Presse-Information 

München, Deutschland – Connected Germany, Deutschlands Veranstaltung für die digitale Wirtschaft, kehrt zu ihrer bisher größten Ausgabe nach München zurück.  

Auf der zweitägigen Veranstaltung, welche vom Medien- und Veranstaltungsspezialisten Total Telecom ausgerichtet wird, werden 150 Sprecher die wichtigsten Themen für den Aufbau von Netzwerken der nächsten Generation in Deutschland diskutieren. Die Veranstaltung ist in fünf Hauptthemen aufgeteilt und behandelt Themen wie die Investitionslandschaft des Landes, die Bereitstellung von Glasfaser und 5G sowie das regulatorische Umfeld. 

Mit über 1.800 Teilnehmern bietet die Connected Germany ein Forum, in dem führende Experten, Entscheidungsträger, Ausrüstungslieferanten, Investoren, Unternehmen und weitere Personen Gedanken austauschen, neue Perspektiven entdecken und wertvolle Partnerschaften eingehen können. 

Die diesjährige Veranstaltung bietet eine beeindruckende Auswahl an wichtigen Sprechern, darunter:  

– Wolfgang Metze, Geschäftsführer Consumer Business, Telekom Deutschland 

– Valentina Daiber, Chief Legal & Corporate Affairs Officer, Telefonica 

– Marc Sauter, Leiter des IoT-Produktmanagements, Vodafone 

– Frederic Ufer, Geschäftsführer, VATM 

– Jan Simons, Leiter Kommunal- und Regionalpolitik, BREKO 

„Wir freuen uns, für Connected Germany 2024 nach München zurückzukehren“, sagt Rowan Thompson, Senior Producer der Veranstaltung.  

„Die Veranstaltung wird unsere bisher wirkungsvollste sein und die klügsten Köpfe aus den Bereichen Telekommunikation und digitale Innovation zusammenbringen. Da Deutschland seine digitale Infrastruktur weiter ausbaut, wird die Veranstaltung eine wichtige Plattform für Branchenführer sein, um zusammenzuarbeiten, Ideen auszutauschen und die Zukunft der Konnektivität im ganzen Land zu gestalten“, so Thompson weiter. 

Weitere Informationen und die Möglichkeit zur Anmeldung für die Connected Germany 2024 finden Sie unter: https://www.terrapinn.com/conference/connected-germany/index.stm  

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Über Total Telecom 

Seit 1997 stellt Total Telecom die Verbindung zwischen den Käufern und Verkäufern auf dem globalen Telekommunikationsmarkt her. Wir tun dies durch qualitativ hochwertige redaktionelle Inhalte und Veranstaltungen, um Diskussionen über Branchenthemen zu fördern und Innovationen und herausragende Leistungen von Unternehmen und Einzelpersonen zu würdigen.   

Unsere Gemeinschaft von mehr als 120.000 Telekommunikationsfachleuten verlässt sich auf Total Telecom, wenn es um tägliche Nachrichten und regelmäßige ausführliche Einblicke geht, die über eine Reihe von Kanälen wie Online, Video, soziale Medien und unsere Veranstaltungsreihe bereitgestellt werden.  

Zu unserem preisgekrönten Veranstaltungsportfolio gehören der Broadband Communities Summit, die World Communication Awards, Connected North, Connected Germany und die größte britische Konnektivitätsveranstaltung Connected Britain.   

Energy and communications provider Utility Warehouse (UW or Telecom Plus) recently boosted their existing range of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based home broadband packages by finally adding a top 944Mbps tier, which costs just £40 per month on an 18-month term.

The change appears to have occurred in the middle of last month, although they didn’t issue a press release about it – we noticed when it was mentioned in their latest minor quarterly trading update. Customers who take this package should note that, after the first 18-months have finished, the standard price will become £49 per month.

The package also includes their ‘UW Wi-Fi Hub’ wireless router and unlimited data usage, but otherwise there’s not a lot of detail and no mention of the package’s upload speeds. However, UW tends to work with both Openreach and CityFibre’s national networks, although we’re unsure if they’ve fully integrated the latter yet (tests suggest they’re still Openreach-only) and thus uploads may be limited to a max of 115Mbps on their top tier.

The official website that was setup last year to support the proposed mobile mega-merger between Vodafone and Three UK – https://vodafoneandthree.uk – mysteriously vanished at the start of this week and has yet to return after several days of waiting. But the issue is more likely to be an awkward technical one than a sign of something more dramatic, we think.

