (OTA) to help “coordinate and facilitate industry efforts“, not least by helping to identify the sources of the remaining issues and get them resolved before the deadline (here).

Paul Bradbury, TOTSCo’s CEO, said:

We’re now into the third week of One Touch Switch (OTS) operations, with over 70 brands placing a total of 100,000 switch orders, resulting in more than 32,000 successful completions. This upward trend is highly encouraging and signals strong progress towards achieving full adoption of OTS for all switches in the coming weeks.

With over 265 brands now live and a switch match success rate at 60%, our focus remains firmly on helping the industry achieve full OTS adoption. Meetings have already begun as part of the ‘matching improvement activities’ outlined in Ofcoms open letter to the OTA2, and we are actively supporting these efforts. We are also working closely with the OTA2 to publish key lessons learned from this exercise as soon as possible.

As I have mentioned previously, we are seeing a number of issues that can be easily resolved by following the best practice guides.

At least one of the remaining problem areas could potentially be linked to TOTSCo’s move to offload their telephone support and backend to India, which some ISPs have told us has resulted in various problems with the new call centre staff struggling to understand many of their requests or being unable to help.

Otherwise, readers can see how the matching process is gradually improving here, and the hope is that they’ll be achieving a success rate of 100% or thereabouts before the deadline.

Some of ISPreview’s readers have spotted that internet provider Home Telecom, which is part of the wider Telecom Acquisitions (TAL) group that also has an established strategic partnership with TalkTalk, appears to be selling broadband plans that are “Powered by Virgin Media” (VMO2). But seemingly only in FTTP areas that have been built for nexfibre.

Just to recap. Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners originally setup the new £4.5bn nexfibre joint venture in 2022 (here), which aims to deploy an open access fibre (FTTP / XGS-PON) network to reach “up to” 7 million UK homes (starting with 5m by 2026) in areas NOT currently served by Virgin Media’s network of 16m+ premises (Virgin shares some of the same parentage). Nexfibre have already covered over 1.3m premises (here).

At present, Virgin Media is the only retail ISP selling packages over nexfibre’s network, although more providers are expected to be added in the future (here and here). In addition, Virgin Media’s own FTTP network will open up to wholesale via a new company – NetCo – in the future too (here), but that isn’t expected to happen until H1 2025.

Suffice to say that we were a little bit surprised to find (credits to Daniel and Chris) that the availability checker on Home Telecom’s website had begun optionally returning results for packages “Powered by Virgin Media O2“, albeit seemingly only for addresses that have been built for nexfibre (we say “for” because nexfibre are utilising Virgin Media’s engineers to do the civil engineering).

As per the picture above, related addresses currently list a 400Mbps and 1000Mbps package at £42 and £50 per month, respectively. This appears to be offered on a 24-month minimum contract term and includes a router. Some additional upfront fees are also listed, such as a £10 installation fee, £20 for “priority booking” (it’s unclear why that’s included by default, as it sounds like it should be optional) and a router delivery fee of £9.95.

Naturally, we have shot off several messages in order to try and get an official clarification from the related parties, but our suspicion is that Home Telecom are either conducting a trial for a future product (one that has now been stumbled upon) or it’s simply an accident, albeit a curiously well-prepared and structured one. Either way, we should have the answer soon. But this could potentially be nexfibre’s first non-Virgin retail ISP partner.

UPDATE 3:52pm

Thanks to our readers for helping to spot that the same packages also show up in some, albeit not all, of Virgin Media’s RFOG and Hybrid Fibre Coax areas. This seems far too soon for NetCo and so is more likely to be a mistake on Home Telecom’s part, but we await something more concrete to clarify. The fact the ability exists at all to show such packages is interesting.

UPDATE 4:23pm

Virgin Media has confirmed there isn’t a wholesale arrangement with their side, although they’re still investigating. But we have been given a hint from elsewhere that it might be more of a retail level / commission-based arrangement. Currently, we probably won’t get the full context until everybody is back at work on Monday.