Broadband ISP BT (EE) has this morning announced that their new scam protection service, which is based on Hiya’s technology and was introduced to their IP-based Digital Voice (phone) customers in May 2024, has blocked more than 2.4 million scam calls and almost 17.7 million spam calls since its introduction.

The ‘Enhanced Call Protect‘ feature, which is a free service, follows BT and EE’s decision to start adopting Hiya’s AI-based voice security solutions in January 2023 (here). The tool in question monitors incoming calls and will notify the user of any suspected spam calls. But it also adopts machine learning to improve its scam detection and protection to help tackle the malicious calls it encounters – in one day blocking more than 46,500 scam calls.

According to data from Hiya, UK residents received an average of 3 spam calls per month from January to June this year, with 28% of all unknown calls flagged as spam. This equates to approximately 195 million spam calls per month.

However, with BT’s service, customers will see a visual warning on their landline phone display, saying, “Nuisance?”, when receiving a potential spam call. They then have a choice to reject or accept an inbound call that is flagged as a spam call. Scam calls are automatically diverted to a customer’s junk voicemail, protecting them from the threat of scammers. Any call from a registered business will have their name displayed to verify it as genuine.

Lucy Baker MBE, BT Consumer’s All-IP Director, said:

“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.”

BT has also included some tips to help consumers spot and tackle scam calls.

Tips to avoid scams include:

If you receive a suspicious call, put the phone down and call back on a trusted number to verify the call
If you mistakenly give a caller your bank account details, contact your bank immediately
If you receive a suspicious call, report the call to BT here
Block any suspicious numbers after you have reported them

Remember:

Take a moment to stop and think. Trust your instincts. If it sounds too good to be true or is suspicious, there’s probably a catch
Don’t stay on the phone unless you’re 100% sure the caller is genuine
Don’t give away any of your personal details or give anyone access to your computer

Oxfordshire-based alternative network operator Zzoomm, which has built their 2Gbps speed full fibre broadband network to cover 202,000 premises (RFS) in England, have today reported that they’ve achieved 20% take-up in a further four of their deployed market towns and often only 15-months after build completion.

The operator’s network, which is home to 30,000 customers (c.15% take-up), is currently available across parts of around 29 market towns and small urban communities in Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Herefordshire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Wiltshire and Cheshire. Zzoomm originally aspired to cover 1 million premises across 85 UK towns by the end of 2025, before the difficulties of raising fresh capital forced their build to stop (here and here). But growth via mergers and acquisitions is still being actively explored (here).

The rate of network take-up by consumers naturally tends to accelerate once it’s no longer being suppressed by an active build phase, which is one of the reasons why we’ve been seeing Zzoomm’s penetration starting to grow more rapidly in recent months. In fact, they’ve already passed the 20% mark in several locations (e.g. Sandhurst and Crowthorne, Shiplake, Northallerton etc.), which is a positive sign for operators.

The latest development is that they’ve now passed the 20% mark in four more locations – Hereford, Stokesley & Great Ayton and Thirsk. This has been achieved on network builds which finished only 15 months ago for Hereford, Stokesley and Great Ayton and 25 months for Thirsk respectively.

Matthew Hare, CEO of Zzoomm, said:

“We are seeing notable take-up of our services across our networks driven by our excellent marketing and sales teams, supported by our customer and field service operations.

As one of our new Zzoomm customers, James Potter commented via Trustpilot. “Everything is working well after one month at 1Gb speed. No install hassle. UK based technical support staff were very helpful during set-up process. The extra speed is preventing buffering across several devices running simultaneously. Thus far well worth the change.

It’s a testament to all those working at Zzoomm that one in five properties across a number of our market towns are now Zzoommers. We are meeting the needs of our customers with our premier service – be it for working from home or multi-person gaming or multiple streaming.

A few weeks ago, we confirmed that nationally we have some 30,000 contracted customers and more than 200,000 ready for service (RFS) properties – the former has continued to increase as we are now adding 1,500 new customers each month. This represents a 15% uptake on a network which has been available for an average of only 17 months.”

Customers who take their residential service typically pay from £32.95 per month for an unlimited 200Mbps (symmetric speed) package on a 12-month term with an included router and installation, which goes up to £54.95 (normally £64.95) if you want their top 2Gbps tier or £29.95 (usually £39.95) for 1Gbps.

Broadband and mobile operator Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2) has today announced that they will open a new office within the business community at Maxim Park in Lanarkshire (Scotland) during early 2025, which will ultimately become home to around 350 employees that are currently based at their Bellshill office in the same region.