Generally speaking, you wouldn’t normally expect the main website for one of the UK’s largest telecoms mergers to simply vanish for a week; that’s a bit on the unusual side. We first spotted the issue on Monday, but initially ignored it, as websites often suffer occasional disruption and such things are usually resolved within a few short hours or 1-2 days.

By Tuesday, we noticed that the website was still offline and the registration status of the domain on some whois checkers was listed as ‘Suspended‘ (example), while Nominet’s lookup (here) noted that “the Registry has configured the domain to not function in the DNS by setting ‘server hold’.” But issues with Domain Name System (DNS) assignments don’t usually take a full week to fix.

All of this prompted ISPreview to ask one of the operator’s PR contacts for an update, at which point we were informed, still on Tuesday morning, that it was “just a temporary issue“. Fast-forward three more days and it’s still offline, but will hopefully return soon (we have today asked for a bit more detail and an update). The issue follows shortly after both operators set out several commitments that they hope will enable the competition watchdog to give their deal the green light (here). But the outcome remains uncertain.

The Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) in England has published some of the initial results from a project it undertook with Birmingham City University (BCU) and other local authorities, which mapped 4G and 5G mobile (mobile broadband) coverage in the County – helping to reveal areas of both poor and no signal.

The effort began in 2022 after NCC secured £20,000 from the Local Government Association (LGA) to fund its Digital Pathfinders project. Over the 18-month survey period, the project covered 7,723 roads in the districts and boroughs of Nottinghamshire, which needed more than 4,000 hours of driving and this accumulated around 7.7 million data points.

Various not-spots across the County were identified by this process – these are areas which lack sufficient coverage and have a signal strength of less than 125 decibel milliwatts (dBm) coverage. “This means that people in these areas, or those who travel across them, cannot make phone calls, send texts messages, or access the internet through mobile networks reliably,” said the study.

The initial findings from this study have indicated that ‘not spots’ exist in both urban and rural areas, such as Mansfield and Newark-on-Trent. Not spots were more present in rural and semi-rural environments. Interestingly, O2 has the “most promising picture“, with fewer not-spots across both 4G and 5G technologies compared to the other operators. It should be noted that 5G, whilst not as widely present as 4G, still presented not spots and poor signal areas.

By comparison to O2’s positive result, Three UK was found to have the “most not spots or bad coverage areas“. Whilst Three has a good 5G to 4G ratio, it still lacks moderate or excellent coverage in several areas, which can “make deploying use cases which require low latency and reliability difficult“.

Figure 1: Overall picture of where poor signal and 4G and 5G not-spots are located – red data points signify poor signal, blue signifies not spots

Unfortunately, the initial results lack much in the way of detail, while the visualisations provided are at a very low resolution and adopt the irritatingly vague ‘coloured’ dots approach. This is where a single dot actually covers quite a wide proportional geographic area and thus aren’t much help unless you can zoom-in close to see the correct representation, which you can’t.

The raw data is no doubt much more detailed than this and should produce quite an accurate map, although at present the public doesn’t have access to the full results and so it’s not much use to the rest of us. But no doubt the county council will be able to use this data to help direct future interventions and upgrades, although we’d still like to see the public being given access to all this.

NCC Statement

Nottinghamshire County Council will identify areas in the County that have poor or no mobile connectivity coverage. These areas will be prioritised for interventions and Officers will seek to lobby the MNOs and other partners to drive improved mobile connectivity in Nottinghamshire. We will consider suitable alternatives.

Looking further ahead, the Council will consider other opportunities and look to replicate the mobile connectivity mapping project in the future to maintain and update the data that has been gathered within the County. This will also mean we can track developments and changes in mobile connectivity as 6G is trialled and previous generations of mobile communications (e.g., 3G) become obsolete.

We will also be developing how we map against full fibre and fixed broadband availability so that we can get a complete picture of internet access, total not spots, or extremely slow speeds for use across sensors and mapping.

The Growing Mid Wales programme and network analyst firm Streetwave have used their ongoing mobile connectivity study in Ceredigion (Wales) to reveal what sort of impact tourism has on mobile broadband performance in seaside towns (there’s a “major” drop in data speeds) and thus where EE, Vodafone, Three UK and O2 may need to upgrade.

Just to recap. Streetwave have been harnessing waste (bin / refuse) collection lorries to map mobile network coverage and speeds in the area since earlier in the year (here, here, here, here and here). In this setup, the trucks are installed with four off-the-shelf Smartphones using software from Streetwave on top, which run continuous network tests (once every 20 metres in rural areas and 5m in urban areas) as the vehicles go about their routes.

However, as well as providing a general performance map, the data can also be used to see how mobile network performance changes over time in specific areas and that’s very relevant when it comes to understanding the impact of tourism season. Put another way, a big influx of new visitors, over a narrow period of time, often puts extra strain on local mobile networks and backhaul capacity.

With its stunning coastline and rich cultural history, Ceredigion remains a popular location for tourists to visit during the summer holidays. With a native population of just 73,000, the county usually receives 300,000 – 350,000 visitors in the month of August. The study thus selected the popular tourism destination towns of Cardigan, New Quay and Aberaeron for closer analysis.

The mobile coverage performance for all of the primary mobile network operators (MNOs) was then analysed across nearly every street in the towns during peak tourist season (August) and non-peak months (July & September). As you’d expect, the results show that all of the operators saw the median download and upload speeds that they deliver fall significantly during August.

Impact of Summer Tourism on Ceredigion Mobile Data Speeds

Operator
Average Fall in Download Speed in August
Average Fall in Upload Speed in August

EE
-30%
-19%

O2
-55%
-35%

Three
-24%
-24%

Vodafone
-20%
-27%

The results also reveal that O2 was “most effected” by the increase in tourist numbers, seeing average download speeds fall by 55% and average upload speeds fall by 35%. The wider impact can also be visualised, such as when we look at the following map of Cardigan below, although sadly there isn’t an interactive version of this for the public to access, yet.

Following the capture of this data, the GMW Digital Programme is now working with various operators and neutral host providers to increase capacity in these seaside towns, as well as other tourism ‘hot-spots’ across Mid Wales.

However, it should be said that the mobile operators will already be aware of this sort of impact from their own internal network usage data, and they often increase capacity during expected periods of high load. But it remains to be seen whether they will go beyond their usual tweaks in order to address the issues. Sometimes there can be complex and costly reasons that may limit an operator’s ability to adapt.

Cardigan

August Performance:

Operator
Download speeds (Mbps)
Change in DL Speeds
Upload Speeds (Mbps)
Change in UL Speeds

EE
22.4
-20%
5.6
-23%

O2
3.4
-41%
2.3
-46%

Vodafone
9.5
-2%
4.9
-22%

Three
16
-12%
3.5
-27%

New Quay

August Performance:

Operator
Download speeds (Mbps)
Change in DL Speeds
Upload Speeds (Mbps)
Change in UL Speeds

EE
6.4
-54%
2
-13%

O2
3.1
-72%
2
-55%

Vodafone
8.7
-38%
3.2
-35%

Three
7.7
-50%
0.7
-46%

Aberaeron

August Performance:

Operator
Download speeds (Mbps)
Change in DL Speeds
Upload Speeds (Mbps)
Change in UL Speeds

EE
15.5
-28%
2.6
-13%

O2
9.7
-49%
4
-2%

Vodafone
24.8
-17%
4.6
-26%

Three
16.7
-15%
1.7
-26%

Brsk, one of the fastest-growing networks in the UK, has announced that work is underway to bring full fibre broadband to the Salford borough of Greater Manchester. Areas to be connected include Blackfriars in the city centre, Seedley, Pendlebury, and Irlams o’ th’ Height.

This investment will offer 25,000 homes and businesses in the area access to the fastest and most reliable type of broadband available in the UK, providing symmetrical upload and download speeds via a brand-new network.

Speaking of the rollout to bring better broadband to the borough, brsk Greater Manchester Regional Head, Gareth Cornelius, said, “Having already brought our world-class full fibre network to Trafford, Stockport, Rochdale, Wigan, Tameside and Manchester, it is fantastic to be coming to Salford and reaching even more people in Greater Manchester with the service they need to be able to go about their daily lives. We are committed to delivering exceptional connectivity and ensuring that communities have access to the fast, reliable internet they deserve.” 

At a time when regulators are cracking down on providers to ensure advertising clarity between copper, part-fibre and full fibre services, residents can rest assured that brsk provides 100% full fibre broadband and nothing less. The provider takes pride in its infrastructure and recently won the ‘Full Fibre Innovation Award’ at Connected Britain 2024. 