With the lease at its current site in Bellshill due to expire shortly, VMO2 went on the hunt for a new home and found the Maxim Park site (Maxim 4 building). The operator will, over the next few months, be working closely with the landlord to install the necessary furniture, fixtures and fittings ahead of employees moving to the site in Spring 2025.

Maxim 4 will become Virgin Media and O2’s second major new office space since its merger in June 2021. The company is separately preparing to move teams into a new HQ in Paddington by the end of the year, and they also have other core office locations in Wythenshawe, Reading, Birmingham and Leeds.

Patricia Cobian, VMO2’s Chief Financial Officer, said:

“We identified a number of potential locations in our search for a new office in Lanarkshire and have secured our preferred choice, Maxim Park, which is already a thriving business community and the modern, spacious home to a number of the UK’s biggest companies .

Located a very short distance from our current Bellshill office, and with excellent amenities and transport links, we are confident that Maxim Park will prove to be a popular choice with our employees who will now have a flexible space to work, collaborate and socialise together on their office days.

As a flexible employer, Maxim Park is ideally sized to support our hybrid working policies and this long-term commitment is further proof of our exciting property plans which are helping us meet the current and future needs of our business and people.”

News 

With existing funding set to run out in 2025, the company is working to find new sources of cash 

The UK’s largest altnet CityFibre has released its annual statement for the 2023 financial year this week, in which it warned that to continue operations as usual it will need to secure additional external funding. 

“As the Group and Company are reliant on securing further external funding which is not guaranteed, a material uncertainty exists which may cast significant doubt on the ability of the Group and Company to continue as a going concern and as a result they may be unable to realise this assets and discharge their liabilities in the normal course of business,” read the report.  

The altnet is currently privately owned by four companies: Antin Infrastructure Partners, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Mubadala Investment Company,city and Interogo Holding. 

As per the report, CityFibre stated that its current debt and equity funding will be fully utilised by mid-2025 and that it has hired external advisors Evercore to help find more debt funding.  

Despite these concerns, the company’s current financial health appeared to be strong, with revenue sitting at £99.67 million in 2023 (up from £30.97 million in 2022), having added 163,000 customers. Gross profit stood at £42.76m 

The company also provided its outlook on the wider market, which concluded that more altnet consolidation in the future is inevitable and argued that they represented the ideal ‘third infrastructure platform’ to challenge Openreach and Virgin Media O2. 

“Given the financial pressures on the market and specifically the challenges for smaller players to raise capital to support their growth, we believe that widespread consolidation of UK alt-nets is inevitable and that as the largest challenger to BT Openreach, we will play a leading role. The market needs a third infrastructure platform of scale to ensure competition remains healthy and delivers for UK consumers. CityFibre is the core of that third platform.” 

A CityFibre spokesperson confirmed that the company is midway though a “capital intensive phase” in its long term investment plan, but nonetheless described 2024 as being a turning point for the company’s profitability. 

“2024 is proving to be a significant year for CityFibre: we are EBITDA positive, we’ve secured a long-term partnership with Sky and we’re a trusted partner of Government, which has awarded us £800m to connect rural communities to full fibre broadband as part of Project Gigabit,” said the statement. 

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

Also in the news:
AltNets’ path to success for FTTx Build Acceptance in Openreach PIA
T-Mobile hit with yet another fine over data breaches
“We were into AI before it was cool!”: Chatting AI and telco trust with Juniper’s Neil McRae 

Interview

At Connected Britain 2024, we caught up with ITS’s Dave Ferry to discuss taking the brand on a UK tour, the company’s latest deal with Sky Business, and the next steps for densifying networks.

Check out the full interview here

Also in the news:
AltNets’ path to success for FTTx Build Acceptance in Openreach PIA
T-Mobile hit with yet another fine over data breaches
“We were into AI before it was cool!”: Chatting AI and telco trust with Juniper’s Neil McRae

News

Over a fifth of cell sites within areas impacted by Hurricane Helene reportedly out of service, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

By: Brad Randall, Broadband Communities

More than 20 percent of cell sites in areas impacted by Hurricane Helene remain out of service.

The Federal Communications Commission reported the findings in their recent Oct. 1 communications status report, which has been updated daily in the aftermath of Helene’s landfall.

The hurricane, which struck Florida at peak intensity as a Category 4 storm on Sept. 26, then brought torrential rains and severe flooding to inland portions of the US Southeast.

The storm resulted in an activation of the FCC’s Disaster Information Reporting System across areas in Florida, all of Georgia, all of South Carolina, and portions of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia.

According to outage data submitted by providers in the affected areas, 21.7 percent of cell sites across areas impacted by Helene are experiencing outages.

That number represents a 9.1 percent rise in outages when compared with Monday’s communications status report.

Wireless service disruptions have been most severe in Florida and North Carolina, the report revealed.

In North Carolina, over 48 percent of cell sites within areas impacted by Helene were experiencing outages, representing a decline from 54 percent on Monday.

Meanwhile, in Florida, 36.7 percent of cell sites reported as being out of service as of Tuesday in areas Helene, the report stated.

The number of outages in Georgia areas also remained significant Tuesday, with nearly 22 percent of cell sites across the state experiencing outages.

Cell tower disruptions have been less severe in impacted areas of Tennessee, where over 12 percent of cell sites in impacted areas are out of service.

In South Carolina, a little over 7 percent of cell towers remained out of service Tuesday, and in Virginia, 3.5 percent of cell towers in impacted areas were experiencing disruptions.

This is a developing story. Stay tuned to BBCMag.com for updates.

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Hampshire-based UK ISP Onestream, which sells broadband packages using Openreach’s national full fibre network, has complained about the poor performance of the new One Touch Switching (OTS) system, which aims to make it easier for consumers to change ISP. But this is currently failing on 56% of requests to join the provider.

The OTS system, which is being introduced via the industry-led One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo), finally went live last month. But Ofcom promptly acknowledged that TOTSCo’s industry-led messaging platform still needed to improve the success rate of its “matching process” (i.e. ensuring that customer switches are correctly verified and migrated between providers) and, as a result of that, they opted to temporarily retain the old migration process (Notification of Transfer / NoT+) – until 24th October 2024 – to act as a fallback for OTS failures.

In addition, Ofcom 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). The situation with the matching process is gradually improving (here), but it remains unclear whether the issues will be fully resolved by 24th.

The problems have been underlined again today after Onestream revealed their dissatisfaction with the fact that 56% of switch requests (where Onestream is the gaining provider) are currently going unmatched.

Aaron Brown, Co-founder of Onestream, told ISPreview:

“We’re huge advocates of consumer choice – everyone should be able to easily switch to the provider they believe provides the right coverage, reliability, customer service, speed and value.

Ahead of the launch of OTS, our dedicated team worked hard on a detailed plan, flawlessly rolled out, to ensure all our systems were tested and worked with OTS from day one. We’re proud to have been among the first to join the platform and have already used it to enable the smooth and swift transfer of customers to Onestream.

However, we’re disappointed that for 56% of requests to join Onestream, we have failed to find a match for the losing provider via OTS. This suggests to us that a significant number of connection providers are dragging their heels.

We would urge them to get their act together because at the moment, the system isn’t delivering what it promised and customers are losing out.”

In fairness, the problem isn’t just being caused by rival connection providers, but also by bugs and other issues (e.g. a lack of clear standards in certain areas) that exist within the current messaging platform. As a result, switches can sometimes fail even when both sides are trying their best to follow the design.

The important thing to remember here is that most providers have a vested interest in making OTS work and for that reason we do expect a positive outcome, it’s just a matter of when.

Press Release

A first-of-its-kind outdoor small cell project in the City of London has been such a success that it has now moved beyond the trial phase. Twenty-five new sites for mobile network operator (MNO) EE are now live on Freshwave’s infrastructure, adding capacity and enhancing the 4G and 5G network experience for EE mobile users in one of the world’s preeminent financial districts. Dozens of additional new sites for EE are also currently being built and will enhance mobile connectivity to the UK’s best network[1] in even more of the Square Mile when they are brought live in the future.

Freshwave, a connectivity infrastructure-as-a-service provider, built new mobile infrastructure for the project and EE was the first MNO to go live in December 2022. Across all of the sites involved in the initial pilot, EE is seeing up to 7.5TB of data downloaded per week.

Freshwave’s bespoke solution enables the network to accommodate all four MNOs on 4G and 5G from day one with no adjustments needed to the infrastructure – making it a UK first. The solution features specially designed wideband antennas, cabinets and columns and extensive dark fibre to each cabinet.

As a neutral host, Freshwave operates the network deploying shareable infrastructure, reducing equipment duplication and creating a more cost-effective solution. This approach also minimises street clutter and the associated disruption during street works. Shareable infrastructure also reduces the environmental impact, while still assuring the mobile connectivity people expect when out and about.

The 25 new live sites are strategically located throughout the Square Mile, including notable landmarks such as outside St Paul’s Cathedral, Cannon Street and the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street.

Outdoor small cells are installed at street level which make them ideal for adding capacity to mobile networks. In busy urban areas, where large numbers of people use their mobiles simultaneously, demand on the macro network can be substantial. Outdoor small cells help alleviate some of this demand themselves, relieving the macro network and ensuring a better experience for users.