Affordable high-speed internet is in high demand across the country to facilitate remote working, learning, gaming and streaming, as more and more of our lives are lived online. Brsk offers competitive pricing across all of their packages, with add-on options to boost connectivity. These include a TV service, mesh Wi-Fi, static IP addresses and VoIP phone services. 

All brsk packages include a guarantee of no mid-contract prices, providing peace of mind that customers can trust their supplier to provide exactly what they pay for, with no nasty surprises. With over 12,000 Trustpilot reviews and an ‘Excellent’ rating  4.7/5, brsk is thrilled to be able to offer home and business owners in the Salford area an award-winning option for their broadband.

The expansion compliments brsk’s mission to make Greater Manchester, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the UK, one of the best digitally connected urban counties. Currently, more than 250,000 homes and businesses in Greater Manchester can access better broadband on brsk’s network, which extends from Rochdale to Stockport, and Ashton in Makerfield to Ashton Under-Lyne.

News

The software aims to prevent ‘vishing’, where fraudsters attempt to collect personal data over the phone

Since its launch in May 2024, BT’s Enhanced Call Protect service has blocked over 2.4 million scam calls and flagged 17.7 million spam calls to landlines, the company has announced.

The service is part of BT’s Digital Voice platform, which uses AI powered tools to identify and block malicious calls.

Developed in partnership with Hiya, Enhanced Call Protect uses machine learning to improve scam detection with every call. When a potential spam call is detected, customers receive a warning on their phone, allowing them to either reject or accept the call. Known scam calls are automatically diverted to the customer’s junk voicemail, shielding users from potential fraud.

According to Hiya, UK residents received an average of three spam calls per month in the first half of 2024, with 28% of all unknown calls flagged as spam. This works out at approximately 195 million spam calls each month.

Currently, 2.5 million BT customers use the service, a number set to double as more people switch to Digital Voice. BT expects to block more than 1.5 million scam calls monthly as the rollout continues.

“Our top priority is ensuring our customers feel secure and confident when using our services. This new Hiya technology is now integrated with Digital Voice and is proving to be incredibly effective at stopping scam calls. We remain committed to protecting customers during the switch to digital landlines,” said Lucy Baker MBE, BT Consumer’s All-IP Director in a press release.

“It’s great to see that our technology has successfully blocked fraud and spam calls, which will in turn give customers the confidence to answer their phones and engage in meaningful conversations without the interruption of unwanted disturbances,” Hiya CEO Alex Algard added.

The rollout of Digital Voice is part of BT’s nationwide transition from analogue to digital landlines, aimed at modernising the UK’s telecoms infrastructure.

BT has visited 340 towns and cities as part of the upgrade, reaching 30% of the UK’s urban areas.

The company faced significant backlash for rushing the replacement of analogue landlines with digital ones last year, primarily due to the negative impact on vulnerable customers who rely on telecare devices, which stopped working during the transition. The rapid switch also posed risks during power outages, particularly in rural areas, potentially leaving people without access to essential services. Campaign groups criticised BT for not implementing adequate safeguards, such as effective battery backup units and hybrid phones, to protect these customers. Additionally, many older individuals found the transition confusing, raising concerns about the cost and understanding of new equipment. In response to these issues, BT delayed the full transition to digital services until January 2027 to ensure a smoother and safer switch for all customers.

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

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 operator says it will soon be able to offer fibre optic broadband to more than 11 million homes and businesses across the country

Vodafone Germany is set to offer its fibre broadband packages to 11 million premises across the country, a move it says will make it the largest fibre network in the country.

The expansion comes via the implementation of new infrastructure sharing partnerships with Deutsche Telekom and Deutsche Glasfaser, which will increase Vodafone’s commercial reach by 9.5 million premises.

These new potential connections will be in addition to the more than half a million homes covered by Vodafone’s own fibre network.

Concurrently, OXG Glasfaser – Vodafone’s fibre joint venture with Altice that was set up last year – is also pushing ahead with its fibre rollout, reaching 1.3 million premises.

OXG has pledged to invest up to €7 billion through to 2029 as it aims to pass 7 million homes.

“In 2019, we launched Germany’s largest gigabit network and thus got the fiber optic expansion in this country underway. Today we are taking the next step and connecting the largest unified fiber optic network for our customers,” said Marcel de Groot, CEO of Vodafone Germany. “We are digging ourselves and with our expansion partners from OXG. And we are sharing infrastructure to increase competition and the range of services for people – even without superstructure.”

Vodafone says it will continue to expand its own fibre network directly by working with districts, municipalities, cities, and communities across the country.

This announcement has largely been received positively, with industry association VATM noting in a statement that it will offer some customers the choice of multiple broadband providers for the first time. VATM’s managing director Frederic Ufer, however, remained critical of Deutsche Telekom’s role in the market, blaming them for slowing down nation fibre efforts.

“We are pleased that competition in the fiber-optic market is being strengthened. Such partnerships successfully drive the topic forward in the interests of the #Anbietervielfalt and thus also for the benefit of consumers,” said Ufer in a translated LinkedIn post. “Unfortunately, Deutsche Telekom is still lagging years behind with its technical possibilities and business models and can offer Vodafone and the market bitstream, but still does not buy it sensibly from other expanding companies, which continues to slow down the expansion,”

How is the German connectivity market changing in 2024? Join the experts in discussion at this year’s Connected Germany

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 by Forescout Research has identified 14 new security vulnerabilities in 24 models of DrayTek‘s popular Vigor routers, which is a familiar name in the UK broadband ISP world. One of the vulnerabilities even has a Common Vulnerability Score (CVSS) of 10 out of 10 and over 704,000 routers were found exposed online in 168 countries.

The report (here) notes that approximately 785,000 DrayTek devices are operating Wi-Fi networks in the wild (over 425,000 of those are in Europe – with 36% in the UK). According to the vendor, DrayTek’s Vigor Web UI “should only be accessible from a local network for security reasons“, but the study “found over 704,000 DrayTek routers that have their UI exposed to the Internet” (most of these are used by businesses and some advanced home users).

The research noted that, out of the 14 new vulnerabilities discovered (see bottom of the article for the full list), one had a maximum severity score of 10, while another one is critical at 9.1 and nine others have medium severity scores. The vulnerabilities could all be used in espionage, data exfiltration, ransomware, and denial of service (DoS) attacks and this threat risk is not theoretical.

On 18th September 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the USA announced it had taken down a botnet exploiting three CVEs on DrayTek assets (CVE-2023-242290, CVE-2020-15415 and CVE-2020-8515). Two weeks prior, CISA added two other DrayTek CVEs to the KEV (CVE-2021-20123 and CVE-2021-20124).

In addition, a significant proportion of these vulnerable devices (38%) were also found to be susceptible to similar issues identified two years ago (here), which have already been patched. This suggests that many end-users of related devices are not checking to ensure they’re using the latest and most secure firmware (software) for their routers.

The good news is that DrayTek have already released firmware patches for the newly discovered vulnerabilities, including their EoL kit, which is in stark contrast to certain other router manufacturers we could name that have a terrible history when it comes to supporting older, but still actively used, devices. Well done DrayTek.

Alternative network operator and ISP Brsk, which has deployed their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines to cover “over” 676,000 homes and is in the process of being merged into Netomnia (here), has today announced that their full fibre network is being expanded to reach 25,000 premises in Salford (Greater Manchester).

Some of the areas in Salford that are due to be connected include Blackfriars in the city centre, Seedley, Pendlebury, and Irlams o’ th’ Height (no, that’s not a typo). The operator’s network has already passed 250,000 premises across the Greater Manchester area – extending from Rochdale to Stockport, and Ashton in Makerfield to Ashton Under-Lyne.

New customers of the service currently pay from just £19 per month on a 24-month term for symmetric speeds of 150Mbps, then £25 for 500Mbps, £30 for 900Mbps and £55 for their top 2Gbps (2000Mbps) tier. The packages all include free installation, a router and a pledge of no mid-contract price rises.

Gareth Cornelius, Greater Manchester Regional Head, said:

“Having already brought our world-class full fibre network to Trafford, Stockport, Rochdale, Wigan, Tameside and Manchester, it is fantastic to be coming to Salford and reaching even more people in Greater Manchester with the service they need to be able to go about their daily lives. We are committed to delivering exceptional connectivity and ensuring that communities have access to the fast, reliable internet they deserve.”

The decision to enter Salford is an interesting one as, currently, only Virgin Media (O2) has significant coverage across most of the area and even their network doesn’t reach every part. By comparison, Openreach’s FTTP network only has limited coverage in the area, as does Hyperoptic and Freedom Fibre.