Simon Frumkin, Freshwave’s CEO, said: “We believe that multi-operator, shareable digital infrastructure is the future of mobile connectivity. Our unique approach allows the mobile network operators to enhance their networks where they need it most with minimal disruption for the surrounding communities and we’re looking forward to continuing to expand the network.”

James Hope, Director of Mobile Radio Access Networks at EE, said: “With our customers using more data than ever we’re committed to ensuring they enjoy the same great experience with EE in more places. Outdoor small cells are an important part of our mobile network and we’re happy to be extending our work with Freshwave using their cutting-edge approach.”

Shravan Joshi, Chairman of the Planning and Transportation Committee at the City of London Corporation, said: “The Square Mile is a world-leading business and leisure location in a dense urban environment. People expect to have world-class connectivity and be able to stay in touch as they move around. We’re thrilled to see the network being extended in this way.” 

[1] Based on the RootMetrics® UK RootScore® Report: H1 2024. Tested at locations across the UK with the best commercially available smartphones on 4 national mobile networks across all available network types. Your experiences may vary. The RootMetrics award is not an endorsement of EE. Visit ee.co.uk/claims for more details.

Press Release 

Munich, Germany – Connected Germany, the country’s Dedicated Digital Economy Event is returning to Munich for its largest ever edition 

Hosted by telecoms media and events specialist Total Telecom, the two-day event will feature 150 speakers debating and discussing the topics most important to building next-generation networks across Germany. Split across five key themes, the event will cover topics such as the country’s investment landscape, fibre & 5G delivery, and the regulatory environment. 

With over 1,800 attendees, Connected Germany will provide a forum where leading experts, decision makers, equipment suppliers, investors, companies, and others can exchange thoughts, discover new perspectives, and form invaluable partnerships.  

This year’s event boasts an impressive lineup of key speakers, including:  

– Wolfgang Metze, Managing Director of Consumer Business, Telekom Deutschland 

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

– Marc Sauter, Head of IoT Product Management, Vodafone 

– Frederic Ufer, Managing Director, VATM 

– Jan Simons, Head of Local & Regional Politics, BREKO 

“We’re delighted to be returning to Munich for Connected Germany 2024,” said the event’s senior producer, Rowan Thompson.  

“The event is set to be our most impactful yet, bringing together the brightest minds in telecom and digital innovation. As Germany continues to evolve its digital infrastructure, the event will provide a crucial platform for industry leaders to collaborate, exchange ideas, and shape the future of connectivity across the country,” he continued. 

For more information or to register to attend Connected Germany 2024, visit: https://www.terrapinn.com/conference/connected-germany/index.stm   

_________________________________________________________________________________ 

About Total Telecom
Since 1997, Total Telecom has provided the connection between the buyers and sellers in the global telecom market. We do this through high quality editorial content and events to facilitate discussion on industry issues, and recognise innovation and excellence by companies and individuals.   

Our community of 120,000+ telecom professionals rely on Total Telecom for daily news and regular in-depth insight, delivered through a number of channels including online, video, social media, and at our series of events.  

Our award-winning event portfolio includes, Broadband Communities Summit, the World Communication Awards, Connected North, Connected Germany, and the UK’s largest connectivity event Connected Britain.   

News

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has fined the operator $31.5 million following a series of data breaches over the past four years

This week, US mobile giant T-Mobile has agreed to pay $31.5 million a part of a settlement with the FCC related to multiple cybersecurity failures.

The settlement comprises a $15.75 million civil fine and a pledge to invest an equal amount to bolster their cybersecurity capabilities.

In its statement, the FCC told T-Mobile to “work to improve cyber hygiene, and adopt robust modern architectures, like zero trust and phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication”.

The fines relate to data breaches which took place between 2021 and 2023 and affected “millions of current, former, and prospective customers” of both T-Mobile and its mobile virtual network operator partners.

According to the FCC’s statement, customer data accessed in these incidents included “PI (Proprietary Information, such as customers’ names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and driver’s license numbers) and CPNI (Customer Proprietary Network Information, such as the features customers subscribed to and the number of lines their accounts)”.

“Today’s mobile networks are top targets for cybercriminals,” said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement. “Consumers’ data is too important and much too sensitive to receive anything less than the best cybersecurity protections.”

T-Mobile is becoming worryingly familiar with fines related to poor cybersecurity, having been fined $60 million by the  Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. back in August.

The company was also fined $80 million by the FCC in April for illegally sharing access to consumers’ location data without obtaining their consent. AT&T and Verizon were also fined in the settlement, with the total fines reaching $200 million.

How is the US connectivity landscape shifting in 2024? Join the operators and their communities in discussion at Broadband Communities Summit West live in San Diego

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